MOJO RISING
IT’S 30 DEGREES in Hargeisa, and Sahra Halgan is spending a slow Friday afternoon recovering from a concert she hosted in Somaliland’s capital the night before. “During the war, we lost all our musicians,” she laments. “Today, if you are a bad singer, you use a producer, they give you a nice voice. You sing like someone who can sing, but you can’t sing live. At my arts centre you have to sing live. Tell everyone to come. I invite them.”
It’s an enticing proposition: musically, Hargeisa lies at the heart of Africa’s funkiest region, bordered and influenced by Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia, the latter claiming Somaliland as its own. With decolonisation, Somaliland (compact and British) and Somalia (sprawling and Italian) were united in 1960, with an Italy-approved government that grew increasingly authoritarian. Something had to give: Somaliland rebelled; Somalia tried to crush the insurrection but was then engulfed in its own civil war; Somaliland declared independence, and still does, but the international community turned its back.
Halgan was a teenager when she joined the liberation movement in the late 1980s. “Sometimes you don’t have a choice. We were under bombardment, so I became a nurse, putting stitches in wounds. We didn’t have painkillers so I sang to try to give relief to the patients. They asked me to sing on the radio to help the morale of our fighters. Singing can be as useful as a big artillery.”
As war swept the country, Halgan fled to France, where she got a job helping fellow refugees in Lyon, and would sing to them.
Once again, her voice led to greater opportunities: she met guitarist Maël Salètes and percussionist Aymeric Krol, and the Sahra Halgan Trio was born, recording Faransiskiyo Somaliland, a blend of traditional rhythms, desert ululations and garage band rock, in 2015. Four years later, with Waa Dardaaran, they hit a groove that combined the snaking guitar lines of Tinariwen with an undeniably punk-like energy. Halgan, meanwhile, dominates any stage with the grace required of a daughter of a country that prides itself on its poetry.
She laughs explain
