If African music genres had to go through immigration, the queue would be loud before it was long.

Highlife would reach the desk first, in a pressed shirt, guitar case in hand, smiling at an officer who had not yet said a word. “Purpose of visit?” the officer would ask. “Visiting family,” Highlife would say, and mean it, because half the people in the airport would already be humming along to something he had left behind in their grandparents’ radios.

“Oh, I am not sure. I have been told I never really left.”

The officer would stamp the passport anyway.

Amapiano would be next, and the officer would notice the log drum before the passport. “Anything to declare?” Amapiano would shrug and say, “Piano. A lot of piano.” There would be a short, polite delay while the officer tried to work out whether a bassline counted as hand luggage, and by the time the question was settled, others behind him would already be bouncing on their toes.

Gnawa would come through slowly, because Gnawa does everything slowly and on purpose. A guembri slung on one shoulder, a pair of iron castanets that would absolutely set off the metal detector, and a calm that makes even the security guards lower their voices. “Occupation?” the officer would ask. “Healer,” Gnawa would answer. “Night shift.” Nobody would feel qualified to ask a follow-up question.

Congolese rumba would try to pass as a tourist. It would fail within seconds, because the officer’s own mother had danced to it at her wedding. “You again,” the officer would say, not unkindly. “Return visit,” Rumba would reply, grinning, “very long.” And the stamp would come down before the sentence ended.

Gengetone would arrive in a group, as it always does, all talking at once in a language the officer could only half follow, which was exactly the point. “Are you all travelling together?” “We are a crew.” “Do you have a manager?” “We have each other.” The officer would sigh, glance at the growing noise, and quietly wave them through before anyone else on the queue got ideas.

Behind them, a few genres would hang back, unsure. Genres without big festival stages or streaming playlists, travelling with a single instrument and no entourage, rehearsing their answers under their breath. “Where are you coming from?” the officer would ask the first one gently. And the genre would hesitate, because nobody had ever asked before.

That is the question at the heart of what we do at the African Music Library. Where did this sound come from, who made it, what is it called at home, and what does it carry that the label on the case does not say? Because a sound that arrives in the world with no papers is easy to misname, and a sound that is misnamed is easy to lose.

So we keep a desk of our own, a little further along the corridor. We ask every genre, every maker, every instrument the same slow question, and we write the answer down.

If African music genres had to go through immigration, the line would be long, the stamps would be generous, and the officers would give up by lunchtime.

And somewhere past the gate, someone would already be dancing in the arrivals hall, with no intention at all of catching their connecting flight.

Three men performing music on stage

If African Music Genres had to Go Through Immigration …

African music in the sixties and seventies thrived on institutions rather than individuals. Names like I.K. Dairo and his Blue Spots, Chief Oliver De Coque, Orlando Owoh, Franco Luambo’s TPOK Jazz, and many of their counterparts across Africa defined the era. These weren’t solo acts with backing crews; they were sprawling collectives, with bandleaders at the center and companies of musicians orbiting around them. Franco’s TPOK Jazz at its peak carried more than fifty members, splitting into two touring parties just to meet demand.

But even then, the center did not always hold. In 1968, nine of Dairo’s ten-piece Blue Spots walked out after eleven years together, leaving him to rebuild from scratch. Franco himself endured a mass defection in the late 1960s, so devastating that he stopped playing for a time before reassembling his band. Splintering was never new to African music. What has changed is what happens after the splinter.

Fast forward to the boy-band wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Nigeria’s Plantashun Boiz, made up of 2Face, Faze, and Blackface, released two hit albums before 2Face went solo in 2004. His career soared across Africa and into Europe, while his former bandmates struggled to regain momentum. East Africa’s Sauti Sol followed a similar arc on a slower clock. Formed in Nairobi in 2005, the quartet balanced group albums with side projects until announcing in 2021 that they would pursue solo ventures under the banner “Alone Together.” By 2023, the pause had become a farewell: a world tour, a final album, and an indefinite hiatus. The brand survives, but the music now arrives one voice at a time.

