The day music died: Afghanistan’s all-female orchestra is silent

September 3 (Reuters) – Negin Khpalwak was sitting at his home in Kabul when he learned that the Taliban had reached the outskirts of the capital.

The 24-year-old conductor, who was the face of Afghanistan’s renowned all-female orchestra, immediately began to panic.

The last time Islamist militants ruled, they banned music and women were not allowed to work. In the last months of their insurgency, they carried out specific attacks against those who said they had betrayed their view of Islamic rule.

Running around the room, Khpalwak grabbed a dressing gown to cover his bare arms and hid a small set of decorative drums. He then collected photographs and press clippings of his famous musical performances, put them in a pile, and burned them.

“I felt so terrible that it seemed to me that the whole memory of my life turned to ashes,” said Khpalwak, who fled to the United States, one of the tens of thousands who escaped abroad after the lightning conquest of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The history of the orchestra in the days following the Taliban victory, which Reuters has gathered through interviews with members of the Khpalwak School of Music, captures the sense of shock felt by young Afghans like Khpalwak, especially women. .

The orchestra, named Zohra after the Persian goddess of music, was made up mainly of girls and women from a Kabul orphanage between the ages of 13 and 20.

Formed in 2014, it became a global symbol of freedom that many Afghans began to enjoy during the twenty years since the last Taliban rule, despite the hostility and threats that some Muslim countries, deeply conservatives, they continued to confront.

Wearing bright red hijabs and playing a mix of Afghan traditional music and Western classics with local instruments such as the guitar – like rabab, the group entertained the audience from the Sydney Opera House to the Davos World Economic Forum.

Today, an armed Taliban guard from the National Music Institute of Afghanistan (ANIM), where he once practiced the group, while in some parts of the country the movement has ordered radio stations to stop playing music.

“We never expected Afghanistan to return to the stone age,” said Ahmad Sarmast, founder of ANIM, who added that the Zohra Orchestra represented women’s freedom and empowerment in Afghanistan and that its members were “cultural diplomats.”

Sarmast, who spoke from Australia, told Reuters that the Taliban had banned staff from entering the institute.

“The girls in the Zohra Orchestra and other orchestras and school ensembles are afraid of their lives and are in hiding,” he said.

A Taliban spokesman did not immediately answer questions about the state of the institute.

Since returning to power when the final Western soldiers withdrew from the country, the Taliban have tried to reassure Afghans and the outside world about the rights they would allow.

The group has said that cultural activities, as well as jobs and education for women, will be allowed within the boundaries of sharia and Islamic and cultural practices in Afghanistan.

INSTRUMENTS LEFT BEHIND

As Khpalwak frantically burned his musical memories on August 15, the day the Taliban marched on Kabul without a fight, some of his comrades attended an ANIM consultation, preparing for a major international tour in the US. ‘October.

At 10 a.m., school security guards rushed to the rehearsal room to tell the musicians that the Taliban were closing. In their rush to escape, many left behind instruments too heavy and visible to carry on the streets of the capital, according to Sarmast. .

Sarmast, who was then in Australia, said he received many messages from students concerned about their safety and asking for help. His staff told him not to return to the country because the Taliban were looking for him and his house had been raided several times.

In 2014, when a suicide bomber blew himself up during a show at a French school in Kabul, he brutally exposed the dangers facing artists in Afghanistan, injuring Sarmast who was in the audience.

At the time, Taliban insurgents called for the attack and said the play, which condemned the suicide attacks, was an insult to “Islamic values”.

Even for twenty years of a Western-backed government in Kabul, which tolerated greater civil liberties than the Taliban, there was resistance to the idea of ​​an all-female orchestra.

Members of the Zohra Orchestra have previously spoken of having to hide their music from conservative families and of being verbally abused and threatened with beatings. There were even objections among young Afghans.

Khpalwak recalled an incident in Kabul when a group of boys were watching one of their performances.

As he packed, he heard them talking to each other. “What a pity these girls play music,” “how have their families allowed it?”, “Girls should be home,” he reminded them.

“TREMBLING FOR FEAR”

Life under the Taliban could be much worse than the whispered fools, said Nazira Wali, a 21-year-old former cellist for Zohra.

Wali, who was studying in the United States when the Taliban retook Kabul, said he was in contact with members of the orchestra at home, who were so afraid of being discovered that they had destroyed their instruments and were deleting profiles of the social networks.

“My heart trembles with fear for them, because now that the Taliban are there we cannot predict what will happen to them in the next moment,” he said.

“If things continue as they are, there will be no music in Afghanistan.”

Reuters contacted several members of the orchestra left in Kabul for this story. None responded.

Khpalwak managed to escape from Kabul a few days after the arrival of the Taliban, embarking on an evacuation flight alongside a group of Afghan journalists.

Tens of thousands of people flocked to Kabul airport to try to flee the country, storming the runway and, in some cases, getting caught outside the planes taking off. Several died in the chaos.

Khpalwak is too young to fully remember life under the old Taliban rule, but upon arriving in the capital when she was a young woman to attend school remains in her memory.

“All I saw were ruins, demolished houses, bullet holes in the walls. That’s what I remember. And that’s the image that comes to my mind now when I hear the name of the Taliban,” he said.

In music school he found solace, and among his bandmates in the Zohra orchestra “girls closer than family.”

“There wasn’t a single day that was a bad day there, because there was always music, it was full of colors and beautiful voices. But now there’s silence. Nothing happens there.”

Edited by Mike Collett-White

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