When conflict erupted in Khartoum in 2023, Haneen Sidahmed‘s personal project to digitize her family’s cassette tapes transformed into a broader effort to safeguard Sudan’s musical memory. The Sudan Tapes Archive, which she founded, now collects and preserves analog recordings from Sudanese diaspora families, offering a digital home for music that streaming platforms have largely overlooked.
From Family Cassettes to Community Archive
Sidahmed, a Sudanese American audiovisual archivist and multidisciplinary artist, traces her connection to Sudanese music to childhood car rides in the United States. Her family’s old Camry was filled with cassette tapes, and she memorized every track on Ahmed Al Mustafa‘s album Ya Rayi3. For diaspora communities, she said, music served as a bridge to the home they had left behind. Al Mustafa’s songs about Omdurman, her mother’s hometown, resonated deeply.
Before launching the archive, Sidahmed collected vintage photographs of Sudan from Facebook forums, a way to access heritage made difficult by sanctions. “Sudan doesn’t have this huge entertainment or cultural industry that can be exported,” she noted. The absence of a robust industry meant that much 20th-century analog music never migrated to digital platforms, creating a generational listening gap. While Sudanese hip hop is readily available online, older genres remained inaccessible.
During the pandemic lockdown, unable to find the songs of her childhood on streaming services, Sidahmed taught herself to digitize cassettes. She began with a $20 cassette-to-USB converter and instructional videos on YouTube, later delving into restoration techniques and repairing degraded tapes. She followed detailed guides posted by enthusiasts in online forums, learning to recover sound from aging magnetic media.
What started as a personal collection of her parents’ tapes and cassettes acquired in Sudan soon expanded. Community donations and contributions from other diasporic families grew the archive into a larger online repository.
War and the Fight for Collective Memory
The outbreak of war in Khartoum in 2023 shifted the archive’s purpose. Sidahmed recalled her initial reaction:
When the war first happened, I could not engage with the music. Once the initial shock wore off, I started seeing it as a larger purpose. 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 rapidly due to neglect. Sidahmed emphasized the human dimension of this loss:
People themselves are huge repositories of memory and history. We are such an oral culture, so the loss of human life is also a loss of story.
Uncovering Global Connections
Sidahmed acknowledges that the music she archives represents only a fraction of Sudan’s vast traditions. “The more I learn the more I understand how little I know of what even encompasses Sudanese music tradition,” she said. “So much gets left out of the traditional canon, like music from Darfur, South Sudan or the East. I need a ten person Sudanese music history team to even begin to scratch the surface.”
Her research has uncovered unexpected historical links. Mahmoud Abdelaziz‘s 1995 album Sakat Al-Rabab was recorded by a Russian orchestra that had learned to perform Sudanese music. Many Sudanese violinists of that era, she found, were taught by North Korean orchestra instructors who came to Sudan.
Communal Listening and Future Plans
At listening parties and community events, Sidahmed creates spaces where people exchange personal associations with songs while discovering music they might otherwise never encounter. She encourages both passive listening during social mingling and active engagement at listening stations, using guiding questions to spark conversation.
Music in Sudan is a communal listening practice. If you were a family you had one tape deck and you’d all listen to one tape.
Sidahmed hopes to inspire more Sudanese to digitize their analog media and archive their stories. She aims to help artists preserve their bodies of work and teach others her DIY archiving process.
Despite the destruction, so much lives on in people’s homes, because they are taking ownership of their heritage.
In Oakland, independent venues, weekly residencies and cultural programmes continue to build infrastructure that supports artists and audiences.
