Sudan Tapes Archive

A $20 cassette-to-USB converter is doing work that Sudan's national institutions can no longer do. Haneen Sidahmed, a Sudanese American archivist in Oakland, started digitizing her father's tapes in lockdown, learning restoration from forum posts written by hobbyists in Wisconsin and Mississippi. That became the Sudan Tapes Archive: her parents' cassettes, tapes she pulled out of Souq Omdurman months before the market burned, and donations from other diaspora families. Since war reached Khartoum in 2023 the museums have been looted and the libraries burned, and archaeologists warned this month that the pyramids at Meroë are deteriorating from neglect. Sidahmed calls it a war on collective memory and treats every restored track as a small reversal. The scholarship is real rather than sentimental. She can tell you that Mahmoud Abdelaziz's Sakat Al-Rabab (1995) was recorded by a Russian orchestra that learned Sudanese repertoire, and that a generation of Sudanese violinists trained under North Korean instructors posted to Khartoum. Her listening parties run outdoors with guiding questions at each station, because the tradition was communal: one family, one tape deck, one tape. The gap is that nobody with a budget is doing this.