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 العملاق وردى يتحدث عن كجبار ويقول الحكومة تدفعنا لحمل السلاح
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'Golden Throat' gives Sudan's Nubians a voice
Dan Morrison, Chronicle Foreign Service
Friday, September 21, 2007
(09-21) 04:00 PDT Khartoum, Sudan --
Fifty years ago, a skinny schoolteacher stepped up to the chrome microphone at Radio Omdurman and gave voice to a unity that Sudan has since found so violently elusive.
The song was Nubian, the music of Sudan's northern ethnic minority, but the language was Arabic. The rhythms reflected the nation's ancient role as a crossroads of Africa. Above it all - resonating in the radios of coffee shops, army barracks and private clubs - soared the lilting voice of 26-year-old amateur crooner Mohammed Wardi. The "Golden Throat" was born.
Wardi soon traded his school days for nights on the Khartoum wedding circuit. Marrying romantic and nationalist poetry to popular music, he became one of the most popular singers in Africa and a leading opponent of Sudan's five-decade parade of dictators.
"I've seen our entire political history," the 75-year-old Wardi says, swaddled in traditional white robes and sipping Scotch on the rocks in his fenced-in garden. "I've heard the first speech of every coup - imagine how many first speeches I've heard - each one the death of democracy."
Songs like "October al-Akbar," a tribute to the October 1964 overthrow of Gen. Ibrahim Abboud, endeared him to audiences in a Sudan riven by cultural and ideological differences. In "October" and other numbers, Wardi fused the words of Sudan's major poets with a big-band sound that included strings, drums and electric guitar. His popularity soon spread from Somalia to Senegal.
"He was the voice of the October Revolution," said Abdullahi Gallab, a friend of the singer's who teaches religious studies at Arizona State University. "It was a big step in Sudanese political consciousness."
Sudan's strongmen were less thrilled: Wardi has spent two years in prison and 15 in exile in Cairo and Los Angeles under three different military regimes.
Today, Wardi is back home in a Sudan still struggling to define itself against a history that includes 30 years of civil war in the south, an ongoing war in the western region of Darfur and growing discontent over a lack of development in the east and the north. The former political prisoner now sings "October al-Akbar," along with more syrupy ballads, at venues including the Officers Club in Khartoum, but he still sees Sudan's government as a barely mellowed dictatorship - one that now threatens his homeland on the Nile River.
At Kajbar, in northern Sudan, the government is planning a hydroelectric dam that would eliminate 26 Nubian towns. This year, six people have been killed by police and more than a dozen imprisoned for opposing the project, which Sudan's Nubians see as an Arab assault on their 5,000-year-old culture.
"We exist from antiquity," Wardi said. "We had our own identity, civilization and kings. Those Arabs are just nomads. They came here - that's OK. They brought Islam - that's OK. But they can't Arabize us."
The project evokes bitter memories of the Aswan High Dam, which Egypt erected in 1964, flooding 340 miles of Nubian lands in both countries. The Sudanese government forced more than 50,000 people to move from the inundated Nile valley to new cities in the eastern desert.
"The people who live along the Nile know this history," Wardi said. "It pushes us to take up the gun, like the people in the south or Darfur."
While the Kajbar dam is almost unknown in the West, it could become yet another point of conflict between the government and its people.
Wardi's days of protest appear to be behind him. He spent 1971 to 1973 in prison, courtesy of the authoritarian regime of Gen. Jafaar Nimeiri. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in Cairo, returning to Sudan when democracy was restored.
In 1989, the army again seized power, led this time by Islamist officers who quickly took aim at what they saw as un-Islamic canker in Sudan's hybrid culture.
Musicians were arrested, and police often broke up wedding parties - then as now the main venues for live music. One of Wardi's brothers was among dozens of military officers killed for opposing the coup. Wardi fled to Egypt and then to Los Angeles.
Back home, the current regime of President Omar el-Bashir tried to stamp its version of Islam onto the arts and sciences. The civil war in the south became increasingly bloody, and the government called it a jihad.
In 1994, singer Khojali Osman was murdered at the Khartoum Musicians Club by Islamist radicals who frown on secular music. At a memorial in London, Wardi told mourners to keep the faith.
"Art is like water," he said. "You can't seal off its source. It will trickle inexorably through the rock to emerge in a new spring somewhere else."
In 2002, Wardi decided to return home after his right kidney failed and he couldn't find a donor in Los Angeles. El-Bashir's dictatorship had softened its war on culture. Peace talks were under way with southern rebels, and a cultural space had opened. One of Sudan's leading industrialists, Oussama Daoud, negotiated Wardi's safe return.
The singer arrived to find hundreds of thousands of people in the streets waiting to greet him - the largest public gathering since independence from Great Britain in 1956. There was no shortage of would-be kidney donors, and he later had a successful transplant in Qatar.
"The welcome I received was a clear message to the authorities," he said. "What I saw was a large crowd, unafraid to gather in such numbers."
Later that year, Wardi and his 30-piece band performed a series of concerts on the banks of the Blue Nile, breaking the 11 p.m. curfew imposed by the then-military dictatorship to spark the audience with songs that hadn't been performed in Sudan for more than a decade.
Today, Wardi remains an amalgam of many of Sudan's contradictions. A firm supporter of the former rebellion in the south, and a first-hand victim of the ruling National Congress Party, he refuses to believe eyewitness and U.N. reports of mass killing and rape in Darfur.
"The Sudanese people don't rape," he said. "No one agrees with the situation in Darfur. It's all a result of the system we have in Khartoum. It encourages the tribes to fight each other."
While his cassettes are hard to find these days on the streets of Khartoum, a recent concert marking Wardi's 50th year as the "Golden Throat" was recently posted on YouTube.com, joining classics like his 1993 concert in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
"I sing first for the country - the country I love," he said. "For all, its good and ill."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/21/MNLRRUS80.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle
فريقنتود
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Medhat Osman
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست