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Begging on Liberia’s Streets by Day, Heating Up Its Clubs by Night

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MONROVIA, Liberia — Emmanuel Dongo, who spends his days begging on Monrovia’s streets, plunged with his crutches onto the concrete stage and into the glare of neon.

He thrust his muscular shoulders forward, limp legs hanging behind him, and transformed himself into Lyrical D, rising rap artist.

“Handicap man trying to survive, then you sitting there just to criticize, when that you, what thing you will really do?” he asked, snapping out the lyrics to a rapt crowd at Code 146, where Liberia’s aspiring rap stars come to make their names. “Will you close your mouth and turn your back on you? I feel too bad when I sitting in this wheelchair, just want to be walking like you, man. See me passing and you mocking at me telling me I not even look like human being.”

Putting down his crutches, Mr. Dongo leaned back into his wheelchair and propelled himself across the stage, dancing frenetically and spitting out angry rhymes about his experiences of discrimination in a society that largely views disability through the lens of superstition. Even though disabled victims of war are a common sight on Liberia’s city streets, handicapped people are often seen as cursed, their amputations or paralyzed limbs viewed as the result of witchcraft by the cruel and envious, or else as punishment for some wrongdoing.

Music seems an unlikely career choice for a Liberian with Mr. Dongo’s many difficulties. But the proliferation of makeshift studios, self-taught engineers and a distinct Liberian sound has given rise to a thriving music scene here, opening up space for emerging artists like Mr. Dongo. Aspiring artists can record songs for as little as $20 if the engineer likes them, or even free if they are a big enough name.

MONROVIA, Liberia — Emmanuel Dongo, who spends his days begging on Monrovia’s streets, plunged with his crutches onto the concrete stage and into the glare of neon. He thrust his muscular shoulders forward, limp legs hanging behind him, and transformed himself into Lyrical D, rising rap artist.

“Handicap man trying to survive, then you sitting there just to criticize, when that you, what thing you will really do?” he asked, snapping out the lyrics to a rapt crowd at Code 146, where Liberia’s aspiring rap stars come to make their names. “Will you close your mouth and turn your back on you? I feel too bad when I sitting in this wheelchair, just want to be walking like you, man. See me passing and you mocking at me telling me I not even look like human being.”

Putting down his crutches, Mr. Dongo leaned back into his wheelchair and propelled himself across the stage, dancing frenetically and spitting out angry rhymes about his experiences of discrimination in a society that largely views disability through the lens of superstition. Even though disabled victims of war are a common sight on Liberia’s city streets, handicapped people are often seen as cursed, their amputations or paralyzed limbs viewed as the result of witchcraft by the cruel and envious, or else as punishment for some wrongdoing.

Music seems an unlikely career choice for a Liberian with Mr. Dongo’s many difficulties. But the proliferation of makeshift studios, self-taught engineers and a distinct Liberian sound has given rise to a thriving music scene here, opening up space for emerging artists like Mr. Dongo. Aspiring artists can record songs for as little as $20 if the engineer likes them, or even free if they are a big enough name.

That night at Code 146, the D.J. played the beat to Lyrical D’s latest club track. Onstage, Mr. Dongo swung back into his wheelchair and began to twist, turn and thump the chair’s front tire up and down.

“Make some noise, party people, make some noise!” he shouted. The listeners in the audience responded, shaking their bodies and raising their arms in the air.

Code 146 is owned and run by Jonathan Koffa, Monrovia’s most famous rapper. Known as Takun J, Mr. Koffa is widely considered a pioneer of HipCo, Liberia’s articulation of rap that uses the nation’s unique patois as its base.

His downtown club is hidden at the end of a dark alley. Its walls are lime green and covered with paintings of the city’s musical icons. Performances rarely start before 11 p.m., with music pumping through crackling speakers till the early hours.

On the evening Mr. Dongo performed, his producer, Alhaji Yaits, 22, who goes by the name Young Master, sat nodding to the beat he had helped produce a week earlier.

