GOLAGUL
Love and war songs

Located some 60 kilometres south-east of the port of Massawa, the Zula Plain stretches from the piedmont  of the highland plateau to the Red Sea.
Since ancient times Zula Plain, protected by the gulf  of the same name and sitting just across from the nearby Dahlak archipelago,  occupies a enviable strategic position as is attested by the ruins of the ancient port city of Adulis, former gateway of the Axumite kingdom to the Red Sea.
The alluvial soils of the plain cover some 140 km² of which only around a tenth is currently under cultivation (principally maize and sorghum).  Whilst the better part of the coastal plains of Eritrea are extremely arid, thanks to seasonal floods flowing off the highlands and the richness of its alluvial soil, Zula plain is exceptionally fertile compared to other parts of the region.

Afar, Tigre and Saho
Three ethnic groups, Afar, Tigre and Saho, make up the majority of the some 15,000 inhabitants of the Zula Plain and its immediate surroundings. They are concentrated largely in the villages of Foro, Afta and Zula. These ethnic groups are distinguished by their origins, their social organisation and their culture, but above all, by their language even if many persons are bilingual and even trilingual.
Tigre and Tigrinya, spoken on the highlands by the largest ethnic group in Eritrea, together are used by some 80% of Eritreans. They are Semitic languages sharing a common ancestry since they are derived from the ancient Ge’ez language which only survives today as a liturgical language used by the Coptic Orthodox religion. Tigre, however, is written using both Arabic script and Ge’ez script  whilst Tigrinya is written only in the Ge’ez script. The Afar and Saho languages, on the other hand, are Hamitic languages and spoken by fewer people. The Afar, Saho and Tigre of the Zula Plain are Muslims like the majority of coastal peoples even if some Tigre living in the highlands are Christians.



The music
The songs collected and recorded on the CD “Golagul” ( commonly used phrase meaning  the Plain) reveal the musical traditions of the three ethnic communities established in the Zula Plain.  If there are rhythmic and thematic differences between the songs of the three  groups, the musical structure in nonetheless virtually the same: the main singer sets the tempo by clapping his or her hands or by beating a drum (kobero); verses sung in solo alternate with choral incantations (men and women separate into groups spontaneously) taking up refrains and rhythmically clapping hands. As the song’s mood ebbs and flows, women give out strident cries to stress certain verses (elel).

In such traditional rural communities isolated from the modern world, song and dance play a preponderant role in social life. Some years back during the liberation struggle, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) began radio programmes broadcasting modernised music as a means of political education. This has been continued by the now legitimate Eritrean government even though somewhat paradoxically one can feel the influence of Amaharic music popular in Ethiopia. In contrast to this modernised type of music, the folk songs on this CD have an ancient origin and reproduce long-standing melodic and rhythmic traditions proper to each ethnic community. Nonetheless, the lyrical content of the songs themselves is frequently inspired in part or in whole by current political reality. These folk songs convey then both the ethnic identity of the artists as well as their attempts to relate to current times. Thirty years of liberation war, of sacrifices and suffering, have contributed to the emergence of a strong sense of a common national identity without for all of that, as these songs show, having diminished the rich variety of a multicultural society.

The songs were recorded in Foro, administrative capital of the region, in February 1999 during the border conflict pitting Eritrea against Ehtiopia since May 1998.