Comrade Fatso Graces Major Music Festival

FARAI Monro popularly known as Comrade Fatso continues to fly the country’s flag high on the international stage.

This time the talented poet is set to rub shoulders with some of the well known international reggae music gurus at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival to be held from June 19-21 in the United States.

Fatso has been invited to perform and to be the Master of Ceremony at the California’s leading World Music and Reggae Festival. It will be his second time in the US inside two months. Last month he was on a one-month tour with his band Chabvondoka.

The festival will see Fatso rubbing shoulders with the legendary Gregory Isaacs, Sly and Robbie (the iconic reggae music producers behind Bob Marley), Anthony B (Jamaica’s dancehall king), Femi Kuti (one of Africa’s leading artists), Michael Rose of Black Uhuru fame, Zap Mama and many other leading international stars.

Another Zimbabwean who will be performing at the festival is United States-based dancer Julia Tsitsi Chigamba and the Chinyakare Ensemble. Chigamba and the Ensembles have performed widely in the United States and Canada. The Sierra Nevada World Music Festival promotes “conscious” music.

The genre carries a message of peace, unity and brotherhood, which transcends the divisions of race and culture. The festival also attracts tens of thousands of festival goers and features the best of world music and reggae.

According to the organisers “over the past 15 years we have endeavoured to build a community where conscious music, roots music and world music is embraced.

“Where bringing diverse people from many lands together in celebration yields more than just the sum of each individual present but something much grander.”

“We believe that music has the power to move mountains and change paradigms, and the phenomenal artists who have graced SNWMF stages over the past decade have imparted an overwhelmingly positive force,” said the organisers on their website.

Fatso, who will also be performing at a concert in Washington DC on June 16, said the invitation showed that his music was appreciated by a wider audience despite the fact that Zimbabwe’s only broadcaster does not give any of his songs airtime.

The Washington concert is in honour of the Soweto uprising, and Fatso will be performing alongside anti-apartheid icon, Dennis Brutus. Brutus’ poetry has been studied all over the world and he is heralded as a poetry and struggle hero in South Africa.

Fatso’s second tour of the States in as many months is testimony of his growing stature internationally. “Though my album House of Hunger is banned in Zimbabwe many people in the Diaspora love it.

“I hope the inclusive government will do something soon for artists whose music is still being deemed politically incorrect by the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation,” he said.

Fatso will be performing at the Mannenberg on Thursday next in his last local appearance before he leaves for the United States.- Zimbabwe Standard.