It's last week and we're standing outside the Ministry of Culture in Khartoum, Tilal Salih and I, waiting for the taxi driver to emerge from afternoon prayers, with the temperature nudging towards the mid-40s and the highway shaking with buses, trucks, battered taxis, and the odd four-wheel drive with UN plates.
Salih, who develops music and cultural programmes with the British Council in Sudan, is not the praying kind. At school he preferred five lashes a day to daily prayer - an educational method that lasted three years. He redials the driver impatiently as a wiry-haired man rolls up handing out posters for a gig by a local group, The Sudanese Roots Band, the singer as heavily dreadlocked as any righteous Rasta. He tapes one up outside the Ministry of Culture. It's no trivial act, more like a challenge. 'Two years ago he would have been given 40 lashes for putting up that poster,' observes Salih. 'So would the singer, for wearing dreadlocks. It's incredible what is happening in Khartoum now.'
Under President al-Bashir, who has held power since 1989 and was indicted by the ICC for genocide in 2010, Sudan has become a pariah state, embroiled in civil warfare in Darfur to the west, the Red Sea state bordering Eritrea to the east, and, until recently, with the South Sudanese. Things have changed in the past year. Three hours drive from Khartoum is the ancient kingdom of Kush; three hours by plane to the south lies the border with the world's youngest state. South Sudan, separated by referendum earlier this year. It has not been an easy divorce. As the British Council's Music Advisor Joel Mills says: "What is very evident is that, just as South Sudan has become another country, so has north Sudan as well."
Both face severe struggles for stability. While the south retains 75% of the oil revenues that drove the Sudanese economy, it lacks almost any infrastructure. "Khartoum is basic," remarks Salih, gesturing around us, "but this is Paris compared to [South Sudan's capital] Juba ." The dominance of the Dinka tribe in South Sudan 's government may also fuel further conflict and instability. The Sudanese economy, meanwhile, has flatlined. "It is collapsing at a very high speed," says Salih. "Things go up 100% in a few months." As Richard Weyers, head of the British Council in Khartoum, points out, whether that results in its government opening up more to the outside world, as it has done in the last two years, or closing in on itself and strengthening the role of the lash, remains to be seen. Everyone is watching very closely.
Salih remains upbeat, however, pointing out cultural changes that have not been seen for a generation. Women in trousers, for instance; a mushrooming, relatively independent media, allied to the mobile phone revolution; and the return of a public music performance, as exemplified by the 10th Festival of International Music, which was held last week. Not many people remember the ninth, which took place 14 years ago. "When they stopped it in 1997, they intentionally stopped all cultural work in the country," says Salih of the government hardliners who closed down pretty well all routes to culture in the capital. "Only from 2010, that was the beginning of a new cultural movement in Sudan, from zero - from less than zero, from minus 50."
That movement may not have happened at all without the British Council's pioneering WAPI - Words and Pictures - project, a scheme to unite artists from different parts of Sudan embroiled in civil warfare by staging small concerts in the British Council garden. These mushroomed via what they now call a creative coalition with the Ministry of Culture and the likes of the Goethe Institute, into a series of concerts drawing audiences in their thousands.
"Our idea was to make something for artists who would otherwise never have a platform," says Salih. "Then we moved to the idea of the creative coalition, of linking Sudanese artists with talented artists from the UK and elsewhere." These included Ms Dynamite's brother Akala rapping Shakespeare to the Sudanese, and this year, rising folk star and song collector Sam Lee, mixing the waters of English and Sudanese traditional music with the mighty Omar Ihsan from Darfur, one of the few internationally-known Sudanese artists, and Dr Al-Fateh Hassan, a demon guitarist with a hand of gold and a tone that West African giants such as Orchestra Boabab's Bartholemy Atisso would love.
Staging the festival has not been an easy ride. Only by the agency of the new Minister of Culture, Alsamaweel Khalafala, whose cool, wood-panelled offices we have just left, has it returned to the People's Theatre, an open-air auditorium on the banks of the Blue Nile.
When its initial budget fell from several million to absolute zero, the minister gouged a seed budget from the president's office, but as a result no Sudanese musicians are being paid, and the original plan to bring musicians from South Sudan - the British Council's WAPI project had featured musical exchanges between the two in both Khartoum and Juba - collapsed at the last minute.
For Salih and his colleague Mewahib Mohamed at the British Council in Khartoum, that may have been for the best. Both have to misgivings about the artists they scouted in South Sudan. "Most of them would be singers with backing tapes," says Mohamed, "A kind of rap reggae dance music the youth would like but we didn't think was representative of a very diverse country with such a big tribal heritage."
"There's a lot of reasons for singers using backing tapes," counters Joel Mills of the British Council in London, who helped organise WAPI events in South Sudan. "One of them is the availability of musicians. The access to instruments, getting tuition, is unaffordable for most people. There's a generation gap in terms of aspiration; between the young who aspire to be hip hop artists, and the older generation who are more oriented towards traditional music. We met amazing people there," she adds, "but the situation is much more challenging. A lot of the skills that people once had have been lost."
To get a taste of the source music from the world's newest states, it's wise to visit to Dafa Ali's Sudanese Traditional Music Centre, about a mile from the People's Theatre in Khartoum. Dafa Ali is a folklorist in the tradition of Alan Lomax, who makes films for Sudanese television, documents the folk traditions of both north and South Sudan on film and disc, and makes and plays the instruments from these traditions.
His centre may be a half-built concrete shell, but it is here that the hidden musical cultures of the new Sudans, north and South, shine through. Dafa's a man who can film and record in the thick of it, amid pounding feet and heavy, heaving figures brandishing rifles and raising the spirits from heavily trance-like chants and dances that imitate the movements of horses, or waters, or cattle. This is not music to be staged - you have to go to where it is to witness it - but you can sense that here, before Dafa Ali's laptop in a rough-hewn room in downtown Khartoum, surrounded by strange-looking wind and stringed instruments, that somewhere between the hard-eyed backing-tape singers and the dense thicket of tribal customs, a powerful new culture is waiting to emerge.
As in Sudan itself, precariously tipped between expansion and implosion as a newly drawn state facing harsh realities, South Sudan 's uniting of tribal identity and modern aspiration into a national culture could unleash a music to blow the minds of the most experienced cultural traveller. All it needs is a viable infrastructure. As the British Council and its creative coalition partners make plans for their next festival in Port Sudan in early 2012, all involved must hope that it is the sound music and not the sound of gunfire, death and mayhem, and, once again, the silence, that we hear.