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.