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- Herausgeber: CASSAVA REPUBLIC
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
"Highlife Giants is an intimate portrait of the pioneering artistes of West Africa's vibrant music scene from the 1920s onwards. It is packed full of inside information from stars including E.T Mensah, Kofo Ghanaba, King Bruce, Bobby Benson, Victor Uwaifo, and Ignace De Souza. Blending European and African-American styles with traditional African patterns, highlife music contributed to the development of post-independent national identity in Ghana, Nigeria and along the West African coast. Highlife Giants is an important and indispensable record on this Pan-African musical identity."
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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HIGHLIFE GIANTS
WEST AFRICAN DANCE BAND PIONEERS
JOHN COLLINS
To my wife, Dovi Helen, and son, Thomas Kojo.
Contents
Introduction
The highlife of Ghana and Nigeria is one of the many varieties of urban popular dance music styles that have emerged in sub-Saharan Africa since the nineteenth century. It fuses African with European, American and, in some cases, Islamic influences. Other West and Central African trans-cultural music styles include: Sierra Leonean goombay and maringa; pan–West African ashiko (or asiko); Nigerian juju, fuji and Afrobeat; Cameroonian makossa; Ivorian ziglibithy and zoblazo; the Congo jazz or soukous of Central Africa; and the Afro-Manding, woussoulou and mbalax music of Mali, Guinea and Senegal. The emergence of highlife and these other African popular music styles parallels what happened in the New World where encounters between European and African American cultures resulted in musical styles such as Negro spirituals, ragtime, jazz, samba, blues, calypso, rumba, swing, R&B, soul, reggae, zouk, disco and hip-hop.
Music historians have noted that the two branches of black popular music, in both the Black New World and in Africa, have been in continuous contact with each other since the nineteenth century. This exchange was made possible through freed slaves returning to Africa, black colonial soldiers stationed in different parts of the continent, and black seamen crisscrossing the Atlantic. In the early twentieth century, the reconnection was enhanced by sheet music, film, records and visits to Africa by African American, Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean artists. Consequently, the music of the African Diaspora, like calypso, rumba, swing and so on, has had a long-term impact on the evolution of African popular music. This Atlantic musical exchange is what I call a ‘transatlantic black musical feedback cycle’ and what the writers Paul Gilroy and Robert Farris Thompson have called the ‘Black Atlantic’ and ‘Afro-Atlantic’ culture.1
The process of the popular music of the black Americas finding its way to Africa is a type of return; what the Ghanaian musicologist Atta Annan Mensah refers to as a musical ‘homecoming’.2 The earliest evidence in West Africa of such a ‘homecoming’ is the Jamaican goombay (or gumbe) drum and dance introduced by freed maroon slaves who returned to Freetown, the capital of the British colony of Sierra Leone, in the early nineteenth century. This laid the foundations for many early Anglophone West African popular music styles, such as maringa, ashiko, highlife and juju music.
Freetown Goombay group (An Introduction to the Music of Sierra Leone (1982) by Cootje van Oven)
Goombay frame-drum music was originally created by the Jamaican maroons (rebel slaves) during the late eighteenth century as a response to the suppression by the British slave masters of traditional African hand-carved peg-drums. African peg-drums were feared by the whites because they were associated with so-called pagan rituals, and because the drums could ‘talk’. In fact, ‘talking drums’ were used in the successful black revolt of the neighbouring Caribbean island of Haiti. By the mid-nineteenth century, this Jamaican maroon drum-dance music had become a craze in Freetown. It later spread inland and along the coast to many other parts of West and Central Africa via migrant workers and fishermen. In Nigeria, for instance, it is called ‘goumbe’ or ‘kumbeh’. It is ‘gome’ in Ghana, where these types of frame-drums were used by some early highlife ensembles.
This brings us to highlife, West Africa’s oldest and most well–known popular dance music. Although the word ‘highlife’ was not coined until the 1920s, the music dates from the late nineteenth century, when three distinct streams of urban music emerged in Ghana. First, the colonial military brass bands triggered a local proto-highlife known as ‘adaha’ music that inspired an even more localised offshoot known as ‘konkoma’. Second, visiting sailors stimulated the growth of the coastal guitar and accordion ‘osibisaaba’ style which later moved inland and resulted in the rustic ‘palm wine’ style of guitar highlife. Third, there were the local high-class African ballroom orchestras, which began playing the occasional local adaha, osibisaaba or other street melodies. It was in this elite context that the name ‘highlife’ was coined in the early 1920s, and it was these pre–World War II dance orchestras that laid the foundation for the post-war highlife dance bands of E.T. Mensah, King Bruce, Bobby Benson and other highlife giants who are discussed in this book.
1. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (USA: Vintage Books, 1984).
