Lying in a tent erected outside his house, Maulud Emhamed Sidi Bashir is listening to a small silver handheld radio. In the Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf in south-western Algeria, people often set up traditional tents like this on the doorsteps of newer buildings. The crackling electric guitar notes Bashir, 75, is listening to are a similar mix of traditional and modern. Many of the songs, his relatives say, are by a band called El Wali.
It can take a while to figure out what, exactly, El Wali is. There is not much information on Google and only one album on YouTube (without the names of the singers or musicians). The very place where the band originated, the Western Sahara, is a question mark to most people. But El Wali has become a sort of national orchestra, a group whose songs don’t have credits and don’t belong to anybody; a shapeshifting entity that changes members over generations.
