The Kru seafarers

node · earth · The West African coast, from Liberia to the Gulf of Guinea

A people of the Liberian and Sierra Leonean coast who worked in large numbers as sailors, stevedores and boat handlers on European vessels from the late eighteenth century onward, hired for their seamanship in surf conditions that European crews could not manage, and settling in Krutowns in port cities along the whole West African coast. They are the return current in this Journey. Kru seamen acquired guitars from European ships and, from the First World War onward, carried a two-finger picking technique along the coast from Freetown to Lagos, applying to the imported instrument a right-hand approach reported to derive from the playing of the Akan seperewa harp-lute. The dockside style that grew around this — palm-wine music, named for where it was played and drunk — is the direct ancestor of guitar-band highlife. The point is not that Africa received music from the Atlantic world; it is that the Atlantic was a circuit, that African seafarers were among its most mobile workers, and that they were choosing what to bring home.