Kakuma refugee camp, a hot, dusty, sprawling settlement in northern Kenya, seems an unlikely place for the birth of a band that fuses traditional melodies from southern Sudan with beats common in music blaring on modern-day East African radio stations.
Even more unlikely are the instruments — fashioned from cowhides, tree branches, the bottom part of a frying pan and even bottle caps — the musicians use. The sounds generated by this motley ensemble had a small crowd of Nairobi youth whooping with delight recently when the band, visiting from Kakuma, played for them.
“This is what we call adungu,” band leader Marial Mark Awuok pointed out. It consists of a rather large wooden box, covered with cowhide and with a hole in the middle. Jutting from one side of the box is a large, curved tree branch. Strings are wound around metal spikes that are drilled into the wood and attached to the box. It is plucked — and looks and sounds — like a harp.
“And this is kochkoch,” he said. It is a wooden bench on to which three rows of bottle caps and small pieces of metal strung together by a wire are attached. Jutting out of the bench on both sides of the metal rows are two spikes that hold two flat, metal plates. Three drums sit in front of the bench. The musician hits the bottle caps, metal plates and drums with sticks.
The rababa looks like a lyre. A metal plate is fused together with the bottom part of a frying pan. Three sticks fused into a rough, upside-down triangle, and to which five plastic strings have been attached, complete the plucking instrument.
Such is the resourcefulness and creativity of the Nazal Jazz Band of the New Sudan Youth Association in Kakuma camp. Formed at the camp in 1992 the band and its four dancers perform for camp residents throughout the year and on festivals commemorating important days, such as World Aids Day and International Women’s Day.
But the band is not strictly about entertainment. “In Kakuma, life is very hard,” explained band member Charles Chan Kondok, who is originally from Bahr el Ghazal, Sudan. Many of the camp’s residents go for days without food and suffer from malnutrition and other ailments as they languish in the overcrowded, unsanitary and sometimes violent camp.
Many residents have suicidal thoughts or even attempt suicide, Kondok said. “Some people might say, ‘This is the end of our life.’ When we realised that these conditions are now facing so many people, [we] composed some songs of courage whereby we encourage them.”
In particular, the band tries to target youth. “Some people say that, in these conditions, ‘Why should I bother going to school? I should just sit at home, or do other things,'” said Kondok. “We encourage them to join school and to work hard to build their future and change their lives. [We sing], your day will still come.”
Through their music, band members also educate their audiences about HIV/Aids prevention, the dangers of early marriages and encourage parents to send their daughters to school. Depending on the audience — which includes refugees from Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among other places — the band sings in English, Kiswahili, Arabic or their native Dinka.
Not only is the music meant to uplift the minds and spirits of Kakuma’s residents, but it is also a survival tactic for the band members themselves as they cope with their own frustrations and traumatic pasts.
“The situation is the camp is very hard — you may face so many difficulties and become so discouraged,” said Dominic Mawut, also from Bahr el Ghazal. What encourages us the most is our music.”
That the members of Nazal Jazz Band made it to Kakuma camp in the first place is itself a miracle.
They were among the so-called “lost boys of Sudan,” an estimated 10 000 children who, in 1987, fled their villages in south Sudan during a particularly fierce round of fighting between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army. The two parties have been at war since 1983 over religion and access to oil, among other issues.
The boys, after being separated from their parents, walked 1 600km over a five-year period from south Sudan to Ethiopia — where they lived briefly in refugee camps — and back.
Along the way many boys died of starvation, dehydration, violence from soldiers and attacks by crocodiles and lions. The band members met each other as they were fleeing Sudan. “We encountered many problems along the way,” said Mawut. “Because of these problems, people have to sing songs of encouragement.”
And that was the genesis of Nazal Jazz Band. Although they had no instruments at the time, the band members began to compose songs to motivate people to keep walking and to assure them that food would soon be on the way.
Once they arrived in Ethiopia, they formed a 24-member band and made instruments out of whatever materials they could find. “People were very, very happy with what we were doing. [We] encouraged many people in the area,” recalled Mawut. But after the fall of Haile Mariam Mengistu in Ethiopia, the boys had to flee again. Band members scattered and only regrouped once at the Kakuma camp in 1992.
The boys were separated again when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the United States State Department began a special resettlement programme for the “lost boys” at the end of 1999. Throughout 2001, and into 2002, about 3 800 youth were to be relocated to the US.
Twelve of the band members are currently in the US as part of the resettlement programme. The remaining 12 are waiting to join them. Mawut thinks the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US slowed down the programme .
When the first 12 Nazal Jazz Band members left for the US, the rest of the band wrote a special song for them, said Mawut. “We sang to them: ‘Don’t forget our country, Sudan.'”