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t was Reuben who founded the group in 1998, a year after he had fled the civil war in Sierra Leone and ended up living in Kalia refugee camp, across the border in Guinea: “In 2007, we had a junta led by Johnny Koroma [and backed, incidentally, by the then Liberian President Charles ‘blood


diamond’ Taylor, currently on trial for war crimes in the Hague], which took over from the democratically elected president Alha- ji Tejan Kabbah. I was staying in Lungi, which happens to be the international airport. The peacekeeping force were trying to take the airport from the control of the junta, and it was terri- ble. There was a lot of shooting, and many people died, but I managed to escape, narrowly. And then I had to walk about 30 miles from where I lived to a safer place, and incidentally ended up in Guinea and registered as a refugee.”


“I was highly frustrated, because I had lost family members, I had lost property,” he says, chuckling incongruously at his misfor- tune. “I came to the camp without anything, and I just thought: ‘Well, instead of thinking about what has happened to me, it’s better to do something to occupy myself, so that my life could be reformed.”


And so, he started singing a cappella with his wife Grace. “I found music as like a therapy, like a treatment to reform my life. And when we started doing it, we saw that our neighbours were visiting us because of that, and that’s how I started to sense that if we get like three or four musicians together, we could be more for help – we could reform our lives and reform other people’s lives.”


Reuben started looking for other musicians among the resi- dents of the camp, and the first instrumental accompanist he found was Francis John Langba (‘Franco’), who had somehow managed to escape the fighting with his acoustic guitar intact. And among the kids who used to hang round the group, Reuben noticed one young boy not even into his teens.


“When I was a little boy in Kalia camp, he became my teach-


er,” Black Nature recalls. “I was going to school in the refugee school, and he was a musician. He’d been doing music his whole life and I always admired musicians. So I started hanging around with him, just seeing when he does his thing. When the band started coming together, he helped me to play drums for them at the same time as doing rap stuff.”


“I saw that he was a very talented guy,” adds Reuben, “and I needed to develop that talent, to make it useful… and I saw the interest in him. He always came around, and he adored the music. I said: ‘You could be a musician,’ and I started learning him some musical skills. And I think he’s doing pretty well.”


Black Nature certainly seems to have learnt a thing or two about playing the congas, judging by his Womad performance, which avoids grandstanding and is very much ‘according to the groove’ as Tony Allen would put it. “Yeah, well, that’s the spirit of music, I’m not alone on stage,” he murmurs.


As the band developed, people from the NGOs working in the camp began to see its worth, but their relative peace was soon shattered when it was attacked by Guinean soldiers and other locals. After moving yet again to another more secure site within Guinea, a Canadian aid organisation helped them acquire an old sound system and electric guitars. Then in 2002, the American film- makers Banker White and Zach Niles, and Canadian singer-song- writer Chris Velan met the group.


“They decided to make a documentary film about us, and then they took us to other camps to play for other refugees,” continues Reuben. For the next three years, they filmed the band as it toured from camp to camp, and it was also during this time that a UN ini- tiative allowed them to return to Freetown. There, with help from members of Reuben’s old group The Emperors, they made their first record. When the documentary about the band came out in late 2005, it brought their story to the wider world, and kick-start- ed their international touring career.


While the group’s debut album Living Like A Refugee (2004) does pretty much what it says on the tin, dwelling mainly on the trials of their lives as displaced people, Rise & Shine is a more confi- dent and diverse record. Aside from the inclusion of the Bonerama Horns (prompted by producer Steve Berlin), who fill out riffs previ- ously reserved for keyboards, there are more outward-looking lyrics. Global Threat combines themes of climate change, disarma- ment and food shortages, while Goat Smoke Pipe is a sly allegory about post-war corruption and inequality in Sierra Leone. And there are love songs, such as Muloma and the lovely, skanking Bend Down The Corner.


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