Artists in Nile Project try to bridge political divisions
Artists from Nile Basin countries are collaborating on a musical initiative called the Nile Project, with the aim of reducing tensions over water-sharing disputes.
CAIRO — Egyptian musician Mina Girgis and Ethiopian-American singer Meklit Hadero started their music band the Nile Project to act as a new platform for dialogue and cultural exchange, away from the language of tension among the governments of the Nile Basin countries, which are currently embroiled in a water dispute.
In the band's second tour since it formed two years ago, the Nile Project, with its 19 musicians and singers, traveled to Nile Basin countries, including Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda and Egypt. The group sang their lyrics in local dialects and expressed their relationship with the Nile, not to convey messages of peace, but to send an invitation saying, “We have something in common. We should look at it and strengthen it before we resort to war.”
“We are not trying to be a form of popular diplomacy that carries a message of peace from one country to another. This project doesn’t belong to Egypt or Ethiopia alone. Rather, it is a project that brings together all the countries of the Nile Basin,” Girgis, the Nile Project’s founder, told Al-Monitor.
In August 2011, during Wafaa al-Nil — meaning the "Flooding of the Nile," a holiday that has traditionally been celebrated in Egypt to mark the river’s annual flooding — the idea for the Nile Project came to Girgis when he attended a concert by an Ethiopian singer in America.
