Afghanistan’s first female rapper refuses to be silenced

With her blue jeans and outspoken lyrics, Susan Feroz has ruffled plenty of feathers in a country where women are still very much second-class citizens, write Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau

IT’S a simple message: “Listen to my voice/It’s not just your choice”, raps Susan Feroz on her new track ‘Naqisul Aqal’, an Islamic term that means “mentally disturbed” and is frequently used to insult women. “I am not just a woman/I am also human.”

Afghanistan’s first female rapper, Feroz is hoping it will make a difference in her tradition-bound homeland. “Men should have this feeling that women are half of our society. Right now, men see woman as having little or no value,” she says. “I want to encourage women, and to make men understand we can do the same things that they do.”