The Ethiopian famine of the early 1980s was one of the defining news stories of the decade, an exposure of the stark divide between developed and developing nations, still referred to at the time as the Third World. It is a received wisdom that the general public in Britain learned about the crisis when shocking images of emaciated men, women and children were shown on BBC news reports. This is not entirely true. In fact, plenty of Rastafarians were already aware of the situation.
The east African country was their spiritual home – many in the movement viewed its former emperor Haile Selassie as their messiah – and a place free from the iniquities of the west. “A lot of Rastafarians went to Ethiopia [before they] came to London,” says the musician and campaigner Leon Leiffer. “I knew many of them, and there was a rumour going around that things were really bad because of the drought. We heard it like that before the mainstream media. And I had the idea to do something to help before we saw anything on the BBC.”
Leiffer, a member of the influential reggae vocal harmony group the Blackstones, is the great social activist you may never have heard of. He was the driving force behind Brafa (British Reggae Artists Famine Appeal), an ensemble that featured, among others, renowned Jamaican vocalist Dennis Brown, roots heroes Aswad and Janet Kay, the queen of lovers rock, that uniquely British strain of romantic reggae. This month marks the 40th anniversary of the release of the group’s charity single, Let’s Make Africa Green Again, created to raise money for famine relief efforts in Ethiopia at around the same time as another, far more notorious charity single.
“We were always singing about Africa, so we thought: let’s put our money where our mouth is,” Leiffer, a friendly 72-year-old with braided grey hair, says over tea in his front room in Leyton, east London. He had initially decided to stage a concert to raise money for famine relief but finding a venue and sponsorship proved too difficult, so the fallback position was to make a record, the proceeds of which would be sent to Ethiopia via Save the Children. Leiffer, who came as a teenager from Jamaica to Britain and pursued a career in music, duly assembled a team consisting of several Rastafarian artists, such as singer Gene Rondo, drummer Jah Bunny and bassist Elroy Bailey, as well as vocalists including Leiffer’s wife Fay Addison and his Blackstones bandmates Tony Douglas and Ken Kendricks.
This was very much a grassroots operation, and word spread of the plan to make a charity record at popular community centres such as Roots Pool in Hackney, east London, where, as Leiffer recalls, you were as likely to see reggae royalty such as Dennis Brown as you were a “notorious local gangster”. One musician alerted another, and Brafa soon put together an all-star UK reggae cast.
Finding a studio willing to give free session time was a problem, but Leiffer and Rondo lucked out through a chance encounter with Eddy Grant, the innovative Guyanese singer who had had a big hit with Electric Avenue. Grant agreed to lend the group his own east London studio, and with that manna from heaven the project motored forward. Leiffer and Rondo combined lyrics from their previous songs, one of which hailed Africa as “paradise”, and they soon had the tune for Let’s Make Africa Green Again.
“On the day of the recording I said to everybody: ‘Let go of your ego!’” recalls Leiffer. “Any artist was welcome, all they had to do was come to the studio and take part. And there were people singing who had never sung on a record before. People walked by, like at carnival time, and we’d say come in, we want you to sing on the chorus. It was an open house, a special thing. We had all kinds of folk with us. There were over 200 people involved, including local schoolkids.”
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That sense of inclusion was pivotal in Brafa. As far as Leiffer was concerned, the priority was for everybody, both in the reggae and wider Black British community, to pull together and do their bit regardless of who they were. Needless to say, Band Aid had captured the world’s attention in November 1984 with Do They Know It’s Christmas? but Leiffer did not feel they were in competition with that song. However, on the vexed issue of the lack of Black British representation in the aforementioned project and its follow-up concert Live Aid – notwithstanding the presence in the latter of pop-jazz star Sade – he has strong views, and believes the argument that reggae artists were simply not big enough to make the bill doesn’t cut any ice.
“I’d say Bob Geldof and Midge Ure have good hearts,” says Leiffer. “They did fantastic. But to have Aswad in the international charts, and [lovers rock star] Trevor Walters, Eddy Grant, Janet Kay all enjoying major commercial success and not be involved … They didn’t call us for Live Aid and they didn’t call us for the recording. We had gifted, talented people and we had something to offer, and I think they should have reached out to us. Soon after our record was made, I was coming from the BBC and saw Geldof walking to Radio 1 and I said: ‘Wh’appen Bob?’ He acknowledged me but made no attempt to stop. I got the feeling of a brush-off.”
While Black newspapers such as Caribbean Times and The Voice (who had offered up their office, with an all-important fax machine, for practical help), and music magazines such as Black Echoes and Blues & Soul ran features, there was scant coverage in the national press. Leiffer remembers an article “the size of a postage stamp” in the Sun, though he has fond memories of appearing on Janice Long’s Radio 1 show to promote the single.
Despite selling well to reggae fans, the song did not make the national pop chart. Still, Brafa soldiered on and finally was able to hold a benefit concert in Shoreditch Park, east London in May 1986 that featured many of the artists on Let’s Make Africa Green Again. It drew a crowd of more than 10,000 people, raising £8,000. Although one headline called it “Live Aid reggae style”, the event also showcased Black British culture in the broadest sense, including appearances by notable sports people such as Olympic sprinter Mike McFarlane and boxer Dennis Andries. The concert countered the largely negative image that clung to Black British youth just a few years after the Brixton and Toxteth riots, which may well have contributed to the mainstream media snub of Brafa.
Some recognition did eventually arrive, though. In 2021, the forecourt of the Britannia Leisure Centre on the border of Shoreditch Park was named Brafa Square in honour of Leiffer and his collective. Today, he is still focused on making music and the Blackstones recently enjoyed radio play on US reggae stations with their single Ting a Ling. Looking back, he feels a sense of achievement in what he, Gene Rondo, who died in 1994, and others did.
“We were well received, maybe not on the level of Band Aid, which I understand,” he says. “We could have had more coverage. Of what we did, though, I am hugely proud. I remember the struggle, and all the good times.”