Beyond Algorithms: Sudan's Sonic Archive of Resistance in-Formation
At night, Khartoum hums differently. It’s not the hum of electricity, because sometimes there is none. Nor is it the rush of traffic, because the roads fall silent under curfew, protest, or the suffocating blanket of fear. No, it’s the sub-bass throb seeping through makeshift speakers in backyards, behind half-erect walls, in plastic tents pitched on sand. This is a rhythm crafted not for polite audition but to be felt through the soles of bare feet and the very bones of the sternum. In these nocturnal moments, Sudan speaks in a voice it dares not use in the stark light of day.
That voice is Zanig (زنق).
And it is here, in this raw, pulsating sound, that we must begin, not with the polished melodies of Wardi or Mostafa Sid Ahmed , the intricate dance of oud strings, or the sanitized performances of state television. No, we begin with the music that, in its audacious honesty, taught us something profound about ourselves when no institution dared to. This isn't about what's official, what's preserved in dusty archives, or what’s sanctioned by cultural arbiters. This is about what clung to life, what thrived despite being unwanted, even reviled. Zanig is a genre born in the alleyways, forged in frustration, steeped in intoxication, built on repetition, and ignited by sudden bursts of joy. It is a music that, like so many of us, was neither welcomed nor explained; it simply was.
I recall the first time I encountered Mutaz Sabbahi (معتز صباحي)1. The melody was unmistakably Sudanese, yet it possessed a liberating looseness, layered with drums that felt as though a caravan from the East African coast had arrived in the city and, with stubborn resolve, decided to stay. Zanig wasn’t born in the capital; it invaded it. Its beats emanated from the peripheries, the borderlands, places the elite rarely bothered to map, and from tongues that refused to conform to Khartoum’s rigid Arabic.
This music didn’t merely sound different; it felt like the genesis of something monumental. A nascent crack in the ossified caste of cultural hegemony. A genre that, in its fierce self-sufficiency, never sought legitimization because it had already become indispensable. In the most improbable fashion, it began to accomplish what years of well-intentioned civil society programs, post-colonial ministries, and donor-funded projects had spectacularly failed to do: it democratized feeling. It bestowed rhythm upon the lives of the majority, not through the empty platitudes of nationalism, but through beats that bore the unbearable weight of being Sudanese and, until then, unspoken for.
And I, a creature of data, a systems thinker, someone utterly captivated by patterns and classifications, found myself utterly unable to ignore that what this music was doing, unofficially, yet profoundly was, in essence, data work.
Let me explain.
When Music Becomes Metadata
The West often asserts that data tells a story. But in Sudan, the story is the data. And Zanig? Zanig is the sprawling, unkempt archive no one has yet dared to truly read.
You won’t find it codified in government reports. It certainly won’t appear in the national bureau of statistics. You won’t encounter it meticulously arranged on the spreadsheets of humanitarian dashboards. But if you truly listen, if you allow the sound to permeate your very being, Zanig overflows with indicators. Emotional ones. Social ones. Economic ones. Each impromptu party, each line improvised by a singer at a slum wedding, each fleeting moment when the crowd showers the performer with Nuqta (نقطة,cash tips) and brazenly shouts out political affiliations, tribal names, or secret grievances to be amplified for all to hear, this, all of this, is metadata. Unstructured, real-time, gloriously messy, utterly unclassified, yet profoundly, undeniably human.
This is not merely a genre. It is a parallel information system. And it breathes.
In the shacks of Janoub al-Hizam (جنوب الحزام), where the state’s presence is only ever felt through the sharp sting of violence or the crushing weight of its absence, Zanig functions as a living census of the forgotten. It whispers, or rather, shouts, who is present, who seethes with anger, who is entangled in love’s embrace, who is gloriously drunk, who is dangerous, and who yearns to be remembered. And like any living data stream, it refuses to remain static. It does not pause, patiently awaiting our condescending attention or official dignification. It simply, relentlessly, keeps playing.
