Bas Chronicles Life in War-Torn Sudan in New Video ‘Khartoum’

Fans of Bas, one of the first rappers signed to J. Cole’s Dreamville Records, know that the Paris-born, Queens-bred rapper calls several places home. Prominent among these is Sudan, where he says his friends and family are amongst the displaced and dead in a brutal war between the East African nation’s military and a paramilitary group that has been raging since April. His new single “Khartoum” and its music video are a personal account of the devastation. The United Nations reports that 5.6 million Sudanese have been expelled from their homes, 25 million people need aid, and up to 9,000 have died. 

“Why nobody care? Why they don’t put us on the media?” Bas asks in his second verse. “I see Ukraine, I see two things that ain’t the same and yet they are/You change a name, change a face, I still feel the pain.” The video includes a colorful collage of footage from Sudan, home videos, and family photos. In one clip a family prays at a gravesite. In another, Bas proudly waves a Sudanese flag to a bustling crowd from a stage. 

“Khartoum” features Afrobeats artist Adekunle Gold on the hook and is produced by a leading producer in the genre, Kel-P, as well as Sensei Bueno of Janelle Monae’s Wondaland, and others. Last year, he told Rolling Stone Radio on Amp that his family’s globetrotting shaped his musical appetite. “My older siblings had like Euro-centric and African tastes—a lot of West African music, a lot of French house, U.K. garage, and then obviously hip-hop,” he said.

“Today, I feel like I’ve failed,” Bas wrote in a lengthy Instagram caption last week, below a photo of his family standing on a rooftop with him. “This same house whose roof we stand upon is no longer ours. It was stormed by rebel militia and taken over, with our family expelled from the premises. The home my father grew up in lays in rubble after an army air strike.”

“I find it hard to express the feeling of loss, the sorrow of losing our beloved city, losing our beloved country,” he continued; he said that “Khartoum” is him trying.

From Rolling Stone US.