Natty Dread

Dr. G featuring Edimbo Lekea

Random by Design traced how Juru built relational infrastructure where systems failed. Spiritual Downloads showed Lester turning breakdown into breakthrough through art and community. Natty Dread reveals what happens when a nickname becomes a practice, the practice becomes a platform, and belonging builds from the skin outward.

Edimbo’s journey – from questioning the official story to painting Black pharaohs and Congolese kings across Seattle and Tacoma – isn’t about fitting into broken systems. It starts with belonging in your own skin, then extends through drum circles, murals, and the persistent act of proper representation. When OG John named him “Natty Dread” in that Everett living room, it wasn’t just a nickname; it was an intergenerational handoff this series keeps tracing.

The recognition continues: on a Seattle bus, Edimbo meets Lester Pearson, carrying canvases wrapped in bedsheets – the quiet rattle of wheels, the weight of work – and both knowing what others miss: art isn’t decoration; it’s infrastructure. Like Juru pressing roots and waiting, Edimbo turned a margin sketch into a logo and a living-room nickname into community architecture.

We don’t need sides – we need a handoff.

~Dr. G

The nickname arrived before the name made sense.

Edimbo was twenty-two, sitting in OG John’s living room in Everett, Washington – a small house that served as unofficial headquarters for young Black men trying to find their footing in a city that didn’t always make room for them. OG John was from Louisiana, maybe twenty years older, with a drawl that softened hard truths and a habit of giving people names that stuck longer than the ones their parents chose.

“ND,” OG would call out when Edimbo walked in. “What’s up, ND?”

Not Edimbo. Never his given name. Always ND – short for Natty Dread, pulled from Bob Marley’s refrain: Dread, Natty Dread now / Dreadlock Congo Bongo I. The nickname was a gift, though Edimbo didn’t fully understand its weight at the time. He knew the song. He’d heard it countless times growing up, first in France where hip-hop and reggae moved through immigrant neighborhoods like shared breath, then in Washington State where music became one of the few constants across multiple displacements.

What he didn’t know yet was that the name would outlast the space where it was given. That ten years later, he’d build a business around it. That “Natty Dread” would become the signature on paintings of Black pharaohs and Congolese kings, on murals in Seattle and Tacoma, on prints shipped to Switzerland and Brooklyn and Albuquerque.

But in OG’s living room, it was simpler than that. It was just a name between friends. A place to exhale. A reminder that someone saw him clearly enough to name what they recognized – even if Edimbo himself was still learning to see it.

The Education Outside School

Long before OG’s living room, there was France.

Edimbo was born in Creil – “a predominantly Black city with African, Afro-Caribbean, and Arab mixture,” as he puts it – an inner-city hub in Oise, north of Paris. He says it plain: “Keep it real – it’s the hood.” His family lived up the hill. His elementary school, Carnot, sat down in Nogent, a predominantly white space where being one of the few Black children meant learning to read more than textbooks.

“I got to see their minds,” he recalls of those early years. “Adults don’t really think that kids will pick up on certain cues and some subtleties. So I got to pick up on that early.”

The racism was overt, he says – none of the coded language that would come later in American schools. In 1990s France, the lines were clear. What Edimbo learned was how to hold two geographies in his mind simultaneously: the white school where he studied, and the neighborhood up the hill where he returned each afternoon to “our life, my people that relate to what I was going through.”

His father, Maurice Lekea, understood the necessity of this dual navigation. At eight years old, Edimbo began taking public transit alone to school. What he didn’t know until years later was that his father had followed the bus for weeks – not hovering, just watching from a distance to ensure his son knew the route. Once Maurice was satisfied that Edimbo could find his way, he stepped back.

“It developed my sense of geography and location,” Edimbo reflects now. The lesson wasn’t just about bus lines. It was about learning to move through spaces that weren’t designed with him in mind, about building independence not as abandonment but as preparation.

But the deeper education happened at home, around tables where his uncles and other elders spoke without filter about African history – not the sanitized versions taught in schools, but the stories of what was taken, what was built, what persisted. They talked about Patrice Lumumba and pre-colonial kingdoms, about raw materials from the Congo that powered space shuttles, about the ways colonization didn’t end but merely changed its vocabulary.

“I used to hear this at a very young age,” Edimbo says. “These things were at the back of my mind. I wasn’t doing anything with that information, just knowing it.” He pauses. “I didn’t think it would serve me at some point. It was just same ole talk, same ole talk.”

His mother, Charlotte Mongengo, held the household together – Congolese food and the unseen labor that sustains a family – while those stories layered into foundation.

“Jumped in the Shark Tank”

At thirteen, Edimbo’s father brought him to America. The plan had been to wait until he was eighteen, after high school in France. But as Edimbo puts it plainly: “I was getting into too much stuff back home. They had to snatch me up.”