2. Atta Annan Mensah, ‘Jazz: The Round Trip’, in Jazz Research, 3/4, (1971/2).
SECTION ONE:
The Origins and Spread of Highlife
1
Black Soldiers, Seamen and the Coastal Elites: Brass Bands, Guitar Bands and Ballroom Dance Orchestras
Highlife was born in Ghana in the late nineteenth century and from the late 1920s the word ‘highlife’ gradually became the generic name for Ghanaian popular music, whether played by brass bands, dance bands, palm wine groups or guitar bands. By the 1950s, highlife had firmly established itself in other West African countries, particularly Nigeria.
Early Brass Band Music in Anglophone West Africa
The earliest musical stream that fed into highlife developed out of the nineteenth century military brass-and-fife bands associated with the British settlements in Freetown, Cape Coast, Lagos, Calabar and, later, the American colony of Liberia. As will be discussed, the Africanisation of western regimental military music seems to be linked to the innovative role of coastal African ethnic groups, as well as African and West Indian soldiers and, in some cases, African sailors and stevedores.
In the case of Nigeria, Bode Omojola refers to the creation of brass bands in Lagos, Calabar and Onitsha from the 1860s,1 whilst Waterman refers to the late-nineteenth-century bands of the Royal West African Frontier Force, the West India Regiment and the Hausa Police. Although these initially played only western music, local songs had been included by the 1920s and 1930s. According to Waterman, the most famous of these local marching bands was the Lagos-based Calabar Group led by Azukwo Bassey.2 Omofolabo Ajayi-Soyinka mentions that the band moved to Lagos around 1930 from the southeastern town of Calabar in present-day Cross River State.3
The drummer Bayo Martins, who was born in Calabar in 1932 and is discussed more fully in Chapter 9, recalled seeing local brass bands playing for the local elites as a child. These bands played a selection of ballroom music as well as ‘native blues’ and ‘itembe’ music. The latter ‘predated what is today’s highlife’ and was sung in Efik or Creole (i.e. pidgin English), which had ‘spread all along the coast from Gambia to the Congo’.4
According to Christopher Fyfe, the militia of the British Sierra Leone Company had a drum-and-fife band in Freetown that, by the 1850s, began to give public Sunday concerts of European songs and hymns for the Krio elites, who were descendants of freed slaves. These Sunday programmes were subsequently taken over by the band of the West India Regiment in 1864.5 Naomi Ware noted that, between the two World Wars, the band of the Royal West African Frontier Force, many of whose members were West Indians, provided popular music for dances and concerts.6
Brass bands were also popular in Liberia in the early 1900s. In 1984, the 67-year-old Monrovian musician David Kwee Bedell told me that, as a small boy, he watched quadrilles being played at public weekend picnics by the marching bands of the indigenous Kru (or Kroo) and Grebo inhabitants.7 As will be mentioned later, the Kru were famous mariners who found their way to many West African port cities, carrying their musical influences with them.
Brass band music in Ghana can be traced back to a regimental ‘native orchestra’ the British set up at Cape Coast Castle in the 1830s. This band played western military marches, polkas and dance music, but not local songs.8 This changed after 1873, when the first of six to seven thousand black soldiers from the English-speaking West Indies9 were stationed at Cape Coast and the neighbouring Elmina Castle to help the British in their 1873–1901 wars against the inland Ashanti Kingdom. These West Indian rifles had regimental brass bands and in their spare time they played early forms of calypsos and other Afro-Caribbean music. This music also utilised call-and-response, rhythmic offbeats, syncopated clave/bell rhythms and other African musical features drawn from their slave past. Not surprisingly, Afro-Caribbean music resonated with the young Fanti musicians who had obtained their brass band skills from military personnel. At first, these local musicians simply copied the West Indians’ clave rhythms and melodies. For instance, according to Attah Annan Mensah, the early highlife tune ‘Everybody Likes Saturday Night’10 was based on a calypso melody.11 Within ten years however, Ghanaian brass band performers moved on to develop their own distinct adaha music. Afro-Caribbean music therefore acted as a catalyst for Ghanaian brass band musicians to indigenise their own music.
Ghana Territorial Army Band, early 1900s (BAPMAF)
According to Atta Annan Mensah, two late-nineteenth-century local brass bands from Elmina, the Lions Soldiers and Edu Magicians, included adaha music in their repertoires. Europeans, however, objected to adaha and its street parades. In 1888, Reverend Dennis Kemp described the sound of drum-and-fife bands as ‘tormenting’ and warned that allowing Sunday-school processions to be led by them would ‘ultimately lead to the ballroom, the heathen dance and other worldly amusements’.12 In 1908, the District Commissioner of Cape Coast, Mr A. Foulkes, curbed the town’s five brass bands from playing their ‘objectionable native tunes’, as he claimed they led to competitive quarrelling, obstruction of roads, drinking and dancing.13
Despite European colonial and missionary protestations, these local marching bands spread from the coastal Fanti area into southern Ghana to both the urban and rural areas, where there was money coming in from the boom in cocoa.
