Songwriter hopes to bring peace to Darfur

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.

"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 Sud-anese 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.

Human rights

In that context, Hamid's Rainbow Project involves trying to slip lyrics about human rights and dignity past the suspicious government monitors.

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.