He landed in Kent, Washington – a city southeast of Seattle where the Liberian community had established itself, where Samoan and Mexican families lived alongside Black Americans, where the school system required uniforms but students found ways to make them their own. “White tees, Air Forces, trying to trick it out,” he remembers, smiling at the memory of teenagers negotiating conformity.

Kent Junior High School introduced him to English as a survival skill, not an academic exercise. He developed a strategy: deliberately mispronounce words in class, trigger laughter, wait for the correction. “I removed the element of being embarrassed,” he explains. “Now it’s funny, and at the end of laughter, someone’s going to be like, ‘No, this is how you say it.’ Thank you. That’s what I was looking for.”

The method wasn’t about pride – it was about efficiency. He needed the language, and he needed it fast. Already fluent in Lingala and French, he had frameworks to build on. Book in Lingala was buku. Milk was miliki. The cognates helped, but syntax required immersion. So he watched children’s television: Dragon Tales, Clifford the Big Red Dog. “I don’t care, I was thirteen years old watching this. I need to pick up on this language quick.”

Sports became his other language. Soccer, then wrestling, then track – each one a doorway into peer networks that didn’t require perfect English, just commitment and skill. He made lifetime friends through soccer, particularly in Kent’s Liberian community. “We’re black, you don’t speak English, but you somewhat look like us. Like, what’s up with you?”

The question was genuine curiosity, an opening. Edimbo walked through it.

At Kent Meridian High School (grades 9-11), he built community. The Liberian population in Kent welcomed him. Soccer gave him two Liberian friends – brothers to this day. Wrestling taught him how to establish himself. Track revealed hidden capacities. These three years gave him roots – people who knew him, spaces of his own.

Then came Roosevelt High School for senior year. Another transfer. Another shark tank.

“You’re Lying to Me”

By senior year at Roosevelt High School in Seattle, Edimbo had grown comfortable with English. What he couldn’t reconcile was what got taught in it.

His history teacher presented information that contradicted everything Edimbo had learned from his uncles. Dates were wrong. Raw materials misattributed. The role of African resources in global development minimized or erased entirely.

“I was like, ‘That’s false. We just watched a documentary about this,’” Edimbo recalls of one confrontation. The class fell silent. Most students wouldn’t know to correct the teacher – they’d never been exposed to alternative narratives. But Edimbo had grown up with elders who shared information “with no filter.”

He knew, for instance, that cobalt – essential for aerospace technology – came from the Congo. He knew about the Songhai Empire, about Timbuktu as an intellectual center, about how contemporary governance structures borrowed from pre-colonial African systems. When his teacher presented a different story, Edimbo spoke up.

“I got to the point where if you’re getting this information wrong, I can’t take your class seriously,” he says. The confrontations became routine. So did the detentions. “I got kicked out of class not for fighting – I got kicked out because I’m checking you for lying to me in my face.”

The teacher couldn’t see past Edimbo’s delivery, which was sometimes sharp, maybe disrespectful, definitely disruptive. Edimbo couldn’t see past the misinformation being presented as fact. Neither could bridge the gap. He stopped taking his cues from the crowd.

He carried out a sentence that still guides him: “You are not a slave – you were enslaved.”

But the deeper education continued elsewhere. At Roosevelt, he also discovered track, specifically hurdling – something he’d never attempted before senior year. Starting from scratch, he dropped times dramatically through the season, qualifying for district meets where he raced against athletes already committed to college programs.

“That experience unlocked this thought about myself,” he reflects. “What else I might be good at, but I just don’t know?” The question would echo.

The Invisible Student

When Edimbo talks about college, he mentions it matter-of-factly: “I was homeless going to college.”

The episodes happened in his late teens, early twenties – blurry years in the early 2010s. He was attending Everett Community College, running track on scholarship (which only covered two quarters), taking graphic design classes, participating in the Black Student Union. From the outside, he was fully engaged. From the inside, the calculation was different.

“People complain about things, man,” he says of overhearing classmates. “I don’t give a damn about that.”

The housing instability clarified priorities. It also clarified what belonging meant – or didn’t mean – in institutional spaces. “I got to the point where if I’m not comfortable in my skin, I ain’t going to be comfortable anywhere,” he explains. “So I’m going to be comfortable even in places where I’m not supposed to be comfortable.”

This wasn’t bravado. It was survival mathematics. If external validation couldn’t be counted on, internal certainty had to be absolute.

I belong in my skin.

OG’s house became one of the few spaces where that certainty could rest. It wasn’t formal mentorship – no structured programs or official titles. Just a living room where young men could talk without performing, where OG listened more than he lectured, where the nickname “Natty Dread” carried affection and recognition without scrutiny.

“He was like an uncle,” Edimbo says. “He became like an uncle.” OG helped him “stand in line” when everything else felt unstable.

