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ly painted houses, their water-wheels, their palm groves, their river spirits, their saints and their ancestors were deemed unwor- thy of anything like the same coverage or concern.
Sometime in the 1940s or ’50s, Osama’s uncle Said Gamal migrated north to work in Egypt’s burgeoning telecoms industry. He formed the Nuba Nour orchestra in Cairo in 1962, mainly to keep the flame of the Nubian language and culture alive in that distant place. It was an intentionally modern combo, comprising an accordeonist, a saxophonist, an oud player, four violinists and three or four different singers. The orchestra played on FM Radio every Thursday and Friday night, singing songs in Nubian composed by band members or by poet friends. Gamal’s people had lost their homeland. He didn’t want them to lose their language too.
Nuba Nour also played at weddings and family feasts, espe- cially in the Cairo neighbourhood of Abdeen, where there was a sizeable Nubian population. And every year, around the feast of Eid el Ahda, band members would make the eighteen-hour train journey back home to Kom Ombo to play for their exiled families. Music became a source of solace and solidarity, a link with those distanced by both space and time.
O
By the late 1970s, when Said Gamal passed away, both Nubia and Nuba Nour were flagging. Nubia’s two seats in the National Assembly had been abolished, Nubian radio had been taken off air and Nubian protest music was officially banned. Even though Pres- ident Sadat was partly Nubian by birth, his promises of return and compensation proved empty. Thousands still languished in the Val- ley of the Devil, dreaming of paradise.
sama Mohammed and fellow band member Hassan Mersal left Kom Ombo for Cairo in the early 1990s. There they took control of their late uncle’s band and injected it with new life, ditching the old ‘western’ format and returning to the musical roots of old Nubia. Daf frame drum, hand claps, call-and-response chants, an occasional oud or small five-stringed lyre, these were the simple building blocks of their sound.
Their songs to the dusky skin of the beloved, to the sweet charms of nature in all its riverside quietude and lushness, or to crafty crocodiles and gullible hippos were conduits for the long- ings of Nubians at home and in exile. Their rhythms, most promi- nently the ubiquitous arageet, were pungent with the smell of home fires, of freshly baked flatbreads and sweet crushed dates, of still nights under a million stars. Their music was an antidote to insipid one- or two-man wedding acts with their electronic key- boards and showbiz smiles.
“In the old Nubia, there was singing everywhere,” Osama tells me. “In the boats, on the banks of Nile, in weddings, in the fields. Nature was the inspiration. The drums were made of palm wood and goat skin. When they were played, it was nature speaking.”
Despite, or perhaps because of what it has lost and struggled to regain, Nubia has produced great musicians, writers and poets. Nuba Nour belongs to that rich tradition of artists whose mission has been to turn memory into art and art into an instrument of hope and defiance.
Earlier this year the group joined the Welsh singer / song-
writer Gai Toms and singer / harper Siân James in the Dammed Nations tour. The ecstatic propulsion of Nubian soul mixed with the bittersweet lament of the Celt, their eyes wide open to catch a faint glimmer of the light far above.
www.nubanour.com F
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