31 Jan 2025 | Music, News and features, United Kingdom
On Wednesday, Index launched its latest magazine issue, Unsung Heroes, with an evening of powerful talks, poetry, and music from Joe Mulhall, Rahima Mahmut, Hanna Komar and Solá Akingbolá celebrating fearless musicians who use their voices to stand up to oppression. The event took place at The Jago in London, bringing together artists, activists, and an engaged audience to honour those who risk everything to make themselves heard.
The latest magazine issue explores the universality of music as one of the most potent forms of self-expression—and how, because of this, it is being silenced worldwide.
The evening opened with a compelling conversation between Hope Not Hate’s Joe Mulhall and Index editor Sarah Dawood. Mulhall spoke in depth about his new book, Rebel Sounds: Music as Resistance, reflecting on the role of music in protest and resistance movements across the globe. The discussion delved into the complex relationship between music, hate speech, and censorship, before Mulhall shared his personal experiences of facing threats from the far right for his work.
Renowned Uyghur musicians Rahima Mahmut and Shohret Nur then took the stage to perform songs that spoke to the attempted erasure of Uyghur identity in China. Nur played a moving solo on the dutar and accompanied Mahmut’s beautiful vocals with the rawap instrument.
Belarusian poet Hanna Komar followed, dedicating her performance to political prisoners still held in Belarus, including Andrei Aliaksandrau, who had just spent his fourth birthday behind bars. Komar spoke of the fraudulent elections that once again cemented President Lukashenka’s grip on power and reflected on the pivotal role music played in the 2020 protests against his rule. Moved by her words, the audience joined in an act of solidarity, writing letters to Aliaksandrau.
The evening closed with an electrifying performance by Solá Akingbolá and the Eegun Rhapsodies. As Akingbolá paid tribute to the revolutionary legacy of Fela Kuti, the audience danced, a living testament to the power of music to unite, resist and inspire.
29 Jan 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, Music, News and features, United Kingdom, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
In January 2019, there was a landmark case in British legal history – it was the first time someone received a prison sentence for performing a song.
The perpetrators were Brixton duo Skengdo x AM, one of the brightest acts of the burgeoning UK drill scene. They had already been put under surveillance by the police after they and two other members of rap group 410 were handed a gang injunction in 2018. This was in response to a song they released depicting clashes with members of rival crews. Three young men from those crews were killed that year, but there was no evidence that members of 410 were involved. The Metropolitan Police still classified 410 as a gang, and the injunction prevented them from entering the “rival” SE11 London postcode area, and from performing songs with lyrics that mentioned rival crews.
But at a concert in December 2018, Skengdo x AM broke the injunction. The pair performed one of their more popular songs, Attempted 1.0, which contained lyrics that were regarded by police as inciting violence. Officers discovered videos of the performance online – and in January 2019 the pair were given nine-month prison sentences suspended for two years.
In a statement, the Met said that the injunction was breached when “they performed drill music that incited and encouraged violence against rival gang members and then posted it on social media”. But it was their fans that shared videos, not them. Shereener Browne, a former barrister for Garden Court Chambers, has spent years working on cases involving young people alleged to be involved in gang or criminal activity. She was shocked by this case, particularly given the pair hadn’t posted online themselves.
“So here, they got an order for not doing anything, and then got an order saying that they were in breach of that order for something that they didn’t do! Head blown,” she told Index. “So we’re just... tearing up Magna Carta – every principle of criminal law is up for grabs. And if it was happening to any other group? We would be marching.”
This is a case that Index on Censorship commented on at the time – and it is not the only instance of UK police trying to control the work of drill artists. One notable case was that of Digga D. In 2018, Digga D (full name Rhys Herbert) was convicted of conspiring to commit violent disorder and ultimately sentenced to a year behind bars. He was also given a criminal behaviour order (CBO) which, alongside having his movements tracked, meant he was required to notify police within 24 hours of uploading music or videos online. Additionally, the lyrics of his songs had to be verified and authorised by the police to ensure that they did not incite violence. If they did, he could be sent back to prison. These restrictions meant that police essentially had control over his work, and this will continue until 2025. Digga D is one of the most influential drill artists on the scene, but even he is forced to censor his work under police surveillance.
