Hot Dogg

It’s been a long journey from Africa to rapping on stage in downtown Winnipeg for hip hop artist Samuel Mijok Lang. A journey that included a 1,600-kilometer walk out of southern Sudan.

Lang is known as Hot Dogg here in Winnipeg, but to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, he’s also known as a “Lost Boy”, a name for the thousands of children who marched en masse out of Sudan to escape the civil war.
Ironically, it’s a name taken from the dwelling orphans in Disney’s Peter Pan.

In 1983, when civil war broke out in Sudan between the Arab government of the north and settled African nations of the south Hot Dogg was only four years old. The conflict lasted for almost two decades and cost 2 million people their lives
Little Hot Dogg was among the 30,000 children aged between 4 and 9 that walked single file across the grassy plains of an unforgiving African landscape towards Ethiopia.

I first met Hot Dogg in the weeks leading up to the 2007 Globe for Darfur Rally in Winnipeg last April. I had arranged for him to perform a couple tracks from his new CD “Lost in War.” Seeing him for the first time, it was hard to imagine that this cheerful, charismatic twenty-one year old was once caught in the cross fire of a deadly civil war; his six-foot-six frame seemed surprisingly unhindered by the weight of his experiences.

I was filled with worry about Hot Dogg pulling off his performance at the Rally.
I didn’t need to. He had around ten kids from the Needs Centre in oversized white Darfur t-shirts belting out the chorus while performing a flawless choreographed dance routine. I was stunned. I just remember looking at the crowd as they held up their right arms, hands fisted, pounding the sky to the beat as Hot Dogg rapped his elegy for Darfur. When he performed his next song, the crowd really lit up; I knew at that moment he was a super star in the making.

Hot Dogg came to Canada in 2004 and enrolled in high school. After graduation he went for his first job interview; he showed up without a resume and when the company owner asked him what his skills were he cheerfully replied that he could swim and do back a flip. But Hot Dogg is charming, and exudes pure goodness…so of course he got the job. Hot Dogg loves Canada but it’s an everyday struggle for him just to get by. He and his Lost Boys face daily challenges of a system that is not designed for them; like being turned down for tuition bursaries for not having death certificates for their parents.

Hot Dogg turned to rap after God appeared to him in a dream and told him that he would spread his message through music and that he would meet his mentor the following day. The next day he was passing through Central Park and there was a rap performance. At the end of the concert Winnipeg rapper Fresh IE pulled him from the audience and offered to take him under his wing and teach him to rap.

When I asked Hot Dogg what his message was he explained that he survived to tell the story of the Lost Boys to Canadians, saying, “We don’t need any more Lost Boys coming from Sudan.” Hot Dogg is driven by the images of his people suffering. One night, when he was only four years old, his village was attacked and he and his family were captured by the militia, Hot Dogg was forced to watch as armed men took turns indulging their viciousness and performed mutilations - too horrific to describe - on his aunt and uncle.

The journey to Ethiopia took four months and thousands of boys perished along the way from starvation, dehydration, disease, bombing raids, and attacks by Arab militias and wild animals. Twenty-six thousand of the child survivors reached Ethiopia, but refugee life was not easy, as Hot Dogg describes, “It was like a death camp, with hunger and disease everywhere you looked.”

After only a year in Ethiopia the children were forced to flee again when rebel forces toppled the government. The rebels were unsympathetic to the Sudanese child refugees and launched a sudden vicious attack against the camp where Hot Dogg and the Lost Boys lived. The children fled Ethiopia in another mass exodus and eventually arrived at the banks of the deadly crocodile infested Gilo River. Hot Dogg was one of the lucky few that crossed with a rope, the rest drowned when the army arrived and open-fired on them, twenty thousand kids flooded into the waters – a little over half survived. For the next ten years, the dusty, dilapidated camp in Kenya was home to the Lost Boys until the UNHCR finally resettled them to Canada, the United States and Australia. Around two hundred Lost Boys came to Winnipeg.

Samuel Mijok Lang, a.k.a. Hot Dogg – a name the Lost Boys gave him because that’s all he ate his first year in Canada – is a survivor. His faith in God reflects his faith in the innate goodness of people. In spite of everything he’s been through, he believes that if Canadians knew what the Lost Boys went through, what the people of Darfur are presently going through, they would unite to stop it. I hate to disappoint him.

Hot Dogg will perform at the Winnipeg Run for Darfur on October 7th in Assiniboine Park. See myspace.com/hotdogg204 for more information on upcoming CD launch party, concert performances and events.
- G.Love Magazine