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Songs of Hope for Sudan, When the Censors Allow
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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.
