The revolution in Sudan in 2019 has been eclipsed by the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023.
But the events of 2019 demand greater attention as they hold lessons for a post-war Sudan.
Music was central to the protests in 2019. The camp outside military headquarters in Khartoum, where demonstrators gathered for weeks to demand civilian rule, became known as Sudan’s largest ever arts festival.
My research on resistance movements has led me to believe that music is not only a cosmetic accessory to protests. In Sudan, it was an integral part of the revolutionary movement that ousted the Omar al-Bashir regime. For decades, music helped cultivate anti-government sentiment and forge the networks and communities that would sustain the revolution in 2019.
I’ve explored this idea in a recent paper, drawing on interviews with protesters and musicians.
Sudanese music and resistance
Music in Sudan has historically been intertwined with popular resistance. First against colonial rulers and then – following independence in 1956 – against post-colonial despots. The patriotic anthems of the 60s and 70s expressed the sentiment that Sudan was being built by the people, not the government.
As one music fan who was a young teenager in the early 1970s said:
There were different ideas, of course, about what sounded good, but if you were making music, you were against the government, that was for sure.
One after the other, however, authoritarian regimes sought to crush all creativity – and especially music – through censorship laws and the systematic intimidation of artists.
Gigs had to be held as private events in people’s homes and even these were regularly broken up by a morality monitoring unit. Many popular musicians left for careers abroad.
But underground music scenes kept anti-government sentiment alive.
My research shows that the exodus of musicians, producers and fans under the Bashir regime did not weaken popular resistance. Instead, this displacement helped build strong transnational social networks, enabling musicians to record music outside Sudan. This was then distributed back to communities inside the borders. Later, these same social networks supported the 2019 revolution.
Read more:
Songs of freedom: the soundtracks of political change in Sudan
Throughout recent history and across various genres and scenes, music has helped the Sudanese imagine alternatives to authoritarian rule and build the relationships needed for collective action.
Given the close historical ties between resistance movements and music scenes, examining the music of the revolution provides insight into the values, identities and visions of democratic change that shaped Sudan’s revolutionary movement.
Music, gender and class
In my paper I analyse the most prominent revolution songs – collected in a shareable YouTube playlist – to explore what protesters’ choices reveal about the movement itself. The songs point to a growing openness towards gender and class.
At the 2019 protests, the revolutionaries honoured a canon of anti-oppression anthems. These included traditional Sudanese staples, hip-hop classics and contemporary pop sing-a-longs.
Not all revolutionary anthems are lyrically political, however, and there are gendered reasons for this.
In Sudan’s decades of patriarchal autocracy, speaking openly about politics through song lyrics was often far riskier for women than for men. As a result, women-led genres, such as tumtum and aghani albanat, typically centred on romance and everyday life, accompanied by handclapping and rhythms played on the doolka drum. Among highbrow creatives, these vocal and percussive genres are considered artistically subordinate to male-dominated genres. These include haqeeba, which features instrumental accompaniment on the more technically demanding oud.
Read more:
Omar al-Bashir brutalised Sudan – how his 30-year legacy is playing out today
However, tumtum and aghani albanat were popular with protesters in 2019. This was not because their lyrics were directly political (they were not). Rather, they represented the defiance of women who continued to create and perform music despite decades of state restrictions on women’s artistry.
Despite their lyrical playfulness and political neutrality, Sudanese society celebrated these genres in the revolution. This sends a powerful political message about a rising cultural openness towards feminine creativity, which had been inhibited by the state.
Zenig is a new Sudanese genre of music. It emerged in the early 2010s from the poor and peripheral neighbourhoods in Khartoum. It takes its rhythmic base from tumtum, and mixes this with retro keyboards, low-fi synths and improvised vocals. It is fundamentally a Khartoumian invention, and is deliberately defiant of conservative gender and class hierarchies.
Zenig contributed to the cacophony of sounds during the 2019 sit-in. One protester remembered “its fast-paced rhythmic style worked well in energising crowds”. The most likely place to hear Zenig at the sit-in was in intimate circles and small stages where friends could dance together. Before the revolution, Zenig was known in Khartoum as the music of poor outcasts.
The significance
By elevating female leadership in the music of the revolution, Sudanese revolutionaries deliberatively negotiated what an alternative ideal Sudanese society would be like; one with more empowerment for women, as both creative and political forerunners.
