by Caleb Heymann
 photos courtesy of Caleb Heymann
Filmmaker Caleb Heymann recorded the trip of Sawif and Ciiz, members of Portland-based hip-hop group, Rebel Soulz, and fellow filmmaker Abdul to Sierra Leone. |
In the winter of 2007, a group of Portland-based musicians and filmmakers boarded a plane for Freetown, Sierra Leone.
The trip had different meanings for each of the people heading to this small country in West Africa. For Sawif and Ciiz, members of the Portland-based hip-hop group, Rebel Soulz, it was an opportunity to showcase their music to an overseas audience and to fulfill their dream of connecting with their spiritual homeland as African Americans. For Sierra Leonean-American Abdul, it was an actual homecoming to a place where he’d spent his childhood before immigrating to America. And for me, as a Portland-based filmmaker living in South Africa, it was a chance to document a rare and amazing story.
Our two-week trip became the foundation for the Moving to the Beat documentary, a project that had begun several years prior. I filmed Sawif, Ciiz and Abdul as they mingled with their musical counterparts on the paradisiacal beaches of Freetown, visited with refugees and amputees victimized by the decade-long civil war, and performed live at local clubs. Through interviews, radio appearances, casual conversations and freestyles, the dialogue was broad and ambitious.
There was palpable excitement in the air, as if long-lost brothers and sisters were coming together. The chant of “Salon fo go bifo! (Sierra Leone must progress!)” and “Forward ahead to Africa” followed us like a steady drum-beat throughout the trip.
The central idea behind Moving to the Beat is that hip-hop bridges the worlds of black youth in Africa and America. Hip-hop is more than the music—it’s a language, an attitude, a way of dressing and moving that forms a common bond and identity. As Afrika Bambaataa observed, hip-hop “dates all the way back to the motherland, where tribes would use call-and-response chants.” Roots can be traced through Cab Calloway’s jazz rhyming and the poetic “rapping” of Isaac Hayes, to the angry political rhetoric of Malcolm X. And with this phase of globalization, it’s come full circle back to Africa, where youth rock Tupac tattoos and holler “West Side!”
Bigger-than-life images of Tupac and other hip-hop celebrities were displayed on posters and passing cars — Cristal, “bling” and white picket mansions. And this presence of American hip-hop on the streets of Freetown led to a general consensus among our Sierra Leonean friends that America was indeed a “second heaven.” At the same time, they struggled to untangle the radical and commercial roots of American hip-hop. There was a genuine response to our call to demystify America as the Wonderland. “Moving to the Beat” became a process of breaking down misconceptions that existed between Africa and America, and recovering the radical soul of hip-hop.
The local hip-hop style of Freetown may be derivative of commercial American rap in style and attitude. But in terms of substance and lyrical content, it is far more progressive than most Western hip-hop. In Sierra Leone, there is widespread awareness that music plays an educational and political role through “sensitizing” the masses to social issues. Songs promoting safe sex actually play in clubs as local hits. Young women turned to hip-hop to speak out against male chauvinism, while young men—many of whom had been child war soldiers — put down the gun and picked up the microphone to attack repressive traditions with “lyrical ammunition.”
When we boarded the plane back to America, we knew that this was still a beginning. Sierra Leoneans had embraced the Rebel Soulz and turned them into local celebrities, and now they were already planning their next trip to “Sa’lone.” As co-directors, Abdul and I knew that we had our work cut out in editing the footage back in Portland. But more than that this project had started a small movement, and our connections laid the groundwork for the Moving to the Beat Freetown organization that is currently fifty members strong. The commitment to social change and building an American – African activist connection through progressive hip-hop remains strong. Our documentary “Moving to the Beat” has recently been screened at film festivals in New York, Atlanta and Amsterdam, and selected for inclusion in the Afropop series by the National Black Programming Consortium.
If you’d like more information or to get involved in the project, please visit our website at www.moving2the beat.com to send us an e-mail.
Caleb Heymann is a director of photography and co-editor. He has shot and edited numerous short films, music videos and live events. He graduated from the South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance (AFDA) with a BFA in Motion Picture Production in March 2007.