This pattern is not uniquely African. Destiny’s Child began as a Houston quartet in the 1990s, weathered early splits, and eventually wound down as Beyoncé’s solo career eclipsed the group’s fame. Whether in Lagos, Nairobi, or Houston, the story repeats: a strong collective identity gives way to a single dominant voice.

Not entirely. To understand the shift, we must return to African roots. Long before record labels and touring circuits, music here was communal. It was woven into initiation rites, healing ceremonies, births, and celebrations. It was less entertainment than shared language, a force that bound communities together. Village ensembles, age-grade drumming groups, and call-and-response choruses assumed that music required more than one voice to function.

The industry translated that communal instinct into commercial formats: big bands in the sixties, boy and girl groups in the nineties. But commerce rewards efficiency. A band splits royalties, credit, and spotlight five ways; a solo artist keeps them all. Once one member tasted the rewards of solitude, the group’s days were numbered.

Africa did not abandon its communal roots for individualism. Rather, the industry borrowed the band’s shape from tradition, discovered the economics did not favor it, and quietly dismantled it. The communal square remains, but now each artist steps into it alone, carrying echoes of the chorus that once defined the sound.

I.K. Dairo & His Blue Spots Band was a Nigerian musical group led by the renowned musician I.K. Dairo. The band was formed in 1957.

I.K. Dairo & His Blue Spots Band

When the Bands Fell Silent …

In the 1960s, a young Malian musician named Ali Farka Touré put on a record by American bluesman John Lee Hooker and was shocked to recognize it. He had never heard the man before, yet the voice, the drone, the hypnotic repeating figure on the guitar all sounded like home. The Songhai songs of the Niger River had taught him that sound long before any record reached him. Years later he would say plainly that the blues had come from Africa, and that what Hooker played was a memory returning to its source. That moment cracks open a story we have told backwards.

We know the American chapters well: the blues of the Mississippi Delta, the swing of Harlem and Kansas City, the bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, the bluegrass whose banjo descends from West African lutes. Each was an act of invention by Black American communities who turned loss into language. But they were also the continuation of something that crossed the Atlantic in memory, in scales, in call and response, in the bend of a note. The question is no longer who invented the blues. It is who kept the other half of the conversation going.

Ali Farka Touré is the figure most people credit with stumbling upon this link, and the world found him almost by accident. Born in 1939 in northern Mali, he played the njarka and the guitar, and he built a style that sounded uncannily like the blues without ever copying it. In the 1990s, the British label World Circuit brought his music to Western audiences, and in 1994 his collaboration with the American guitarist Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktu, won a Grammy. Meanwhile, deeper in the Sahara, another story was unfolding. In 1979, young Tuareg men in exile in refugee camps in southern Algeria, displaced by drought and conflict, formed a band called Tinariwen. They smuggled in electric guitars and built a sound of their own, born of longing and resistance. The West would not hear them properly for another two decades, but the desert had been playing all along

What the world now calls desert blues goes by several names. It is also called Saharan blues, Tuareg blues, or Tuareg rock, and the Tuareg themselves speak of assouf, meaning nostalgia or longing, and tishoumaren, a term thought to come from the French word for the unemployed, a nod to the displaced young men who first played it. The sound is easy to recognise once you have heard it. The electric guitar leads, often weaving looping, trance-like riffs built on pentatonic scales. Vocals move in call and response, sung in Tamasheq or Songhai, and carry the weight of exile, homeland, freedom and protest. Underneath, hand claps, calabash and a rolling rhythm create a groove that musicians and critics often compare to the gait of a camel crossing the sand. It feels like a trance, a protest, and a prayer at once.