Although adaha brass bands became popular in the early 1900s throughout southern Ghana, a ‘poor man’s version’ of adaha called ‘konkoma’ or ‘konkomba’ surfaced around 1930, in villages where people could not afford the expensive imported brass band instruments.14 Except for the occasional big brass band drum and sometimes a flute or bugle, only locally constructed hand-held goombay-type frame drums, modelled on the western military side drum, were used. They subsequently became known as ‘konkoma drums’ and ‘pati drums’. Men were the instrumentalists but both men and women sang, marched and danced to this music. Though konkoma groups used mainly local instruments, they did keep the baton-waving conductors and the western-type synchronised marching of adaha brass bands. Also, like adaha brass bands, the konkoma groups played a cross-section of foreign and local popular music.
Konkoma became a Ghanaian craze in the 1930s and 1940s. According to Sackey, it was created by ‘school drop-outs’ and ‘ruffian boys’.15 K.N. Bame and A.M. Opoku, who were schoolboy members of the Kpandu town’s konkoma group in the late 1930s and early 1940s, told me that the members usually marched to the performance venue, but then formed a semicircle for the dancers to perform either freestyle or in drill-like formation. According to the Ghanaian choreographer A.M. Opoku, the baton-wielding konkoma conductor would dramatically pass the baton ‘under his thigh and catch it with his left hand – and as soon as it came down, the drumming would start’.16 The instrumentalists and dancers, says Sackey, wore armed-forces-inspired uniforms.17 Opoku described these as check shirts, shorts with ‘many secret pockets’ (for silk handkerchiefs) and peaked caps with tassels of varying colours that represented the particular konkoma group. These groups were highly competitive and expressed their rivalry by the use of all sorts of eye-catchers. This competitiveness was also reflected in the dancing itself. According to Opoku, the word ‘konkoma’ is part of the Akan expression ‘me twa konkoma ma bo fum’ (I cut konkoma and I fall down), which was used when the dancers purposely bumped into each other and tried to knock one another down on the phrase ‘ko’ of ‘konkoma’.
Because of its marches and ranks of uniformed young men, the British decided to use konkoma to recruit Ghanaians into the British Army during the Second World War. Sackey for instance, refers to anti-German-Axis konkoma songs, such as the one that translates from Fanti that they are chasing him (i.e. the Japanese) out of Burma.18 This connection between konkoma, Ghanaian soldiers and the Second World War is also reflected in the fact that konkoma music was used in the wartime African Theatre that entertained the tens of thousands of Allied African troops fighting against the Japanese in India and Burma from 1943–6.19
Uniformed member of Tsito Konkoma band, late 1940s (Senyo Adzei)
Although the konkoma variety of highlife gradually died out during the 1950s due to the rise of highlife dance and guitar bands, it influenced various forms of mid-twentieth-century Ghanaian traditional recreational music. These modernised or ‘neo-traditional’ drum-dance performance styles include the akyewa and asaadua of the Akan20 and the borborbor21 of the Ewe people of southeastern Ghana and Togo. Moreover, in its eastwards movement, konkoma highlife spread as far as western Nigeria. According to the Nigerian musician Segun Bucknor, konkoma music was an informal, ‘low-class’, percussion-based highlife that came to Lagos in the 1930s:
By the early thirties you had informal dance steps like konkoma. This was not like the dance bands but was what you would now call highlife, but without the guitar. During weekends labourers or carpenters would form a group to play at naming ceremonies for some few drinks, and a couple of pounds […] this dance-step was later called agidigbo, as it took its name from a Nigerian box instrument with five strings [i.e. thumb piano with plucked metal lamellae].22
The Yoruba musician Adeolu Akinsanya was a pioneer of agidigbo music and was influenced by Ghanaian konkoma highlife music.23 In the late 1940s and 1950s he formed his Lagos-based Rancho Boys and Rio Lindo Orchestra, which used five or six local instruments as well as Afro-Cuban bongos, maracas, congas and local percussion.
West/Central African Palm Wine Guitar Music
Although this book focuses on dance band highlife, I will say something briefly here about the guitar band variety. Although these two branches of highlife had different origins and social contexts, they shared similar instruments, songs, urban audiences and performance spaces.
The origins of Ghanaian guitar highlife and other forms of West/Central African guitar music – such as Sierra Leonean ashiko/asiko and maringa, western Nigerian juju music, Cameroonian makossa and the acoustic ‘dry’ guitar music of the Democratic Republic of Congo – goes back to palm wine and ‘native blues’ guitar music. These terms were used to collectively describe the various early-twentieth-century music styles that combined local percussion instruments such as tambourines, box drums, goombay-type frame drums, rasps and wooden claves (or a bottle struck by a nail or coin), with the portable ones of visiting seamen: the concertina, accordion, piccolo, penny whistle, harmonica, mandolin, banjo and guitar.
A particularly important formative group that pioneered African guitar playing was the coastal Kru or Kroo people of Liberia. The Kru were traditionally long-distance canoe men who knew the West African coast well and were therefore employed as navigators, surf-boat operators and seamen by the Portuguese, the British and the Americans.
