While the international community has invested Sierra Leone’s recovery in trials and tribunals, Sierra Leoneans themselves have relied on family and sheer inner will to rebuild lives devastated by the country’s civil war.
The award-winning documentary The Refugee All Stars captures this resilience of the human spirit in a Guinean refugee camp, where six Sierra Leonean musicians combine their talents to divert their fellow residents from the sorrows of displacement.
As what he had anticipated would be a brief stay at various United Nations-sponsored camps turned into an indefinite sojourn, Refugee All Stars founder Reuben Koroma said: “Nothing is happening here … I think we should be doing something to entertain the people.”
Koroma, lyricist and lead singer, first paired up with Rastafarian guitarist Franco Langba, who infused his soulful lyrics with a bouncing reggae cadence. The duo moved from camp to camp, picking up new members along the way who were similarly suspended in exile and grief.
The film follows the band for three years as they tour UN-run camps across Guinea to play concerts for fellow refugees and, ultimately, revisit Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, in 2003 to test both the officially proclaimed peace and their willingness to return home. Koroma says in the film that the group’s “only contribution is to detraumatise the people”.
Trauma has certainly cast its shadow on Sierra Leone. In 1991, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) launched a rebel movement against the country’s government that escalated into an indiscriminate campaign of mutilation and rape that would not come to an end until 2002. The film relates individual survival stories of band members, most of whom fled Sierra Leone for bordering Guinea at the conflict’s height in 1997.
Grace Ampomah, a back-up singer and Koroma’s girlfriend, recalls her shock at first hearing gunfire and explosions during an otherwise routine trip to the water pump.
Alhadji Kamara, or Black Nature, is a freestyle-rapping teenager who emulates the United States hip-hop artist Busta Rhymes. He came to Guinea at age 11 after his father was killed in the war, but does not know the fate of his mother, whom, he admits, he might not recognise if he saw her again.
Singer Arahim Kamara and harmonica player Mohamed Bangura suffered amputations of their left arm and left hand, respectively. Bangura, however, experienced even more punishment at the hands of rebels. He witnessed the murder of his parents and was subsequently forced at gunpoint into killing his young child.
Koroma took the initiative. He decided to take “all the problems, the suffering of the people, and make a song of it”. His resolve, along with that of his band members, is reminiscent of the artistic life force that drives the pianist “playing for his life” in Harlem-born author James Baldwin’s story Sonny’s Blues.
Baldwin’s protagonist watches an ensemble that includes his brother, Sonny, play the blues. He knows that the blues are nothing new, but listens attentively nonetheless. “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”
The documentary similarly represents music as emotional reprieve. However, it further illustrates that such relief is temporary and insufficient as a sole buoy for the hopes of a person, much less those of an entire nation. Arahim Kamara confesses: “[Music] heals my trauma, because, when I’m playing, I forget about myself for the moment, what has happened.”
But as soon as the band stop playing, Kamara returns to the starkness of his reality and wonders: “How can I feed my family?” Koroma, moreover, denounces as “economic backwardness” the skewed incentives at work in the UN programmes that encourage Sierra Leonean refugees to repatriate.
He explains that many refugees would like to return to Sierra Leone, but cites the irrationality of forsaking free health care, schooling, food and lodging in exchange for 25Â 000 Leones ($10) and transport to a country they have not lived in for years without any means of supporting themselves once they get there. The band wrestle with such concerns in deciding whether to return to Freetown for good and try to make it as professional musicians.
The film, then, does not allow a message about empowerment through music wholly to overtake the urgent need for Sierra Leoneans to satisfy basic requirements, such as food, housing and education. That having been said, the music is very good. And flouting the bleak circumstances from which it was borne, the music is lively and infectious.
The group have camp residents dancing up a storm in the tarpaulin tents. The Refugee All Stars are the West African answer to Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club — their music is as stirring as their documentary.
Incidentally, Refugee All Stars filmmakers Zach Niles and Banker White, unlike Buena Vista’s Ry Cooder, remain mute and behind the camera throughout the documentary, a move that focuses the audience on the musicians without distracting them with a tale of their “discovery” by Western patrons.
The band lives the Krio proverb “If you wan wet fo san, sidon na faia“. The saying, translated from the Sierra Leonean mélange of local languages and English, goes that if you await the sun, sit by the fire — or, in order to achieve something, you must suffer first. The proverb corresponds with the band members’ unswerving faith in destiny and a belief, reiterated throughout the film, that there must be some higher purpose for the suffering they have endured.
Still, such a dour tenet does not comport with their unceasingly hopeful nature and belief in self that will not be broken. Perhaps it is better said that each band member, having withstood extreme pressures with the mere defiance of will, has formed a diamond inside. — IPS