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November 20, 2019 15:14:10
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Heartbreaking separation behind South Sudanese singer’s new life in the outback
When the war began, Gordon Koang had just returned from a tour of Canada. He can still reel off a list of the cities he played.
It was late 2013 and a political crisis in South Sudan, one of the world’s youngest and most disadvantaged countries, had devolved into a conflict split along tribal lines.
Because Koang, his wife and six children are members of the Nuer ethnic group, they became a target for forces loyal to the president, who is a Dinka.
At the time, Gordon had been a successful musician for 20 years with nine albums to his name. When he returned from Canada, he says, his bank accounts were looted, his two cars were taken and his house was bulldozed.
The family fled across the border to Uganda.
“They don’t care if you are disabled, like me,” says Koang, who was born blind.
“When they see you and you have this map” — he points to the rows of scars across his forehead, a traditional form of facial marking — “then they know that you are Nuer. No question, they come and kill you.”
About 4 million people in a country of 10 million have been displaced and 400,000 killed since the war started.
By December of 2014, with no end to the conflict in sight, Koang, 41, and his cousin and collaborator Paul Biel arrived in Australia for a series of concerts over the new-year period.
In Melbourne, they decided to start the process of claiming asylum.
A pop star in South Sudan
Koang sings in English, Arabic and Nuer, his voice rising and falling in complex melodies in sync with his thom, the traditional Nuer instrument he plays.
The thom looks like a boxy guitar but with free-floating strings, absent a supporting neck.
Gordon Koang performs live at The Tote in Melbourne
“Long ago, it was totally different, because they are tying them with pieces of cloth [with] metal, not wood,” Koang says.
Koang started playing in church before beginning to write his own songs in the late 1990s. Later, he performed in the street with his cousin Biel — who has been his carer for many years — by his side.
Crowds would gather.
“Gordon loves someone to talk to,” Biel says of his cousin. “He loves to collect information because he is a musician … he loves stories.”
After that came performances across Sudan and around Africa and appearances on TV and radio.
Koang’s Youtube videos, some of which refer to him as the “king of music”, have hundreds of thousands of views; he proudly affirms he is a pop star in his home country.
‘My dear asylum seeker’
Koang knew no-one when he and Biel decided to stay in Australia in 2015. At first, he received a bridging visa while the Government assessed his asylum claim.
It is that experience that inspired a song, Asylum Seeker, which he released earlier this year through Music In Exile, a Melbourne not-for-profit that helps asylum seekers and migrant Australians release and promote their music.
Gordon Koang – Asylum Seeker
“My dear asylum seeker, we know you’re waiting for your permanent protection visa,” Koang sings on the track. “Sometimes it has been hard. Our advice is it won’t be long until you have it. You need to be patient.”
Koang says he wrote the song because despite his sunny disposition — in person and on stage, he is gracious and quick to smile — he was suffering.
“And my children, also my wife, they are suffering there,” he says, referring to the refugee camp in Uganda where his family remains.
His music helped him deal with the uncertainty, and he thought it might help others, too.
“These people, they need the song that will comfort them, to make them have patience, to make them have discipline,” he says.
“I want when they hear it they say, ‘Oh, there are so many people also waiting, it’s not me alone’, and then [they] can wait until the time comes.”
Putting a band together
Music In Exile started as a planned compilation for Bedroom Suck, the independent Australian record label founded in 2010.
Bedroom Suck’s identity had been anchored around Australia’s guitar-heavy underground scene, with few artists from culturally or linguistically diverse backgrounds.
But label founder Joe Alexander wanted to dig into the music being made within migrant and diaspora communities in Melbourne.
“From there, it just got a life of its own,” Alexander tells the ABC.
“There are so many artists who are creating work and doing incredible things that don’t really interact with, at least from my sense, the mainstream music industry.”
Photo:
Gordon Koang works with the not-for-profit Music In Exile record label. (Supplied: Big Sound)
All profits from the label go back to the artists to help them build their careers. Artists like Koang can also leverage Bedroom Suck’s significant contacts in overseas markets to help with touring or distribution.
Alexander was connected with Koang through Multicultural Arts Victoria, who had given Alexander a list of phone numbers of migrant musicians he might be able to help.
After an initial meeting in Koang and Biel’s lounge room in the Dandenong Ranges, outside Melbourne, “we put his band together,” Alexander says, and booked some studio time.
“Gordon would just dictate all the parts. ‘OK, you, play a bass line like this’, and he would sing us the part,” Alexander says.
“He crafted the music in that way … then he would play the thom and sing. He obviously had a very clear idea of what he wanted from a song writing perspective.”
Finding comfort in the thom
The thom Koang currently plays was built in Australia. His first one is still in Uganda, with his wife.
“I used to tell my wife, ‘You play your song there, I will play music here, then we comfort ourselves’,” Koang says with a smile.
He is sitting in a rehearsal room in Melbourne as he waits for the rest of his band to arrive. Koang is about to get busy. He is booked to play two major summer festivals: Strawberry Fields and Meredith.
And he has taken his own advice. Sometimes it has been hard, but he has been patient, and his time finally came in August. He and his cousin’s permanent protection visas were granted after nearly five years.
In September, Koang won a major prize at Brisbane’s Big Sound music conference.
That came with $30,000 — money Koang hopes will help him to reunite with his wife and children.
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