Zaho

Zehira Darabid (Arabic: زهيرة درابيد ; born May 10, 1980), known by her stage name Zaho, is an Algerian-Canadian R&B singer.

Zahera Darabid was born on May 10, 1980, in Bab Ezzouar, a suburb of the Algerian capital Algiers. At the age of 18, she and her family moved to Montréal, Canada. Her father is an executive and her mother a mathematics professor. She has a brother and sister.

In December 1991, the civil war wreaked havoc in Algeria, and she was only 11 years old at the time. Cousins, neighbors, her swimming teacher, the manager of the café on her street, all disappeared. Her father, Mohamed, and her mother, Fadela, were even nearly killed in a market bombing she suffers from the state of emergency in the country and the generalized curfew. She longed for another life with her loved ones, far from war-torn Algeria. As a teenager, she dreamed of becoming an astronaut or a pilot, but soon realized that this was impossible in a country in the midst of civil war. So she began sending applications to universities abroad, but few if any arrived during the 1990s. On December 31, 1998, she and her family moved to Montreal, Canada as part of a selective immigration program, as the country was looking for computer scientists. Before moving to Canada, her father was an executive at the Ministry of Planning, and her mother a professor of operational research at the National Institute of Informatics in Algiers. She declares that her family belonged to that intellectual class that had little money and whose only wealth was education. She was shocked when she arrived in Montreal, having spent her youth in a country plagued by civil war. She recounts her exile in the song Kif'n'dir, featured on her debut album Dima. After three years in Canada, the ghosts of her past resurface, and she recounts how she sometimes even has panic attacks, standing motionless and stunned in the middle of the street recalling a time when she missed a bus that exploded a few meters away. For a long time, she says, she prevented herself from returning to Algeria, and blamed herself for having left part of her family there. A few years later, she reconnected with her homeland, returning to see her loved ones with arms full of gifts.