Hana Baba’s ‘Folktales from Sudan’ Highlights Her Country’s Culture

Next Tuesday, April 15, marks two years since the start of the war in Sudan, which has led to what the UN calls “the most devastating humanitarian and displacement crisis in the world.”

The war has destroyed lives, demolished cultural institutions and forced over 12 million people from their home country. Meanwhile, throughout the Sudan diaspora, people are doing what they can to preserve their heritage.

In Oakland, one Sudanese American woman is digitizing old cassette tapes to preserve her country’s music. And in San Francisco, a restaurant is working to ensure the next generation knows about Sudanese cuisine.

For Union City-based award-winning journalist Hana Baba, it’s about preserving culture through her latest podcast venture, Folktales from Sudan.

Baba, the host of KALW’s Crosscurrents and co-host of The Stoop, is using her audio storytelling talents to bring listeners folk stories from her home country.

With a sound-designed mix of Sudanese music and Baba’s radio-friendly voice, the series features children’s tales like Lolaba and the Eagle and The Father and Three Sons — stories with messages about the downfall of greed and the importance of familial love.

Additionally, from mid-May through early June, Baba will perform these stories in person at seven different Oakland Public Library locations.

During each 45-minute session, she’ll share three stories while hibiscus tea and “a little taste of something from Sudanese culture” is served, she says.

She’ll be accompanied by Ahmed Alejail, who plays a small, pear-shaped wooden guitar called an oud. As part of the interactive experience, audience members will learn Sudanese-Arabic sayings and participate in sing-alongs.

“I’m just excited to show people something positive about Sudan,” says Baba, who views storytelling as a way to combat negative stereotypes. “Preserving culture preserves people, and heritage is such a huge part of identity.”

After so many headlines about the current war, and the destruction of cultural institutions — the national radio station, musical archives and multiple museums — Baba began to feel as if her very culture was being attacked. So she asked herself what could be done to assist those in need, beyond sending financial resources. She landed on folktales.

“My aunties and my uncles who have preserved these folktales are now refugees in other countries,” Baba laments. “They’ve had to flee the very homes where I heard these stories.”

She credits her uncle, who kept “hundreds and hundreds of folktales in his head,” as the first person to share them with her. Baba recalls sitting in a room full of her cousins, all gathered at their elder’s feet as he spoke.

“It was an incredible experience and it lived with me for decades,” says Baba, adding that throughout her career as a journalist she’s wanted to do something with this form of storytelling.

“I’ve always felt like our stories — our African folktales — deserved a global stage,” she says.

When she was younger, Baba was exposed to stories with European foundations, like Hansel & Gretel and Cinderella.

“It’s different,” she says of the princes and princesses of Nubian descent in Sudanese stories. There were witches, but they’d appear as ghouls and goblins. “The stories were not rated PG- 13,” she says, laughing, “some of them were scary as hell.”

When she became a parent, she watered the stories down a bit, so as not to be frightening. But that’s no different from what Disney does, she notes. “Come to realize,” Baba says, “these seven dwarfs in Snow White were actually seven child slaves working in the mines of Germany.”

So now she’s on a mission to share the stories with the kids born of Sudanese heritage who will never get to see their home country.

“The most generous estimates say 20 years until this place will be rebuilt,” Baba says of Sudan. For the thousands of people who’ve had to leave, specifically children, culture is what keeps them attached to home, Baba says: “It helps them preserve who they are, and where they came from.”

Hana Baba’s Folktales from Sudan is available now on YouTube and multiple podcast platforms. More details about her in-person storytelling events here.