Haneen Sidahmed is a young Sudanese American woman who grew up in Sacramento. She grew up listening to her parents’ old music tapes they’d brought from back home.
One day she was playing her favorite song and wished she could access it online — she wanted it to be accessible to her generation on Spotify and Instagram. The music all still lived mostly on cassette tapes in homes and cars around the diaspora. So, in 2020, she got a cassette deck, a digitizer, and got to work — archiving the classic songs of Sudan on the web. Today, her SoundCloud account "Sudan Tapes Archive" is a go to for the Sudanese across the diaspora.
And in these times of war in the country, when militias have ravaged and destroyed cultural heritage sites and physical musical collections, her work is even more important. I visited Haneen in her Oakland home to listen to some oldies. First I asked her to recall the time when it all began.
This story aired in the January 11, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
