Peace in Liberia

By Crispin Sartwell

A lovely anthem for this moment is "Peace in Liberia," by Alpha Blondy, a reggae artist from Liberia's neighbor Cote D'Ivoire. "We're calling on Jesus Christ to save I and I; we're calling on Allah to save I and I; we're calling on Adonoi to save I and I." Alpha Blondy calls on the Gods of the three great monotheisms to save his people, a group in which - despite the status of the United States as "Babylon" - we might hope to include ourselves. He might also have added a call to Jah Rastfari, the God of Rastafarianism, the Jamaican religion that fundamentally informs reggae and is one of the signal world religious developments of the twentieth century. Alpha Blondy, though raised among Moslems, considers himself a Rasta.

Both Blondy's life and the history of Liberia are case studies in the complexity and profundity of Africa and its diaspora.

Though Alpha Blondy sings mostly in French, he also uses various African languages including his native Dioula, Jamaican patois, English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The reggae he plays originated in the late sixties among black Jamaicans, descendants of slaves brought from west Africa - including what are now Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire, to work the cane fields.

Reggae itself originates in African styles, together with styles of Carribbean islands and the British hymns known in Jamaica as sankeys. The style was also strongly influenced by the American rhythm and blues that wafted across the Carribbean from New Orleans and Miami on the airwaves of the fifties and sixties, which is itself a synthesis of African and European musics. But by the late seventies reggae had circulated back into the United States, thanks in part to the doubly diasporic Jamaican communities springing up in the cities of the east coast (communities that brought us Colin Powell, among others). When he was studying English at Columbia University, Alpha Blondy heard Burning Spear in Central Park and became a reggae artist. Before long he was one of the most popular musicians in Africa, playing music that sounded very much like Bob Marley's.

And he also resolved to carry Marley's message of peace and freedom. He has sung Arabic prayers in Israel, and Hebrew prayers in Egypt. So influential is he that, though the Cote d'Ivoire government had banned his music in the late nineties, an illegally-circulated single critical of the government was widely credited with leading to a coup in 1999.

Blondy's story is notable for all the cultures and locations and spiritualities of the African and African diasporic experience that it interweaves, for its transformation of disaster into hope through art, and for the recirculation of that hope across the world. His African reggae is a return, in art, of Jamaica and of New York, to Africa.

Liberia as a nation originates in a movement among white Americans of the early 19^th century to return black slaves to Africa. Thomas Jefferson was among the early proponents of repatriation, and his attitudes display both the promise and the problems of the movement: he held that black people were inferior and that the races should not mix (rather ironic, given his own reproductive proclivities), but that slavery should be ended and even in some sense atoned for.

The people who pushed the plan included both abolitionists and slave masters who feared the influence of free blacks. They included James Monroe (for whom the capitol of Liberia is named), Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. The repatriation effort was a mixed success, and the returned slaves established in Liberia a planterocracy in imitation of the American south, oppressing the indigenous population. The next generation of abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, repudiated the Liberian project as an embodiment of race prejudice.

The rule of "Americo-Liberians" remained in place until 1980. Now we prepare to send American peacekeepers - no doubt including many African-Americans - to try to stop the horrific Liberian civil war. One thing you can bet they'll hear when they get there is the sound of Alpha Blondy, the African Rasta.

Rastafarianism was largely the child of the Jamaican black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, and when Alpha Blondy heard Burning Spear in 1979, he certainly heard lyrics about Garvey. Garvey taught the repatriation to Africa of people of African descent in the West. The most positive construal of the dream of Liberia, in other words, persists even in African-American religious understanding.

And in fact, the most powerful function of the notion of repatriation is symbolic. It means return, freedom, home, brotherhood, peace. Above all, it signals redemption. That is something Alpha Blondy brings from everywhere into the universal vision of his songs and it is something we can all pray that Liberians - and we - can find.

Crispin Sartwell's book "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives" will be published in the Fall.

Alpha Blondy was born Sedou Kone in Dimbroko, Ivory Coast. He was raised by his grandmother who imparted knowledge from the Koran as well as traditional Dioula morality. It was she who gave him the nickname "Blondy", a version of the Diola word for "bandit", after he was thrown out of school for forming his own band. He added the name "Alpha", which meant "beginning" or "first", hence his name means "first bandit." As a young man he spent two years studying English at Columbia University in New York, often performing reggae in the streets and in Harlem clubs. Leading Jamaican producer Clive Hunt heard him singing Bob Marley songs and recorded six tracks with him that were not released. An altercation with the Ivorian ambassador in New York led to his arrest when he returned home to the Ivory Coast; there a fight with a policeman led to jail. He finally was released and launched his career in earnest.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the American Declaration of Independence, declared that "Blacks . . . are inferior to Whites in the endowments of both body and mind" (The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Modern Library, New York, 1944, page 262).

To his great credit Jefferson was opposed to slavery as a concept: but he was adamant that "(W)hen freed, the Black is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture" (ibid).