The Kru were first employed as sailors on board British ships from the late eighteenth century, where they had access to some of the small, portable musical instruments mentioned earlier. The African style of playing these western instruments was thus pioneered on the high seas by the Kru mariners. Of particular importance was the Spanish guitar,24 to which the Kru applied a two-finger (thumb and first finger) plucking technique drawn from the traditional African oppositional way of playing local lutes and harp-lutes25. During the late nineteenth century these West African seamen began spreading their innovations down the West and Central African coast.26 Kru songs, guitar techniques and syncopated rhythms became an important influence on the emerging coastal popular music styles of many African countries.
In 1920, there were about five thousand Kru in Freetown, Sierra Leone and their music impacted the emerging local maringa music of the Krio population. Maringa emerged in the 1930s and was played on large thumb pianos (congamas), goombay drums, guitars, concertinas, cigarette tins, bottles and musical saws.
In Nigeria, both Waterman and Alaja-Browne refer to the ‘Kru’s bass’ two-finger technique of Lagosian palm wine or native blues music in the 1920s and 1930s.27 In fact, Lagos’ largest interwar palm wine group, the Jolly Boys Orchestra, was based at this city’s harbour-front area and was partly composed of seamen. Its leader was a Kru ex-seaman known as ‘Sunday Harbour Giant’. Early exponents of Yoruba juju music, like Tunde King (who coined the term ‘juju music’), Ojoge Daniel, Ayinde Bakare and Akanbi Wright all used the Kru two-finger guitar picking style.
Nineteeth-century drawing of Liberian Kru surf-boat operators (A History of West Africa (1967) by J.B. Webster and A.A. Boahen, with H.O. Idowu.)
Congo paddle-wheel steamer, which plied the Congo River in the early 1900s (The Congo and Coasts of Africa (1907) by Richard Harding Davis, p. 38)
The introduction of the palm wine guitar techniques to DR Congo is linked to the five thousand coastmen from English-speaking West Africa who worked there as contract artisans, clerks and sailors between 1885 and 1908.28 These West African coastmen, operating in the port of Matadi and up and down the Congo River, helped trigger Congo’s earliest recognised local popular music style, called ‘maringa’,29 which was played on thumb pianos, frame drums, guitars and accordions. As will be discussed in Chapter 13, maringa spread throughout the DR Congo (as well as neighbouring Congo–Brazzaville and Gabon) in the 1920s and laid the foundation for ‘Congo jazz’ (or soukous), the dominant style of Central African dance music during the 1950s, pioneered by the likes of Le Grande Kallé, Dr. Nico, Tabu Ley Rochereau and Franco Luambo.
Maringa band in Gabon (BAPMAF)
There is also a maritime factor in the emergence of the makossa popular music of the southern Cameroons. Makossa began as a low-class palm wine guitar band music that surfaced in the 1940s and 1950s in the port town of Douala, where local ambass-bey street music was blended with Congolese maringa and West African ashiko by pioneering artists such as Eboa Lotin, Misse Ngoh, Mama Ohandja and Ebanda Manfred.
Ashiko itself was a popular urban music in late-nineteenth-century Freetown, and was played on goombay frame drums, musical saws, accordions and guitars by the town’s Krio population. Around 1900, these Freetown Krios introduced ashiko to cities like Lagos and Cape Coast,30 turning it into a pan–West African accordion/guitar music style.
According to Ajayi Thomas, in Lagos ‘asiko’ was particularly popular in the early 1900s with the city’s Christianised Saro (Sierra Leonean) inhabitants.31 Ashiko was also introduced to the Cameroons by West African seamen, where, by the 1940s, it was being played in Douala by local artists like Jean Aladin Bikoko and Uncle Joseph Medjo.
In Ghana, the Kru guitar and accordion songs and Krio ashiko music were introduced to the low-class dockside drinking bars in ports like Cape Coast by foreign sailors and stevedores. These in turn influenced the local recreational music styles of the Fanti people, such as kununku, akrodo, adenkum, densim and the fishermen’s osibi music, which involved wrestling displays by young men.32 In the very early 1900s, this cultural blending resulted in the osibisaaba, a Fanti guitar/accordion music that used claves and the ‘adakam’ box drum to supply 4/4 or 6/8 rhythms for a local type of ring dance. The earliest recording of this music took place in 1927/8 by Fanti musicians such as Roland C. Nathaniels, George William Aingo and Jacob Sam. In June 1928, Jacob Sam (Kwame Asare), a twenty-five year old guitarist, took his Kumasi Trio33 to London to record thirty-six guitar songs for the Zonophone record company, including one of the most important highlifes ever composed: ‘Yaa Amponsah’.34
During the 1930s Fanti osibisaaba music spread from the coast into the agricultural heartland of southern Ghana where the guitar gradually replaced the local Akan stringed ‘seprewa’ (or seperewa) harp-lute. However, as it did so, the guitar players absorbed the modal playing style of the seperewa.35 This resulted in a guitar (and occasionally accordion) music style known as ‘odonson’ or ‘Ashanti blues’. Like seprewa music, this indigenised guitar music was accompanied by proverbial lyrics and was played at both funerals and village spots that sold palm wine. Thus, it was from this time that this local acoustic guitar music also became known as ‘palm wine music’.