On Worship and Refusal
Esaam Satti once sang, almost with an accusatory tone, "الزنق معبود" (Zanig is worshipped). And he is not wrong. Yet, he is not merely criticizing. He is, with piercing accuracy, describing the profound phenomenon that occurs when a culture defiantly refuses to be curated or confined by the very hands that once sought to exclude it.
To some, Zanig is irredeemably vulgar. To others, it is unclean, sinful, even dangerous. It lacks the refined elegance of classical Sudanese music. It simply does not fit the idealized mold of the "madīna",the demure, clean city girl; the respectable, morally upright citizen. But that, precisely, is why it is so fervently loved. It offers no apologies for its very existence. It does not temper its raw energy for the patriarchal gaze or soften its edges for the moral overseer.
Within the chaotic embrace of Zanig, queerness finds a fleeting, yet vital, hiding place. So too does simmering frustration. So does gender nonconformity. So does the raw, unvarnished hunger for human touch, for recognition, for a brief, blessed reprieve from hardship. It is, in its most unbridled form, an act of profound refusal. A refusal to be ignored. A refusal to be dictated what counts as "culture."
There is a poignant, almost beautiful irony here. The very genre often dismissed as possessing the lowest artistic value is, in fact, the one most capable of revealing who we truly are. This is music not merely heard but viscerally lived. And perhaps even more radically, it is music that listens back.
To Decolonize is to Listen Differently
Decolonizing data does not simply entail adding new categories to a form or inserting a convenient checkbox for "ethnic minority." It demands a fundamental understanding that truth does not always manifest itself neatly in spreadsheets.
Sometimes, it sings.
Sometimes, it stumbles out, gloriously drunk at 3 AM, shouting names over a crackling microphone in a makeshift shack, demanding to be compensated in love or laughter or unbridled rage.
Sometimes, it adorns itself in a dress that religious police would have long since outlawed. Sometimes, it improvises lyrics because the pain is too fresh, too immediate to be carefully penned down. And sometimes, it invents entirely new rhythms purely to survive one more night.
Zanig is not merely a genre. It is a dataset of defiance. A vibrant, defiant refusal to be erased.
And I am utterly convinced that it is time we begin archiving it, not out of charity or quaint cultural interest, but out of absolute necessity. Because no revolution, true and lasting, is complete without its deeply felt soundtrack, and no archive, if it purports to be complete, can afford to omit what the people sing when no one, officially, is watching.
Esaam Satti: The Sonic Outlet of the Politically Awake
Yet, Zanig is not the sole archive.
Somewhere else, quieter, slower, less amplified, a different kind of music persistently plays. It does not clamor for the crowd’s attention. It does not grandiosely announce itself as a revolution. But it stays. It lingers. And in that lingering, it articulates something that Zanig, in its boisterous communal energy, cannot.
That voice belongs to Esaam Satti.
He sings like a man desperately attempting to grasp a fleeting thought as it threatens to vanish from his mind. Not performatively, not perfectly, but with deliberate intent. Sometimes the lines fray and dissolve mid-bar, sometimes the rhyme crumbles under the sheer weight of the emotion it struggles to carry. And yet, you find yourself utterly compelled to keep listening. Because, in a profound sense, the very failure is the point.
Unlike Zanig, which is ecstatic, external, and profoundly collective, Satti’s sound is meditative, intensely interior, and piercingly precise. Not precise in the manner of engineered beats, but with the surgical precision of a scalpel. It cleaves through emotional registers that Zanig, in its collective dance, merely circles around. And in doing so, he achieves something profoundly radical: he humanizes the individual self within a system that relentlessly reduces people to anonymous collectives, sterile categories, or generalized crises.
Where Zanig gives fervent voice to the communal ID, the unbridled rage, the gnawing hunger, the uninhibited desire, Satti gives voice to the intimate, often hesitant inner monologue. The part of us that is not always certain. The part that mourns deeply before it ever contemplates fighting. The part that yearns to name the hurt, to articulate its very essence, before declaring its political stance.
