Labadi Beach, Accra, Ghana

Wednesday night we pile in a tro tro en masse and descend on the Labadi Beach reggae party, where we watch varying combinations of bands and singers blare reggae through distorted speakers over a mingling crowd of dreadlocked African and Jamaican rastas, Ghanaians selling meat skewers, popcorn, plantain chips and trinkets and a sprinkling of white faces. We must cut a strange sight- a bunch of white people hanging out in a group in a sea of  black faces, and when I’m approached by someone from the bar I don’t hesitate to tell him we are a band from the U.S. who wants to play on stage tonight. A couple hours and many tall bottles of Star lager later there we are, plugging in onstage using borrowed equipment facing a curious African crowd for the first time. We shrug off the butterflies and tear into “Heaven”, our reworking of a Ghanaian pop song from the 1970’s we found on an afrobeat collection back home, and “Kari Buro”, a stomping Zimbabwe-flavored tune of our own, and if the difference between us and the rest of the reggae bands that have hogged the stage all night is enough to make some committed rastas shuffle away up the beach in disgust when they hear us, it’s also enough to inspire our first ever African mosh pit when some of our friends- led by Coustudia and Bongo- mingle with a few of the crowd who have decided that we’re all right and thrash around in jubilation on the beach in front of the stage. Gradually we see hands in the air and bobbing dreadlocked heads out in the crowd, and as we hear yells for every syncopation Lara uses and every twist of phrase for Todd’s trumpet solo we feel like the crowd is throwing every bit of energy we feel for being here, on this beach, playing for this crowd, right back in our face and amplifying it a hundredfold.

Afterwards we are exhilarated and mostly hang around while people come up and introduce themselves and congragulate us- one dreadlocked African tells me he was lying flat on his back on the beach all night, “Bored off my ass”, and didn’t get up until he heard us play. But there is some tension too- as I overhear a couple rastas (Jamaican, I think), loudly berating Peter and Paul, the identical twin reggae singing duo who had invited us onstage and to use their instruments, for allowing the white people onstage, and one rasta angrily tells me and Todd that we are “not Aphrodesia, because you don’t even know what that means, and you don’t even know what you are singing” before storming off into the night. Still, they’re in the minority by far, as most of the outpouring of enthusiasm and gratitude overwhelms us and makes us feel like we belong here, on this beach 6000 miles from home, diving headlong into a culture we have so far only pretended to know.