Today, desert blues has travelled far beyond the Sahara. Tinariwen won their own Grammy in 2012 and have shared stages with Western rock and pop artists. Bombino from Niger recorded with American producer Dan Auerbach, and his compatriot Mdou Moctar is known for blistering guitar work that draws comparisons to rock’s greatest, bringing a Tamasheq-language film and album to international audiences. Songhoy Blues formed in Bamako among musicians displaced from northern Mali by the 2012 conflict and turned exile into a global career.

Tamikrest, Imarhan, Etran de l’Aïr and Vieux Farka Touré, Ali’s own son, keep widening the sound. The impact goes well beyond sales. These artists have carried the politics and the poetry of Sahelian peoples onto the world’s biggest stages, proved that African guitar traditions can lead rather than follow, and forced an industry long used to treating the continent as inspiration to recognise it as a source of innovation.

The history is more tangled than any single origin story allows, and scholars still debate how directly Sahel and Delta music are related. Perhaps that is the point. Desert blues does not settle the question of who owns the blues. It shows that the blues is a conversation across oceans and centuries, one that began with a shared inheritance and is still being written. For the African Music Library, that conversation is the reason our work matters. Archiving these recordings protects the languages, stories, and people behind them, so the next generation of listeners, scholars, and guitarists can hear the other half of the story and add to it.

Tinariwen

Blues from Africa

You wake with the first light, the sky still pale and tender, and the palace grounds are already stirring. The air is cool and faintly damp, carrying the smell of wet earth and woodsmoke. In the middle of the courtyard stands a lone tree, old and broad-limbed, its branches spread like open hands. Dew clings to its leaves, and a few early birds quarrel in the canopy. Horses neigh in the stables nearby, their breath rising in soft clouds. Women bend over great pots of tuwo masara, and the smoke drifts upward, carrying the scent of maize and spice. Children dart through the dust, laughing, while elders in flowing robes make their way slowly toward the courtyard.

“Ina kwana?” an old man greets another beneath the tree, lowering himself onto a mat.

“Lafiya lau,” comes the reply. “And you? Did you sleep, or did the drummers keep you awake with their practicing?”

“Sleep? At my age, I only rest my eyes and let my ears keep working.” He chuckles and nods toward the pots. “But they are cooking early. Today the whole town will eat.”

A little girl skids to a stop beside the women, panting. “Hajiya, is it true the emir will wear the turban today?”

“It is true,” says the woman at the pot, not looking up from her stirring paddle. “So go and wash your face, little one. You cannot greet history with dust on your cheeks.”

As the sun climbs, the dew burns away and the day grows warm and golden. A light harmattan breeze stirs the dust and carries it in pale ribbons across the ground, tugging at the hems of robes and the edges of turbans. Traders arrive with baskets of kola nuts and bolts of dyed cloth, spreading their wares in the shade of the lone tree.

“Kola, fresh from the south!” one of them calls. “Taste it and tell me I lie!”

“I do not need to taste it to know you lie,” a buyer answers, grinning, and breaks a lobe in half anyway. “How much for the whole basket?”

“For you, because today is a blessed day, I will cheat you only a little.”

Laughter ripples through the small crowd, and the courtyard fills with color and chatter. Somewhere near the kitchens, a group of women begins to sing as they work, their voices low and unhurried at first, rising and falling in call and response. The melody drifts over the pounding of pestles and the clatter of calabashes, and for a while it is the only music in the air.

Then the kakaki sounds. The royal trumpet’s piercing cry cuts across the grounds, and it is more than music: it announces authority and calls tradition to attention. Birds burst from the branches of the tree and scatter into the sky.

“Listen,” an elder murmurs, raising one finger. “That is not a trumpet. That is the voice of the house of the emir, and it has been speaking for centuries.”

The kalangu drums answer, rolling like distant thunder and pulling the dancers to their feet. The talking drum speaks in praise, its tones shaping words that exalt the emir’s lineage and carry history in its rhythm.

“Do you hear what it says?” a young man whispers to his friend.