There is no anthem here. No singular, unifying ideology. Just pure, unadulterated texture. A kind of sonic diarization. A profound form of metadata for the internal life of Sudanese youth who do not yet know which side of history they will ultimately inhabit, but who know, with aching certainty, that they are irrevocably inside of it.
Sound Without Industry
Esaam Satti has, in the time of our project, recently trended. This was a remarkable shift, for previously, he had seemed to exist beyond the fleeting whims of virality. His songs, before this recent surge, rarely achieved the dizzying metrics that dominate contemporary digital listening platforms. And yet, his music moves. It circulates through clandestine private folders, via surreptitious Bluetooth transfers, through quietly shared Google Drive links, his work travels like a whispered, deeply personal story. Persistent. Too intimate, perhaps, to broadcast widely, yet too urgent, too vital, to ignore.
In an era defined by algorithmic exposure and the insatiable hunger for clicks, this previous refusal, or perhaps, this exile, from mainstream circulation was not a failure. It was, in fact, compelling evidence of an entirely different logic at play. A logic that does not measure reach by superficial views, but by profound recognition. Not "did you hear it?" but "did it fundamentally change the way you heard yourself?"
To speak of Esaam Satti, then, is not to speak of a singular artist but of a broader sonic tendency, a quiet, tenacious resistance that deliberately chooses slowness, that embraces incompletion, that steadfastly chooses to remain unmarketable. It is both an aesthetic and a political stance. It is a defiant refusal to produce sound for mere consumption. It is, rather, sound as a deeply transformative encounter.
The Stage as Archive: On Aswat Almadina
In another vibrant corridor of this pivotal moment, a collective of musicians has seized upon this very impulse and amplified it, quite literally. Not louder, but infinitely wider. Their stage is not a mere platform; it is an open, insistent invitation. Their music is not ornamental; it is, in its very essence, infrastructural. Something profound is built, brick by sonic brick, whenever they play.
This group does not simply perform Sudan, they actively assemble it. Sonically. Socially. Historically. In their intricate arrangements, age-old traditions and vibrant urbanity do not cancel each other out. Instead, they converse, they flirt, they argue, sometimes vehemently. And that, too, is data.
Not data for sterile graphs, but for living, breathing memory. They are, in essence, archiving the present by defiantly refusing to flatten its complexities. In their performances, we glimpse a profound possibility: a Sudan that is neither framed solely by post-conflict narratives nor trapped in the anxieties of pre-revolution tension, nor perpetually defined by crisis. Just a Sudan in the agonizing, beautiful process of becoming utterly audible to itself.
Music as Data, Listening as Method
Let us return, now, to the data.
Because that is what this has always been about; not merely numbers, but profound meaning. Not official indicators, but the visceral reality of how the unofficial is profoundly lived.
Within this framework, music is not an output. It is, rather, a critical input. A signal. A vital site. A complex system of knowing.
Zanig unveils what transpires when the marginalized margins suddenly swell and become sonic majorities. Esaam Satti illuminates the intricate texture of interiority within a society that, tragically, often has no time or space for it. Aswat Almadina (أصوات المدينة) reveals what becomes breathtakingly possible when musical composition is treated with the same meticulous care and visionary scope as civic design.
Together, these are not disparate scenes. They are overlapping, sometimes discordant, frequencies in a broken transmission. And the paramount task, if we care about data in any meaningful sense beyond mere tabulation, is not to label them, to categorize them, or to dissect them. It is, simply and profoundly, to listen.
Because these sounds narrate truths that the most meticulously compiled surveys often fail to capture.
That grief is data. That ambiguity is data. That defiant refusal is data.
That sometimes, the most reliable, most piercing indicator of a society’s simmering temperature is not found in its official reports, but in its insistent, undeniable rhythms.
That to decolonize is not merely to translate existing knowledge into a new vernacular, but to recognize, with humbling clarity, when knowledge is already speaking, already vibrating with truth, simply not in the rigid, predefined language of form fields and sterile drop-down menus.
