Dividing Lines

In 1990s South Africa, there were violent clashes between Xhosa and Zulu people. And the main way they understood how to define the other group–language. But Jochen Arndt says that 300 years earlier, Xhosa and Zulu didn’t even exist as distinct languages. And: Sudan experienced decades of violent conflict in the ‘90s and ‘00s, including the genocide in Darfur. When we tell the history of those conflicts, it’s usually numbers and dates. Daniel Rothbart and Karina Korostelina recorded oral histories with Sudanese people about what it was like to actually live through those years and what justice after the violence would look like.

Later in the show: For centuries, Jewish and Muslim people co-existed in Algeria and other parts of Northern Africa. When French colonial rule took power there, things soured and many Jewish North Africans left for France. But they brought Muslim Arab musical cultures with them. Jonathan Glasser says we can learn a lot about the relationships between Algerian Jews and Muslims by looking at their musical collaborations and connections.