“Every word. It names his grandfather, and his grandfather’s father.” The friend’s eyes shine. “My own father taught me to hear it.”

The women’s singing does not stop. It swells to meet the drums, bright and unbroken, a thread of human voice running through the metal and the thunder.

By midday, the sun stands high and the courtyard is alive with movement. The heat shimmers above the packed earth, and the lone tree throws a wide pool of shade where the oldest elders sit, fanning themselves slowly and watching everything. Riders parade in embroidered regalia, their horses dressed in tassels and bright trappings that shimmer in the light. Hooves drum the ground, and dust rises in golden clouds that hang in the still, hot air.

“Look at that bay stallion,” one elder says. “He prances as if he knows he carries the day on his back.”

“He knows,” says the man beside him. “Horses understand pride better than men do.”

The goge, the traditional fiddle, sings a haunting melody, each string trembling with memory. Flutes rise above it in light, airy phrases, softening the force of the drums and trumpets. Together the instruments guide every step of the dancers, every cheer of the crowd, every ululation from the women.

Then the turban is placed upon the emir’s head, and the whole courtyard erupts. Trumpets blare, drums thunder, fiddles sing, and flutes soar above them. The crowd roars, voices swelling like waves, and the women’s ululations pierce the noise like arrows of joy.

“Allah ya ja zamanin Sarki!” a voice cries out, and a hundred voices take it up. “May God lengthen the emir’s reign!”

You feel the ground tremble beneath the rhythm and the air grow thick with reverence. Even the old tree seems to shiver as the sound rolls over it. The newly turbaned emir steps forward to greet his people, and the music crowns him as surely as the cloth on his head.

“Ranka ya dade,” the eldest councilor says, bowing low. “Long life to you. Your people have waited for this day.”

The emir rests a hand on the old man’s shoulder. “And I have waited to be worthy of it,” he says quietly. “Pray for me, Baba. The turban is lighter than the work beneath it.”

The afternoon unfolds in layers of celebration. Praise singers step forward, their voices rising over the instruments as they recount the emir’s virtues and the history of his house. Gifts are presented, horses gallop in displays of skill, and dancers whirl in vivid cloth. The women return to their singing, and now whole groups join in, clapping and swaying, their voices rolling across the courtyard in long, golden waves.

“Eat, eat!” a cook shouts, pressing a steaming bowl into the hands of a passing stranger. “No one leaves this palace hungry today.”

“I am only passing through,” the stranger protests, already smiling.

“Today, nobody is only passing through.”

The palace kitchens never rest, feeding the multitude with meat and grain, and the air is heavy with the smell of roasting meat, spiced broth, and woodsmoke, mingled with dust and sweat and the sweetness of crushed kola.

By dusk, the heat gives way to a gentler air. The sky glows orange and violet, and the long shadow of the lone tree stretches across the courtyard like a hand reaching toward the palace gates. The music settles into a steady heartbeat. Elders offer prayers. Children still play in the lengthening shadows, their laughter softer now.

“Tomorrow, will there be drums again?” the little girl asks, her face washed and her eyes heavy with sleep.

“Tomorrow there will be work,” her grandmother says, gathering her onto her lap. “But the drums will still be inside you. That is what a day like this is for.”

Lamps are lit along the walls, and their small flames tremble in the evening wind. The emir, seated in his new authority, receives the homage of his people. Far off, the women’s voices rise once more in a slow, tender song, and the instruments grow quieter but do not fall silent. Their echoes follow the day into the night.

You leave with the sound still in your ears and the rhythm still in your chest, the smell of smoke and spice clinging to your clothes. From dawn to dusk you have witnessed more than a ceremony. It was a living poem of heritage, a day when music, ritual, and the old tree standing watch bound a community together in celebration of continuity and culture.

The cover image for the blog post titled, A Turban at Dawn, A Kingdom at Dusk

A Turban at Dawn, A Kingdom at Dusk

Africa is a continent of rhythm and melody. Every region carries its own signature, and the people in each one express it through their music. Today, we take a genre-focused trip around the continent. Are you ready?