The Met has been scrutinising drill musicians for a while. In 2019, it launched a targeted initiative titled Project Alpha which scoured social media platforms for potential signs of gang activity in posts and videos by young, usually Black, people. As revealed by The Guardian, the force monitors the activity of young people – primarily young men aged 15 to 21 – online, which it says aims to fight serious violence, identify offenders and assist in removing videos that glorify stabbings and shootings. In many cases, Big Tech is complying, and this policy has led to hundreds of drill music videos being removed from platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
In a Freedom of Information application on Project Alpha, it was revealed that the Met made 682 requests to remove drill songs from streaming platforms between 1 January 2021 and 31 October 2023, with most requests made to YouTube. Another FOI request found that on YouTube specifically, 654 requests for removal were made between September 2020 and January 2022, and 635 of them were granted.
Browne believes that the claimed attempt to tackle gang violence has become a concerted effort to silence drill artists, and young Black men in particular. It amounts to systemic racism, she told Index, with the evidence for this being that other genres of music are not censored or surveilled in the same way.
“It creates a culture of fear amongst mainly young, Black men, and it makes them feel even more disenfranchised, marginalised and silenced,” she said. “Because if you see your heroes – and I think to a lot of these young men, the drill and rap artists that break through are seen as their heroes – being silenced in that way, it’s going to make you angry and frustrated.
“There’s this demonisation of an entire generation of young Black people, and it’s crushing their self-esteem.”
The moral panic surrounding drill music means it has become common practice for lyrics to be used in court as evidence of criminal activity amongst drill artists. Rapping about crime and violence is often seen as an admission of guilt rather than musical storytelling, and even listening to drill music can be taken as a precursor to violent behaviour.
Art Not Evidence is a campaign group fighting against the criminalisation of drill. Founded a year ago, it has collaborated with musicians and human rights organisations to battle against the use of lyrics – and creative expression more broadly – to unfairly implicate people in criminal charges when there is a lack of real evidence. Co-founder Elli Brazzill works in the music industry and has spent time at a major record label with some of the biggest names in music. She noticed how the police began to interfere with the work of drill artists signed to the label.
“I started to see the disparities between the way different artists are treated, and what I referred to as a correlation between the growing popularity of certain rap and drill artists and an increase in police interference and surveillance,” she told Index. One artist who was signed after serving a prison sentence was at risk of further criminal punishment for simply posting online about Black Lives Matter, she claimed.
In founding Art Not Evidence, Brazzill hopes that she can help change presumptions around drill music, from a violent and dangerous genre to a form of therapy and creative expression. “What all the other genres are awarded, and rap and drill music are not, is artistic licence,” she said. “Which is why it comes up in court as autobiographical, as literal, as a confession, as a premeditation to crime.”
Music can be a therapeutic tool. According to the charity Youth Music, which conducted a survey of 16 to 24-year-olds last year, nearly three quarters found that listening to, reading or writing musical lyrics enabled them to “process difficult feelings and emotions”, whilst half said it helped to reduce feelings of isolation or loneliness. “That is what these kids need, especially if you’re in a community where you don’t talk about things,” said Brazzill. “I’m 28 now, and I still struggle to talk about my emotions! When you’re 15, all you can do is let it out like this. I’m pretty sure every artist would say that that is what it is for them.”
Censoring drill music only further ostracises an already-marginalised group, Browne believes. “It’s a group of young men who have fallen through the cracks – very often excluded from schools, put into pupil referral units... they’re not doing their A-levels, they’re not going to university,” she said.
“There are very, very few legitimate ways for them to raise themselves [and] lift themselves out of poverty, and this is one of the few ways that they can do that. That’s why it’s even more cruel for the state to try to shut down those avenues of escape.”
