page_title: Sub-Saharan African music traditions
section_title: Sahel and Sudan
hierarchical_section_title: Sub-Saharan African music traditions / Regions / Sahel and Sudan
caption_attribution_description: English: Own work, derivative of free-use files, shows African climatic regions
context_page_description: In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the use of music is not limited to entertainment: it serves a purpose to the local community and helps in the conduct of daily routines. Traditional African music supplies appropriate music and dance for work and for religious ceremonies of birth, naming, rites of passage, marriage and funerals. The beats and sounds of the drum are used in communication as well as in cultural expression.
  African dances are largely participatory: there are traditionally no barriers between dancers and onlookers except with regard to spiritual, religious and initiation dances. Even ritual dances often have a time when spectators participate. Dances help people work, mature, praise or criticize members of the community, celebrate festivals and funerals, compete, recite history, proverbs and poetry and encounter gods. They inculcate social patterns and values. Many dances are performed by only males or females. Dances are often segregated by gender, reinforcing gender roles in children. Community structures such as kinship, age, and status are also often reinforced.
context_section_description: The music of Sudan (turquoise on the map) indicates the difficulty of dividing music traditions according to state frontiers. The musicology of Sudan involves some 133 language communities. that speak over 400 dialects, Afro-Asian, Nilotic and Niger–Congo.
  Sudan takes its name from that of the sub-Saharan savanna which makes, with the Nile, a great cross-roads of the region. South of the Sahara the Sahel forms a bio-geographic zone of transition between the desert and the Sudanian Savannas, stretching between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. The Nilotic peoples prominent in southern Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and northern Tanzania, include the Luo, Dinka, Nuer and Maasai. Many of these have been included in the Eastern region.
  The Dinka are a mainly agro-pastoral people inhabiting the Bahr el Ghazal region of the Nile basin, Jonglei and parts of southern Kordufan and Upper Nile regions. They number around 1.5 million, about 10% of the population. of Sudan.
  The Arabian rebab has found a home among the Nuba peoples.
  The Senegambian Fula have migrated as far as Sudan at various times, often speaking Arabic as well as their own language. The Hausa people, who speak a language related to Ancient Egyptian and Biblical Hebrew, have moved in the opposite direction. Further west the Berber music of the Tuareg has penetrated to Sub-Saharan countries. These are included in the Western region, but the music of Sub-Saharan herders and nomads is heard from west to east.
caption: The sahel (brown) and the Sudan (green)
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