It “breaks down barriers”: in Nicosia, capital of Cyprus, music helps African asylum seekers to integrate and forget their precarious situation for the duration of a song. Ibrahim Kamara, a 29-year-old Gambian, arrived on the Mediterranean island five years ago. One morning, he sees a djembe in a store, an African percussion instrument that immediately reminds him of his country of origin. “Like me, he came from Brikama”, the second largest city in Gambia, told AFP the musician, who was offered a similar instrument some time later.
Playing the djembe then constituted “a breath of fresh air” for Ibrahim who, after his arrival on the island, lived with a dozen people in a tent in a park in Nicosia, sometimes with stifling heat. “It was really difficult, we had no food” and “(we had to) queue to drink from a fountain,” he recalls. In addition to deprivation, he says he suffered from racism in a country where nearly 5% of the 915,000 inhabitants are asylum seekers and where 1,500 applications are filed each month, according to the Cypriot government.
“One day at the bank, when I was standing next to someone in a queue, that person moved away from me and put on a mask,” says Ibrahim, still waiting for the answer. to his asylum application. But little by little, he says he was able, “thanks to the drums, to create a link” with the Cypriot population. Djembe means “bringing people together” in Bambara, a language widely used in West Africa, he likes to recall.
He now leads music workshops every Monday after receiving support from the European association Project Phoenix, which since 2018 has helped around ten people in an irregular situation to integrate professionally on the island. And casually, the income from these courses, added to another odd job, allowed him to find a “nice” three-room apartment. But above all, these workshops allow Cypriots to discover his universe. Our country must “discover their African culture” in order to be able to “welcome them better”, believes Panayiota Constanti, who joined the percussionist’s lessons a year and a half ago, during a session in a park in Nicosia.
Like Ibrahim, Isaac Yossi, a Cameroonian who calls himself “Big Yoss”, wanted to bring together migrants and Cypriots around a common project. Three years ago he founded the music group Skyband. Together with six other African asylum seekers, they play in Cypriot restaurants, weddings or private parties, fusing African rhythms and Greek music to pay homage to “a common humanity”.
At first skeptical, the Cypriots “changed their outlook” when “I started to sing in Greek”, said Isaac during a rehearsal, acoustic guitar in hand, after playing Tha Mai Edo, by the famous Greek singer Konstantinos Argiros. To integrate, he learned Greek, a language spoken in the southern part of the island which is administered by the Cypriot government, recognized by the UN. Turkish is the language used in the northern part, invaded in 1974 by Turkey.
The island does not offer enough “opportunities” for migrants to show off their talents, laments Maria Demosthenous, piano teacher and manager of Isaac’s group. “When we think of migrants, we don’t imagine that they can entertain us or make good music,” says this 43-year-old Cypriot who campaigns for them to perform more on stage. “We have to see them as human beings, as the people they were before they became migrants.”
