What began as a personal effort to digitize childhood cassettes has grown into the Sudan Tapes Archive, a digital repository that safeguards Sudanese musical heritage from active erasure amid the country’s ongoing war. Haneen Sidahmed, a Sudanese American audiovisual archivist and multidisciplinary artist, founded the archive after realizing that the analog music of her youth was absent from streaming platforms.
From Family Cassettes to Community Archive
Sidahmed’s first musical memory is of listening to cassette tapes in her family’s old Camry after moving to the United States. “Ahmed Al Mustafa’s album Ya Rayi3 was on rotation all the time and I had memorized all of the tracks,” she says. For Sidahmed, music served as a bridge to Sudan, particularly songs that referenced her mother’s hometown of Omdurman.
Before launching the archive, she collected vintage photographs of Sudan from Facebook forums as a way to access heritage made difficult by sanctions. “Sudan doesn’t have this big entertainment or cultural industry that can be exported,” she notes. The absence of a formal industry meant that much analog music never migrated to digital platforms, creating a generational gap in listening habits.
During the pandemic lockdown, Sidahmed sought a distraction and began digitizing her father’s old cassettes using a $20 converter and online tutorials. She later learned restoration techniques from detailed guides posted by enthusiasts in niche internet communities. As her personal collection expanded, it attracted donations from other diasporic families, transforming the project into a community archive.
War and the Fight for Collective Memory
When conflict erupted in Khartoum in 2023, the archive’s purpose deepened. “Once the initial shock wore off, I started seeing it as a larger purpose,” Sidahmed says. “The war is also a war on collective memory, so this work is a small way of preserving and restoring the memory that is being actively erased.”
Over the past three and a half years, national museums have been looted and libraries burned. Archaeologists have warned that the ancient Pyramids of Meroë are deteriorating due to neglect. Sidahmed emphasizes that people themselves are repositories of history: “We are such an oral culture, so the loss of human life is also a loss of story.”
Uncovering Hidden Histories
Sidahmed acknowledges that the music she archives represents only a fraction of Sudan’s diverse traditions. “So much gets left out of the traditional canon, like music from Darfur, South Sudan or the East,” she says. Her research has uncovered connections to global music history: Mahmoud Abdelaziz‘s 1995 album Sakat Al-Rabab was recorded by a Russian orchestra that had learned Sudanese music, and many Sudanese violinists were taught by North Korean instructors who came to Sudan.
Listening as a Communal Practice
At her listening parties and community events, Sidahmed recreates the communal listening experience central to Sudanese culture. “If you were a family you had one tape deck and you’d all listen to one tape,” she explains. Attendees engage with the music either passively while socializing or actively at listening stations, using guiding questions to spark conversation about the memories and associations each song evokes.
Sidahmed hopes to inspire more Sudanese to digitize their analog media and to teach her DIY archiving process. “Despite the destruction, so much lives on in people’s homes, because they are taking ownership of their heritage,” she says. Across the city, independent venues, weekly residencies and cultural programmes are building infrastructure that allows artists and audiences to continue showing up.
