Bèle Fòòr
Fur
Prospect Lefferts Gardensollowing genocidal campaigns by the government-backed Janjaweed militias in Sudan in the early 2000s, hundreds of thousands of Darfuri fled to refugee camps in Chad and, when possible, elsewhere. Of the much smaller number who made it as refugees to the U.S., most settled in Iowa and Indiana, from which several hundred left for a small Darfuri enclave in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. All the dozen or so Darfuri languages are giving way to what is now called Darfuri Arabic, which was already making inroads before the killings, but has also been the principal medium of communication among all kinds of Darfuris, in the refugee camps and in exile. ELA worked with the Darfur People’s Association of New York and other groups to record speakers of Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit, of which there are a small number of speakers in New York but now many more now in cities across the U.S.