Post: #1
Title: ابا ذر حامد وحكامات دارفور....غناء للسلام وغناء للحرب واشنطنون بوست (توجدصور وفيديو)
Author: ابراهيم على ابراهيم المحامى
Date: 06-19-2008, 08:43 PM
Parent: #0
Songs of Hope for Sudan, When the Censors Allow
Video
Singing for Peace
Abazar Hamid leads a group of Hakama singers in a rendition of "Peace Darfur," a song that the Sudanese government has censored.
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AL DAEIN, Sudan -- It is difficult to unleash your inner Bob Marley in Sudan, but singer-songwriter Abazar Hamid is trying. He submits peace and love songs month after month to the government's music monitoring committee, an apparently surly bunch that mostly censors and rejects them.
This Story
"Songs like 'New Sudan,' they didn't like. Songs like 'Peace Darfur,' they didn't like. Next week, I'll try the Abyei song," Hamid said, referring to a reggae song about a contested Sudanese town recently destroyed by government forces. It includes the controversial line, "My brother, be with me."
"I talk with them and talk with them, and sometimes they allow it," he said.
Hamid, who is 37 and sweet-voiced, has earned some renown around Khartoum, the capital, for his sentimental love songs that get radio airplay. But he recently decided to give up his day job as an architect to devote himself full time to the more controversial goal of using music to transform a country so often at war with itself.
At the moment, there is conflict in the Darfur region in the west, the possibility of a return to civil war in the south and rebels in the east.
In that context, Hamid's Rainbow Project involves trying to slip lyrics about human rights and dignity past the suspicious government monitors. Hamid, a married father of three who favors groovy hippie shirts and knit caps, is also hoping to record an album of peace songs, if he can find the money and a producer abroad.
But he was here in this desert trading town in Darfur recently working on the most ambitious part of the project. It's an effort to reform the traditional Arab singers known as Hakama -- more colloquially, the Janjaweed women -- who are about as far from Bob Marley as it gets.
"They are singing you have to kill, kill, kill," Hamid said. "They have a big influence on the community and a very dangerous role in conflict."
A bit propagandists, a bit hate radio, Hakama singers exist in just about every Arab town and village in Sudan. Their traditional role is to compose and sing songs to stir up men's baser instincts and launch them to war.
During the early part of the Darfur conflict, many were paid with cash, gold and jewelry by local authorities to sing songs urging the government's nomadic Arab militias -- which came to be known as the Janjaweed -- to kill, rape and pillage ethnically African civilians. According to an Amnesty International report, one lyric went like this:
"The blood of the blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land!"
Hamid sat in the hot shade of a tree with a dozen or so Hakama singers, trying to convince them of the less financially rewarding, and perhaps less exciting, merits of singing about peace.
Wrapped in green, red, yellow and peach sarongs, their eyes rimmed black with kohl, the women did not seem entirely convinced. One heavily perfumed woman boasted that her beauty and voice had persuaded five men to go to war, where they all died.
"I felt very brave and ran after the horses without my head scarf," said the woman, Khadija Jacob, recalling the day she sent a group of several thousand militiamen to fight. "I felt proud because of that. We feel excited. When it is war, you have to do that. If you don't sing for your men to kill, other men will come and kill you."
Hamid pressed on. He taught the women the lyrics to "Peace Darfur," and they sang it with faint enthusiasm. He talked with them about how they felt now, seeing the destruction the war has caused.
"I want the men to go outside the village and fight because I'm afraid of war," Jacob told him. "Later, I felt sorry, because I know one day my family will be affected, and because I see the child of a man who died every day" around town.
The main obstacle to reforming the Hakama singers, Hamid said, is money. As the Hakama leader, Fatima Osman Ahmed, told him: "Many people can pay for war -- nobody pays for peace."
"This is a problem," Hamid said. "How to make money off of this."
Hamid said he'd never heard of Bob Geldof, the rock star, political activist and promoter who has helped organize several music festivals to benefit Africa, the latest being Live 8 in July 2005.
"I was never contacted," Hamid said, seeming genuinely surprised that he wasn't.
For now, Hamid -- whose favorite singers are Marley and Ray Charles -- makes what money he can performing at festivals, such as one here recently. Dozens of traditional Arab leaders in white robes danced and shook their walking sticks to the rollicking, synthesized "Peace Darfur" before local authorities shut down the concert early.
Some of his songs have been played on Sudanese radio, mostly innocuous ones.
"The love songs make it," he said. "The others, they don't."
Hamid, who lives in an apartment in Khartoum, has a lawyer, and they often argue with members of the government committee when they try to censor his lyrics or ban his songs. Sometimes it works.
He recently cut a pragmatic deal with the censors to let him record and produce "New Sudan" and "Peace Darfur" in exchange for never singing a song he wrote titled "Enough."
"And now the whispering became screaming," the lyrics go. "And the ash burns as a fire in opposition to cheating. We will not wait for a long time. We will not wait until night."
To see a video of singers performing songs written by Abazar Hamid or to read more of these features, go to the Worldview page at www.washingtonpost.com/worldview.
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