{"id":120216,"date":"2023-03-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-16T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/?p=120216"},"modified":"2023-03-16T18:23:09","modified_gmt":"2023-03-16T16:23:09","slug":"beja-power-noori-dorpa-band-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pan-african-music.com\/en\/beja-power-noori-dorpa-band-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Beja Power! and the ancient rhythms of Noori & His Dorpa Band"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Utrecht\u2019s Grote Zaal, or \u201cBig Room\u201d, a mass of festival-goers pile into the state-of-the-art concert hall to witness the first European performance of Noori & His Dorpa Band. A group hailing from Port Sudan, it is one of the major highlights of this year\u2019s Le Guess Who?<\/a> Festival, a yearly event known for its amalgam of innovative talent from around the world. In the massive venue, Noori takes the stage to much applause. Two percussionists, a bassist, guitar player and saxophonist are spread out along the stage. The group slides effortlessly into their brand of Beja groove, a style yet unknown still nostalgic and familiar. Playing their album opener \u201cJabana\u201d, or \u201cOthers\u201d, the musicians bring the international audience together under the hypnotic jams of Noori and his troop. Between tracks Noori smiles and waves, sometimes bowing his head in appreciation of the audience\u2019s loud cheers. At the end of the concert, as the crowd erupts in a standing ovation and as the musicians slowly leave the stage, Noori waits a minute, basking in the limelight, closing his watered eyes to bow.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next day we meet Noori at Utrecht\u2019s Janskerk cathedral. Slipping into the next room, the colorful soundcheck reverberating in the background for a second performance happening in this new venue tonight, Noori spoke about his life, music and cultural mission. Speaking in his native Arabic, each question provoked long, uninterrupted replies. Often with a smile, a gesture of the hand or a solemn look. Noori tells us the tragic and inspiring story of his Beja people and his life\u2019s mission to preserve and promote his culture\u2019s music in the face of oppression and violence. A story that is as long as it is complex, we spent the next hour recording Noori\u2019s echoed voice in this once sacred place to understand the musician\u2019s long and arduous path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Noori\u2019s tambo-guitar is born<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In the early 1990s, in the scrap yards somewhere outside of Port Sudan, a young musician named Noori wandered among the rubble in search of nothing in particular. Somewhere in the debris, Noori spotted the well-preserved neck of an electric guitar. An uncommon instrument in this part of the world. More acquainted with the kissar (a Nubian lyre or tambour) of which Noori\u2019s father was a master, Noori was nonetheless drawn to the instrument. For years the neck sat somewhere among Noori\u2019s affairs gathering dust. Later, when Noori was gifted a vintage 1970s four-string tambour (Sudanese lyre<\/a>), the musician, capable in welding and tuning, merged the two, making a hybrid, electric, tambo-guitar. A first of its kind. \u201cIt is a mix between a Sudanese drum and a guitar<\/em>,\u201d Noori says in Arabic with a cheeky grin, \u201cI designed it and made it myself<\/em>.\u201d Seeing Noori with his tambor-guitar today, the soundboard wrapped in cowry shells, the axes painted in the reggae red, yellow, green and the African continent emblazoned in the center, there\u2019s an unmistakable pride in Noori\u2019s creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Noori and his tambo-guitar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Plucking and composing from the young age of 10, Noori, now well into his mid-life, has merged and preserved more than hardware in his musical career. A member of the Beja tribe, a group historically pushed aside in the name of resources and cultural conformity, Noori\u2019s work has been a mile-marker in the absent history of Beja music recordings. A people with ancestral and often mythological ties to the Nubians and the ancient Kingdom of Kush, the African element of the Beja identity, like the rich deposits of gold in the region, has been a source of wealth and conflict. Though Noori\u2019s father, the tambour player, made good on the transmission of the Beja spirit to young Noori. Drinking from the patrilineal well, Noori was intoxicated with the power of his people\u2019s music. \u201cMy father used to play a traditional instrument, the \u2018tambur\u2019 or \u2018rababa\u2019, I used to watch and listen to him play and that gave me the love of music. When I listen to music, I enter a second state and I feel the need to close my eyes and it takes me to another more spiritual world. It is these influences, these experiences that have inspired me and transmitted this passion for music<\/em>.\u201d And in this way, the arc of Noori\u2019s destiny was bent towards the Beja musical frequency. History and circumstance would provide the backdrop to this passion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Beja\u2019s long act of resistance<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

An ancient people, the Beja trace their ancestry back millennia. Historians have found linguistic commonalities between the language of the Blemmyes, a tribe of the ancient Kingdom of Kush which reigned the Nile Valley from as far back as 1070 BC. In this Nubian history, the Beja have played a key role, undergoing multiple transformation, conversions and migrations, but dominating the Eastern Desert, a region located between the Nile and the Red Sea, and maintaining control of the area\u2019s abundant gold deposits. While this culture, constantly in flux, emerged as Christian in the 6th Century in the era of Constantine via the influence of missionaries and merchants making their way throughout Afro-Eurasia, the more recent cultural imposition came in the aftermath of the Baqt Treaty; history\u2019s longest lasting peace agreement between the Nubian and Arab ethnic groups. This treaty, which normalized Arab presence in what is modern day Egypt, set the groundwork for Arabisation of the region through