Archiving the Unsanctioned
And so, what, precisely, do we do with this profound revelation?
We do not simply record it. We do not tokenize it, reducing its vibrancy to a digital commodity. We do not frame it as a quaint cultural curiosity, a mere anthropological footnote. We treat it, with the utmost gravity, as we would treat any truly essential dataset, with rigorous structure, meticulous context, unwavering ethical consent, and profound care.
We recognize, with unblinking clarity, that music in Sudan today is not merely entertainment; it is, in its essence, infrastructure for emotional survival. It is policy enacted by other, more visceral means. It is the syllabus no conventional school could ever conceive, the census no bureaucratic ministry could ever hope to count, the archive no colonial administrator, in their wildest, most controlling dreams, ever imagined.
To listen is, in this context, to remember.
And to remember is, in this particular and crucial case, to actively resist forgetting as the default setting of entrenched power.
Zanig Pulse: Mapping Sudan’s Unseen Power Struggles Through Sound
It began with a feeling.
Not a neatly formulated hypothesis. Not a quantifiable indicator. Not a meticulously designed survey or a complex regression analysis. Just a visceral, undeniable feeling: that something profound was shifting in Sudan, quietly, beneath the surface, long before the war erupted, and long before anyone dared to name it.
A new kind of visibility was pulsing, a subterranean current rippling through the nation. Not in grandiose speeches. Not in screaming headlines. But in the very basslines. Zanig wasn’t merely a genre anymore; it had metamorphosed into a specific frequency where unspoken politics vibrated, a collective pulse throbbing with suppressed truths.
And so, we listened.
What began as a flicker of intuition rapidly evolved into a sprawling, immersive listening experiment. Then, a robust data framework. And finally, a meticulously crafted map.
This, then, is the genesis of the Political Mapping Tool (PMT) project: a daring, unconventional hybrid of raw street culture, intricate systems modeling, and a form of counter-intelligence gleaned directly through sound.
Listening as Sensing
We approached Zanig not as mere entertainment, but as an unstructured, distributed data stream, a sophisticated, organic sensor network, its intricate code embedded in beats and slang. We didn’t passively scrape sentiment. We actively, relentlessly, traced emergence.
"What if we treated every Zanig drop like a seismic reading?" someone mused one night, a question hanging in the air, electric with possibility. That was the precise moment it truly began.
Each performance transformed into a vital node. Each pulsating crowd, a living proxy. Each artist, a potent signal amplifier for the unseen, often volatile dynamics at play in a country teetering on the precipice of war.
A raucous wedding in Nyala, its sound system blaring lyrics overtly referencing the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). A TikTok Live stream from Umbadda, teeming with youth chanting Hamedti memes, their voices raw with rebellious energy. A street kiosk, its dilapidated speakers thrumming with a track referencing tribal shifts and the simmering frustrations within the military. Each of these moments became an integral thread in our intricate mesh, our sprawling, pulsating sonic map.
Phase One: Building the Listening Infrastructure
We didn’t install antennas; we rode the very waves of sound.
Digital Listening Posts:
SoundCloud accounts that exploded in popularity in 2022, their digital ripples tracing the flow of influence.
TikTok hashtags, especially the raw, unfiltered energy of Live sessions, where spontaneity unveiled unspoken truths.
Facebook group shares, charting the organic spread of musical and political allegiances.
YouTube videos and their comment sections, virtual forums brimming with raw sentiment and revealing discussions.
Street-Level Sensors:
Rakhsa drivers, their vehicle speakers blaring music that often served as a surprisingly accurate barometer of shifting loyalties.
Toktok drivers and kiosks, functioning as impromptu, analog trending dashboards, their playlists reflecting the popular mood.
Phone shops, oddly consistent collectors and distributors of popular songs, often acting as local cultural gatekeepers.
Ethnographic Overlays:
Field logs, meticulously tracking lyrical content, crowd reactions, and the unsettling appearance of uniforms among the revelers.
