Alone in front of her laptop, Gilda-Nancy Horvath composed and recorded her first angry rap, “Trushula” -- the anthem of an artist railing against the racism suffered by her Roma people in her native Austria and beyond. Eight years later, her quest has gained fresh relevance with the resurgence of the European far-right -- several of whose figureheads she assails in that early track, pounding out her rhyming verses to the rhythm of keyboards and drums.

With the Nazi-rooted Freedom Party (FPOe) topping the polls for the first time in Austria’s national elections last weekend, the activist told AFP she is set on “denouncing the lies of the far right”. Besides wanting to “settle scores” with racists targeting her community, Horvath raps in Romani -- under her stage name Nancy Black -- to keep the language alive and to “stop the suffering”.

Across Europe, Roma -- estimated to number 14 million -- face poverty and discrimination at school and work, according to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA).

Horvath is descended from the Lovara, a group of Roma who worked as horse-dealers under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Austria, Roma officially account for 30,000 of the country’s nine million people, but this is thought to be an underestimate since many do not declare themselves for fear of discrimination. “The Nancy Black project gives them the courage not to hide,” she said.

Roma singer Gilda-Nancy Horvath, known as Nancy Black, poses for a picture prior to her performance.

Roma singer Gilda-Nancy Horvath, known as Nancy Black, performs at Brunnenpassage in Vienna.

Roma singer Gilda-Nancy Horvath, known as Nancy Black, performs at Brunnenpassage.

Netflix Roma hip-hop drama

Wearing round glasses and dressed all in black, Horvath chooses to sing in Romani, an endangered language which is orally transmitted. She has also released Romani lullabies. “With the death of this language we are also forgetting a large part of our history,” she said. When she raps in Romani, she said, it “touches young people”.

Last year, Netflix launched a series about a 17-year-old Roma girl torn between her family’s strict rules and her dream of making a name for herself in hip-hop.

Horvath also fights for Roma artists to appear on Spotify and iTunes to be able to “penetrate and find their place in mainstream culture”. Roma singers are starting to break into pop culture, according to Anna Piotrowska, a musicologist at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

She cites the example of Polish artist Viki Gabor, who won the Junior Eurovision in 2019.“Roma have always assimilated (Western) fashions and reworked them in an innovative way”, Piotrowska told AFP. And “protest rap is very popular” among young people.

Women in particular are breaking down barriers, Piotrowska added. Previously, Roma music was “a man’s job”, she added, with men accounting for 99 percent of those playing the cymbal -- a popular Roma instrument.

Roma Holocaust memory

But discrimination and inequality endure, Horvath said, even in Austria where the constitution protects Roma as a minority present since the 15th century. It gives Roma the right to their own broadcasts and bilingual establishments, and a fund to finance associations.

Horvath herself worked for years as a journalist for the Romani programs of the public television channel ORF. At one of her recent stage shows, she used satire to make her audience understand the stigmatization Roma people suffer.

In front of an audience of about a hundred, almost entirely non-Roma -- or “gadje” in Romani -- she read between songs a text that turned a vicious sterotype on its head, making the “gadje” a “discriminated minority”. “I use the same pseudo-scientific language” as that used in public discourse to make people believe that because the Oktoberfest beer festival in Munich exists, and rapes are committed there every year, Germans are all alcoholics and violent, she said.

“That is not representative of German society, and yet it is how the Roma are spoken about in the media,” she said. She also writes poems about the killing of at least 500,000 Roma by the Nazis -- an atrocity also referred to in her early song “Trushula”.

Roma call it the “Porajmos”, which literally means “devouring”. “Our ancestors were murdered. That is a reality,” said Horvath, who has visited Auschwitz several times to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. “But in my family’s daily life, as in most families, there was silence.”—AFP