The Sonic Activist | Gabriel Akon | TEDxYouth@ScotchCollegeAdelaide
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocKSsYx6E6s Video ID: ocKSsYx6E6s ============================================================ welcome to the mind of a young black african king diceboro man from original skin born to a lost world but he's destined to win let it begin dawn full of thoughts and the knowledge they bring acknowledging things that make us unique if you get knocked down bounce back to your feet and if you ever get lost just follow the beat let's talk let the poetry speak and when you're looking at the stars i hope you're noticing me my story is deep i'm hoping you're digging the glory that i seek is barely just a figment of my imagination i'm trying to make it happen i'm trying to change the nation really hold it down like isaac newton's equation they don't understand the gravity of my situation i had a dream when i was eight years old i was climbing up an endless ladder in the middle of the darkest nights i don't know what i was doing that i just found myself climbing this ladder so i kept going and going and going over time my fragile body began demanding some rest but i tried to push through unfortunately my body gave way and i decided to catch my breath it was at that moment that i realized the whole time i was going towards my heavenly destination but not once did i look down to see my origins of where i came from it was at that moment when i decided to take a look down the ladder the most scary and inspiring thing happened to me i saw a sea of people climbing up with me now a million questions began running through my mind and the first one and most important question was where the hell are we going actually even more important than that was why was an eight-year-old boy the one that's up here before i could collect my thoughts and really make sense of it i figured i must be up here for a reason and we must be going somewhere so i can't stop and with that decision that mental shift i got myself back together put my little body back on the ladder and started climbing and climbing and climbing and sure enough everybody began climbing again and then i woke up so i actually never got to find out where we were going see that was just a normal dream for an eight-year-old but 17 years later reflecting upon it and analyzing it i realized was actually a vision and a premonition of the direction my life would eventually take and that moment actually plan to the seeds of the idea that i'm standing up here to share with you today but before i get to that idea i have a refugee story for you see i was born in the middle of a war in the middle of a jungle in the middle of a famine and on top of that my family had just been walking for two months straight trying to get from ethiopia to the next refugee camp i was not supposed to live but somehow i did and even more lucky my family made it to kakuma refugee camp you see kakuma refugee camp was a unhcr camp that was initially built for 90 000 people by the time we got there in the mid 90s the numbers have fluctuated up to 200 000 refugees from more than 10 different countries in that refugee camp i ended up spending the next seven years of my life so i went there when i was two months old i left when i was seven years old i saw the most bizarre inspiring scariest things in that place i saw humanity at his highest and its lowest now one thing i remember vividly was seeing so many people suffer from preventable diseases and due to lack of access to medical resources and doctors and that initially fueled my first dream of wanting to be a doctor a neurosurgeon see i had an uncle before the war who studied in khartoum and relocated to norway to become one of the biggest orthopedic surgeons in norway so i always had a role model someone to look up to and um i'm going to channel my inner nelson mandela right now to remind every single one of you guys here who are mostly students and everybody gets message visas education is still the fastest way out of poverty when you're a eight-year-old boy in the biggest refugee camp in the world and you have the biggest dreams education was the only way up so i used to take my academic studies that my life depended on it because it really did fast forward seven years later we got smuggled out of the refugee camp smuggled by my incredible mother who to this point i i'm trying to figure out if she really is wonder woman or not you see i almost died on that journey it was a 24 24-hour journey outside the refugee camp but that's a story for another time the next three years we went and lived in a small village in kenya for three years and that was the most normal phase of my life to that point when i was aged 10 years old we got accepted to come to australia under the humanitarian visa program you see we'd applied to go to america to go to canada to go to norway so when you're a refugee you just want to get out of where you're at people don't realize that it's not nothing special about yo i want to go to australia you just go to where you think you can find life and opportunities for your family fortunately australia accepted me to come here under the humanitarian visa program so real quick shout out to australia for that man otherwise i won't be here right now [Applause] after after i got here i quickly realized two things this land provided me endless opportunities safety shelter but one thing was now in my mind [Music] i realized i entered the second phase of my lifetime survival part two except this time i didn't have the support network of a strong community like i did back in the camp as a matter of fact the predominantly white society i'd find myself in were the ones placing the barriers in front of me that i had to overcome but it's all good survival was all ever known and i could figure it out i had to learn really quickly what racism was i didn't know what racism is i had to learn really quickly that having this smooth dark chocolate beautiful skin was a problem in this country i had to then learn that this country didn't have a good track record against the idea of blackness i studied the indigenous experience i studied laws like terenulus policies like the white australian policy which was so effective that inspired apartheid in south africa we were so good at racism in australia other copies started copying us other countries started copying us because we're that good at it let that sink in first survival to our learn music second one sports sports was always special to us because even one of those camps we call it a cheap vacation any of us can make a soccer ball and for that two hours one hour you're running around you forgot that you're hungry you forget that you're in pain you even forget that was an escape for us but i found out here in australia if i play sports i can make friends and connect and bond with people human connection is the most precious thing we can use in this world so that covered that and it also made me realize why some of the young guys i grew up with some of my relatives people like aware mobile thomas deng ended up choosing sports specifically soccer and actually went on to become professional footballers and they actually represent soccer rouge right now the second tool that i picked up and the most important one was music see i got introduced to music through rhythm and poetry i realized when i