An African Voice
Acclaimed
film maker Sorious Samura talks about growing up in Sierra Leone,
surviving war and the problems facing Africa today.
It is January 1999. On a street in Freetown, Sierra
Leone, a young boy begs for his life. “My name is Gibrilla Kargbo,”
he pleads with the pro-government soldiers that surround him. “I
only came to find fish for us to cook. Don’t you people know
me?” Coldly, casually, one of the soldiers shoves the boy a
few metres along the road and guns him down. The picture freezes;
the shocking image stands still on the television screen. “I
am still haunted by this boy,” says the voice on the soundtrack.
“My camera has saved lives, but not this time.”
So began Cry Freetown, a shocking film that introduced the world to
Sierra Leone’s bloody civil war, and to Sorious Samura, the
man who would become one of Africa’s most powerful voices.
Sorious Samura was born in 1964 to a poor native family living in
Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown. At that time, Sierra Leone
was a divided society. The Creole class (mostly former slaves returned
from overseas) held power and the natives had few opportunities. “If
you had a native name, you were seen as a savage,” says Sorious.
Discrimination was a daily reality; Sorious had to change his name
just to get into a good school.
Of his eight brothers and sisters, Sorious was the only one able to
complete his education. Even so, from the age of nine, he had to go
out in the evening and sell snacks on the street to earn enough to
pay school fees.
Aged fifteen, Sorious left school and joined one a theatre group.
It was there that he came across his first video camera and learned
his skills filming local dance troupes and selling videos to tourists.
His work showed great potential and a British director making a film
for the Red Cross employed him as cameraman. Sorious had little idea
of how to make a documentary, but with this experience, and the help
of a few books about film-making, got a job scripting and filming
documentaries for Unicef.
“That gave me the boost to believe in myself,” says Sorious.
“I thought, ‘If I get some proper training, maybe I can
do something to channel my frustration and tell the stories of young
people.’” He sent applications to universities overseas
and was eventually accepted by Leeds Metropolitan. Unicef would pay
his course fee and a Lebanese businessman from Freetown, an old friend,
gave him £1000. It was just enough to pay his way to England.
Just before Sorious left Sierra Leone in 1991, war broke out. The
Revolutionary United Front (RUF) launched a rebellion against the
government of President Joseph Momoh, beginning a conflict that would
smoulder for years. Rebel soldiers spread terror across the land and
by the end of the nineties they controlled over half the country.
A force of Nigerian peacekeepers was deployed to Freetown in 1997,
but the violence continued and Western governments took little notice.
Sorious was dismayed at what was happening in his home and decided
that when he finished his course he would go back to film the war,
to force the world to take notice. But first, he had to save enough
money to buy a camera.
“I just focussed on working,” he says of the years after
he graduated in 1993. “I took away the thoughts about enjoyment,
going to parties or nightclubs like other friends.” For six
days a week, almost twenty-four hours a day, Sorious stacked shelves
in a video store, flipped burgers in MacDonald’s and cleaned
London tube stations. By October 1998, he had saved enough and returned
to his war-torn homeland.
Sorious arrived in Sierra Leone just as the conflict was reaching
its peak. Rebel forces were just a few miles from Freetown and, in
January 1999, they attacked the city. It became one of the bloodiest
episodes in West Africa’s history.
Rebels rampaged through Freetown, killing civilians at random; journalists
were especially targeted. Friends warned Sorious not to go out with
his camera, but he was determined to do his job. “Something
inside me kept saying, ‘I’ve got to do something’,”
he says. “I was scared to hell. I would hear bullets hiss past
my ear and hit the wall behind me. People were dying all around; I
thought that any minute could be my last. But at least if I died,
I honestly hoped that someone would get those tapes and get the story.”
Miraculously, Sorious survived the battle for Freetown unharmed. But
what he witnessed in those terrible days exacted a heavy emotional
toll. “I would see, right in front of me, helpless people being
mutilated, shot, beaten,” he says. “People always say
‘Why didn’t you do something? Why were you just holding
the camera?’ They don’t understand how this still haunts
me. I can’t bear to watch the opening scene of ‘Cry Freetown’
because in my head I’ve thought maybe I could have saved the
boy’s life.”
Sorious had filmed where no one else would dare and the BBC soon approached
him for his footage. He only wanted the rest of the world to see what
was happening in Sierra Leone, so he gave them his tapes for nothing;
but Sorious was disappointed with their programme. They changed his
script and didn’t even sent him a copy. The one promise they
did fulfil was to submit his film to the Rory Peck Trust (a charity
for the protection of freelance cameramen) who, to his great surprise,
nominated him as freelance cameraman of the year and invited him to
London for an awards ceremony. Perhaps the world was finally taking
notice.
