Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars

Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars play Saint Rocke Tuesday night. Photo by Zach Smith

They spent a decade in exile, moving from camp to camp. Now they travel the world, playing songs of loss, hope, peace, and love. They are the true rolling stones.

Reuben Koroma knew something needed to be done.

It was 1998. He had been forced into exile by the decade-long civil war that ravaged his native Sierra Leone. He was in a refugee camp in Guinea. The language was foreign. The food was scarce and strange. He saw despondency all around him. He and his fellow refugees struggled to maintain a sense of their very humanity.

And Koroma did what came most naturally to him. He took the bare materials of his life and raised his voice in song.

“You left your country to seek refuge in another man’s land

You will be comforted by strange dialects

You will be fed with unusual diets

You got to sleep in a tarpaulin house

Which is so hard

You got to sleep on a tarpaulin mat

Which is so cold

Living like a refugee

Is not easy,

It’s really not easy.”

He sang with a very direct purpose. Koroma simply wanted the officials that visited his camp to know what the people were experiencing.

“Because of the congestion in the camp, like a 100 families, we are choked in, no privacy, all this frustration,” Koroma said. “We are asking people just for some rice, and the supply was all gone. And so all these things people are complaining and talking about, I just took these constraints and frustrations and wrote this song and then tried to sing when the delegates are coming into the camp, to sing it so they can really know what is bothering the people. I greet them with this song so the people could maybe have their supplies, so people could be treated nice. So that when the big officials came…they might be able to correct things. That is the main reason why I wrote it.”

Soon, other voices joined him in song. A sweet-natured man named Franco Langba – a professional musician who possessed the only guitar in the camp – was the first to join. The two soon became inseparable.

“Wherever he lives, I must make sure I am around there,” Franco would later say.

Eventually they had a band unlike any other. One man, Mohamed Bangura, played harmonica and sang. He had only one hand. The rebels had chopped off his other hand. He had suffered an unspeakable tragedy – rebels had killed his mother and his father and forced him, at gunpoint, to put his child in a mortar and pestle and beat the child to death.

“This is the reason I joined this band – I am more happy when they are near me,” he said later. “I have more confidence to sing, to sing and play the music.”

Another man, Adbul Rahim Kamara, was missing his entire arm. He still sang because he believed in the love of God.

“What they did to me is a fractional part of my body they chop off,” he said, when interviewed for a documentary later. “So I take it as destiny. If I meet the one that did that to me, I’ll greet him. And I’ll forgive and forget.”

Another young man, a teenager who called himself Black Nature, was an aspiring rapper who idolized Busta Rhymes and sounded like a Jamaican dance hall toaster. Koroma’s wife, Grace, sang harmony and served as “band mother.”

Soon they were a full-fledged band. They called themselves Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, and their sound combined the sweet redemption and soulfulness of Bob Marley with the mellow swing of traditional West African music and the soaring effervescence of African high life.

More people than Koroma ever dreamed would hear their music. One day in 2002 three American filmmakers would walk into their camp. Zach Niles, Banker White, and Chris Velan had come to Guinea in search of a way to tell a story about refugees that would bring their often ignored and misunderstood plight to a wider audience. They were searching for musicians, in particular, and when they heard the songs of the Refugee All Stars, they knew they’d found who they were looking for.

“We went over with the intention of finding refugee musicians and using that as a way of telling a wider story about refugees, and on top of that a wider story about Africa, than people normally get,” Niles said.

The documentary they eventually filmed followed the band as they first toured refugee camps around Guinea and then – with great trepidation – returned to Sierra Leone for a short visit to find out if it was possible to go home permanently. While in Sierra Leone, the band reunited with Reuben’s former bandmate, Ashade Pearce, and recorded their first album, Living Like a Refugee.

Both the album and the film – called simply Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars – would attract worldwide attention. The band was granted Visa’s and embarked on the most unexpected odyssey of their lives: a tour of the United States that culminated with a major concert at the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas.

“It was like seeing a new world, to be candid,” Koroma said. “Because since I was born, I never moved out. The only country had been to was the Republic of Guinea, where I sought refuge. As a matter of fact, in our country it is very difficult for some to even get a Visa to come to America. If you are given that opportunity, it is like you have achieved a very big position, to be able to come to the most advanced country in the world. So I felt very good when I came to America. I saw New York, my first place, JFK, the airport. Everyone was so confused, but it was so beautiful in my eyes – to just be taken from the slums in Africa and I see this great world.”

The Refugee All Stars made the most of their opportunity. Niles, who had become their band manager almost by default, didn’t know what to expect when they went on stage in Austin. All their concerts to that point had been small-scale; sometimes, they even played in the streets.

“The SXSW show was amazing,” Niles said. “As much as we loved the band, it was not necessarily our intention that they would become an international touring group in this way…At that point we had no idea what they were going to do, or if it was going to be a complete wreck. But when they came out and started playing, it was like, ‘Wow, this is the real deal.’ They had been playing, professional musicians for their whole lives, something that only became clear after hearing them through a real sound system, in front of a real audience – the fact that these were professional performers came screaming really clear.”

The band – which plays Saint Rocke Tuesday night – has since recorded two more albums and gained international fame, playing American festivals such as Bonnaroo, touring such far flung locales as Japan, Norway, and Italy, and playing with musicians ranging from New Orleans’s legendary Trombone Shorty and Aerosmith. Their new record, Rise & Shine, was produced by Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin.

“They are on their second major record release and sixth world tour,” Niles said. “I mean, it is mind-blowing. I still kind of pinch myself, going to shows and seeing people where T-shirts with the band on them still kind of blows my mind.”

Koroma feels a responsibility to share the story of his country – the good story – with the world.

“I always feel that I am becoming an ambassador for my country, because most people got to know Sierra Leone because of the brutal war. Most people think there is no good thing that will come out of Sierra Leone. That is why we are here.”

Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars play Saint Rocke August 10. For more information on the band, see sierrealeonerefugeeallstars.com or for tickets see saintrocke.com.


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