Seatbelts on, and we take off from Nigeria, the giant of Africa. In the southwest, Yoruba percussion gave birth to Apala. Its roots lie in the pre-dawn calls that woke Muslim faithful to eat before the Ramadan fast, and from that humble purpose grew hypnotic rhythms and lyrics rich in proverbs.

Our first landing is Ghana, where the coastal Fante people shaped Osibisaaba. This guitar style blended the local seperewa with the playing of visiting Kru sailors, and in doing so it laid the foundation for palm wine music and highlife, two of West Africa’s most enduring sounds.

A short hop west brings us to Ivory Coast, where Zouglou rose from student protests in Abidjan in the 1990s. Armed with satire and sharp social critique, it became the voice of a generation.

We follow the coastline to Liberia, where Bassa and Kru traditions fused into Gbema, a mid-20th century style that later evolved into Hipco. Hipco mixes indigenous beats with urban storytelling and speaks to a nation’s resilience. Stay a moment longer, because the story did not stop there. Today’s young artists have married trap to Hipco, creating Trapco, a sound that carries global hip-hop aesthetics in local dialects and gives Liberia a distinct voice in the digital age.

Now we turn inland to Mali, where the hunter’s harp traditions inspired Wassoulou. Often led by women, its powerful vocals and bold social commentary make it one of West Africa’s most empowering sounds.

Then comes the long haul south, to Angola, where we refuel and meet Rebita, a lively dance genre rooted in traditional rhythms. It is considered a forerunner of semba and, in turn, a distant cousin of samba, proof that Angolan music crossed the Atlantic and left its mark.

We continue to Zimbabwe, where Sungura pulses through the nation’s popular music. Its fast, intricate guitar picking and storytelling lyrics capture the everyday struggles and joys of ordinary people.

Then we reach South Africa, home to two iconic genres. Isicathamiya, the soft-toned Zulu choral tradition, found global recognition through Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Marabi, born in Johannesburg’s shebeens in the 1920s, brought township jazz to life with its repetitive piano riffs and set the stage for modern South African jazz.

Our flight now sweeps up to the Horn of Africa and Eritrea, where the Tigre people gave rise to Tigre music. It preserves ancient storytelling while adapting to modern forms, and its rhythms and vocal styles carry the memory of a people across generations.

Following the Red Sea north, we land in Egypt and meet Mahraganat, a raw, electronic street sound from Cairo’s working-class neighborhoods. It fuses shaabi folk with digital beats and has become the anthem of Egypt’s youth.

Our final stop is Algeria, where the city of Oran gave rise to Rai. This rebellious folk-pop genre blended Arabic melodies with Western influences, became the soundtrack of protest and youthful defiance, and carried its message across North Africa and into Europe.

Please remain seated as we land. The journey is over, but the music never stops.

Before you go, one question for you, our passengers: which genre from your own region did we leave out? Reply and tell us, and it may earn a seat on the next flight.

A cover image of Africa for the blog post titled, A Musical Genre Trip Across Africa

Afrique

A Musical Genre Trip Across Africa

We have always heard about the all-male bands that made waves across Africa and the diaspora from the 1960s to the late 1990s and early 2000s: the highlife bands of Ghana, the juju bands of Nigeria, the soukous and Congolese Rumba bands of the DRC, the choral groups of South Africa, the muziki wa dansi bands of East Africa, and many others. But we cannot look away from the women’s bands that made their mark against all odds, in a deeply patriarchal social scene, stringent customs, and under the guiding myths of different ethnic groups. Some women took a stand, stepped into the spotlight, shone, and made a mark.

Only a handful of them, but today we look at the Mahotella Queens of South Africa. Though the group was formed by a man, the South African music producer, talent scout, and songwriter Rupert Bopape, the Queens held the stage.

