Mohamed Baldho

As I begin my new assignment, a key priority is for @whosudan to strengthen partnerships with health authorities & partners, reinforce Sudan’s health system, & expand access to life-saving health services. Our goal is to save lives among the most vulnerable people in Sudan.

It is with a heavy heart that I received this morning the news that Ahmed Ali Egal has passed in Minneapolis. To his family, to his fellow artists, and to every Somali who grew up with his voice in the room, I offer my sincere condolences. Inna lillaahi wa inna ilayhi raajicuun. Every soul shall taste death, and the appointed term is never early and never late. Egal entered the profession in 1967, while still a student, not through a recording studio but through the theatre, in stage productions including “Yaxaas Dhegadduub.” That origin explains him. He belonged to a generation for whom a song was never a standalone product; it was a scene, an argument, a piece of a public conversation. His brother, the poet Abdiqadir Ali Egal, wrote his first songs, and the craft passed between them the way craft used to pass between Somalis, hand to hand, without an institution in between. With Waaberi Band he recorded alongside Magool, Baxsan, Khadra Dahir Ige, Maandeeq, Guudo Carwo, Sahra Ahmed, and others, and he composed as well as performed, setting Hassan Sheikh Mumin’s lyrics to his own melody in the legendary “Is Cafiya.” Qalanjooy, Caraweelo, Haro Digeed, Walaashay Gacalisooy, Rag Hargeysa soo Maray, Cakuye Hawl Adduun: more than fifty years of work that younger performers in Mogadishu, Kismayo, Baidoa, Hargeisa, Garowe and the diaspora still borrow from. He moved between the romantic and the reflective with a freedom few of his peers attempted. His death lands in a year already heavy. Only days ago we buried the poet Adan Tarabi Jama in Hargeisa, another voice of the Waaberi generation. In mid-July, the veteran journalist Mahmoud Abdi Ali, Ducaale of Radio Mogadishu and later BCC, died in London, a man whose voice reached households that owned little else but a radio. In April we lost the Waaberi singer Shankaroon Ahmed Yusuf, Sagal, also in the United States. On the last day of March this year, the scholar and poet Ali Jimale Ahmed died at sixty-seven, and the intellectual life of the Horn lost one of the rare figures who challenged the very language through which a people is understood. Khadra Dahir Ige went in 2022, Lul Jeylani Ali in 2024. Hadrawi himself left us in 2022. Eebbe ﷻ ha u wada naxariisto. Note what these names have in common. Not one of them held office. Not one of them owed his standing to a government office, a faction, or a political seat. They were singers, poets, broadcasters, scholars. They belonged to all of us precisely because they belonged to none of our camps, and their funerals are the last occasions on which Somalis still agree. This is not a run of bad luck. It is a generation reaching its end, and reaching it mostly abroad. Reflect on the last word of the preceding sentence. The recordings survive. What does not survive is the person who could tell you how a song was made, who was in the room, which word was chosen over which other word and why. We have no national archive holding those testimonies, no institution sitting with these elders while they can still speak. Every janazah is also a small, unrecorded closure. We can mourn Egal and others properly. We can also do the obvious thing this season demands: go to the ones still with us, and write it down before we are writing obituaries instead. What is written down is a trust, and we must take the trusts we were given seriously. Eebbaha Raxmaanka ﷻ ahi ha u naxariisto Axmed Cali Cigaal. Jannadii Firdawsa ha geeyo. Ehelkana sabir iyo iimaan ha ka siiyo. Ma-dhinte waa Eebbe. اَلبَقَاءُ وَالدّوَامُ لِلّٰهِ وَحدَه