came to this country the second thing i needed to do was learn how to express myself i hate being misunderstood so i had to learn the language i forget how to hack if i can use poetry learning one word will inspire me to go then feel the need to learn three more so i can find things to rhyme with and surely enough within six months to a year i figured out english and then through that i got introduced to hip-hop culture now that was a critical part because i'm in australia now but i don't have a cultural reference to be able to relate my experience to so hip-hop gave me a global platform which transcended race religion or even political beliefs see hip-hop was founded in 1970s by dj kuhr afrika bambaataa and pioneers like grandmaster flash rhythm and poetry has been around for tens of thousands of years hundreds see in our culture i come from the monjung people from the south of sudan on the river now from the cradle of human civilization and we call it why see our people been doing this for so long that it's entrenched as a part of us and there's no one that's not limited to it anyone can make music i realized that that global culture was so close to my own identity and i gravitated to hippo i also found out the power of the beat the drum beat see studies have shown that a drum b pattern can influence the olympic system the medulla oblongata and actually if you get a group of people in one location and play the same beat for them long enough their hearts will actually begin to be in rhythm and then the power of poetry added to that music becomes an unstoppable force and then now i had a global culture to attach it to so my mind began wondering how i can piece them all together i think i figured it out i call it sonic activism and as a sonic activist it's my job to introduce what sonic activism is to you guys and the rest of the world you see sonic activism is the use of sound that force that i was telling you about before that's so powerful to explore interact with and reconstruct the world around us to become a better version of itself the sonic is the vessel which we use to carry the inspiration and the message the activist activism is the manifestation of that message into progressive action tupac sonic activist malcolm x sonic activist john lennon sonic activist maya angelou sonic activist muhammad ali sonic activist you you you can be a sonic activist you don't have to make music sound travels even when i'm talking introducing a friend to a new idea they didn't know before that's sonic activism standing up for someone who doesn't have a voice that's sonic activism so now that you know what it is i'm challenging to see how many sonic activists by the time this talk is over i can produce now i found a culture i could belong in i found a concept i can attach myself to what was next i learned how to survive in this country now it's my turn to thrive i created a superhero and gave an alter ego and called him diceboro that's my stage name when i make music and i present up here if she dies poorer does not care what you think about it that's boris on a certain mission matter of fact the word daespuro comes from the english word diaspora which comes from the greek word test which means people disperse from their homeland people forced to live outside their homelands literally personifying my life journey so far and as a sonic as a sonic activist and now using the dice for superpowers i realized that i came to this country when i was 10 years old and 13 years later without a single word of english 13 years later became the best artist in south australia using those superpowers i managed to partner up with my brother with my bill and his foundation barefooted boots to be able to build a recording studio on the same refugee camp that we grew up in giving opportunities to these kids who might not have had it with these superpowers i managed to link up with the tmp foundation and become an ambassador for them and right now we're helping put more than 1400 kids through school back in south sudan with an aim to try and get that number to 5000 in the next couple years with those superpowers i created a label called playback gateway to give a voice to those that we silence with those superpowers i managed to create a voice for myself to be able to stand up against the media when they decide to bully my community and with those superpowers you have no idea what i'm about to do next my scope right now is on racism that's my next target you see racism is a cancer of humanity it is literally the biggest distraction for no damn reason that keeps us apart from actually unifying and doing the things we can actually achieve as a human race we need to take this as serious as we take poverty or climate change racism is the cancer for humanity remember that einstein said it seems to be a good uh brain when einstein says things so remember he actually did say that there's a generation that i'm here to represent of new australians as you call them who've been living on the fringes of your society for so long and all they've ever wanted to do was contribute to the society a generation that we can tap into the potential with minimal investment and maximum outcome because all they want to do is belong and add to the narrative i'm here to represent a generation of new australians and i call them the austro-aliens they want to be australian but they get treated like aliens so they stuck somewhere in between i'm talking about the kids i just want a fair go when they rock up to school and get bullied because of the color of their skin or the religion they worship or their political ideas the kids don't want a fair go when they show up to a job interview but they don't even stand a chance because their names are not aussie enough the kids who want a fair go when they get over police and then end up in the justice system and end up getting longer terms than any average is trading yet when they succeed in cold australians see i represent these kids or this group of austral aliens because i am one of them when i succeed i am australian but when i fail i'm african what does that leave me with when it comes to choosing my identity when i succeed i'm australian when i fail i'm african i want you guys to remember those words very closely because they're the summarization of my experience for the last few years but it's all right i'm here now i've lived here for the last 15 years i'm as australian as i can get even though i come from south sudan i'll be able to call out the problems we have and said you know what we need to fix this so one thing i want to remind you is an african proverb that i grew up on a child who was not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth so let's embrace these children and anybody that wants to be part of this beautiful nation and no more leading people on the outskirts and i'm going to use my story as an example all my life all i've known is trials and tribulations i've managed to get those trials and tribulations to help build up my character that character has helped me build unlimited hope but i did not stop there i've been cursed enough to see what it's like to be in a refugee camp see kids suffer for more than five years so i'm hoping to turn that hope into progressive action and i'm hoping to inspire every single one of you guys today to start your journey on becoming a sonic activist thank you