For Immediate Release
September 29, 2009
For more information, contact Amy Schmidt, ND Council on the Arts, (701) 328-7594
Fieldwork of the North Dakota Council on the Arts Results in Televised Documentary
A Lyrical Life: The Struggle and Hope of South Sudan
Premiers Sunday, October 4, 2009, at 3:30PM on Prairie Public Television
Ongoing fieldwork with and documentation of Ma’di musicians and singers by the North Dakota Council on the Arts (NDCA) resulted in the production of a 30 minute documentary titled A Lyrical Life: The Struggle and Hope of South Sudan. A partnership forged between the Ma’di community, the NDCA, Amid Productions, Prairie Public Television (PPTV), and charitable organizations in Kenya, South Sudan, Switzerland, and the Netherlands brought this documentary to fruition. It features traditional music, video footage from South Sudan and North Dakota, interviews with Ma’di musicians as well as with the renowned African Bishop Taban Paride who escaped multiple attempts on his life. The documentary premiers on Prairie Public Television: Sunday, October 4, 2009, at 3:30PM. A special screening also is planned for the national Ma’di Community Association in the United States’ (MACAUS) annual convention held November 27-28, 2009, in Fargo/Moorhead.
In the early 1990s Ma’di and other groups from South Sudan and northern Uganda began arriving in states like North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, and Tennessee. Fleeing war-torn South Sudan, they sought safety and freedom in a new country as refugees. Sudan has been at war almost continuously since 1955. One of the world’s longest, ongoing conflicts claiming millions of lives and leaving millions of others displaced.
The history and cultural context of the conflict is explained through three traditional Ma’di songs. As one of the featured musicians, now living in Fargo, ND, explains, “African culture, especially in southern Sudan, our education is more based on music, because we didn’t have a written culture; like the Egyptians have the hieroglyphics. We didn’t have that. So all of our history is kept in songs… All of our education is in songs… It’s like a library of everything.”
Through the songs Ojja, Kalendo, and Oriku the war and its causes are described from 1955, when the British handed control of the country to a militant Islamist government in the north, in Khartoum, to renewed hostilities in 1983 to the present as many people try to make a new life in both South Sudan and as refugees in America. Issues involved in the conflict include forced Islamization of Christians and indigenous believers, historical and modern-day slavery, “crimes against humanity” by the Murahaleen and Lord’s Resistance Army, and starvation. Yet through it all the people of South Sudan hope and strive for a better life.
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The North Dakota Council on the Arts is the state agency responsible for the support and development of the arts throughout North Dakota, and is funded by the state legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Amy Schmidt
Public Information Officer
North Dakota Council on the Arts
1600 E. Century Ave., Suite 6
Bismarck, ND 58503-0649
amschmid@nd.gov
Phone: (701) 328-7594
Fax: (701) 328-7595