Zakia Abu Gassim Abu Bakr
Sudanese guitarist (born 1930s)
Zakia Abu Gassim Abu Bakr, Zakia Abdul Gassim Abu Bakr or Zakia Abulqasim (Arabic: زكية أبوالقاسم أبوبكر; born 1930s) is a Sudanese guitarist.
She started performing in the 1960s and is recognised as Sudan's first female professional guitarist. As of 2018, aged in her 80s, she was still leading an all-woman traditional Sudanese music group, Sawa Sawa.
Early life
She was born in Abbasiya, Omdurman, Sudan. She did not complete her secondary education, but taught for four years at the Fella Gerges School and studied courses provided by the Sudanese Red Crescent, and literacy course arranged by the municipal council.
Musical career
She learned to play first the flute, then the oud, and then the guitar. In the 1960s the jazz musician Sharhabil Ahmed, who she subsequently married, invited her to join his band. She played in traditional Sudanese dress.
In the 1980s the couple moved to Cairo, Egypt, to benefit their children's education: all seven children grew to be artists and musicians. During their time in Cairo they performed at Cairo Opera House and at the Roman theatre in Alexandria, and toured to festivals in places including Asmara, Berlin, London, Paris and the Netherlands.
“Zakia Abu Gassim Abu Bakr” enters the record as sudanese guitarist (born 1930s). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Zakia, Gassim and Bakr can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q109259313. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zakia Abu Gassim Abu Bakr” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.