Mostafa Sid Ahmed

Mostafa Sid Ahmed Almagbul (1953 - 17 January 1996; Arabic: مصطفى سيد احمد‎), also spelled Mustafa Sid Ahmad, was a popular Sudanese singer and composer from the late 1970s onwards until his death in 1996. During his lifetime, he released more than a hundred songs. According to an article published during the Sudanese revolution of 2018/19, he was remembered "for performing a selective and expressive type of lyric that touches upon the causes of ordinary and deprived people."[1]

Mustafa Sid Ahmad
Background information
Birth nameMustafa Sid Ahmad Almagbul
Born1953
OriginWad Sulfaab, Sudan
Died (aged 43)
GenresMusic of Sudan, African Music
Occupation(s)High-school teacher, singer-songwriter, textile designer
Instrumentssinger, Oud, multiple instruments
Years activemid 1970s–1996

A former teacher, he studied at the College of Music and Drama in Khartoum and composed his music to the lyrics of many well-known Sudanese poets like Mahjub Sharif, often expressing the longing for freedom and the struggle of the Sudanese people against dictatorship.[2]

Early life

Sid Ahmed was born in Wad Sulfabb village, Al Jazirah State in central Sudan, close to the town of Al-Hasa Hisa. He had seven sisters and one brother, named Al-Makkabool. Al-Makkabool had a great influence on him, because his brother was known in his homeland as a singer and poet. His dramatic death, when he was only 27, gave Sid Ahmed a great desire to complete his brother's career.

He started primary education in Al-Hasa Hisa, close to his home village, and then moved to Port Sudan, the capital of Red Sea state, where he got his secondary education. Mostafa Sid Ahmed first appeared in public as a singer in 1971 at the Teachers Training Institute, but soon quit working as a teacher to concentrate on his musical career.

Artistic career

Sid Ahmed spent four years studying at the College of Music and Drama in Khartoum and graduated in the late 1970s. He is considered the pioneer of a new style of Sudanese singing, because of his poetic style, labelled by many as sophisticated and complicated, and as "political singing".

At the start of Sid Ahmed's career, he collaborated with many established singers, writers and poets, but disagreements arose with some of the poets he had been collaborating with. For example, he had a disagreement with one of the poets who wrote the song "Shagga Alayaam" ("The suffering of the days"), and the argument led to a dispute with the entire Sudanese Musicians' Union.

After this, Sid Ahmed chose to collaborate with younger poets. These were not song writers in particular, and their poetry was classified as symbolic. The style of poetry concerned itself with freedom and the struggle of the Sudanese people against the dictatorship of the latter years of the Ja'far al-Numayri regime from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. These new poets included Yahia Fadullah, Abu zar Al-gafari, Muhammad Elmahdi Abed Elwahab, Qasim Abu zid, Katab Hassan Ahmad, Salaah haj Seed. Later, in the late 1980s and 1990s, he collaborated with more poets, including Al-Sadiq Al-raddi, Muhammad Elhassan Salim Homid, Alkattiabi, Azahri Muhammad Ali, Atif Khiry, Abed Elrahim Abu Zakrra, Madani El-Nakhaly, and Muhammad Ali Shammu.

Sid Ahmed was also known as a poet and composer. When he was afflicted by kidney failure in 1989, he travelled to Russia and underwent surgery there, before moving on to Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt. He subsequently emigrated to Qatar, where he spent the rest of his life and died after a long struggle with kidney failure on 17 January 1996. During his time in Qatar, Sid Ahmed released many songs, most of which expressed the suffering and struggle of the Sudanese against the regime of Omar al-Bashir. His songs reflected his suffering from exile, sometimes mixed with the struggle against his own physical pain. According to the notes of The Sounds of Sudan, his song "With the Birds" ("مع الطيور"), also known as "Migrating Birds" ("الطيور المهاجرة") or "Passport" ("جواز سفر") is one of Mustafa Sid Ahmed's most popular songs.[3]

The central subject of his work is the condition of the popular classes, crushed by dictatorships. Likely one of the best-known songs of his repertoire, “‘Amm ‘Abd al-Rahim”, (Uncle Abd al-Rahim) is one example: it tells of the death of a peasant ruined by the expropriation of his lands, who leaves for work in the morning on his chariot pulled by a tired beast. He is absorbed by his thoughts about his family that he loves dearly, but whose needs he is unable to provide for: he thinks of his children’s overly worn clothes, and of his wife’s face as she seeks to console him about their misery. So lost is he in these preoccupations that he fails to hear the sound of the train that crushes him. The song was and remains a symbol of the situation of oppression in which the popular and peasant classes live, and mentioning it was already a means of situating oneself within the political opposition.

Khadidja Medani and Elena Vezzadini. Leftist Leanings and the Enlivening of Revolutionary Memory. January 1st, 2019[4]








See also

References
  1. "Sudanese Lyric Writers And Singers Inspire Change And Justice". sudanow-magazine.net. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  2. "Leftist Leanings and the Enlivening of Revolutionary Memory : Interview with Elena Vezzadini". Noria. 1 January 2019. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  3. The Sounds of Sudan. ""With the Birds" ("مع الطيور") by Mustafa Seed Ahmed | English Translation - YouTube". www.youtube.com. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
  4. "Leftist Leanings and the Enlivening of Revolutionary Memory : Interview with Elena Vezzadini". Noria. 1 January 2019. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
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