Mr. Yaits discovered Mr. Dongo, 27, on the streets of Monrovia three years ago and, in between other paying projects, has been helping him produce an album free of charge.

Mr. Dongo’s wheelchair is regularly parked at the bottom of the steps leading to Mr. Yaits’s studio. Inside, the walls are decorated in bubble-gum colors with the names of artists Mr. Yaits has worked with and a large picture of him presiding over a mixing board.

Mr. Yaits, like Mr. Dongo, was inspired by Takun J and HipCo music, a sound born in Monrovia in the aftermath of Liberia’s civil war, which ended in 2003. HipCo is raw, gritty and deeply anti-establishment in spirit. It throws punches at politicians and the Liberian elite, whom HipCo rappers accuse of plundering the country’s wealth and ignoring the poor.

Dozens of artists like Mr. Dongo jockey for a chance to perform at Code 146’s weekly open-mike sessions. In the early days of his career, Mr. Dongo was ridiculed when he performed at the street jams that regularly spring up across the city, but at Code 146 he was welcomed with open arms.

Born in a rural area outside the capital, Mr. Dongo came into the world on the eve of a conflict that killed more than 250,000 and displaced millions. His mother was never able to reach a clinic to have him vaccinated for polio, leaving Mr. Dongo with two withered legs.

His uncle, a health worker, eventually brought Mr. Dongo to Monrovia but lost his job and was not able to support him. Instead, he sent Mr. Dongo to a grim government-run home for disabled people.

Mr. Dongo lived there for over a decade before moving out on his own to pursue his dream of becoming a rap star.

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By day, Mr. Dongo sits on busy traffic islands and begs outside the shiny supermarkets that serve Liberia’s expatriates and elite, who drive around in ample S.U.V.s and live in plush air-conditioned compounds protected by barbed wire.

He uses most of the money to support his 2-year-old son, who lives with Mr. Dongo’s mother. The rest of the money goes toward the fledgling music career he hopes will lift him out of poverty in a nation where opportunities for handicapped people simply do not exist.

Just getting around Monrovia is tough for the disabled. Footpaths are rare, and when they exist, they are often a series of disjointed concrete panels that jut out like jagged teeth. Metal manholes are often stolen for scrap metal, leaving open holes in the middle of roads.

Many of Monrovia’s main thoroughfares have been paved in recent years, though, and Mr. Dongo and other disabled people can often be seen gliding in their wheelchairs through city traffic, dodging cars in a country where road rules are rarely respected.

Like many Monrovians, Mr. Dongo lives in a slum, called Clara Town, where he has to muscle his way through the narrow dusty pathways that run between the community’s zinc shacks. While largely independent, he often pays neighbors to fetch him water from the pump to bathe, to hand-wash his clothes and sometimes to cook.

Mr. Dongo fantasizes about a future in which he no longer begs in order to survive or navigates potholed roads and back streets; instead, he’s ferried around in a black S.U.V., accompanied by a bodyguard who pushes him past screaming fans to the stage.

On the streets he feels embarrassed when those who know him as an artist see him begging.

“I know that sitting on the street begging I belittle myself,” Mr. Dongo said. “But when I perform onstage, I feel good because I know that my dream is working and people go wild for me.”

As Lyrical D finished his short set at Code 146, Mr. Koffa stood behind the bar, a quietly commanding presence. His bare, muscular arms were tattooed with maps of Liberia and tributes to HipCo. At the end of the performance, Mr. Koffa told Lyrical D that he liked his new track and shook his hand.

Several days later, Mr. Dongo was out on the street filming a video for his song “Show Love.” A director told Mr. Dongo where to position himself as workers shooed people away from the shot. A friend played the song through a mobile phone plugged into a boom box, and Mr. Dongo began to sing.

He was accompanied by two friends dressed in matching red-and-white striped T-shirts and jeans: his backup dancers, twirling in wheelchairs. Mr. Dongo furrowed his brow and performed small stunts with his chair.

“I can remember when I used to go on show, people used to laugh,” he sang. “But I keep pushing, no fun, keep pushing, no fun, keep pushing, I not give up.”

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