Abazar Hamid has had many of his songs censored by authorities in Sudan.
In 2005 he quit his job as an architect to devote himself full time to the more controversial goal of using music to transform a country so often at war with itself.
Abazar, who had played with bands for several years, submitted his peace and love songs to the government’s music monitoring committee, which mostly censored and rejected them. Only the most innocuous of his love songs have been played on Sudanese radio.
Unlike most other artists Abazar contested the authorities with the help of his lawyer. Once he even cut a pragmatic deal with the censors to let him record and produce “New Sudan” and “Peace Darfur” in exchange for never singing a song he wrote titled “Enough”.
Abazar Hamid in 2008 – rather unsuccessfully – travelled to rural areas of the country trying to convince traditional Arab ‘hate singers’ known as the Janjaweed women to sing about peace. Getting back to Khartoum things got politically “too hot” for Abazar, who went into exile in Cairo in late 2008. “Salam Darfur” is a song in support of the victims of the conflicts in Darfur.