AfroReggae: Rio's top hip-hop band

Cities are, by their very nature, multifaceted places: congregations of different races and backgrounds, of wealth and poverty, of hope and despair. Surely none, however, exemplify this truism so blatantly as Rio de Janeiro.

Rio is the rich man's playground where glorious penthouse apartments overlook some of the world's most famous beaches. But woe betide the careless swimmer who underestimates the perilous currents just off shore. It is famed for the natural beauty of its residents patrolling the sand in dental floss bikinis and it's a place where plastic surgery thrives. Rio is a natural bay blessed with all the geographical assets of a tropical paradise, but look up the rocky outcrops that punctuate the city and see the dilapidated shanty towns - favelas - that bleed down their sides. It is a rainbow of races (European, African, indigenous Brazilian and all mixtures thereof) that live apparently harmoniously side by side; a vibrant fantasy, certainly, for the American sex tourists who flock to its bars. In the favelas, however, Rio also boasts some of the most racially, economically, socially and - arguably - institutionally excluded communities on the planet. It is a city in thrall to drug factions that are effectively quasi governments for vast sections of the population.

These factions and the endemically corrupt police have been fighting for territorial control for the best part of 20 years. In fact, despite its postcard beauty, Rio is, by most definitions, at war. A simple statistic illuminates the level of violence: between 1948 and 1999, an estimated 13,000 people were killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Between 1979 and 2000, more than 48,000 died firearm related deaths in the city of Rio.

It was from one of the poorest communities at the very heart of this violence that a revolutionary group called AfroReggae was born. As multifaceted as the city they have come, for many, to represent, they are on one hand a hip-hop band who just opened for The Rolling Stones on Copacabana beach, on the other a radical social movement of extraordinary dynamism.

In August 1993, at the very height of the drug war, a leader of the Comando Vermelho faction from the favela of Vigário Geral shot dead four policemen. The next day, a group of 30 armed officers entered the same favela and exacted their revenge, killing 21 innocent people, none of whom had anything to do with the drug trade. The whole of Brazil was outraged by the atrocity. It is arguable, however, that since media, police and wider public had gradually come to regard the factions and the favelas they came from as one and the same thing, such a massacre was inevitable. Certainly the outrage was short-lived and few of those responsible ever brought to justice.

At the time, a young man called José Junior was running a free newspaper called AfroReggae Noticias that covered reggae, Afro Brazilian music and black issues. He was outraged too but he decided he actually had to do something about it. He headed into Vigário with some of his friends from the paper and founded workshops in recycling, percussion and dance. A year later, AfroReggae had set up a "cultural nucleus" in the favela. A dozen years later, the AfroReggae band, formed in those early workshops, is touring the UK for the first time.

I first met Junior about five years ago. We talked in AfroReggae's cultural centre in Vigário. Though I've been to many favelas since, I've never got used to the weapons you often see openly handled by the factions' soldados in the communities' narrow streets; teenage boys gripping Uzis, AR15s or AK47s in one fist, plastic bags of cocaine in the other. I remember it was a damp, late afternoon by the time we met in his small office and he talked animatedly. He struck me, then as now, as a clear-thinking, driven and charismatic individual; but, above all, as a storyteller. I remember that he repeatedly returned to twin themes; that AfroReggae changed the way the wider city perceived favela life and that they developed the self-esteem of the community; useful stories both. I remember he talked with such enthusiasm and for so long that it was dusk by the time he finished. Outside in the half light there were rumours of an imminent invasion by the faction from a neighbouring community and I was hurried out of the favela over a footbridge.

I returned to Vigário in late 2005 to research a book about AfroReggae and the setting of the war in which they work. Both the organisation and the context have escalated, in one case for good and the other for bad. In Rio there is something of an arms race developing between the police and the factions. The police now deploy a caveirão - a kind of heavily armoured car - for their incursions into the favelas. In turn, the factions have begun to source ever more sophisticated weaponry (mortars, flame throwers and the like) to defend their turf. The favela residents remain caught in the middle and, frequently, in the line of fire.

On 31 March 2005, for example, an armed gang (believed to have been military police officers) drove around the Baixada Fluminense for two and a half hours. They shot dead 29 people in 11 locations. It was the worst mass killing in the city since the Vigário massacre 12 years previously. In Vigário itself, meanwhile, the population has fallen by more than two thirds in the last few years (from around 35,000 to 9,000). This is at least in part due to the 2004 occupation of the community by drug traffickers from the neighbouring favela. Many residents fled, fearing for their lives.

AfroReggae continue to go from strength to strength, running 60 projects involving hundreds of kids in favelas across the city. Aside from the nucleus in Vigário, they now have three others, including a state of the art "technology hub" and a centre in Complexo do Alemão. Aside from the main band, they now have eight more, plus a samba school, a circus troupe and a theatre group. They run workshop programmes in music, percussion, dance, capoeira, rapping, graffiti, circus and theatre. Most intriguingly, they have developed a project in the neighbouring state of Minas Gerais teaching "ghetto culture" - through percussion, theatre, graffiti and streetball - to the police. It looks set to move to the city of Rio itself this year. They are also, now, the subject of an award-winning documentary, Favela Rising, by the American film-makers Jeff Zimbalist and Matt Mochary.

AfroReggae are a hip-hop band and a social movement but they are also many things between the two. These are some of them. They are an NGO that is 30 per cent self-sustaining and aims to be entirely self-sufficient within a decade. Unlike many NGOs they are a permanent presence in the favelas.

Unlike many hip-hop artists, they still live in the communities they come from and each senior member takes responsibility for educating the younger recruits. They consciously mimic the hierarchies of the drug factions, providing familiar structures for those tempted by the drug trade and ex-soldados. They are one of the few organisations that can walk freely throughout every Rio neighbourhood since they have the ear of the top dogs in politics, media, civil society, police and even the drug factions. They are also one of the few organisations that can mediate between all of those. And they are redefining the story of Rio's favelas for anyone open-minded enough to listen.

AfroReggae's Favela to the World tour: Barbican, London EC2, 3 & 4 March; Oxford Town Hall, 6 March; Contact Theatre, Manchester, 10 & 11 March (www.favelatotheworld.com). 'Favela Rising' opens at the ICA and the Ritzy, Brixton, 10 March. 'Culture is our Weapon: AfroReggae in the Favelas of Rio' (Latin America Bureau) is outon 2 March