Fanti osibisaaba group in 1928. Leader Kwame Asare (right) was taught guitar by a Kru (Kwaa Mensah, via BAPMAF)
Early West African Ballroom Dance Orchestras
Besides the brass band and guitar varieties of early Anglophone West African popular music, a third musical stream that became involved in the highlife story in the early 1900s arose in the context of the balls and concerts of the local African elites of Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria. The Sierra Leonean musicologist Christian Dowu Horton mentions that the Sierra Leone Weekly Times newspaper was reporting Freetown light concerts, operettas and choral performances as far back as 1830.36 Flemming Harrev speaks of a Krio ‘Dignity Ball’ in 1883 at the West African Hotel in Freetown and a ‘Grand Concert’ there in 1892, performed by students of local educational institutes.
Late-nineteenth-century Lagos also had ballroom dances, concerts and recitals by European-trained performers who largely belonged to the Saro and the Aguda elites. The Saro people were descendants of Yoruba ‘recaptive’ slaves who were settled by the British anti-slavery squadrons in Freetown, and had returned home to Nigeria from the 1830s. As early as the 1860s, these Saros were staging western-type concerts and theatre. By the early 1900s the Lagosian Saros had introduced ashiko music and an accompanying dance that resembled the foxtrot.
The Aguda people are the descendants of freed Brazilian slaves who settled in Lagos (as well as Porto Novo in Benin and Accra in Ghana) from the 1830s. They brought with them the carata fancy dress, elaborate calunga masquerades, the bonfin festival and the samba drum.37 In the 1880s, the Aguda elite established a Brazilian Dramatic Society that put on a ‘Grand Theatre’ for Queen Victoria’s birthday in 1888.38 According to Ebun Clark (1979), these Lagos elites enjoyed black and white minstrel shows and patronised ‘Native Air Operas’, cantatas and oratorios that were precursors to the Yoruba travelling theatre (of Hubert Ogunde and others) that emerged after the Second World War.39
Ghana also had its elite functions and one of the earliest documented examples is the ‘Magic Costume Ball and Concert’ held at the Cape Coast Castle’s Great Hall in 1903 for a mixed audience of local and European ballroom dancers.40
Whether in Cape Coast, Freetown or Lagos, the local elites seemed to have loved refined ballroom dancing, and as a result, a number of local dance orchestras were formed in the early 1900s. These orchestras were large symphonic-type ensembles that sometimes played European light classical pieces, but with a focus on ballroom dance music such as the waltz, polka, foxtrot, quickstep, rumba, ragtime, tango and samba. In the 1920s and 1930s Sierra Leone had several ballroom orchestras: Henry Smart’s Triumph Orchestra, Collingwoode Williams and Lawrence Nicol’s Dapa Jazz Band and David Christian Parker’s Danvers Orchestra.41 Nigeria had its own bands favoured by the local ‘Oyinbo Dudu’ (black Englishmen).42 They included: the Nigerian Police band, the Lagos City Orchestra, the Chocolate Dandies (formed in 1927), the Triumph Club Dance Orchestra (formed by pianist Fela Sowande in 1932),43 Ezekiel Akpata’s Lisabi Mills Orchestra,44 the Sunnyside Hotel Orchestra of Calabar and the Broderick Orchestra of Port Harcourt. Indeed the musicologist Tundi Vidal says there were twenty ballroom outfits operating in Nigeria during the 1920s to 1940s.45
In Ghana, the two earliest were the Excelsior Orchestra and the Jazz Kings, set up in Accra in 1914 and 1916 respectively. The music of these elite outfits came from sheet music and from listening to imported western records of ballroom music, ragtime and Negro spirituals.
The Exelsior Orchestra’s surviving members, 1959. Frank Torto is in the middle, with a baton. (‘The First Orchestra’, Ghanaian Daily Graphic, 1 September 1974, p. 10)
The Emergence of Highlife
The name ‘highlife’ was coined in the 1920s in Ghana, when local dance orchestras began including an occasional popular tune or street song in their repertoires. One of the very first written references to local Ghanaian music being given such a name comes from the 5 September 1925 progamme of the Cape Coast Literary and Social Club’s ‘Grand Soiree’ held at Hamilton Hall.46 The music provided by the Rag-a-Jazzbo Orchestra included waltzes, one-steps, foxtrots, ‘high life’ and a local variety of blues.
