Salam alaykum.
Before I start talking: We've been sitting for a long time, so I just want to play a little game.
I need two volunteers from the crowd, any two random volunteers...
...little game.
Another random volunteer?
Alright, come up.
Come on up here.
(Applause)
Stand right here.
Stand facing each other.
So, the game we are going to play has only one rule.
There is a red line here
and the person who convinces the other person to cross the red line, wins.
That's the only rule. If you convince her to cross the line, you win.
What would you tell her to convince her to cross the line?
Girl 1: "Be strong. Use your strength."
Girl 2: "There is an iPad over the line."
RA: So you try to bribe her to cross the line.
That's a good thing, that's a good thing. Thank you.
Thank you, thank you.
(Applause)
Now, the real answer to that question is, you tell that person:
"If you cross the red line, I will cross the red line and then we'll both win."
See, that's the difference between real life and competitive sports.
In competitive sports, we believe that there has to be only one winner,
but in real life we can all win together and I'll try to explain this later.
(Applause)
The reason I decided to talk about racism today is because
four months ago, I was chilling in the 'Nile Street' with around 15 of my friends,
University of Khartoum Students,
people that society considers to be educated people and the future of our country,
and they were talking about politics,
you know, UoK students love talking about politics, religion and all of that,
so I said, you know, let's see what these educated people have to say about racism,
and so I decided to start a conversation about racism.
They were are all saying beautiful things until this one guy asked a question.
He said, "What if a man from Southern Sudan, who happens to be a Muslim, well educated,
and has a decent job,
what if this man proposes to your sister? Will you allow it?"
14 out of the 15 guys that were sitting said no,
and they insisted they said this has nothing has to do with racism.
So that brings me to a question. Do people understand what racism is?
A statistic that we did in 12 schools throughout Khartoum,
12 high schools –
we have been working with high school kids about racism, doing workshops –
80 percent of our high school students
do not know anything about racism.
They don't know what racism is.
But once you explain it to them, once you say, "Racism is this, that and the third,"
and you give them examples of racism,
they all click, they say, "I know this is happening but I just didn't know that it has a name."
so it shows you that this is a big problem that we live in everyday,
but we don't have a name for it, that means we cannot point to it as a problem and solve it.
So the question is,
Is there racism in Sudan? Is there racism in Sudan?
You guys wanna answer it? Audience: Yeaah!
RA: OK. But the average person...
Before before we continue, let's define racism, alright?
Racism is views, practices and actions,
reflecting a belief, a belief that members of the same race share certain attributes
that make this race collectively, as a whole,
less desirable, more desirable, inferior, superior.
It's like when you say, "Black people are thieves,"
that's it, you are closing the door, saying black people are thieves.
"White people are this," this is racism, when you generalize.
Alright.
So to answer the question, "Is there racism in Sudan?",
what we'll do instead of saying yes or no – you guys already said yes,
but then my presentation will be over so we still have to do this.
So to answer the question, we'll look at racism
and what it does to an individual and what it does to society.
And then we'll look at the Sudanese individual and the Sudanese Society
and see if there are traces of racism.
So first we'll talk about 'stereotypical racism'.
Stereotyping is when you generalize something,
just like I said, "Black people are thieves."
You see one black thief, you say, "All black people are thieves."
This is stereotypical racism.
So what stereotypical racism does is that it reinforces the stereotypes,
for example, we continue with the thief thingy,
if – let's say we have a tribe called Tribe X, and Tribe X is known to be a tribe of thieves,
so what we'll see on the streets, if a lady is walking by, she sees a kid from Tribe X.
He hasn't stolen anything yet, still a kid,
she says, "Oh, that's the Tribe X kid, so I'm gonna cling on to my bag,
because I know what he is trying to do, he is trying to steal my purse."
So this Tribe X kid goes and sits on the public transportation
and the man sitting next to him is like,
"Oh, Tribe X kid is sitting next to me.
I need to check my pocket every two minutes to make sure my wallet is still there."
So this kid is being treated like a thief before he steals anything,
and if anything is missing, society accuses him of being a thief.
So society actually pushes this guy towards being a thief,
and if we look at the Sudanese society, we have a lot of stereotypes.
One of the stereotypes that we have is about the Shaigiya people.
Is anybody here Shaigiya?
Raise your hand if you are Shaigiya.
So OK, we love Shaigiya people, it's OK to be proud of yourself
as long as you don't think you are better than anybody else, that's not racism.
(Laughter) (Applause)
One stereotype that we have about Shaigiya People is that they are cheap.
Some people say Shaigiya people don't like giving anything,
so let's look at a kid who's born to a Shaigiya family.
This guy is born and society treats him like he is cheap,
for example if I want to make a phone call and I don't have credit,
this guy sitting in the middle is Shaigiya,
so I go like, "Do you have credit?", he says, "No,"
then I'm like, "Oh, he's Shaigiya."
"Do you have credit?" (Laughter)
So this guy – so I'm giving him an excuse for being cheap.
I'm like, "You are Shaigiya, it's OK, you don't have to be generous."
If he does something nice, I'm like, "Oh my God!
This Shaigiya person has actually invited me for a drink.
I don't know how it happened."
(Applause)
So what we are doing is, we are not giving him a chance to be a generous person
because we are giving him an excuse for being cheap
and we are not actually encouraging him to do do anything,
so this enforces the stereotype, it makes him more and more cheap.
And this can be seen in our society.
One of the things that racism causes is what we call self-hatred.
When a person is constantly subjected to racism,
they start to question themselves.