The Mahotella Queens are a South African female vocal group formed in Johannesburg in 1964, and they remain one of the most enduring voices of mbaqanga, the township sound that carried the rhythms, struggles and joy of Black South African life during the Apartheid. Their original line-up revolved around five singers fronted by the soprano Hilda Tloubatla. Bopape assembled a pool of about ten female singers at Mavuthela to record girl-group tracks under many different names, but the name that stuck was Mahotella Queens. A name born almost by accident became a legacy.

They were known for mbaqanga, and they sang it with a partner. Fronting the vocal team was Simon Nkabinde, whose searing groan earned him the title “Indoda Mahlathini”, the main man.

Take a moment to picture this: the deep, rumbling growl of Mahlathini set against the women’s bright harmonies, all driven by the Makgona Tsohle Band, the studio musicians who gave the sound its bounce. Together they became the country’s most popular girl group from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. Their early catalog includes “Meet the Mahotella Queens (1966), and the single “Kazet” is the song that first brought them international attention.

The core five were Hilda Tloubatla, Nobesuthu Mbadu, Mildred Mangxola, Juliet Mazamisa and Ethel Mngomezulu, and their story is not a straight line. In 1971, Mahlathini signed with the rival company EMI, and the original Queens ended up joining rival girl groups, while Bopape formed a new line-up. The women who had made the sound famous suddenly found themselves scattered across the industry.

Then came the return. In 1983, the original five reunited with Mahlathini and the Makgona Tsohle Band for the comeback release Amaqhawe Omgqashiyo. After one more hiatus, Tloubatla, Mbadu and Mangxola regrouped full-time in 1986, and that trio became the classic line-up. A successful tour of France in 1987 paved the way for an international career that has now lasted four decades, even after the deaths of Mahlathini in 1999 and of several Makgona Tsohle members. The losses have been real. Nobesuthu Mbadu died on August 21, 2021, at the age of 76, and Mildred Mangxola is now listed among the group’s past members.

Yet the Queens never froze in time. Their discography spans nearly fifty albums, from the 1960s through Marriage Is a Problem (1991), Women of the World (1993), and Reign & Shine (2006). They also explored new territory, with Siyadumisa (Songs of Praise) becoming their first gospel-oriented album, proof of a group willing to grow alongside its own faith and life experience.

Against all odds, today the group still exists with this line-up: Hilda Tloubatla, Amanda Nkosi and Nqobile Njapha. Only Tloubatla remains from the original group, and the Queens continue to tour and record. Nkosi and Njapha are stepping into shoes that carry more than sixty years of history. The Mahotella Queens are proof that a group can endure separation, changing labels, changing eras, and heartbreaking loss, and still stand on stage.

Their story reminds us that women in African music were never on the margins. In many cases, they were holding the whole song together.

Mahotella Queens

The Mahotella Queens

Pause for a minute and think about it. If the whole of Africa wanted to record one album, how would we even begin?

Which genres would carry the songs? Afrobeats? The many variants of Highlife from Liberia, Ghana, and Nigeria? Bikutsi? Cape Jazz? Kuduro? Sega? Taarab, with Stambeli threaded through it? We could go further and chase fusions that do not yet exist: Ethio-jazz from Ethiopia meeting Rai from Algeria, or a Hausa sound from Nigeria meeting Marrabenta from Mozambique. Maybe Cape Jazz from South Africa folded into Kapuka rap from Kenya. Could the fusion stretch across three genres or more: Apala, Salegy, and Maluf, all on the same track?

Oh, what if we went further still, a blend of Andalusian classical, Congolese Rumba, and Gumbe, all in one?

Or perhaps we set the contemporary sounds aside and lean traditional instead.

What language would we sing in? Try, and fail, to imagine narrowing that choice down from the roughly two thousand languages spoken across the continent.

Among the instruments, the many drums of Sub-Saharan Africa would carry the beat, with the balafon close behind, while the guitars wait their turn to strum in at the bridge. But what of the shekere? The ngoni? The udu? The uhadi? Would they have a spot?

