INTERVIEW : PRINCE KOLONI
Interview by : Jérome Bast
Pictures by : DR
on Monday, September 05th 2011 - 9 716 views
Don't ask him to choose between aléké and reggae: Prince Koloni won't. Although he began his career playing this traditional music inherited from the Maroons (with the group Fondering, he released no fewer than 12 albums), it is with reggae that the little prince of Amazonia found the means to call Suriname's leaders to account. A true Bushi Nengué, descendant of the Maroons who defied the government in Paramaribo, Prince Koloni acts as a relay for information that doesn't always reach the Maroni river. "90% of my music is about my country", says the man who now lives in France. He presents his new album "Jah is the way", recorded in Jamaica.
Reggaefrance / Your new album, "Jah is the way", comes out six years after the previous one. Why so long?
Prince Koloni / I did a lot of things in the meantime, because I'm pursuing in parallel all the projects I started when I began my career: aleke, bigi pokoe... After the album "Introducing Prince Koloni" (released in France in 2005, ed.), I put out two local albums in French Guiana. But internationally, I hadn't released anything for six years. We had prepared three albums: an acoustic album, a reggae one and an aleke one. We blended the reggae album and the acoustic album, which is good for changing the vibe.
There's even a dancehall track, which gives the album its title...
The dancehall track was just for Kariang Studio, it wasn't planned for my album. At that time, the guy from Kariang was releasing an album in Japan and asked me to sing Jah is the way. In the end, we kept the track for the album. It's very different from the rest. I was helped in the studio, because I had never sung dancehall before. It didn't really convince me.
You mention Kariang, because the album was recorded in Jamaica...
Yes, we also recorded at Tuff Gong. I had written and composed the tracks on my computer, and Dean Fraser brought the musicians together: Kirk, Beres Hammond's drummer, but also Leebert "Gibby" Morrison and Solje Hamilton for the mix.
 Quand on parle de Kingston, on te raconte tellement d’histoires, c’est vraiment flippant. 
The most striking track is Real Bushi Nengue.
It's a track against the Suriname government. I recorded it a long time ago, and it came out locally in French Guiana, before the Bushi Nengue elections against the Paramaribo government. Judgement also deals with the elections. People in Suriname lack education. For years, politicians have made promises and forgotten them once in power. Since I now live in France, it's easier for me to talk like that, I'm less threatened. The Bushi Nengue won the elections but the dictator Desi Bouterse came back. He killed a lot of people in Paramaribo. He's the one who won the elections in 2010.
That overlaps a little with the subject of Watching You.
90% of my music is about my country. Watching you is meant to challenge people, to get them to consider their way of life. In Suriname, there is no more work, but Desi Bouterse isn't looking for solutions, and young people are reduced to theft and armed robbery. People believed in him, but police and soldiers are everywhere on the streets. I hope people realise he isn't the right choice. The big problem is that the situation in Suriname forces people to go into exile in French Guiana, for example, but there they can only work illegally, they are in an illegal situation. They are looking for something they can't find.
The track Nature with Tarrus Riley evokes the ecological threats hanging over the Maroni river and the Amazon...
I grew up there, I was a gold miner in the forest and on the river... I saw hectares of forest completely razed, even though wood is so important to us, we make pirogues and houses out of it... If you fly over the forest, you can gauge the extent of the devastation. Big companies arrived easily, thanks to corruption in Paramaribo, and look for gold using mercury. When I worked, I didn't know it was that dangerous, for people as well as for nature. With music, I can speak out, say what I did and what I saw.\nWe travel upriver by pirogue; I've seen the system, people throw anything and everything into the water, or abandon it in the forest. There's a bit of a lack of education. They need to be taught that some objects can stay there for 100 years. That plastic in the ground could stay there forever... Metal is constantly dumped into the river by the big companies...\nI saw this with my own eyes. The people of the river don't have TV, they don't know you shouldn't eat a fish poisoned with mercury. Because mercury is a heavy metal, it stays at the bottom of the water and is ingested by the fish...
Does Murderer evoke the civil war in Suriname?
Exactly, I wrote it at the same time as Real Bushi Nengue. My father was a pirogue pilot for the police at the time. When the civil war came, we crossed to the French side to work. Many members of my family died during that war of the government against the Bushi Nengue, who were independent on the river. On the river, you don't need Paramaribo much.
You started out playing aleke with the group Fondering. Together you released 12 albums.
That was in 1993, when I was a gold miner. That's why we created Fondering, because we all worked for the same boss and went on holiday at the same time... When we released our first album, we quickly found ourselves playing lots of concerts. I went to the Netherlands, where I have a lot of family, to do three concerts. In the end I stayed there and made another album... By going to Holland, I was able to get out of the local Surinamese market and give my music an international dimension.\nAleke was the first music I discovered and began to play, and I still play it today. But it's with reggae that I can challenge the government. With reggae, there's room to speak. Aleke, with its drums, is heavier; you don't necessarily understand the lyrics. But everybody knows reggae. Still, I can't let aleke go. It's the music of my country.
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