In a soupy hot African night we arrived at Lungi airport into a shouting
throng of people all offering to take our bags. “Missionaries?” a man asked
us. “Musicians,” we corrected. He looked surprised. The woman officer at
customs examined the leaflet about our concerts in Freetown and nodded us
through. We crammed into a rackety old helicopter, our luggage and musical
instruments piled in the middle, for a deafening journey across the bay to
Freetown.
What was an amateur choir from Richmond, one of the wealthiest suburbs of
London, doing on board a helicopter at night in Sierra Leone, one of the
poorest countries in the world, the first UK choir to travel there in 37
years?
It had all started a year ago at a wedding party in Suffolk for a member of
our choir. One guest was Rachel Cooper, the Deputy High Commissioner for
Sierra Leone, back on a home break. She’s also in the choir. What’s it like
out there, we asked her. She described the relentless poverty, the 15 per
cent of children who die before the age of 5, the collapse of infrastructure
during the decade of civil war that ended seven years ago. But also, from a
musician’s perspective, she was eloquent about the limitations of cultural
life. Musical education, she said, was down to one small music academy in
Freetown, which had very few instruments or resources. Musicians never had
the chance to meet and perform with like-minded people from other cultures.
Wouldn’t it be great, we said, if our choir could go out there on a cultural
exchange, meet the choral singers of Freetown, perhaps take out some
second-hand instruments? So here we were, 12 months later, half of our
chamber choir, Cantanti Camerati, in Africa, having raised nearly £10,000
and collected about 100 second-hand instruments, from tubas to violins and
keyboards. We were 18 singers, led by the conductor, Patrick Martin, and we
were to take part in a singing festival put on in our honour. As usual with
UK choirs we had plenty of women but barely enough men — three tenors,
including the intrepid Mike Wigney, a paraplegic in a wheelchair since he
broke his back in a mountaineering accident, and four basses. We had come to
share our music and to learn about a society that was very different from
our own.
What did we expect to find in this former British colony, its city districts
bearing names such as Aberdeen, Waterloo, Sussex and Ruislip? We had come
braced for poverty and it was all around us in the chaotic shanty towns of
Freetown. Against a spectacular backdrop of mountains and palm-fringed
golden beaches, many were scratching a living breaking stones or carrying
huge loads of fruit, cement or water on their heads. But the choirs we met
were not like that. In a country with almost 70 per cent adult illiteracy,
they were educated, professional people like us — accountants, medical
students — who sang in their spare time and loved the same Handel and Haydn
and Gilbert & Sullivan that we did.
What we didn’t expect was the huge welcome we received wherever we went. We
were treated like celebrities. Our first stop was at Broadcasting House, the
headquarters of Sierra Leone TV, to sing in the studio then later to appear
on chat shows on television and radio. After several takes with the noisy
air conditioning switched off we’d recorded three songs, including the
spiritual Little David Play on Yo’ Harp, the most popular with
the producers. “Can you do more?” they asked. “We would like 30 minutes.” We
were sweltering.
“What can the people of Freetown expect from your concerts?” the bouncy
chat-show host asked. It was a fair question. We do a lot of English music
and unaccompanied madrigals. We said we hoped they would be entertained.
We’re not the only ones trying cultural initiatives in traumatised nations.
Writing in this newspaper last year about the charity Dramatic Need, which
brings drama, music and painting to South African children, the film-maker Danny
Boyle said that the arts “allow people to participate in their own
recovery, help them to relocate and resuscitate their sense of self. It’s
not for nothing that the arts are called the humanities; they humanise us.”
This summer, too, the Choir of London performed Puccini’s La Bohème
in the occupied territories in the Middle East, involving a chorus of
Palestinian children. “There are some concerts the local people can’t put on
by themselves but with our help they have a taste of how things could be,”
explained Andy Staples, who sang there.
Our own first concert was at St George’s cathedral in Freetown, where the last
English choir to visit, King’s College Cambridge, had sung under David
Willcocks in 1972, long before the war. It was about half full and as we
competed with the noise of the electric fans to sing Roger Quilter’s The
Pretty Birds Do Sing a large fruit bat swooped around with piercing
squeaks.
The civil war had affected most people we met. In this population of six
million some 50,000 were killed and an estimated one million displaced in
the conflict. In the streets we saw the results of its savagery in amputees
whose limbs had been hacked off in the prolonged campaign of terror from the
Liberian-backed rebels. People told us about fleeing to Guinea or The
Gambia. We passed the heavily guarded UN Special Court on judgment day for
three rebel leaders convicted of war crimes. Their appeal was rejected and
they were hustled out of the country in a UN plane to serve their sentences
in Rwanda.
At the smartly modern University of Freetown students can take peace and
conflict studies but not music. Yet singing is part of life here, we found,
and it has a role in the forward-looking “rebranding” of this democracy,
whose President and Cabinet will be in London next week for a major
conference on progress and investment. At a primary school on Tower Hill the
children gave us a song by their headmistress, All Children Must Go to
School, in which they sang about wanting to be “President, or a doctor
or a lawyer”. Women at an ante-natal class in Kissy Hospital, visited by one
choir member who’s a midwife, were learning songs about getting their
husbands to wear condoms to protect against HIV.
We hadn’t expected to find such a devout society. Roughly half and half Muslim
and Christian, the religious groups live together in enviable harmony,
intermarrying and visiting each other’s places of worship. Trucks and “poda
poda” taxis carry religious slogans painted on the front: “Praise de Lord”
or “May Allah bless my Dad”. Two Muslim men in robes were sitting in the
cathedral as we rehearsed. “If I go into a Muslim house,” the St George’s
choirmaster Reginald Wilhelm explained, “and start to sing The King
of Love My Shepherd Is, they will sing it with me because we went to
school together.”
The local choir we sang with for a joint concert at the British Council — a
full house this time — was mostly made up of young men, some of them singing
alto and soprano parts. Most had come up through church choirs, and the
Anglican ones here are all-male. “It’s good for them to see your choir with
so many women in it,” the choir’s conductor, Kitty Fadlu-Deen, said. “Here
parents don’t encourage girls to take part in such activities.” She hoped
that we would encourage nuance and phrasing.
When we joined forces for the Hallelujah Chorus our English tones felt
lost in a wall of sound from these powerful, wonderful voices that made the
music vibrate in our hands and was “uplifting” to conduct, Patrick Martin
said.
The Ballanta Music Academy is a three-storey concrete block on Liverpool
Street, with chickens pecking in the dirt outside. It had just acquired a
generator and a small recording studio, gifts from Wells Cathedral School in
Somerset, whose sixth-formers were also visiting. But there was still no
running water. Our instrument donations were pounced on by students keen to
try the violins, cello and the clarinets. Some of the brass went to the
police and army marching bands, whose own instruments looked as if they had
been run over by a truck. A euphonium was still played despite a bullet hole
repaired with cardboard.
Was our trip useful when there was so much real hardship? “We’re still living
in the euphoria of Cantanti!” Fadlu-Deen wrote this week. “All of us at the
academy are so uplifted in spirit.” There is no doubt that the instruments
we brought will be well used, too, and for us the concert with the Freetown
choir was an unforgettable experience, especially the joyous Sierra Leonean
folksongs they taught us, and their gift of African drums.
We hope we can achieve some of their spontaneity and freedom when we sing
those songs at our Christmas concert in Richmond next month.
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