On a cold November night in 1999, the great and the good of broadcast
news had assembled for the Rory Peck Awards in London. Ron McCullagh,
head of Insight News Television was in the audience. “There
were rumours doing the rounds that there was a Sierra Leonean man
who stood a very good chance of winning,” says Ron. “Then
this material comes up on the screen and people from both sides started
nudging me. It was amazing footage.” For the first time, a stunned
audience saw the shocking, graphic images that Sorious had recorded
of the attack on Freetown. It was no contest; he won two awards. But
if his footage was explosive, his speech was nuclear.
Winning the award had vindicated Sorious. All along, he had felt that
Sierra Leone’s story was important, but the Western media was
ignoring it. Now, as the assembled bureau chiefs of the BBC, CNN,
NBC and many more sat in stunned silence, Sorious vented years of
anger and frustration. “Where were you when my country was on
its knees?” he asked the audience. “Is it because we are
far away in Africa? Is it because we are black? You can keep this
award if it means you will tell the story of Africa properly.”
“He walked off the stage and there were three or four seconds
of absolute silence,” says Ron. “Then, almost as one,
the audience rose and applauded him. Each of them, as individuals,
responded emotionally to the truth of what Sorious had said.”
“I stood up and spoke from my heart,” says Sorious, “and
I was shocked when I saw these people that I hold in such high esteem
give me a standing ovation. It was better than the award.” With
his head spinning, Sorious found himself surrounded by TV executives
and bombarded with offers of work. One of the people who came to him
out of the hundreds that night was Ron McCullagh. They have been working
together ever since.
Seven weeks later, Ron and Sorious produced ‘Cry Freetown’,
a violent and disturbing film that went on to win just about every
television documentary award in existence. It was shown for three
days in a row in the United Nations cinema in New York and in December
1999, UN peacekeepers were deployed in Freetown. Sorious had finally
achieved his goal; the world knew about Sierra Leone.
I catch up with Sorious at his office near Clapham Common. We sit
in a cramped production suite flanked by banks of digital video equipment
and blinking TV screens; a colourful spaghetti of electrical cables
lies at our feet. Throughout our conversation, his mobile phone rings
and people demand his attention. He has become a successful and respected
journalist.
To be honest, I find it hard to picture the person before me as someone
who lived through the horror of Sierra Leone’s civil war. The
gentle demeanour, easy smile and big sleepy eyes don’t seem
to fit with the man who recorded the shocking images of Cry Freetown.
It is not until the conversation turns to Africa, and the way television
news still fails to tell its story, that I glimpse the passion and
determination that lie within.
“The media has a tremendous responsibility to let the positive
stories be told,” he says. “Otherwise, people will just
think that it’s hopeless, helpless. Africa, why should we bother?
“We have to start giving names and faces to millions who are
struggling in Africa. I want to engage the outside world and provoke
their conscience, but most importantly my hope is to make sure that
every story I tell dignifies the people who are victims. To give more
context to their stories so that people understand how and why things
happen. If not, people will just keep switching off.”
Working together at Insight, Sorious and Ron McCullagh have gone a
long way to achieving this goal, and in the process have explored
many African issues the mainstream media still ignores. In Exodus,
Sorious followed the trail of thousands of desperate Africans who
leave their families behind to make the long and dangerous journey
to find work in Europe. He told the story of men who had spent years
struggling through desert and over sea, only to find an equally difficult
life in their destinations.
In Walking on Ashes, he visited Uganda, regarded
as one of Africa’s success stories, and discovered that poverty,
unrest and violence still lurk beneath the peaceful veneer. Most recently,
in Living with Hunger, he spent a month living on the edge of starvation
with a family in an Ethiopian village. He ate what they ate, toiled
with them in the fields, and all but collapsed from hunger in the
process.
Despite all that he has been through, Sorious is still full of vigour
and optimism. He talks with great enthusiasm of his plans to make
films about with Aids, modern slavery and the plight of illegal immigrants.
He remains committed to bringing the world’s attention to Africa,
and to making Africa face up to its own problems. “The best
thing that’s happened is the partnership between me and the
guys at Insight,” he says as we say goodbye. “It’s
only through partnership like this that we will turn Africa around.”