They start to hate themselves.
It's like, "Oh, I'm black, maybe there is something wrong with my color,
because people are making fun of me,
my hair is nappy, there is something wrong with nappy hair."
And then you become embarrassed of who you are.
And we can see this in the Sudanese society.
Some of our sisters, they're bleaching their skin with toxic chemicals
because society tells them that if you become white,
if you behave like white people, then you become a better person.
(Applause)
And so you see a Sudanese person goes to Egypt, he stays in Egypt for two months,
and he comes back as an Egyptian.
He stays in Saudi Arabia, he comes back as a Saudi Arabian,
because we don't have a reason to be proud of ourselves,
because we have racism within ourselves.
So if you consider self-hatred – (Applause) –
and you look at the Sudanese society, you see a lot of self-hatred.
One other thing that racism does is
it creates more racism, what we call reverse racism,
and reverse racism is when somebody is being racist towards you
and you don't want to hate yourself, so you say, "Hey, I'll just hate you
and I'll become racist towards you," and this will create a head-on collision
and that can be seen in the African-American struggle.
It lead to the rise of militant groups,
we have the Black Panthers, the Black Panthers is a militant group.
When the average African-American was straightening his hair and lightening his skin,
the Black Panthers, they were growing afros and taking the AK47
and then that created more violence.
The white people called them niggers, they called them wiggers.
You call me chocolate, I'll call you vanilla.
And then it just became a conflict within the society.
So racism leads to more racism,
and we can see this in our society here.
Some tribes, they never get along here in Sudan,
because one tribe might have started this and became racist against this tribe,
and now they are racist against each other
and this leads to nowhere.
So what's being done to fight racism in Sudan?
Well, I'm actually here to talk about a group of people.
I'm very honored to be a member of this group.
We call it the Unity House, and what we do is –
shout out to the Unity House –
Big round of applause! (Applause)
The Unity House is a group of artists, musicians, writers and... yeah.
What we do is we fight racism through art.
We perform at open mic nights,
we perform at poetry events and we try to fight racism through poetry and writing.
We also conduct workshops, we have conducted twelve workshops
throughout the capital in high schools... (Applause)
with high school children, where 80 percent of them don't know what's racism is.
We have conducted five workshops in Aldamazeen and in Babanosa
and we have conducted a workshop for poets in Aldamazeen.
So how this works? Why do we use arts to fight racism?
The thing with arts is that arts is a soft tool, art is easy to accept,
like you saw the play by Shawareea earlier,
like they're trying to send you a very deep message
and you just see it in a form of entertainment, it doesn't have to be rare
so that's what we do,
in performances we create scenarios,
in workshops what we do is we usually work with artists,
so we get them to feel comfortable first
and then we start talking about racism, and then we create scenarios.
One of the workshops we were working on,
poets from Aldamazeen, this one girl at the beginning of the workshop,
she introduced herself, she said, "My name is so so, and I'm a war poet."
I said, "What is a war poet?"
She said, "I write poetry to provoke people and encourage people to fight the rebels."
That was her idea.
After five days, after the workshops finished, she performed the piece.
And in that piece she was talking about building a house with her lover,
her and her lover building a house.
So I called her and said, "What is this that you're talking about?
Like, what does this have to do with racism?"
She said, "My lover is the rebels that I'm fighting and the house is Sudan that I'm trying to build."
(Applause)
So the whole idea changed
because we just got together and we started talking and we started creating scenarios.
And the power of scenario is
that sometimes you don't know something is wrong until we put you in that position.
I was doing a workshop in Abubaker Alamin High School in Omdurman for girls
and this one girl, she said, "A man proposed to my sister and we rejected him because of his tribe,
and my sister loved this man very much
and then she got depressed and she dropped out of school for two years now."
And I said, "Is this right?"
She couldn't tell me it was wrong, so she said,
"You know, we are tribe, we have our traditions, we can't give our daughter to anybody."
So I tried to switch things a little bit.
I said, "What if the man that you love comes to propose to you,
and your family rejects him because of his tribe?"
So she was quiet, so then I tried to flip it again.
I said, "Is your mom and dad from the same tribe?"
She said, "Yes." I said, "Let's assume they were not from the same tribe."
I said, "Is your dad a good person?", she said, "Yes."
I said, "Does your dad deserve to be rejected?"
She said, "No."
So I said, "What if your dad came and proposed to your mom,
and then he was rejected because of his tribe, would that be fair?"
She said, "No, that's not fair."
So what we do is we mix things a little bit
and when we put them in positions that they're not in,
and that way we can change the society.
One other thing that art does is art gives you a lot of options,
like I can talk about racism, or I can talk about the things that racism does.
And one of my favorite topics is to talk about self hate.
If I feel like a group of people hate themselves because people have been racist towards them,
I try to make them feel better.
So to end this, I'm going to share a piece of poetry that I wrote
for all Africans, because I believe Africans are very beautiful people
and they deserve to be happy for who they are.
(Applause)
And this piece is called "Africa".
So Africa, please wake up, your history was stolen.
Some of it survived but still it was taught wrong.
We wasn't taught about the beautiful African beings, the African kings
that traveled all across the globe doing African things.
African rhythm, African words over African beats.
African [artists] [still sleeping] through them African streets.
African eyes, open up and realize that sit back and watch as the melanine dries.
It hurts me to see all the Africans cry.
Africans, why?
Why Africans die, over hunger while the colonizer's eating our pie.
Africa is not poor, that's an African lie
black gold still glitters under African sky.
Best believe these facts from this African guy.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)