Folktales from Sudan: The podcast helping Sudan's diaspora preserve their identity and culture through storytelling traditions

For Hana Baba, storytelling was always synonymous with being Sudanese. Childhood trips to her family’s native Sudan are memorialised by weekly storytimes, with Friday evenings spent with cousins, tea, and cookies, as her uncle shared family stories.

“It was showtime. For a little American kid from a Disney and all that TV watching background, it was an art form that sustained my attention and helped me fall in love with it," Hana shares with The New Arab. 

"He would stand up and perform these folktales that he had heard and memorised from my great-grandmother. And so early on, I had this love of voice – this oral storytelling tradition.”

That love of audio lingered, and eventually took Hana into radio and journalism, where she now hosts Crosscurrents, a daily radio newsmagazine in San Francisco, and The Stoop, a podcast highlighting stories across the African diaspora.

But the stories from her grandmother’s hosh continued to linger, inspiring Hana’s newest venture.

In Folktales From Sudan, the award-winning journalist aims to preserve and share the stories that many Sudanese people grew up with.

As the ongoing war in Sudan marked its second anniversary this month, circumstances nationwide remain dire. Thousands across the country have died, and the UN Refugee Agency estimates nearly 13 million people have been displaced, and some 25 million need humanitarian assistance.

Lives in Sudan and the diaspora have changed over the last two years and the continued targeting of educational and social institutions across the country has proven especially frightening for what it means for Sudanese culture.

“As the war went on, we started seeing videos of our cultural institutions being demolished," Hana continues.

"Museums were attacked and looted – the records, archives, and music collections in the national broadcaster – all of these things were being destroyed. And these hundreds of thousands, millions of people, were now fleeing. The very memories of our culture were being displaced,” she adds. 

Hana was inspired by the idea that heritage preservation would be a key part of rebuilding Sudan and began working on her Folktales series.

“In a diaspora – when you have feet in two worlds – and something goes down back home, you feel helpless a lot of the time, and you want to do something, but you don’t know what that is. As cultural preservation projects started to pop up on my Instagram, people were saying, ‘this is what we can do, we can preserve bits of culture.’”

To her, preserving the folktales was a way to contribute and provide a positive attachment to Sudan, amid a media climate that highlights the war, poverty, and famine.

Hana relied largely on her memory in her compilation of the stories, having told them to her English-speaking children in a language mix she coined, “Arabeezy” (a mix of Arabic and English).

"It felt like a huge responsibility to be a keeper of this heritage... The beauty of oral storytelling traditions is that they are living and breathing, and they’re transferred from generation to generation by people taking them, telling them in their own way, and adding their own flavour and spice"

She leaned heavily on her elder family members in filling in story gaps, using WhatsApp to ask her aunts, uncles, and mum to help her remember the folktales.

She recalls chat arguments over the story details as a particular highlight of the experience.

“They would all be remembering the folktales together and have these arguments of ‘wait a minute, the witch’s nose was green’ and someone else would say ‘no, you’re wrong, the witch’s nose was red.’ To me, it was so beautiful because it gives them something productive to do during this war, while preserving their grandma’s stories,” Hana said.

As she prepared the podcast, Hana also confronted questions about the nature of oral histories and their free-flowing nature, often between generations and a hallmark of familial bonding.

One of those in particular has stuck with her in her navigation of the work: Who do folktales belong to?

“It felt like a huge responsibility to be a keeper of this heritage, and I had to dig into it. The beauty of oral storytelling traditions is that they are living and breathing and they’re transferred from generation to generation by people taking them, telling them in their own way, and adding their own flavour and spice," she explains.

"It’s how I can take a story my uncle told me and meet another Sudanese person, and they say ‘that’s a very familiar story, but we don’t call her Fatna, we call her Maryam. And the goat isn’t a goat, it’s another animal.’ So, you feel how these stories take on the character and flavour of the person telling them.”

And Hana’s flavour is an animated one; full of exciting voices, musical interludes, and her signature Arabeezy – a deliberate choice for her intended audience, Sudanese diaspora kids across the English-speaking world.

She tells stories like Kiret the Goat and Lolaba and the Eagle in a way that enamours the listener and sprinkles in messages that children (and many adults) need to hear about the importance of listening, the problems with greediness, and more.

On intentionally making the podcast for diaspora kids, Hana emphasised, “[Sudanese diaspora kids] deserve to enjoy their own culture in a language they understand. Even the most generous estimates say 20 years until the country is rebuilt. So there is a whole generation of children who will not get to go back to Sudan to be there and experience it. So yes, this is a gift to all the thousands of diaspora children who can now understand the stories. This is absolutely for them. They deserve this.”

She takes pride in the stories carrying a uniquely Sudani thread, incorporating words from the Sudanese Arabic dialect, and listeners catch mention of ful, taamiya, kisra, and more – all foods that evoke certain images, smells, and tastes for listeners.

In Hana’s view, the “Sudani-est” part of the podcast comes in the little chants and songs, which are left entirely in their original Arabic. The incorporation of Sudanese Arabic is integral to the project, which Baba notes as “unapologetic.”

Hana hopes that the Folktales from Sudan series will inspire her audience beyond just engagement with their Sudanese identity, potentially spurring interest in media or the arts for those across the diaspora.

“I want Sudani kids to have something Sudani – in our Arabic. I want to see more storytelling, and to all Sudanese communities I go to, I tell parents to please let your kids enter the media fields. Let your children get into journalism and creative arts — we need you,” she says, reflecting on diaspora tendencies to encourage medicine, law, or engineering as desirable fields.

“I’m a big believer in cultural diplomacy. It’s the food, the sounds, the smells, the perfumes, al-bakhoor, all of it must be revived and preserved. And if we don’t do it, I don’t think anybody else is going to.”

The podcast will be accompanied by events around California’s Bay Area, where Hana Baba will be doing live readings at Oakland Public Library locations.

She hopes the project will resonate with Sudani and non-Sudani kids and that they will be proud to showcase the stories.

“You could take people to Sudan through one story, and to me, that’s the goal.”

Listen to Hana Baba’s Folktales from Sudan on YouTube. She can be found at her website and on Instagram.

[Cover photo: An illustration of Alhadeeya, a character from the 'Folktales from Sudan' series, by Waddah El-Tahir]

Suha Musa is a freelance journalist and Masters student in NYU’s GLOJO programme. Suha is deeply passionate about the representation of Muslims, political relationships between the West and the Arab World, and media accessibility. She is also deeply interested in researching the current conflict in Sudan