It should be pointed out that highlifes played at elite functions seemed to have been an occasional novelty feature for the elite dance fans. As a small child in the 1930s, Frances Ademola recalled looking out from a window of her house, which overlooked the partially open-air courtyard of the Rodger Club, and seeing well-to-do Ghanaians doing sedate ballroom dancing. However, when the orchestra struck up a highlife, the whole dance floor would fill with animated dancers, waving handkerchiefs or doing a follow-the-leader ‘la conga’ dance and generally, as Ademola put it, ‘letting their hair down’.47
1925 Cape Coast Grande Soiree brochure, with the first known reference to the term ‘highlife’ (Cape Coast Archives via Nate Plageman)
Attah Annan Mensah observes that it ‘was through the patronage of high-ranking merchants and other local elites enjoying the good life that the new musical type earned its name’.48 Likewise, Ghanaba talks of the name ‘highlife’ being associated with ‘middle-class Africans who wore tuxedos and played “the white man” for the night’.49 However, according to Yebuah Mensah it was neither the well-to-do ballroom musicians nor their high-class clientele who actually coined the word ‘highlife’. Rather, it was a catchword invented by the poor who gathered outside the exclusive clubs to enjoy a free show on the pavements outside.50
1. Bode Omojola, Nigerian Art Music (Nairobi: Institut Français Recherche en Afrique, 1995), as quoted in Godwin Sadoh, ‘The Organ Works of Fela Sowande’ (PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2004), p. 22.
2. Chris Waterman, Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
3. Omofolabo Ajayi-Soyinka, ‘Calabar’, in Carole Boyce Davies (ed.), Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, (California: ABC-CLIO, 2008), p. 526.
4. Bayo Martins, interviewed by Wolfgang Bender in ‘Bayo Martins: Voice of the Drum’ (Lagos: Music Foundation Nigeria, 2004).
5. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, (Oxford University Press, 1962), as referenced by Flemming Harrev, ‘Goumbe and the Development of Krio Popular Music in Freetown, Sierra Leone’, paper presented at the fourth International Conference of the IASPM, Accra, 12–19 August 1987, p. 6.
6. Naomi Ware, ‘Popular Music and African Identity in Freetown Sierra Leone’ in Bruno Nettle (ed.), Eight Urban Musical Cultures, (University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 300.
7. David Kwee Bedell, personal communication, Monrovia, September 1984. Bedell told me that the Liberian variant of the quadrille involved a circle dance and that the music for it was supplied by guitar and accordion, two instruments that he played.
8. John Beecham, Ashanti and the Gold Coast (London, John Mason, 1841).
9. Festus B. Aboagye, The Ghanaian Army (Accra: Sedco Publishing, 1999).
10. The earliest recording of this old highlife tune was made in Lagos, 1942, by Akanabi Wright (Paul Oliver, 1990: 71).
11. Atta Annan Mensah, ‘Highlife’, unpublished manuscript (1969/70).
12. Dennis Kemp, Nine Years at the Gold Coast (Ghana: Macmillan, 1898), quoted in Robert Boonzajer Flaes and Fred Gales, unpublished manuscript, (1991), pp. 13 and 20, and f/n 20, 22 and 38. Also see Boonzajer Flaes, Brass Unbound (Royal Tropical Institute, 2000), p. 14 and f/n 23.
13. Letter from District Commissioner’s Office, 16 March 1909, Ghana National Archives, no. 134e.
14. Chrys Kwesi Sackey, Konkoma, (Berlin: D. Reimer 1989).
15. Ibid.
16. K.N. Bame and A.M. Opuku, personal communication, 1970s. Both were teachers at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana.
17. Sackey, Konkoma, 1989
18. Ibid.
19. Approximately 65,000 Ghanaians did military service during World War II (Fage, 1966), of which 42,000 Ghanaian servicemen fought in India and Burma as part of the 374,000-strong Royal West African Frontier Force. These figures are from Salm (2003: 66/7), referencing various Gold Coast Armed Services reports.
20. For more on the akyewa or ‘aways’, popular with the village youth of the 1940s and 1950s, see Opoku, (1966: 25). For the slightly later asaadua, see Nketia (1973: 66 ff).
21. This still-prevalent, Ewe, neo-traditional drum-dance was invented in 1950 in the town of Kpandu as a combination of the local akpase recreational dance with konkoma music (Collins, 1996: 101–3).
22. Segun Buckno, personal communication, Lagos, 21 December 1975. Ajayi Thomas (1992: 87), says the agidigbo was introduced to Lagos in the 1940s by palm wine tappers from the Yoruba town of Ila.
23. Both Waterman (1990: 84–5) and Alaja-Browne (1985: 65) say that konkoma was brought to Lagos by Ghanaian Ewe and Fanti migrants. Because of the Afro-Cuban influence, agidigbo was also known as ‘mambo’ music and Akinsanya and similar groups (like the Rosey Mambo Orchestra) began releasing records of this music on the local Jofabro label in 1952 (Waterman, 1990).
24. They also developed an early form of pidgin English and created the African-mermaid or ‘Mammy Wata’ cult.
25. It should be noted that this oppositional technique is also used with other African instruments, such as the thumb piano, in which the two thumbs play oppositionally.
26. These included ‘Kru Towns’ in Freetown, Sierra Leone; Accra and Takoradi in Ghana; Lagos (Tinubu Square) and Calabar in Nigeria; and Fernando Po (Bioku) in Equatorial Guinea.
