This story originally aired on January 11, 2024. It aired most recently in the January 14, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
The war in Sudan between the army and a militia has been going on for almost two years. It plunged parts of the nation into a famine and created the world’s largest refugee crisis. And last week the U.S. state department declared that the militia is carrying out a genocide in Sudan.
The death toll is currently unknown — large parts of the country have no internet or phone network — but U.S. officials estimated last year that 150,000 people had been killed. And in these times of war in the country, the militias have also ravaged and destroyed heritage sites and centers Sudanese culture.
One woman in Oakland is working to save what she can.
Click the play button to listen.
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.
If you’d like to donate to help people affected by the war in Sudan visit: https://sadagaat-usa.org or https://sapa-usa.org
