Taxi drivers in Sierra Leone attract young passengers by providing CD players and DVDs showing the latest hip-hop videos on TV screens hooked up to their rear mirrors. Then they turn up the volume. Olusegun Ogundeji has a blast
Drivers of flashy cars — ”rides” in local lingo — mostly comprise a class of people we call the Just Comes (aka JCs). In other words locals who return to Sierra Leone from abroad after a long sojourn. Typically they arrive back with Tuaregs and Hummers, and state-of-the-art audio systems they play at top volume.
The JCs use the blast of sound from their automobiles to draw attention to their big-brand cars, or simply to announce their own personal presence everywhere they go. The idea is that once attention is drawn to their vehicles, it will extend to themselves.
Male JCs are fond of wearing studs, long chains and elaborately plaited hair. These styles have been duplicated by young ”home-based” guys who seek every opportunity to go out of the country.
So whether you have just arrived from neighbouring Liberia or Nigeria, or all the way from the United States, England or Europe, if you have a car with sound to show off, you’re a JC.
Now many taxi drivers who ply the Freetown roads are following in the JCs’ footsteps. They don’t drive Range Rover Sport Submarines or BMW X5s, but they too have been infected by the ”sound craze” bug.
The taxi drivers can’t afford fancy built-in sound systems, so they rely on portable CD players — and many of them have gone one better than the JCs by installing DVD players and digital TVs in their cabs, which they use as live bait to attract passengers.
Taking a taxi the other day through Lumley, west Freetown, where many of the JCs are based, I asked the driver, Musa Sesay, about their influence on local life. ”You’ll know one when you see one,” he told me bluntly as he moved his elderly Toyota Corolla gently down Wilkinson Road towards the central business district.
Sesay confirmed that JC bling has made them the talk of the town and started a trend now being embraced by commercial drivers.
Some drivers say they were prompted by passengers to install audio sound systems, and even video, in their vehicles. Many have obliged and Freetown traffic jams throb with the latest hip-hop hits from Nigeria and the US — often with music videos to go with them. Poda poda drivers — as the taxis they drive are known here — pander to their biggest customers, the youth. More sedate passengers who object to P-Square’s Do Me blaring in their ears are generally ignored.
It is not unusual to see TV screens hanging below the rear-view mirror of a poda poda. Some drivers even attach a separate screen to one or both front seats for rear passengers, giving them real in-flight-style entertainment.
It has been observed by drivers that many potential passengers nowadays are interested only in the humming sounds of an approaching taxi and will pick the one playing the music they most admire. Younger passengers often prefer to skip a poda poda or two and wait for one blasting ”their” music before embarking.
For this reason, more drivers are attaching CD Walkmans to bigger and bigger speakers for their passengers’ delight.
The music and videos are also a good way to keep passengers happy considering that traffic jams are a way of life in Freetown. Not much has changed in the city’s design since colonial days and with buildings having been packed on either side of the roads, there’s not much chance of expansion. This all counts against the city’s ability to accommodate the increasing number of cars that have hit the asphalt, especially since the end of the war in 2002. Waiting in a jam without moving an inch for up to 15 minutes is not unusual.
More than one million people now live in Freetown and only roads in the eastern part of the city were constructed to modern taste — between 1978 and 1979 — by the Siaka Steven administration.
Playing music has become a way to loosen up passengers and get them to chat with one another and feel more comfortable instead of the muteness usually experienced during short taxi journeys. Even passengers who don’t dance to the beats seem to feel less tense.
Musa Sesay said he was forced to ditch his old car stereo by his customers. ”You won’t believe how addicted some of these people are until you have a non-functioning car stereo.”
Sesay finally gave up on trying to play DJ: having twice repaired his faulty stereo system, he decided to remove it to avoid disappointment and endless complaints from his passengers.
For more extravagant poda poda drivers, it’s the secondary students who go to school in two batches every day — morning and afternoon sessions — that spur them to fix or improve on their sound systems.
But as the majority of these drivers are in their twenties — club-goers by night — they too enjoy the vibes.
Music videos are the perfect length for those who boast DVDs and TVs in their cabs. Crossing from the western part of Freetown, the residential base for middle classes, to the centre is a 6,4km drive, or a 15 to 25 minute drive, including the mandatory traffic jam. The distance is almost the same from the east, where the majority of the country’s low-income earners live, though eastern Freetowners are heard to complain that their routes are so disorganised that it can take up to an hour to travel the same distance.
So they sit back and enjoy — or try to ignore — a variety of the latest hits. Popular taxi music includes local tunes from artists such as Famous who did Ar nor know, Problem M’s Player, Kao de Nero’s Freetown Warrior, Bu Berry’s Kobuko, DX3’s Small Borbor and so on. OtherÂwise the drivers play American and Nigerian hip-hop like Lolly Pop by Lil Wayne and P-Square’s Do Me.
It costs a lot to buy and install all this equipment. New DVD player/TVs range between 500Â 000 leone (about $170) and 750Â 000 leone while even used ones cost around 300Â 000 leone. Added to this, the sound systems run on batteries and can use up to six sets of two A4 batteries every day, not least thanks to the huge speakers running off them.
The most basic and most common equipment remains the CD Walkman, which costs a modest 60 000 leone (about $20). This is usually placed on the driver’s lap, where it can be controlled at will.
The music is so loud that traffic wardens are stationed almost every mile along the roads to caution drivers. Many locally made subwoofers have been confiscated in Freetown, but the music plays on.
Olusegun Ogundeji is the Freetown bureau chief for the IDG News Service