Sahra Halgan, the voice of Somaliland
Audio 48:28
Sahra Halgan in SessionLab.
© RFI
By: Hortense Volle
51 mins
For SessionLab, Hortense Volle met in Toulouse, a few hours before her concert at the Rio Loco festival, the singer from Somaliland, Sahra Halgan.
A
conversation with your feet in the grass, in complete privacy and in 3D audio.
An original podcast to listen to with headphones.
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The aptly named Sahra Halgan, Sahra, "the fighter" in Somali, is the voice of a ghost country.
A country of 4 million souls located on the borders of the Horn of Africa: Somaliland.
Self-proclaimed independent in May 1991, it has been trying for 30 years to be recognized as a sovereign state, in vain.
The international community still sees it as an integral part of Somalia.
It was in the 1980s, when she was not even 20 years old, that Sahra's songs won the hearts of a whole people forever.
Improvised nurse on the Somali conflict front, she sings to treat the wounded and encourage the combatants.
The fratricidal struggles which marked the end of the war forced her into exile and it was France which, in 1992, granted her political asylum.
After having lived for more than 20 years in the Lyon region and created the "Sahra Halgan Trio", the one who has remained an emblem of resistance for the diaspora returns to live in Somaliland.
From her hometown, Hargeisa, the capital, she continues to fight for recognition of her country with her song as her only weapon.
Driven by the rock energy of the Lyon trio that accompanies him, Sahra Halgan has only one ambition: to place his country on the world map.
Characteristic of the territories of East Africa where influences from the Middle East and Africa mingle, his voice surprises with its flexibility, its timbre and its originality, combining throaty voice and oriental ornamentation.
Speaking to both
dancefloors
as consciousness, his latest album,
Waa Dardaaran,
mixes original compositions, traditional songs and songs from the golden age of the Somali scenes.
A podcast shot in Toulouse in June 2021 at the Rio Loco festival, produced with the assistance of the RFI sound library and enhanced with reports from France24.
Titles broadcast in the podcast
:
Excerpts from the album
Waa Dardaaran
(Buda Musique, 2019):
Kiidhaba, Hiddo, Xarago, Talo, Durdur,
Massalo ,
Alaah.
Extracts from the album
Faransiskiyo Somaliland
(2015):
Naftaydaay Raali Noqo, Alah Inu Ku Dhawro, Somaliland
During our conversation, Sahra Halgan mentioned ...
The documentary
Sahra Halgan returns to Somaliland
(52 ') written with Aymeric Krol and directed by Cris Ubermann.
This film looks back on Sahra's journey during the conflict against the Somali regime of dictator Siad Barré, from Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, to Berbera then Buruo, other symbolic towns of the resistance and of the SNM, the national liberation movement of Somaliland of which she has become an emblematic figure.
The comic strip that tells its story
Somaliland
(2020, Jarjille editions).
By Clément Goutelle (screenplay), Léah Touitou (storyboard), Max Lewko (drawing).
The cultural center she created in Hargeisa, her hometown: Hiddo Dhawr ("preserves culture").
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Music
Somaliland