When the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021 and began carrying out door-to-door searches, Zeba, who does not want her real name published, was afraid and tore her own phone to pieces. Damboraa folk instrument similar to the lute, which is very popular in the country. The 54-year-old artist has not played in public for three years now and being away from music makes her unimaginably sad. “Sometimes, I go to my neighbor’s house. We close the doors and windows tightly, sing and play the Dambora “of her son,” she explains, sitting on the hills where the Giant Buddhas of Bamiyan once stood, which the Taliban blew up in March 2001.
The 54-year-old woman’s gray hair peeks out from under her headscarf. Her dark eyes are filled with sadness. Dambora “It was my only consolation in this complicated life, but with the arrival of the Taliban, I lost that source of hope too,” she laments, while watching the sunset and the people walking through the area.
Your case is not the only one. Many artists, cultural centers and music conservatories have seen the Taliban’s rules clip their wings and put an end to their craft and livelihood. The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice banned the playing of music at public celebrations. Because it is considered immoral, those who are discovered playing, alone or in a group, are severely punished and in many cases the instruments are destroyed and burned.
Fundamentalists are especially intransigent with women artists, who are banned from any type of musical education. For this reason, Zeba measures her words and avoids directly criticizing the fundamentalists. “Anyway, now that I’m old and I can’t sing anymore,” she assures the journalist from the Afghan media Rukhshana Media.
“
When female singers are eliminated in one fell swoop, it sends a message to young people and future generations that women do not have the same rights and opportunities.
Esmatullah Alizada, Afghan musician
Zeba was a well-known local singer. Locals and visitors alike sought her out and gathered around her to listen to her warm voice as she played the dambora. Bamiyan was one of the few places in the country where the musical talent of young female artists was encouraged, an initiative supported by several artists, including Zeba. Her present, clearly, could be different. She herself says that Farhad Darya, a well-known Afghan artist, gave her a dambora in gratitude for his musical talent during Hamid Karzai’s second term (2009-2014).
“When female singers are eliminated in one fell swoop, it sends a message to young people and future generations that women do not have the same rights and opportunities,” explains former Afghan composer and singer Esmatullah Alizada, who is very active in defending the rights of musicians. He performed in Afghanistan for almost 13 years, but now lives as a refugee in France. For him, the suppression of female singers and musicians means a serious loss of talent and artistic diversity and helps to further entrench gender inequality and psychological damage to women.
A sinful widow
This weekend, a new round of international meetings on the future of Afghanistan under the auspices of the UN will be held in Doha. Representatives of the Taliban government, which has not been officially recognised as such, will attend for the first time. NGOs have criticised the fact that Afghan women and human rights activists are not included in the meeting and have stressed that sitting at the table with the fundamentalists implies tacitly recognising their power.
Music is just one example of the freedoms lost. Over the past three years, fundamentalists have virtually erased women from most professional sectors in Afghanistan, except for health and education, where, by necessity, there is greater acceptance of female professionals. Overall, severe restrictions have caused Afghan women to disappear from most jobs. In addition, they have closed the doors of secondary schools to young girls and, in December 2022, banned them from university. For all these reasons, the UN believes that Afghan women could be victims of a “apartheid “gender discrimination”, a harsh term that defines the relentless harassment and the progressive reduction of the most basic rights simply for being a woman.
“Even before the Taliban came again, singing as a woman was not easy for me,” Zeba says. This woman is self-taught. She started playing the Dambora in the home of her husband’s parents, whom she married at the age of 13, in an agreement between the families. She sang folkloric melodies that spoke of dreams, love, family or the desire to reunite with her loved ones.
And, as happens everywhere in the world, music helped her cope with the vicissitudes of life. Her husband was murdered in the early 1990s and she was forced to marry one of her brothers-in-law. She was mistreated, especially by her mother-in-law, who beat her and forbade her from doing anything that brought her joy, such as spending time with her. Dambora. But his mother-in-law loved listening to it, so he kept playing.
When she was 25 years old and after four years of marriage, her second husband left one day without saying anything and she was left alone with her four children. It was the late 1990s and Bamiyan was mired in poverty and violence, as the Taliban had taken control in some parts of the country. In Afghanistan in those years it was no longer very popular for a woman to sing and play an instrument. “My neighbors saw me as a sinful widow and advised their daughters and wives to stay away from me and my daughters,” she says. “But at least the Government didn’t interfere with my work,” she adds.
To make ends meet, Zeba baked bread and her daughters embroidered. She now lives with her two youngest daughters, since the two eldest left Bamiyan. Her neighbor Ali (not his real name), who opens the door for her so she can continue playing the dambora of his son, explains that Zeba hasn’t been around much lately. “When the Taliban arrived, I hid my son’s instrument in a well. Zeba used to come to our house once a month to sing and play. Damborabut we haven’t seen it since the beginning of 2024.”
You can follow Future Planet in x, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and subscribe here to our newsletter.
