Pan-African Reggae
Located in 2 routes
Reggae as a pan-African liberation music, both in Jamaican records celebrating African unity and repatriation and in the reggae made across the African continent. It keeps roots reggae's one-drop and steppers foundations (70-85 BPM) while often adding African languages, local percussion and highlife/mbalax color, with lyrics of continental solidarity, anti-colonial struggle and Rastafari. Vocals are rousing and anthemic, sometimes multilingual. The mood is celebratory and militant, framing reggae as the sound of a united, decolonized Africa.
History
Bob Marley's 'Zimbabwe' and 'Africa Unite' and his 1980 Zimbabwe independence performance made reggae a soundtrack of African liberation, and the genre took deep root across the continent. Ivorian Alpha Blondy (singing in Dioula, French and English) and South African Lucky Dube became global reggae stars in the 1980s, Ivory Coast's Tiken Jah Fakoly and Nigeria's Majek Fashek followed, and reggae fused with local styles from Abidjan to Johannesburg. Pan-African reggae carried anti-apartheid and pro-democracy messages, made reggae one of Africa's most popular imported-then-indigenized genres, and reinforced the music's founding link to African identity.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Lloyd Bradley, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King (Penguin, 2000)
- Steve Barrow & Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae (Rough Guides, 2004)
- David Katz, Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae (Bloomsbury, 2003)
- Kevin O'Brien Chang & Wayne Chen, Reggae Routes: The Story of Jamaican Music (Temple University Press, 1998)