“The stateless persons are invisible patriots in a land that saw them born. Stateless people, citizens nowhere. Let’s fight for their rights.”
Ibrahim Ahmed (AKA Pino), first started composing his own rhymes, and performing as an MC, with a group of friends in Gao (Mali) in 1996. Soon after, he discovered his passion for playing the guitar, and that was just the start.
In 2006, he founded the group “Tamikrest”, in which he was both singer and guitarist, and performed with them, and recording several hit albums, until 2011. In 2012, he joined the group Terakaft, and has performed with them in concerts all over Europe. In 2014, he played the role of “Kidane” in the multi-Cesar award winning film, Timbuktu (2014) by Abderrahmane Sissako. This film was also nominated in the same year for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the first time a film from Mauritania had been so honoured.
Pino is from the Gao region of North Mali. As a Tuareg, he is very familiar with the nomadic traditions in his region, and particularly the role they can play in relation to some of the key causes of statelessness, including awareness about the importance of birth registration, and access to appropriate civil/birth registration systems.
In celebration of the 3rd anniversary of the iBelong campaign in Dakar, Pino participated in a national talk-show on the subject of statelessness that was broadcast on TV TFM (Dakar), on 17 November 2017. He delivered a powerful message on the importance of eradicating statelessness throughout the region, and performed a song, together with other artists from around the region, that he had composed especially for the event, called « Ibelong ».
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