At Everett, transformation accelerated. He met Dr. Joy DeGruy speaking about post-traumatic slave disorder. He watched Hidden Colors and felt his mind “revolutionize.” He read Marcus Garvey, listened to Dr. Sebi, stopped eating pork and cheese. His coach, Norm, became another anchor – a Black coach who “didn’t take no shit” and kept him accountable.

When community college classes connected to his questions, he excelled. Chemistry became “the study of Black people.” Geology revealed Earth’s resources. An essay on Ivory Coast became research he couldn’t stop pursuing. “Once I figured that out, it was a wrap. I was just knocking papers down.”

“The Work Was Always There.”

The surprise wasn’t that Edimbo could draw. It was that no one had known for twenty years.

His sister was first to notice, watching him sketch detailed Egyptian masks – the shading around eye sockets, the texture of gold leaf, the precision of hieroglyphic borders. “She’s like, ‘Twenty-plus years, this is her first time seeing me draw detailed work like this.’”

His friends at Everett reacted with similar astonishment. He’d been in their lives for years – playing sports, attending BSU meetings, carrying himself with the same energy. The art had been there all along, private work on the backs of old bills during phone conversations, small doodles that no one thought to ask about.

“I didn’t want that kind of attention,” he admits, recalling a friend in France who drew well and became everyone’s go-to for portraits. “Can you draw me? Can you draw me? I was like, I ain’t gonna tell them nothing. I’m gonna tell them I don’t know my right from my left.”

But at Everett, the calculus changed. He was tired of staring at computer screens for graphic design work. He wanted to create with his hands. And there was something else – a realization crystallizing around history, representation, and the stories that get told through images.

“Any representation of us is always us getting our ass kicked or doing the short end of the stick,” he observed. Movies like Roots and The Color Purple – important, painful, but also limited in what they showed. “Why do I need to watch it over and over again? It’s a psychological attack by way of art.”

So he started painting pharaohs. Black kings. Proper representation, as he calls it – not sanitized or colonized, but melanated, golden, powerful. His first piece was a pharaoh from a magazine photograph, a beige statue with Afrocentric features. He painted it with “the right pigmentation” – dark skin, gold headdress, full dignity intact.

The reaction was immediate. Friends lost their composure. Family members who’d known him his whole life stood speechless. At an art sale at Everett, one of his three submitted pieces sold before the event even started – purchased by a staff member for $100.

“The light bulb went on,” Edimbo recalls of seeing that hundred-dollar bill. Not just the money – though that mattered – but the possibility it represented. He could do something he was naturally good at, talk about topics he cared deeply about, and sustain himself financially. “Man, I feel like I hit the jackpot.”

He bought a stack of canvases and didn’t look back.

Jessica Marquez, an artist at Everett, confronted him: “What are you doing? Get you some canvas… you don’t need to be putting this on paper with a #2 pencil.” She saw before the system did. Even after graduation, his graphic design teacher let him use the art studio and gave him supplies.

The BSU needed a logo. He offered. They passed. He watched them scramble for a month, then kept working on his own art.

Natty Dread Becomes a Business

The logo had been there for years, actually. That small emblem he’d been sketching in the margins of assignment sheets since he was twenty-one or twenty-two – just a personal mark, a way to claim his work. His graphic design teacher once deducted a point for it: the assignment asked for name and date, not a symbol.

Edimbo laughed at the minus one. Kept drawing it anyway

When he started selling paintings, the question of a business name arose. He remembered OG’s nickname, remembered Bob Marley’s song, remembered the way the name carried both threat and pride. Dread – not lock, he’d tell people who challenged the terminology. “Is this a hair product? I’m not selling hair products.”

The word dread means fearful, threatening. But fearful to whom? “Empowering us is fearful to others,” he’d say. “So what?”

Natty Dread Illustrations became the brand. The emblem he’d been drawing for years became the logo. And OG’s gift – that casual nickname from a Louisiana man’s living room – became the signature on paintings that would travel far beyond Everett.

He got on buses carrying canvases wrapped in bedsheets. He worked as a mover and in restaurant kitchens to fund supplies. He did after-school programs with elementary students, painted murals across the region.

His work now marks spaces: Kezira Ethiopian Restaurant in South Seattle, Safari Kenyan Restaurant, Taradise Bar in White Center, Sound Performance Gym in Lynnwood, Ayeko Farm in Enumclaw. In the Central District, a Dr. Sebi portrait remains visible even though the shop closed.

On a city bus in 2020, he met Lester Pearson – another artist carrying wrapped canvases. Recognition was instant. “I do art too, man. I just see you on the bus with this – it’s what I do. Respect.” Different paths, shared understanding: the art isn’t decoration; it’s infrastructure.

“Old Versus Young”

At thirty-five, Edimbo works in the space between generations. The stakes feel higher. What drives him is bringing together “the old versus the young” – elders with wisdom and youth still figuring themselves out.