Her point is valid. If these young Black people cannot tell the stories and realities of their lives, and they are instead silenced because their retelling is deemed “too violent” or “glorifies gang culture”, we are depriving them of a crucial outlet, erasing a core element of modern-day British culture and exacerbating the cycle of poverty and crime. And inevitably, this can only lead to prison sentences for some young people. Brazzill recalled the poignant words of one drill artist from a recent podcast interview: “You are really angry, and you don’t want us to make the music talking about our life. But you don’t care if we’ll just go back and have to do The Life."
28 Jan 2025 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, News and features, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
After three years of Taliban rule, nobody really believed women could be erased further from public life in Afghanistan.
“But the Taliban found another way: they’ve restricted our voices and faces,” said Maryam, an Afghan legal scholar and journalist.
Maryam, who uses a pseudonym, was referring to the Taliban’s “vice and virtue” laws, which were passed in August and ban women from speaking, singing or showing their faces in public. If women break the rules, they – or their male relatives – face imprisonment.
Maryam spoke to Index in hushed tones over Signal from the relative safety of her living room in Afghanistan.
The new laws typify the rapid intensification of the Taliban’s crackdown, which has already seen women banned from parks, workplaces, schools and universities since it took power in August 2021. Once implemented monthly, harsh laws, decrees, house raids and arrests are now a daily occurrence.
“It’s a very intense attack on the dignity of humans and the dignity of women,” said Shaharzad Akbar, executive director of Afghan rights group Rawadari. “Before, there was some wiggle room, but it’s very scary because now it’s law, it’s out there and people are required to comply with it.”
The crackdown isn’t manifesting just through new laws.
“The Taliban have also been destroying institutions and putting new institutions in place to actually implement and carry out their vision of society,” said Akbar. She should know, having chaired the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission before it was abruptly dismantled when the Taliban toppled Kabul.
At that time, Maryam was on the cusp of completing her legal training, having graduated from university, and working as an assistant lawyer in the country’s courts, often assisting on highly sensitive divorce and domestic violence cases that drew the ire of Taliban members.
After the takeover, the Taliban closed the country’s only bar association. All existing licences to practise law were revoked, putting lawyers out of work. Many like Maryam, who were still waiting for their licences to be formally approved, never received their documentation. As the Taliban filled the Ministry of Justice and the courts with its own lawyers, judges and prosecutors, Maryam’s chances of a legal career vanished.
Maryam was just a toddler when the Taliban was overthrown in 2001. Now 26 years old, she finds it hard speaking about the early “bad days” after the Taliban’s recent return to power and the subsequent unravelling of decades of progress on women’s rights.
She has relatives – mostly judges and their immediate families – who have managed to leave the country. Yet, like many Afghans, she’s not been deemed enough “at risk” to warrant evacuation. Instead, she’s focused on doing what she can while living under the constant threat of Taliban restrictions.
Through word of mouth, she established a homeschool teaching English to girls in her neighbourhood. It was one of the many underground schools that proliferated across Afghanistan after September 2021 when the Taliban issued a ban on girls over the age of 11 attending secondary school.
However, as rumours swirled about the rising number of secret schools, the authorities began doing door-to-door searches. She received messages over Telegram from Taliban fighters warning that she’d be thrown into jail if she didn’t stop “working against the regime”.
Maryam said she had no choice but to close the school.
“We already were in danger because of the position of my family in the justice system,” she said. “I didn’t want to make more danger for myself, my family or my students.”
In December 2022, the Taliban banned all Afghan women from attending university. Maryam’s husband, an engineer, was teaching at a local university, and he was devastated that his female students were being forced to give up their studies.
Under the most recent law, he faces losing his job if he leaves work to accompany Maryam anywhere. Without him, she’s forbidden from leaving the house.
The Taliban has created hundreds of positions for men to teach in gender-segregated religious schools – madrassas – across the country, while women with university degrees and teaching experience are forced to stay at home.
Rawadari – one of the few organisations that has maintained a network on the ground documenting violations of civil and political rights since the takeover – has been closely following the detrimental impact of the education ban on women’s and girls’ mental health across Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
The overwhelming sense of ‘hopelessness’ is undeniable, said Akbar, who now lives in the UK in exile but still finds reports of what’s happening back home extremely difficult to hear.
