Musician and writer Dave Bidini travelled recently to Sierra Leone with War Child Canada. Here he writes about meeting two extraordinary young men.

On my first morning in Freetown, Sierra Leone, I was whisked by one of War Child’s two drivers, Isa, in his truck to a Lebanese bakery-- the Bliss Patisserie-- where we met Barmmy Boy and Lustinejaa over croissants and cafe au laits. Barmmy and Lus are two eighteen year old Freetown rappers supported by War Child for their politically-charged and socially-conscious music. Even though both kids were eighteen, there was very little teenage folly to them. Growing up in the war had matured them quickly, having sacrificed their hanging-out years to try and create an musical impression in one of Africa’s most suffering cities. When I asked Lus, somewhat naively, about working to supplement the money they didn’t make as musicians, he told me, “There are no jobs. As a young person, if you go to an interview for a job, people laugh at you because you have no experience. If you tell them that you have experience, they tell you that it’s not enough experience. A lot of colleagues are affected by this; they drink and take drugs. We grew up the hard way, too, but we are still progressing.”

Barmmy and Lus were part of a former youth collective called The iEARN Music Club, who released one CD-- “Salone For Go Befo” (“Sierra Leone Must Move Forward”)-- with songs like “HIV Dangerous,” and “Freeze.” They’ve now formed a new collective-- AUCAYD (Artists United for Children and Youth Development)-- as a means of sustaining their crusade.

One afternoon, the boys brought me into the heart of Freetown, where we sat for awhile in Victoria Park, Freetown’s sprawling-- if seasonally arid-- civic gardens. We found a stoop under a tree and talked, surrounded by a dozen or so sleeping men. The fellows bought suspicious beef spears from a roving processionaire for 3000 Leones (one dollar) and postulated about the state of Africa. Listening to them talk, it became clear that, like all worthy musicians-- from Woody Guthrie to The Pogues-- they were actuley aware of their past. Lus wondered aloud: “How can the world expect Africa to be more than it is when an entire generation was taken away by the slave trade, only to return to be colonized? And then came many, many wars. Africa has had a very slow and painful start, and it’s not hard to see why.” Whenever the subject of war came up-- as it did now-- I talked about how conflict had affected my country, too; how thousands of young Canadians were handed their fate in two world wars. This was partly a reflex motion, and partly a way of discussing these issues in something other than a pitying light: poor Africa, shit on by the rest of the world. I didn’t know whether the boys were buying what I was selling, but after hearing my thoughts about war and humanity, Lus held up his hands and recited “The Second Coming” by WB Yeats, repeating the verse “the falcon cannot hear the falconer” as a way of illuminating the universal state of the human condition.