Jeano Elong is a singer, bass player and songwriter from Cameroon based in Hamburg. His style is danceable, eclectic and political. Jeano arrived in Hamburg in 2013.
This followed a years-long odyssey that took him from Cameroon to Tripoli, Libya, where he initially worked as an industrial welder in the port and later ran his own workshop. When NATO bombed Libya in 2011 to support the rebels against the then ruler Muammar al-Gaddafi, the army forced him to carry out welding work in a camp. “We had to weld missile launchers onto the army’s jeeps,” he recalls. “When the NATO bombs fell on the camp, I feared for my life. I didn’t come to Europe to find a better job; on the contrary: I had to give up my work. I fled the war.” After a perilous crossing, he arrived in Lampedusa and later in various Italian camps, until the Italian government – like many other African Lampedusa refugees – issued him with EU travel documents and sent him north.
Along with thousands of Africans arriving from Libya, Jeano also made his way to Germany.
In Hamburg, he became part of the Lampedusa protest movement that kept the city on tenterhooks in the winter of 2012–13. In May 2014, he collaborated for the first time with the activist music collective Schwabinggrad Ballett, where he met Twickel and Gaier. On the album “Beyond Welcome” by Schwabinggrad Ballett & Arrivati (Buback Records, 2016), he plays bass and sings; among other things, he composed and sang the refugee anthem “Don’t Fuck Up”. “I played the album for my mother in Cameroon,” recalls Elong. “She said: ‘That’s lovely, but I don’t understand what you’re singing.’ My mother doesn’t speak French or English. So I started writing songs in my own language.”