You are in for a treat, a really big one that you won’t know what hit you. One of the world’s biggest reggae stars, Ivorian born Alpha Blondy will be headlining the 27th edition of Koroga Festival, on Sunday, September 22, 2019, at Two Rivers Mall Grounds, Nairobi.
Since his first success in the 1980s with the pan-African hit “Opération Coup De Poing (Brigadier Sabari),” the Ivorian superstar born, Seydou Koné, has managed to successfully take his unique form of reggae to music fans across the globe and is adored by fans all over including those who are lovers of other music genres. “Brigadier Sabari,” was an account of Blondy‘s run-in with an Abidjan police street raid in which he was nearly beaten to death. It was the first time a West African artist had dared to mention police brutality in public.
On the circuit for almost forty years now, he began playing in the second half of the 1970s in the United States and recorded his first hits the following decade in Côte d’Ivoire: “Cocody Rock”, “Apartheid Is Nazism”, “Jérusalem.” With almost twenty studio albums to his credit, Alpha Blondy has been touring the world since then and primarily defends a certain vision of music; That of a magical interlude that lets us point out the evils of our time to build a better one. Moreover, the day Alpha Blondy became a singer, he changed his name from Seydou Koné and opted for a new surname that’s synonymous with a new life.
What many are not aware of is, at some point in his life, he moved to New York (also briefly Texas), where he studied English at Hunter College in New York, and later in the Columbia University American Language Program. He majored in English because he wanted to become an English teacher. He got his big break from friend Fulgence Kass, an employee of Ivory Coast Television who helped him land a spot on the Premiere Chance talent show upon return to Ivory Coast (modern day Côte d’Ivoire).