Diaraby

The closing track of Talking Timbuktu is sung in Bambara, and its title is a Bambara word for love or a beloved. The album credits it as traditional, arranged by Touré. It is a small-group recording. Touré sings and plays electric guitar, Cooder adds electric guitar, bass, marimba and sampled accordion, and Hamma Sankaré and Oumar Touré play calabash and congas and sing in the chorus. Mark Ettel recorded it at Ocean Way in September 1993 and mixed it with Larry Hirsch.

Carlo Massarini describes a tender serenade about a young man whose love is opposed by the woman's family, melancholy and sweet rather than despairing. Its guitar riff became the music for the Geo-quiz on the PRI and BBC radio programme The World, and listeners voted to keep it. A short excerpt is on the soundtrack of Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged (1998), and the song has been on compilations from Ambiances du Sahara: Desert Blues (1995) to I Heard It on NPR: At Home in the World (2003).

His son Vieux Farka Touré has recorded it twice: with Idan Raichel as the Touré-Raichel Collective on The Paris Session (2014), and with Khruangbin as Diarabi on their tribute album Ali (2022), cut in Burton, Texas, in 2019. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.