Black America's Influence on Khartoum, Sudan

In the 1970's, shortly after the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement, that ended a 17-year civil war in the South  between the military and An-yan-ya rebels, investors poured their money in from Europe, the US and the Middle East. And at least in Khartoum, life was fine and prosperous throughout the 1970s, and there was plenty to go around. The people of Khartoum modernized, importing luxury items from Europe and the US, as well as importing the Black American culture.

Of course, the Khartoumites wanted to live like Americans, and for a while they did, but the influence from America came most of all from Black America. Marvin Gaye, Barry White, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Kool and the Gang and the Isley Brothers were played on the radio. Funk had a huge impact on Haqiba music, and the famous Amen Break came to characterize Mohammed Wardi's pop songs. (Mohammed Wardi is the Nubian Beethoven, the best composer and singer to have ever come out of Nubia and the Republic of Sudan.)

Times got tough, as good times were paid for with debt. And to add insult to injury, oil prices went up, food prices went down and Middle Eastern investors pulled out for some strange reason. (Perhaps because, shortly after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, the Republic of Sudan's Islamist movement sent a delegate to the newly throned Ayatollah Khomeini, who received them warmly, and sent back a cultural mission group, that set up a cultural center in Khartoum in the same year.) 

Prosperity was replaced by inflation and poverty, and Khartoum looked like a relic of the 1970s until 2000 or so. By then, oil was discovered (after a short period of de-Islamizing Sudan to appease investors) and Khartoum, for a while and in some respects, moved on. You should have seen the afros on middle-aged Khartoumites in the 1990s, as an era of limbo dragged on from 1979 till 1999. 

Khartoum never really recovered, and things will still get worse....before they get better.

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Many Black Americans do not know how they influenced the world. There are people all over the world who dress like them, listen to their music, watch their movies and use some of their coined their words. When Africa modernizes, it copies Black America with little exception. When Khartoum looked towards America, it saw a people much like itself in the Black culture of America. And I personally think that the 1970s was the Golden Era for Black America as it was for Khartoum.

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This song has funk written all over it.

(Don't mind the mustache - that was a popular mustache style in the Arab League countries at the time, called "eleven". Though Hitler was huge in the Arab world back then - and I think he still is.)

Ibrahim 3awad - Your Heart is Stone

Sorry, no translation for now.