Sonita Alizadah
Sonita Alizadeh is an Afghan rapper and campaigner against forced marriage, born in Herat on 11 November 1996. Her music and her activism are the same thing, and the circumstances that produced them are extraordinary. She grew up in Herat under Taliban rule. Her family considered selling her as a bride when she was ten, and later fled to Iran, where she cleaned bathrooms and taught herself to read and write. She found rap through the Iranian artist Yas and through Eminem, and started writing. In 2014 she won a thousand dollars in a US competition for a song urging Afghans to vote, and sent the money to her mother. "Brides for Sale" is the song she is known for. She wrote and filmed it as her family prepared to sell her into marriage at sixteen; the documentary-maker Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami paid two thousand dollars to buy six months' delay, and the video went around the world. Ghaemmaghami's film Sonita premiered in 2015 and won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance in 2016. She was named one of the BBC's 100 Women in 2015, graduated from Bard College in 2023 and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.
4 songs on Sandar. Stream them free, or go ad-free with Plus.
Songs by Sonita Alizadah
- Dige Jang Base
- Dokhtar Foroshi
- Hamvatan
- Mano Bebakhshed