Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars

From a West African refugee camp to the Fuji Rock Festival in two years’ time

Photos by Dan Grunebaum

It’s a cliché that great art is born out of suffering, but for a group of musicians from Sierra Leone, their art also let them escape a situation in which their lives hung in the balance.

“I was so traumatized that I thought of doing something that could keep me from my worries, and found music,” explains leader Reuben M. Koroma backstage after a rousing Sunday set at last weekend’s tenth Fuji Rock Festival. “Whenever I started to strum the guitar, people would gather around, and when the refugees got to know that I was an entertainer, we started entertaining hundreds, thousands of refugees. So I started assembling other musicians who became interested in playing with me.”

A professional musician in the capital of Freetown, Koroma (pictured) had thought he and his wife were safe from the civil war that engulfed the country in the ’90s. But when the rebels reached the capital in 1997, the couple suddenly had to flee. “I escaped the war between bullets and bombs, walking about 35 miles with my wife, and went to a refugee camp in neighboring Guinea.”

Koroma would ultimately spend eight years as a refugee. Many of his experiences are captured on the Refugee All Stars’ debut album, named for the title song “Living Like A Refugee.”

“Living like a refugee is not easy,” he explains. “You’ve left your country to seek refuge in another man’s land; you will be confronted by strange dialects; and you will be fed an unusual diet. Just imagine you are a refugee and you have no way to get food, and then they tell you that the computer has no record of your name, so you have to starve... So I took all the difficulties I experienced in the refugee camp and wrote a song about it.”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in charge of the camps, gradually found that it could make use of this ragtag but growing band of musicians. “It was quick for the UNHCR to identify us as a powerful instrument, because sometimes when they would hold a meeting, people were so confused they wouldn’t attend. When the UNHCR realized that our music made people come together, they started to use us for meetings.”

Things took a turn for the worse when the camps came under attack from the Guinean army, which believed they were being used as staging grounds for rebel campaigns. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan heard about the situation and came to Guinea to entreat the government to protect the refugees. “I was just a common man in the camp, and as a musician everyone thinks I am a funny man,” recalls Koroma, now 42. “But when they heard that Kofi Annan was coming to visit the camp, the camp manager said, ‘I want you to sing the song “Living Like a Refugee,”’ so I performed the song for that camp.”

In 2002 the All Stars came to the attention of American documentary filmmakers Banker White and Zach Niles, who followed them as they performed in the camps and then tracked their tearful 2004 homecoming. Backed by the likes of Keith Richards and Angelina Jolie, the resulting film, The Refugee All Stars, won a series of awards in 2005 and 2006, and brought the musicians to the world at large—most recently Japan, where the movie debuted at the recent Refugee Film Festival. Earlier this year, the 11-piece powerhouse also took their blend of Afrobeat and Sierra Leone’s reggae-like baskeda music to New York and key events such as Austin’s South By Southwest festival.

Through two performances and a speech at the Fuji Rock Festival’s NGO village, the All Stars, one of whose hands was amputated by the rebels, got their message of the indomitability of the human spirit out loud and clear. But not all their songs are rooted in conflict. Midway through the concert, they put down their electric guitars to play a traditional number. “We call it ‘Buti Van Gay,’” says Koroma. “It’s a traditional song that means ‘Shake the Buttocks.’”

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