27. Afolabi Alaja-Browne, ‘Juju Music’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1985). Afolabi Alaja-Brown, ‘From “Ere E Faaji Ti O Paria” to “Ere E Faaji Alariwa”’, paper presented at the fourth International Conference of IASPM, Accra, 12–19 August 1987. Waterman, Juju: A Social History, 1990. Chris Waterman, ‘Juju: The Historical Development, Socio-economic Organisation and Communicative Functions of West Africa Popular Music’ (PhD thesis, University of Illinois, 1986).
28. In 1908, the Belgian government confiscated their King’s ‘free state’ for his cruel and counterproductive colonial policy and began developing a modern infrastructure of roads and railways for its mining industry.
29. Whether there is a link between Freetown maringa and that of the Congo is yet to be determined, but it is of interest to note that the Sierra Leonians were part of the group of West African coastmen who worked in Matadi and on the Congo River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
30. Kwaa Mensah, interviewed in John Collins, Music Makers of West Africa (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1985), p. 15. Waterman, Juju: A Social History, 1990, p. 39.
31. T. Ajayi Thomas, History of Juju Music (New York: The Orgnisation, 1992), p. 73.
32. Atta Annan Mensah, personal communication. Kwaa Mensah, personal communication.
33. The three young members were all coastal Fantis but were working in the inland town of Kumasi for the British Tarkwa Trading Company.
34. Released on the Zonophone 1000 series with H.E. Biney on second guitar and Kwah Kanta on percussion.
35. Akan melodies do not follow western I-IV-V chord progression but rather move between two centres, a full tone apart.
36. Christian Dowu Horton, ‘History of Popular Bands’, African Popular Music, 14 (1983), pp. 12–13.
37. Waterman, ‘Juju: The Historical Development’, 1986, p. 58. Alaja-Browne, ‘From “Ere E Faaji Ti O Pariwo”’, 1987, p. 3. Frank Aig-Imoukhuede, ‘Contemporary Culture’ in A.B. Aderibigbe (ed.), Lagos: The Development of an African City (Nigeria: Longman Nigeria, 1975), p. 213.
38. Michael J.C. Echeruo, ‘Concert and Theatre in Late Nineteenth Century Lagos’, Nigeria Magazine, 74 (September 1962), pp. 69–70. Echeruo mentions that some of the important Brazilian-Aguda concert names of the times were J.J. de Costa, J.A. Campos, L.G. Barboza and P.Z.S. lva.
39. Ebun Clark, Hubert Ogunde (Oxford University Press, 1979).
40.Cape Coast Leader 21 February 1903. Document donated to BAPMAF by Catherine Cole. Also see Catherine Cole 2001, pp. 64–6.
41. Horton, ‘History of Popular Bands’, 1983, pp. 12–13. Christain Dowu Horton, ‘Popular Bands in Sierra Leone’, Black Perspectives in Music, 12:2 (1984), pp. 183–192. Ware, ‘Popular Music and African Identity’, 1978, p. 300.
42. Waterman, ‘Juju: The Historical Development’, 1986. Waterman, Juju: A Social History, 1990. Atta Annan Mensah, ‘Jazz: The Round Trip’, Jazz Research, 3/4 (1971/2).
43. Acclaimed Nigerian art-music pianist/composer who also played jazz in Lagos and continued to do so when he went to the UK in 1935 to study music. He became a music director of the wartime Colonial Film Unit. He returned to Nigeria in in 1953 to become head of the music section of NBC, and then a professor at the University of Ibadan.
44. Waterman, ‘Juju: The Historical Development’, 1986. Waterman, Juju: A Social History, 1990.
45. Tunji Vidal, ‘Africanism and Europeanism on Popular Music: West African Highlife Music and Culture in Retrospect’, paper presented at the Jim Rex Lawson International Highlife Music Conference, University of Port Harcourt, 21–23 January 2015.
46. Document donated to J. Collins/BAPMAF archives by Nate Plageman in 2005.
47. Frances Ademola, owner of Loom Art Gallery, Accra, personal communication, 19 January 2009.
48. Atta Annan Mensah, ‘Highlife’, 1969/70.
49. Kofi Ghanaba, Hey Baby! Dig Dat Happy Feelin’ (Self-published, 1995), pp. 27–8.
50. Yebuah Mensah, personal communication, July/August 1973.
2
Highlife Dance Bands and the Early Independence Era
The Impact of World War II
The weakening of the colonial European powers following the Second World War of 1939–45 helped paved the way for independence movements in India and across Africa. Material resources from the Indian sub-continent and Africa became vital to the Allied war effort, as was the employment of tens of thousands of Indian and African soldiers. Around 375,000 Africans fought abroad. These included the Nigerian ‘Boma Boys’ as well as 42,000 Ghanaian servicemen who fought against the Japanese in India and Burma.1 In fact, in Ghana, the trigger for independence was the famous 1948 march for backpay by ex-servicemen on the colonial administration at Christiansborg Castle in Accra. The protest resulted in several fatalities, the mass looting of European shops, and the British ulimately losing their colonial nerve.
