Alpha Blondy

Well supported

Seydou Koné, born 1 January 1953 in Dimbokro and billed Alpha Blondy, is the artist who made reggae an African language rather than an imported one. Raised Muslim by his grandmother, he studied English in Liberia and then in New York at Hunter College and Columbia, and learned reggae from Bob Marley records lent to him by a Liberian friend. He returned to Côte d'Ivoire in the early 1980s and, with his twelve-piece band the Solar System, released Jah Glory in 1982 and Cocody Rock in 1984. In 1986 he recorded Jérusalem in Kingston with the Wailers behind him, singing the title track across Arabic, English, French and Hebrew as an argument that the faiths could be addressed at once. He sings in Dioula, French and English, and his subjects are African politics, Pan-African unity and the failures of the states he lives under — "Brigadier Sabari" is an account of a beating by Abidjan police.