Omani Music Masks A Slave Trading Past

By Benjamin Plackett. It’s not long into an interview with an ethnomusicologist, Majid al-Harthy, before he makes what he sees as an important distinction. Omani traditional music doesn’t have an African “influence,” he explains with a friendly fervour, but rather it has an African “presence.” In that seemingly simple semantic difference, he says, lies a denial of Oman’s history in the slave trade. More...