The Second World War also had a big impact on the popular entertainment scene of many African countries. Servicemen returned home with new music and performance ideas and, more importantly, Allied troops who were stationed in some of these countries introduced their own homegrown music styles. During the war years, thousands of British and American troops were stationed in Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.2 American swing and big band jazz was the favourite dance music of the Allied troops and, as a result, these servicemen brought with them swing-jazz records as well as the associated American slang, zoot-suit fashions, dark glasses and jitterbug and jive dances. A local nightclub scene opened up to cater for them, which led to local swing bands springing up in these countries.
Boma Boys in May, 1943. They were Royal West African Frontier Force Infantrymen who fought in Burma (UK Naval Historical Branch)
Allied troops drinking in a bar in Sierra Leone or Ghana, 1943 (www.flickr.com via Gbaku)
In Nigeria there were the Deluxe Swing Rascals, the Swing Rhythm Brothers, the Harlem Dynamites and Soji Lijadu’s Chocolate Dandies, followed, just after the war, by Bobby Benson’s Theatrical Party and the Sammy Akpabot Players. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the 1940s there was the Mayfair Dance Band, featuring the trombonist Boston Griffiths; Jacob Lewis’s Cuban Swing Band;3 and the Blue Rhythm Jazz Band, which specialised in swing music. There were also Ralph White’s Melody Swingers, Charles Mann’s Band and the Royal West Africa Frontier Force Band.4
The importance of Ghana to the war effort during the Second World War can be assessed from the fact that numerous Allied army camps were established in Accra, and that Achimota College in Accra was being prepared as a potential seat for an exiled British government, if Britain were invaded by Germany. Furthermore, American pre-fabricated planes were being assembled in Takoradi and, for a time, over a hundred American planes were stopping at Accra for refuelling every day.5
For entertainment, the Allied troops listened to swing records and numerous drinking bars sprang up to cater for them, often with American-sounding names such as the Weekend-in-Havana and Kit-Kat in Accra. Besides the availability of jazz and swing records, the foreign troops also brought in film shorts of Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw and Buddy Rich. Not content with records and film, some of the musically inclined Allied servicemen actually established swing bands that consisted of foreign soldiers and Ghanaian musicians who had passed through the local dance orchestras and could read music. The earliest of these bands was the Black and White Spots, set up in 1940 by a Scottish soldier known as Sergeant Jack Leopard, and which included the young E.T. Mensah (see Chapter 3). After this band came the Tempos, formed in 1942 by an English engineer with two Ghanaians and some white army personnel.
Although both the wartime Black and White Spots and the Tempos were influenced by American big band jazz, these Ghanaian outfits were based on the smaller ‘combo’ size, due to problems of acquiring instruments and large numbers of trained musicians. Yet another, even smaller band that provided swing music for foreign wartime troops’ army camps and local bars was the Fireworks Four, which consisted solely of Ghanaians, including the drummer Kofi Ghanaba (See Chapter 6).
When the foreign soldiers were demobilised these swing bands collapsed, except for the Tempos, which continued to operate with Ghanaian musicians. After E.T. Mensah took over the band’s leadership in 1948, it went on to become the most important West African highlife dance group of the 1950s.
The Tempos
Besides successfully blending swing music with highlife, other important ingredients in the Tempos’ repertoire were Trinidadian calypsos and Afro-Cuban music. Calypso melodies had been popular in Ghana from the late nineteenth century, when West Indian soldiers introduced the music. But the calypsos I speak of here are the later post–Second World War calypsos of Trinidadian musicians like Lord Kitchener, Lord Beginner and Lord Invader. Invader’s song ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’ was popularised by the American Andrews Sisters’ record in 1945,6 triggering an international craze for this Caribbean music. Cuban music had also been popular in Ghana for many years – as far back as Don Azpiazu’s international son-rumba record hit ‘Peanut Vendor’ first released by the American Victor Record Company in 1930.7 It was then re-released in 1933 on the British HMV GV label that was aimed at the colonial West African and Indian markets.8
In the case of the Tempos, it was the introduction of Afro-Cuban instruments such as the congas and bongos that became important in the band’s rise to stardom. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, it was Kofi Ghanaba who actually introduced Cuban drums. This was an important addition to the Tempos line-up as the pre-war dance orchestras did not use local African drums. The Afro-Cuban variety, in the form of instruments like the conga hand drums, helped pave the way for the introduction of almost identical local African hand drums in the 1950s and 1960s.9
The Tempos’ successful post-war blend of swing and West Indian music with highlife became the model for scores of Ghanaian dance bands, like King Bruce’s Black Beats, Tommy Grippman’s Red Spots, Saka Acquaye’s African Tones, Jerry Hansen’s Ramblers, Sammy Obot’s Broadway and Stan Plange’s Uhuru.
Kwame Nkrumah at the Kit-Kat nightclub in the 1950s (Ghana Information Service)
