Living Like a Refugee

When rebels attacked Freetown in the late 1990s, during Sierra Leone's civil war, the singer Reuben Koroma, his wife Grace and their friend Franco, all part of the city's music scene, fled across the border into Guinea. They found each other again in the Kalia refugee camp and started making music. Later moved to the remote Sembakounya camp, they were joined by more players, including the rapper Black Nature. A Canadian relief agency gave them two old electric guitars, a microphone and a basic sound system. In August 2002 the American filmmakers Zach Niles and Banker White and the Canadian songwriter Chris Velan came across the group in rehearsal. They had been searching the camps for stories that would balance the Western media's focus on the region's violence with a sense of beauty and resilience. The band was about to tour Guinea's refugee camps with help from the UN refugee agency, and the filmmakers followed them for three years, through joyful receptions, old traumas and the return to Freetown in 2004, where they recorded their first album. Its title track gave the record its name, Living Like a Refugee, released in September 2006. The 2005 documentary about them carried the band to Central Park SummerStage, Fuji Rock, Bonnaroo and The Oprah Winfrey Show, and they even opened for Aerosmith. Their sound, often heard as reggae, draws on baskeda, a West African rhythm close to it in spirit. The song stands as a record of people who kept making music when they had lost almost everything else.