Sorie Kondi

Last Login 05/20/12

• Freetown, Sierra Leone
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Sorie Kondi was born in the village of Mangiloko, near the city of Makeni in Sierra Leone, West Africa around the year 1968. His actual birthdate is not certain because there is no official record of his birth. He never went to school but began to play the Kondi, a traditional instrument of Sierra Leone as a teenager. It was apparent early on that he had a special talent for music, and by 1984 he started earning some small money by playing at ceremonies and travelling to nearby villages.

Being born blind in such a poor country and never receiving any formal education would seem like enough hardship by itself. But then his life was uprooted in 1996 when civil war forced him to leave his home and seek refuge in Freetown. Despite the ongoing war, he began recording his first album there in 1998, and finished it after 4 months. But on January 6, 1999, the rebels staged a brutal assault on Freetown called Operation No Living Thing. Almost all the city’s residents fled to the bush. Sorie was abandoned, forced to hide inside his house for 5 days while much of the city was looted and burned down. When the dust settled, the master tapes had been lost and his career plans derailed. He decided to remain in the capital city, in a neighborhood called Fourah Bay, renting a one-room shack perched on a dangerously steep hill (dangerous, that is, even for a sighted person).

Having lost his chance to commercially release a cassette, Sorie Kondi made a name for himself (literally, he adopted the name of his instrument as his surname) as a street musician. Unfortunately, this profession doesn’t bring in much money in a country where almost everybody is living in poverty.

Sorie Kondi is a musical genius and a cultural treasure, able to sing in four different languages (Loko, his mother tongue, Temne, Krio, and English). He is also an innovator; he taught himself how to play a little-known traditional instrument at the age of 15, later electrified it, and developed a unique style of playing it.