Manual annotations of intricate slang, subtle political references, and emergent memes, capturing the nuanced tapestry of local discourse.
We weren’t merely collecting; we were co-listening, engaging directly with communities already profoundly tuned into these vibrant, informal channels.
Phase Two: Feature Extraction and Signal Modeling
Each Zanig moment transformed into an "event packet," meticulously parsed into rich metadata:
timestamp: The precise moment of capture.
location: GPS coordinates or a descriptive neighborhood label.
platform: Where the sound emerged (TikTok, kiosk, SoundCloud, etc.).
artist + song: The creator and their creation.
raw_lyrics: The unadulterated text of the song.
rsf_or_saf_mentions: A boolean indicator, coupled with contextual notes, marking references to either the RSF or the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
tribal_references: Explicit or implicit mentions of tribal affiliations.
tip_amount (نقطة): The approximate cash tips received, a crude but telling economic indicator.
engagement_level: A subjective scale (1-5) gauging crowd enthusiasm.
memes_or_ adjectives_or_nicknames_used: Specific cultural touchstones (e.g., "Hamedti al-Dalee" - حميدتي نار الضلع).
notable_figures_spotted_in_footage: Any recognizable individuals present in associated visuals.
We then trained an NLP model on the nuanced complexities of Sudanese dialects. Where the machine learning stumbled, our human ethnographers stepped in, filling the crucial gaps with their profound contextual understanding.
What emerged was a dynamic, symbiotic chorus of machine learning and dedicated fieldwork.
Phase Three: Connecting the Sonic to the Structural
Once we had established this intricate musical mesh, we began to triangulate its insights with more conventional, structural data:
RSF recruitment calls and event timings (and log of how news travel).
IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) and broader displacement flows.
Informal economy activity in known conflict hubs.
Fluctuations in marketplace prices and disruptions to vital trade routes.
Telecom tower data: anomalous spikes in mobile traffic around the emergence of certain sound drops.
What we unearthed was startling: the soundscapes were consistently outpacing the official reports. The Zanig wasn’t merely echoing power shifts; it was, with an unsettling prescience, announcing them.
And in some disquieting cases, it was actively scripting them.
Emerging Patterns: What the Bassline Told Us
Influence Spread:
References to Hamedti surged dramatically in tandem with viral hit songs.
Youth engagement indexes within specific areas rose weeks, sometimes even a month, before public RSF events were observed in those very same zones.
Recruitment Signals:
Higher tip amounts (Nuqta) clustered conspicuously around RSF-linked artists.
Performance footage began to reveal the unsettling presence of uniforms, RSF flags, and military gear among the enthusiastic crowds.
Political Dynamics Model (Pilot): We translated these raw sonic signals into a dynamic system dynamics model.
Actors: RSF, SAF, urban youth, tribal elders, informal economy players.
Loops: Virality → Recruitment → Visibility → Legitimacy. Popularity spikes consistently preceded significant recruitment pushes. This model became the crucial backbone of the Sudan Political Mapping Tool, transforming it from a mere tool for hindsight into a powerful instrument for genuine foresight.
How to Replicate It: Sonic Intelligence Blueprint
You don't need sophisticated AI labs or vast computational power. What you need is curiosity, deep contextual understanding, and a willingness to engage with the world beyond official channels.
Define Your Sensor: What informal cultural form is encoding hidden dynamics in your specific context? Is it music, slang, clothing, graffiti? Identify its unique language.
Build Dual Listening Posts:
Online: Scour TikTok, YouTube, SoundCloud, WhatsApp forwards, and other digital platforms where content is organically shared.
Offline: Engage directly with drivers, shopkeepers, public markets, those who serve as the informal pulse of the community.
Extract and Tag: Create a structured database to capture key metadata. For example:
SQL
CREATE TABLE performances (
id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
timestamp TIMESTAMP,
location TEXT,
platform TEXT,
artist TEXT,
lyrics_raw TEXT,
crowd_engagement INT,
affiliation TEXT
);
Run Signal Detection: Utilize basic scripting for initial analysis.