The inclusion of genres like Zenig at the 2019 sit-in demonstrates that Sudan’s revolution was not only about changing the regime.
For many young Sudanese, it was also an expression of yearning for broader societal change and an upending of societal power relations.
Read more:
Ethiopia’s musicians fled the country after the 1974 revolution – how their culture lives on
The revolution in 2019 was a unique time for openness, experimentation and future-making facilitated by music.
Music and rebuilding
The war has prevented Sudanese civilians from continuing these important social negotiations.
The resistance movement and its musicians have been displaced within Sudan and to regional hubs like Cairo (Egypt) and Nairobi (Kenya). Many have tragically lost their lives. Some have remained in Khartoum and continue to make hopeful music against the odds.
Even as Sudan’s future remains uncertain, music will be surely be central in the rebuilding of civilian lives that will come.
Cathy Wilcock receives funding from ESRC (UK) and has received funding from the NWO (The Netherlands).
Murder Matter
A British man on safari walks into a bar far out in the reaches of a game reserve in Southern Africa, he stays at the bar for a while shooting the shit with the bartender and drinking like a fish, he offer to buy the barkeep a round and since no one else is within 2km of their small oasis of liquor the barkeep obliges. The englishman goes off to the bathroom to have a good old go at the porcelain, he\’s back and ready for a few more whiskeys. He\’s just sat down when suddenly in the distance he hears a scream. He looks over his shoulder and dismisses it as nothing, he turns to the barkeep and orders a drink, takes a sip and hears the scream again. He looks at the barkeep who just shrugs it off. A minute or two later he and the barman hear it again and go outside to take a look. They see a lone figure running towards them screaming, he spots them and lets out a cry, RUN!!!!! HE\”S COMING!!!!!
The barkeep and the Englishman both look at the terrified bedraggled sight before them, and try to calm him down, but he\’s completely inconsolable. They give him water and finally manage to get a word out of him but he struggles free from their grasp and run away screaming.
A few minutes later the same thing happens with a whole group of men running in and screaming, he\’s coming, he\’s coming the barkeep grabs hold of one of the men as he tries to sprint past the bar and tries to get information out of him, again no response other than terrified gibberish.
The barkeep and his customer are starting to get worried, they start to pack up before another group of horrified natives run up to the bar most of them flee but one tries to hide behind the bar, the barkeep pulls out a shotgun and points it at the terrified man\’s face, finally managing to coax some words out of him. \”He\’s coming for us, Vernon Koekemoer is coming for us, we have to hide!!! We have to get out of here.\” He gets up and tries to run but the barkeep grabs him, feeling trapped in a panic he grabs the barkeeps shotgun and blows his own head off. The Englishman and the barkeep look at each other starting to really panic now.
They look out of the window and off in the distance they see a tornado coming towards the bar, at the bottom of the tornado they see the hugest beast of a man they have ever seen, as he gets closer they spot that he is riding a rhinocerous and using a crocodile as a riding whip, with each smack of the crocodile across the back of the rhino the louder is screams and the faster it runs, the tornado following it getting ever larger.
The 2 look at each other and start to fortify their position, they\’ve got a gun and they\’re waaay to drunk to run, so they start piling bar stool and tables and anything they can get their hands on to make sure they\’ll be safe when he arrives. They\’re not gonna make it, they can see the man slowing down his rhino, by now the crocodile is nothing but reptile paste on the bruised rump of the half dead rhino, the rhino drops down dead from exhaustion and crashes to the ground right outside the bar the tornado loses it\’s last breath in a cloud of dust as the huge man crashes his way through the make shift barricade and charges up towards the bar where the 2 men have taken shelter, he grabs a bottle of the hardest liquor on the shelf and down the entire litre in 1 gulp, he peers over the bar sobbing and sees the 2 defenders cowering down behind the crates of beer, they look up at the mans\’ face and he stares at them with a look of complete and utter hopelessness, he stares at them for a half second and half screams, half sobs, \”Oh my god what are you still doing here!!! WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE NOW!!!! Vernon Koekemoer is coming!!!!\”
Gbbledgoodk
Hoezit /Howzit – How is it going? How are you? A common greeting which is often used instead of “hello” and “how are you?” It combines the two phrases into a simple, “Howzit”, thereby saving time.Example: “Howzit my bru!”