Freetown Prisons

Photo by Tariq Zaidi (www.tariqzaidi.com)

The car doesn’t arrive, our guide is unreachable, and when alternative transport is found, it breaks down.  “I am in Sierra Leone, and a lot of things can go wrong,” I was saying to myself, as the driver stepped out and started kicking the engine of his taxi. He kept abusing the car, which should have been off the roads before I was born, kicking and shaking it with all his strength, as if it had misbehaved, and was in need of some serious punishment. We were two hours late for the concert, stuck in an unexpected street, somewhere in the hills of Freetown, yet this was a serious, intimate moment for the driver, so there was no logic to save the taxi from the beating. My phone rang. It was the warden. “We can’t keep the prisoners out any longer. If you are not here in 15 minutes we need to move on.” And as I was resigning to the prospect of not playing this recital in the ominous Pademba Road Freetown prisons, the car, affected by a powerful African black magic, roared and started. “We are on our way,” I muttered on the phone.

As the heavy door rattled, I felt my ribs screaming and my skull squashed by the sounds of the cold steel. I was told once that the difference between a person drowning at sea and the one trying to save them is only in the way they enter the water. I tried to keep this thought alive, taking the step across the line separating freedom from captivity, entering a world that did not belong to the world I knew, an independent universe, a dark mirror to my familiar one. As we walked in, the guard, that just a moment ago had politely checked our documents and courteously registered us in the visitors’ log, turned to me and said firmly, “Listen to me carefully now. From this moment on, you will do exactly as I say. If I say stop, you will stop. If I say turn around and run, you will run. Do you understand?” He said this in a tone reflective of his lifelong habit of demanding respect and obedience. It seemed like a rhetorical question, but I nodded, trying to show no emotion.

As we were entering the yard, Tariq, the photographer travelling with me, turned to me and said, “I don’t like this,” and then continued with an elaborate evacuation plan should things go wrong, which included running fast, climbing a 7-foot water tank, and jumping over barbed wire to the opposite side. He has travelled to some of the most dangerous places on earth, yet, like me, he felt the rattling in his ribcage as the door hammered behind us, letting fear take over his mind, that inside this structure, we too can be forgotten.

I chose the wrong piece of music to start the performance. My hands felt as if not mine, cold and foreign, hearing the thumping of my heartbeat pushing against my throat. The disorientation of adrenaline was taking over my body as the notes of Tchaikovsky Intermezzo from the Nutcracker were flying across the air, blasting in full power. Like a child’s singing in a steel factory, the music was too weak to be heard. Then, the piano was placed in the middle of the dusty yard, and guards, dressed in loose, dull grey uniforms, holding sticks as weapons, surrounded me as I sat to play. Several prisoners were wandering around the stage area, indistinctively dressed in similar grey uniforms of a different shade. These, limited in number, well-behaved inmates, had the privilege of walking in the yard. In front of me, a tall fence separated us from the rest of the yard, a place where more than one thousand prisoners lived, in a space built for three hundred. I tried not to look up, as the romantic music of Tchaikovsky felt like a parody in this space. The prisoners behind the fence were climbing on top of each other, yelling and screaming as if at a football match, more interested in the presence of foreign visitors, and not even able to hear the music. They were dressed in rags, and looked as if out of a Victor Hugo novel, wearing their own dirty, worn out clothes, probably the same ones they were wearing when arrested and brought in, years ago. Some of them were in their cells, in the old, solid compound behind everything else, waving their hands through the bars. These were the death row inmates, not allowed out, apart from specific times, separated from the rest. Their cells, I was told later, face the gallows.

Prisons were my childhood nightmare. The lack of space to breathe, the wild, loud shouts, the miserable existence, all belonged to the hell that is an African prison and I chose to come in it to play a recital. My idealistic beliefs that music is one of the lost things needed in a prison were fading, drowning in the screams of those in captivity. The music wasn’t working. I had to do something about it. Change of pace. I put away the delicate, romantic Tchaikovsky, and started playing the Harmonious Blacksmith by Handel. For a few seconds the change went unnoticed, lost in the yells and the laughs behind the fence. Then, an invisible wave, as if a secret water cannon had started pouring water all across the audience, the rhythm got noticed. The basis of human consciousness, rhythm, of my heartbeat in my throat, of the Handel quavers bouncing freely across this isolated universe. One by one, the invisible splash hit the inmates, and they started moving, until the whole prison population was jumping up and down to the rhythm of this unfamiliar music. It could have been hip hop, or an African war dance, or Handel, it didn’t make any difference, and suddenly the experience was shared, by the foreign visitor, the guards and the inmates in dirty rags. I couldn’t tell any longer if it was my heartbeat that I was feeling, or the ground shaking under my feet, from the continued bouncing of a thousand human bodies. Even before the last note brought the piece to an end, the cheering was loud enough to bring down the walls and fences. The guards became uneasy. “OK, you played enough, you should go now,” I was commanded, but before responding, I started playing a Greek dance, arranged for the piano by Hatzhidakes. The shouting and jubilation continued with the same momentum. African dance to Greek music, unconfined moving, free and spectacular. I sensed the excitement of communication running through my fingers, and I felt a heat unfamiliar in this place: freedom.

As we were rushed out quickly a few minutes later, our guide Alusine stayed behind. He was talking to someone behind the fance, and the guards had to force him out, pulling him by the arm. “I found a friend, Mr. Panos,” he said. “We are from the same community. I can’t believe he is here. He stole something two years ago to feed himself, and he is still awaiting trial. He said the music reminded him of the time we were children, when we were both free.”