Python
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("lyrics_dataset.csv")
df['rsf_mention'] = df['lyrics'].str.contains("حميدتي|الدعم السريع", case=False)
tip_data = df.groupby('artist')['tip_amount'].sum()
Layer in Ethnography: Use tools like Kobo Toolbox or even simple paper notebooks. Track presence, persistent rumors, affiliations, and subtle shifts in crowd demographics or behavior.
Simulate: Employ system dynamics software such as Vensim or InsightMaker. Model flows of influence, exposure, and recruitment, ensuring your loops are rooted in observed realities, not just assumed ones.
Closing Frequency: What We Heard Before the War
Before Khartoum fell into its current, dreadful silence but of the Beats of the Antonov, it had already begun to hum with signals; subtle, yet persistent, vibrations that bespoke an impending catastrophe. Before borders hardened into impenetrable lines, the very airwaves softened the edges between the political and the poetic, blurring distinctions, dissolving certainties. And long before the RSF crossed those unforgivable red lines, the vibrant, rebellious sound of Zanig had already breached every social, moral, and cultural threshold.
We weren’t hearing propaganda in the traditional sense. We were hearing something far more intimate: proximity, sound as a direct, visceral connection to a shifting center of gravity. Every kiosk that blared the same viral track in Omdurman and El Fasher was performing a kind of signal alignment, synchronizing the emotional frequencies of disparate populations. Every kid mimicking Hamedti’s name in a TikTok Live wasn’t merely consuming culture; they were, in their innocent imitation, actively contributing to a new, unsettling form of legitimacy.
And that, perhaps, was the most profound revelation: Legitimacy is now platformed. And performance is governance.
In fragile states, where official institutions fail to speak clearly, or worse, fall silent altogether, the artists, the unofficial chroniclers of the streets, speak first. Where intelligence reports require multiple layers of clearance, a song needs only a signal, a beat, a collective resonance. Where data dashboards lag, burdened by bureaucracy and delay, Zanig pulses ahead, charting the course of impending chaos.
The power was not just in the lyrics themselves, but in the quantifiable lag between when a song achieved viral status and when an NGO, days or weeks later, belatedly reported unrest in the same area. We measured that lag. On average, we found a two-week lead time between the emergence of a viral RSF-affiliated Zanig track and observable RSF mobilization in those very same zones. The music wasn’t merely reacting to events; it was, with chilling precision, orchestrating them.
Foresight in a Fugue State
One could argue that Sudan was, in a sense, hallucinating a new political order before it fully emerged, its collective subconscious conjuring a future yet to manifest. But this hallucination had choreography. A beat. A tempo. A discernable trend line. And crucially, it could be plotted, mapped, and understood.
We weren’t engaged in mere musicology. We were conducting audio-forensics fused seamlessly with rigorous systems thinking. Each hit track transformed into a node of burgeoning influence. Each remixed lyric became a telling ideological indicator. Each crowd reaction served as a potent proxy for shifting legitimacy. By the time the conventional reports belatedly caught up, the songs were already three steps ahead, playing out the next act of the unfolding drama.
This is not an argument against conventional data, far from it. It is, rather, a passionate plea for an expansion of our analytical aperture. A vital reminder that in places where electricity fails, people still, against all odds, find ways to charge their phones at the local market, if only to share one precious, vital track. We didn’t have access to war rooms or classified intelligence briefings. We had access to wedding DJs. And in Sudan, in those harrowing days, that proved to be more than enough.
Why It Matters: Sound as Strategic Insight
When development agencies, security analysts, and peacebuilders, with their conventional tools and rigid frameworks, choose to ignore the informal vectors of influence, they inevitably miss the most crucial, most dynamic data. The data that is playing, often loudly, in plain sight. Or, more accurately, in plain sound.
Had we treated Zanig as merely "just another genre," a cultural curiosity, we would have fundamentally missed the single most dynamic indicator of power consolidation in Sudan before the war erupted.
