Calling cell Number 18

It was my first text message to a cell phone behind bars: "Bonsoir. This is Austin Dacey with The Impossible Music Sessions."

The recipient, I hoped, was Pierre Roger Lambo Sandjo, better known as Lapiro de Mbanga, a popular Cameroonian singer serving a 3-year sentence in New Bell Prison, located the commercial capital of Douala. The facility, built in the early 1930s for a population of 800 inmates now reportedly houses closer to 3,000. On top of life-threatening overcrowding, poor nutrition, and sanitation, inmates are subjected to systematic abuses by guards, as detailed in a 2009 report by the U.S. State Department, that include stripping, shackling, flogging, beating, denial of medical care, and solitary confinement in tiny cells.

Lapiro is being forced to share cell Number 18 with over 50 other prisoners. He has recently suffered severe bouts of typhoid fever and lumbago. And yet, I was told, he is able to receive texts and calls on his mobile phone at any time.

It is on this phone that Lapiro is expected to join an unlikely public event in Brooklyn on the evening of 16 November. That night, the Impossible Music Sessions will feature Lapiro's banned song, “Constitution Constipée,” the song that landed him in New Bell. Since the artist cannot be there, the performance will be delivered by Group Saloum, a Boston-based Afro-pop ensemble fronted by the Senegalese percussionist and singer Lamine Touré. Also present to comment will be Maran Turner, the director of Freedom Now, a legal advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., that is working for Lapiro's release.

“Constipated Constitution” is an infectious screed against the Cameroonian President Paul Biya that became an unofficial anthem of street protests in February 2008. The protesters were demonstrating against the escalating cost of living, low wages and plans by the government to amend the Constitution to remove a term limits that would have barred Biya from seeking reelection in 2011. Riots erupted in a number of cities, including Douala and the capital of Yaoundé. Over 100 citizens were killed by security forces, according to La Maison des Droits de l'Homme and Amnesty International.

A 2009 report by Amnesty explains,

More than 1,500 people arrested during the February protests were brought to trial unusually swiftly, with little or no time to prepare their defence. Many of the defendants had no legal counsel, while others were denied time to consult their lawyers. The trials were summary in nature. Hundreds of defendants were sentenced to between three months and two years in prison. Despite a presidential amnesty in June, hundreds remained in prison at the end of the year, either because they had appealed or because they could not afford to pay court-imposed fines.

Lapiro and another singer, Joe La Conscience, were arrested and accused of complicity in the riots. In September, after a trial that observers consider a sham, Lapiro was sentenced to a heavy fine and three years imprisonment. “But this will neither stop me nor my music," Lapiro said at the time. Since then, his case has been taken up by numerous human rights groups and the Secretary General of the United Nations.

In an email to supporters on 22 October 2010, the executive director of Freemuse, Marie Korpe, wrote, "Lapiro--real fighter--is still awaiting a date for his case in the Supreme Court. Our understanding is that the political system in Cameroon wants to keep him in the prison as long as they can." Meanwhile, she said, he draws sustenance from receiving recordings of music--another auditory right he has somehow retained in New Bell--and letters of support from fellow musicians and listeners.

I hope that Impossible Music Session will be a buoying force, however modest. But first I must get the man on the phone.

In the interview below, recorded at New Bell Prison in 2009, Lapiro remains defiant: “If instead of using guns you use music, you use the voice, you use the sound, then people who are against freedom will be shot down by your lyrics, by your sound, by your musical attitude.”