He runs drum circles. Works with farmers. Shows up to elementary schools and universities, to city council meetings and community events. The art is the vehicle – the shared language that lets a grandmother’s hands and a sixth-grader’s hands find the same beat.

“We don’t need sides – we need a handoff,” he explains. “How to bridge that gap between the wise and the ones still figuring life out.”

In a moment when generational divides are sharpened into weapons, his work insists otherwise. The drum circle doesn’t ask your age. The mural wall doesn’t care.

He thinks of OG’s living room – how it worked precisely because it wasn’t formal or transactional. Just space held open for young men to vent, to question, to exist without having to perform competence they didn’t yet possess.

“He would let us vent,” Edimbo recalls. “Sometimes he would just sit there quiet, but he’s twenty years older than us. And he’s letting us into his space.”

That model – space without hierarchy, listening without lecturing – shapes how he works with youth now: make room, hold silence, offer what’s useful when asked.

He’s also thinking about trades – plumbing, electrical, construction. Not as backup plans but as crafts, as artistry in their own right. “There’s still some level of artistry that goes into building a road, building a house, building a bridge,” he argues. Old heads teach the craft; young ones bring new eyes. The negative association with manual labor – the way it evokes plantation work – needs reframing. “What if you could build that for your own community? Are you really slaving? Or are you building a self-sustaining way to live?”

It’s the same question that animates all his work: not just what you create, but who it serves and who controls it.

“I Belong in My Skin.”

Ask him where he belongs and he doesn’t name an institution.

“I belong in my skin. That means I belong on this planet right now.”

Not in institutions. Not through validation from external systems. In his skin – the first and final container.

“If I’m not comfortable in my own skin,” he continues, “it doesn’t matter what kind of T-shirt I got on. I ain’t gonna be comfortable.” The metaphor extends: if you can’t be comfortable in your first skin, no second skin will fix it.

This isn’t self-help rhetoric. It’s philosophy born from necessity. When you’re thirteen learning English through children’s cartoons, when you’re navigating housing instability while attending college, when you’re challenging teachers in front of classmates who don’t have the alternative knowledge to support your corrections – external belonging becomes unreliable. So you root differently.

“I’m already in a country that’s not mine,” Edimbo says. “Everything I’m going to get into is going to be new anyway.” The foreignness isn’t just geographic – it’s structural, cultural, systemic. So instead of waiting for spaces to welcome him, he asks different questions: What can I learn here? What can I take with me? Where’s the door, and what’s on the other side?

The nickname OG gave him – Natty Dread – carried that same energy. In Bob Marley’s song, the Natty Dread walks through Babylon unshaken: Don’t care what the world say. Not defiance for its own sake. Just clarity about who you are in spaces that would prefer you be someone else.

Edimbo didn’t choose the name. But once given, he understood it. Recognized himself in it. Made it literal – turned the nickname into a business, the business into a practice, the practice into infrastructure for others.

What Carries Forward

He left a security job. He’s living now on drum circles, murals, and art sales. He took a break from teaching but plans to return in a different format. It’s not stable in the conventional sense – there’s no salary, no benefits, no retirement plan. But there’s sovereignty in it, the kind his father started teaching him at eight years old on a bus in France.

“I’m making a living using what I like to feed my people,” he explains. “Not exploit you, only empower you. And I’m making a living off empowering you.” The circularity isn’t redundant – it’s the model. Give something that sustains you while sustaining others.

When I ask what he’d tell his younger self – that thirteen-year-old kid at Kent Junior High, navigating a new language and a new country – he doesn’t reach for inspiration. He reaches for instruction.

“Calm down,” he says, laughing. “You’re all over the place. Sometimes when you relax, you can make better decisions.”

Then, more seriously: “Don’t belittle your own skills when someone is congratulating you for it. Do not minimize a compliment sent to you.”

It’s the kind of advice that only makes sense in retrospect, after you’ve spent years being invisible in plain sight, after your art sells before you even arrive at the show, after the people who’ve known you longest react with shock at capacities you’ve always possessed.

The art was always there. The name was given. The work continues.

And in living rooms, drum circles, and murals across the region, that nickname – Natty Dread – keeps doing what OG John intended when he said it: recognizing what’s already present, calling it by name, making space for it to be seen.

I belong in my skin.

Unshaken, he keeps his line.

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Edimbo is an artist living in Tacoma and showing work across Seattle, operating as Natty Dread Illustrations. His parents, Maurice Lekea and Charlotte Mongengo, raised him between France and the U.S. He founded the KABULA ART EXHIBITION – the first showcase centered on Congolese artists and culture – with the third annual slated for June 2026. His current work includes collaborations with Congolese artists, new murals, and partnership with the Congolese Integration Network.

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