commerce, intermarrying and the widespread introduction of the Arabic language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since, the Beja and its many tribes and subgroups have had a tenuous evolution alongside the Arab world. Despite the nearly complete Islamisation of the Beja by the 15th century, the Beja order fractured into multiple communities that would fight on all sides of the battle lines that were being drawn during the formation of Sudan and the Mahdist conflicts of the late 19th century. While some tribes sided with the Anglo- Egyptian coalition to the North, and another subset with the Italian backed Eritrean forces to the South, the large nomadic subdivision of the Beja, the Hadendoa, made history fighting for a sovereign Sudan. Led by Osman Digna, a self proclaimed Messiah or Mahdi, he and his Beja army wreaked havoc on British attempts to forcibly unify Egypt and Sudan. Osman and the Hadendoa\u2019s efforts were immortalized in the Western world by way of Rudyard Kipling\u2019s poem \u201cFuzzy Wuzzy\u201d which read; \u201cSo ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ‘ome in the Soudan; You’re a pore benighted ‘eathen but a first- class fightin’ man.<\/em>\u201d Fuzzy Wuzzy<\/em>, despite being an \u201cabysmal\u201d work of poetry as Christopher Hitchens once said, and being a derogatory slur Rudyard used in reference to the Beja\u2019s tiffa hairstyle, nonetheless praised the Beja resistance for doing what few could, \u201cbreaking the square\u201d in the British line of defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hedendoa Beja Nomads – D.P. Chrysaides, Port Sudan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Though the Mahdist War ended in defeat at the end of the 19th century, the sovereign spirit continued in the Anglo-Egyptian Crown colony and the pressure and dissent from within Sudan (as well as the evolution of domestic Egyptian policy) brought Sudanese independence to a head in 1956. The next year the Beja Congress was formed; a group of Beja intellectuals gathered to defend the interest of the politically and economically marginalized Beja people. This congress fought for the Beja of the Eastern Desert who had historically low rates of representation and less access to education and health services compared to other parts of Sudan. Enduring a series of bans from military juntas and extremist governments, the Beja congress eventually resorted to military interventions along the Khartoum-Port Sudan road, even going so far as to declare a Beja \u201ccapital\u201d in Khor Telkok. Canadian academic and journalist for the Sudan Times once noted, \u201cBeja resentment and support for the Beja Congress is clear to anyone spending just a short time in the coffee shops of Port Sudan.<\/em>” (Young 2007<\/a>). The relationship between the Beja people, the recently imposed military regime, and the proceeding dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, all signal a dubious relationship between the ethnic group and the Sudanese powers that be, and are the new front of resistance for the Beja people along with Noori himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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African identity under an Arab regime<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was beaten by Omar al-Bashir\u2019s regime. I was subjected to repression and abuse by his security services. They threatened me and imprisoned me several times. The persecution led me to migrate to Egypt, where I practiced my music freely in Egyptian cultural centers and collaborated with Egyptian artists. After eight years, I returned to Sudan and found that the situation was even worse than before\u2014and that we, the Beja people, are still suffering as an artistic community,<\/em>\u201d Noori wrote in his article published on Africa Is a Country<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cause for this abuse, while in-part economic and political, also stems from the deep seeded divide of the African and Arab identity. \u201cI am like Othello – Arab-African<\/em>\u201d says Mustafa Sa’eed, the enigmatic Sudanese intellectual of Tayeb Salih\u2019s landmark novel Season of Migration to the North<\/em>. \u201cMy face is Arab like the desert of the Empty Quarter, while my head is African and teems with a mischievous childishness,<\/em>\u201d Mustafa concludes in jest, playing on the stereotypical archetypes the West and others have of his ethnic background. This in-between has made the Beja a cultural scapegoat for Omar al-Bashir and other elites looking to impose their conservative order. \u201cHe has confused people in order to divide them on their origins<\/em>\u201d Noori says of Bashir\u2019s ethnic policy, \u201cone is Arab, the other is African, some tribes are better than others, he has plunged people into darkness.\u201d <\/em>Noori continues on this tense question of Arab-African divide, \u201cthe problem in Sudan is that they want to change our African identity to an Arab identity that is not ours.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Omar al-Bashir ran a political career on marginalizing non-conformist groups within Sudan. From the genocide in Darfur to the imposition of sharia on non-Muslim ethnic groups in South Sudan leading the the Second Sudanese Civil War, (lasting 22 years, from 1983 to 2005, and one of the longest civil conflicts on record) Bashir\u2019s campaign of arabisation also touched the Beja people of the Eastern Desert to Port Sudan, though this imposition received less media attention. \u201cThe policy in Sudan has destroyed our heritage, and we have gradually forgotten and lost our African culture,<\/em>\u201d says Noori, deeply affected by this threat of cultural erasure. \u201cI then understood that I had to have a role as a musician to change this situation, to act for the good of my people<\/em>.\u201d Noori concludes, \u201cit opened my mind, I started to question the meaning of what I was doing, of the music I was playing, questions I had never asked myself before. I understood that I, as a Sudanese, was part of this culture, of these African rhythms, but our history was dominated and influenced by the Arabs, but I understood that I was African and that even if they tried to change our culture, I remain African<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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