Freemuse came as a wake-up call. Censorship of the written word is understood — as organisations like PEN make clear — but the censorship of music has been beneath most people’s radar. That’s a problem of Western-style societies that are more attuned to literature than music. In much of Africa and Asia messages are conveyed through music — for evidence look at the control that’s been kept on music in Zimbabwe by the Mugabe regime. That’s why Freemuse’s website has been an increasingly valuable source of information about music censorship — collating stories from around the world, and as a place where musicians themselves can air their problems.
But, as editor of Songlines, the world music magazine published in the UK, the issue was driven home by the publication of the first Freemuse report in 2001. “Can You Stop the Birds Singing?”, by John Baily, was about the prohibition of music in Afghanistan by the Taliban — probably the most severe music censorship in history. I read the report and asked John Baily to write us a story for Songlines. That was published in Autumn 2001 with the cover-line SILENCE, Music in Afghanistan. “The ban amounts to the prohibition of all musical instruments and of the sounds they make”, wrote Baily. “The Taliban claims that music has a corrupting influence on people, distracting them from their real duties, which are to pray and to praise God.”
It was a timely and disturbing story. Songlines is a magazine that gets read in the media world, and after 9/11 and the fall of the Taliban, I was contacted by the BBC. They were interested in a film about the return of music to Afghanistan.
The film was shot in January 2002, just two months after the fall of the Taliban. Kabul was still a mess, but the radio and TV had leapt back into action and cassettes and CDs of Afghan music were being shipped in lorry-loads from Pakistan. On the streets of the city crowds gathered around cassette-stalls in large numbers and people groomed and dusted down their ghetto-blasters. There was a hunger for music and a sense of reclaiming an identity.
The documentary, Breaking the Silence, captures a unique moment in Afghanistan’s history as it re-engages with its soul. It’s been shown at several Freemuse events and film festivals and Mashinai, one of the ‘stars’ of the film and a formidable player of the sarinda fiddle who had to work as a butcher during the Taliban years, came to perform in Copenhagen for a Freemuse conference. This is all part of connecting a circle that began with Freemuse’s work. Hopefully, drawing different media organisations together around the Music Freedom Day can spread the word further.
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