It told us, with chilling accuracy, who the youth genuinely admired, who held their emotional allegiance. It told us where money, often illicit, was beginning to flow. It told us, with stark clarity, what uniforms were being glamorized, what symbols were gaining currency. It told us precisely which side possessed the vital emotional capital, the hearts and minds, not just the cold, hard military power. And because of that, because we listened, we were able to map political flows long before they solidified into bloody frontlines.
The Blueprint Revisited (Final Notes for Replication)
If you are compelled to replicate this vital work, do not begin with software or complex algorithms. Begin, instead, with instinct. With presence. With the humbling, yet profound, act of listening.
Then, and only then, move methodically:
Identify your informal data stream.
In Sudan, it was Zanig. In another context, it might be pervasive memes, evolving dialects, or even the cryptic graffiti scrawled on city walls.Log before you model.
Observe and record: What do people genuinely react to? What do they tip for? What do they share clandestinely in the dead of night?Quantify without killing the signal.
Employ light tags, rich qualitative overlays, and small-scale machine learning, avoiding the pitfalls of over-abstraction that can sterilize vital information.Build your simulation model after ethnography.
System dynamics is infinitely more useful when its intricate loops are deeply rooted in observed realities, not merely assumed ones.Test it rigorously against conventional data.
When you observe a trend emerging in your informal stream, ask yourself: Does it prefigure displacement? Recruitment? Violence? Is there a measurable lag?
Final Reflection: The Future is Felt Before It's Seen
We, in our hubris, once believed that early warning systems were solely about satellites and meticulously compiled spreadsheets. But sometimes, often in the most critical of moments, they are simply about listening, truly listening, to what people, in their everyday lives, already instinctively know, long before the official channels catch up.
One Zanig artist, when asked about the political implications of his music, told us, with disarming earnestness, "We’re not political." Yet, two months later, his very lyrics were being quoted, word for word, by armed men at checkpoints, their voices echoing the sentiment he had unwittingly captured. That, in that chilling moment, was when we truly understood: Even if the artists had no conscious intention to signal politics, their audiences heard politics anyway. The signal was not in the artist's intention. It was, undeniably, in the uptake.
And that, in its essence, is the final, profound truth the Zanig Pulse part of the PMT project revealed:
In fragile contexts, popular culture does not merely reflect power; it vitally precedes it. In that ephemeral, crucial gap between the resonant beat drop and the fatal bullet, there exists a profound, actionable space for foresight. You just have to listen in time.
Onward, Eastward: The Unseen Archives in Motion
This mini-series began by exploring the striking musical and poetic parallels that link Morocco’s Nass El Ghiwane with Sudan’s rich tradition of sonic resistance. At its heart lies a central thesis: the potent musicology of decolonization and a radical re-understanding of data science, where sound becomes a crucial vessel for dissent, memory, and survival across diverse struggles. The Zanig Pulse Project, which you've just read about, serves as a vivid illustration of this approach in action; an open-source investigation into the unspoken truths embedded within a nation's pulse, revealing its unseen archives in motion.
In the next piece of this mini-series, we're heading east from here, deep into the Persian-speaking world, to Iran. There, we will delve into the very blueprint of this alternative data science, exploring what the "sonic grammar" of a nation has in common with the strategic, ethical construction of counter-data systems. We will unpack how non-state actors, facing systematic erasure or state-sanctioned silence, build their own indispensable archives; not with detached metrics, but with care, ethical reflection, and a profound commitment to justice, demonstrating that true insights often resonate far beyond conventional reports.
Until next time,
Wigdan
Mutaz Sabbahi is a modern Sudanese singer, not a zanig artist per se. He was my first encounter with true innovation in Sudanese music; the very first time I noticed something changing.
I was blown away by this!
You should definitely write a book. In your writing there is a huge talent and taste that is very educational. I wish you could have been in a position of power to apply your knowledge towards change in our beloved country. I highly recommend and encourage you to please continue writing.