“I think most of the girls believed this will be temporary and never imagined they would experience what their mothers had experienced,” she said. “They are depressed and they’re struggling to keep their hopes alive.”
Maryam continues to battle her own mental health struggles as a result of the restrictions, but has found some solace in working in the shadows as an online educator, mental health trainer, journalist and advocate.
However, as the internet and social media platforms are increasingly monitored by the Taliban and its spies, she has had to be more careful about her online interactions.
“I can’t trust who is safe and who is not,” she said. “There are women on Instagram and other places who are looking for women who are disobeying Taliban rule. For that reason, I don’t share anything about myself. They just hear my voice and the teachings I’m offering them. I’m scared and my colleagues are scared, but we go forward, do the job and provide teaching for those who need it.”
Unsilenced in exile
There is also growing momentum from Afghan women internationally to give their sisters inside the country a voice. One such woman is Qazi Marzia Babakarkhail, who became a judge in Afghanistan at 26 – the same age that Maryam is now.
Babakarkhail worked in the family courts, later setting up a small shelter for divorced women in Afghanistan and a school for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Those initiatives were a lifeline to dozens of women, but they soon drew unwanted attention from the Taliban and she fled the country in 2008 after two assassination attempts.
Since moving to the UK, Babakarkhail has learnt English and now works as a caseworker for an MP near Manchester. As well as helping campaign for the evacuation of hundreds of female judges, she speaks daily to former colleagues and friends still trapped in Afghanistan.
Her advocacy earned her an invitation to an all-Afghan women’s summit held in Tirana, Albania, in September. It was the first time since the Taliban regained power that such a large group of Afghan women – more than 100 from across Europe, the USA, Canada and Afghanistan itself – had been given an international platform to discuss the rollback of women’s rights. They are so often excluded from conversations on Afghanistan’s future.
This marked a sharp contrast with a UN meeting held earlier in June in Doha, which was heavily criticised for inviting Taliban leaders and neglecting to bring Afghan women’s voices to the table.
Babakarkhail said the summit had opened ‘a new window of hope’ for Afghan women. Seeing women who defied the Taliban travel to Tirana reminded her of her own perilous journey and gave her hope for Afghanistan’s future.
“They are real activists because they are still fighting and still stay in Afghanistan,” she said. “Of course they do a lot of things silently, but they will go back. They know how to deal with the Taliban and they will keep silent. They made us proud.”
She is hopeful the summit – which discussed the unravelling human rights situation, the urgent need for humanitarian aid and international recognition of the Taliban’s mistreatment of women as “gender apartheid” – will provide the necessary wake-up call to the international community.
“We don’t want the United Nations or other countries to recognise the Taliban as a government,” she said. “This group is a stand against the Taliban and a stand for people in Afghanistan.”
Pushing for accountability
The international push for accountability, both at the International Criminal Court – which has an ongoing investigation into alleged crimes committed in Afghanistan – and the groundbreaking move to bring a gender persecution case against the Taliban at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – are other signs that the dial may finally be shifting in Afghan women’s favour.
Akbar has been one of the leading voices campaigning to bring the case to the ICJ. Although she is appalled by what is happening to her motherland, she believes these judicial measures and the summit in Tirana will help ensure Afghan women’s voices are no longer silenced.
“We have a saying in Farsi,” said Akbar. “We say, ‘Drop by drop, you make a river.’ All of this will come together to become this river of hope and this river of defiance against the Taliban. The dream really is that we show the Taliban that the power of people everywhere in the world is with the women of Afghanistan and not with them.”
For Maryam, such developments are already reviving dreams that Afghan women’s rights and freedoms will one day be restored.
“I know that the suffering that women are enduring under the Taliban’s gender apartheid regime is unique,” she said.
She hopes the ongoing efforts, both by women like her inside the country and by those elsewhere in the world, will be enough.
“We are motivating and inspiring each other. We will win and the future will be ours – women’s.”