Would we pass over the krakeb for its sharp clang, and lean instead toward the ramkie guitar? Perhaps not. Maybe the atenteben flute, the Oja flute, and the n’dehou would play together despite their distinct notes and pitches.

How loud would the response to the call be? Or would the album become less about the genres we picked and more about giving other African languages a place on the record, a spot away from the usual selections?

What colors would sit on the cover? Red? Green? Yellow? Black? White? Blue? They would not settle into a rainbow, not neatly, but the result would still be ours, and it would stand for our unity all the same.

Would the outcome be worth all the deliberation and time spent on it? Would everyone get a place on the album, no matter how brief? Or would we simply be building another Tower of Babel?

Maybe we would deliberate and never reach a conclusion, and walk away from the project altogether, but not before recognizing that our diversity should be celebrated, not compressed into a sixteen-track album.

The cover image for the blog post titled If the Whole of Africa Were to Record an Album.

If the Whole of Africa Were to Record an Album

There is a moment in many African households: at weddings, coronations, naming ceremonies, even before going to war, where the air shifts. Someone begins to chant. Not quite singing, not quite speaking, not an invitation to dance. Still, the room leans in. Names are called, not as a roll call to mark attendance, but as an act of recognition. Ancestry, victories from long-past battles, allegories, and old tales sometimes too true to believe are summoned into the present. This is not performance in the way we usually mean it. It is recognition.

Praise singing has long been an aspect of African music that gets overlooked, folded quietly into the genres built on top of it rather than credited in its own right. Think of Juju, Fuji, and Highlife, three key genres out of Nigeria, each carrying praise traditions within them without always naming them as such. Across the continent, whether today or in the years past, praise traditions celebrate kings, communities, warriors, and lineages, often in grand, public, performative registers. Griots in West Africa, praise poets in Southern Africa, court musicians across empires past, all carried versions of this role: to remember publicly, and to remember loudly.

But sit inside Yoruba culture for a while, and you find something quieter living beside that grandeur. Oríkì.

Oríkì is not interested in the crowd. It is interested in you.

Where praise singing often moves outward, toward the collective, the throne, the town, Oríkì moves inward. It is personal to the point of being intimate. A eulogy of sorts, though not for the dead. A poetic calling-forth of everything that makes a person who they are: their ancestry, their character, the stories that shaped them, and even the destiny they are still walking toward.

To have an Oríkì recited over you is to hear your own history narrated back to you in verse. It might name the farmer's great-grandfather whose harvests fed a whole compound. It might invoke the mother who never raised her voice but was feared for her wisdom. It might carry warnings folded into praise, reminders of what you must not become, alongside affirmations of what you are capable of becoming.

This is why Oríkì resists being filed neatly under “praise singing” as a genre label. It is closer to a technology of memory. Sung, chanted, or simply spoken by an elder at the right moment, it functions simultaneously as affirmation, archive, and invocation. It tells a child who they descend from. It tells an adult, mid-crisis, who they still are. It does not flatter. It roots.

There is also something worth sitting with in the fact that Oríkì is rarely fixed. Unlike a court praise song preserved for a specific king, an individual’s Oríkì can grow. New lines are added as a life unfolds, new achievements folded into old lineage. It is a living document, composed collaboratively by family and community over generations, updated the way an oral archive updates: through repetition, correction, and the occasional embellishment by whoever is doing the reciting that day.

So when we talk about praise singing in African music, it is worth remembering that praise is not one register. Somewhere between the public performance of communal pride and the private recitation of a name, Oríkì marks the point where praise becomes rootedness, where music stops entertaining and starts naming.

Maybe that is the real throughline across African musical traditions broadly, and one worth returning to in future issues: music has never only been sound. It has been memory, made audible.

Dancers perform on stage in dramatic lighting

Beyond Praise Singing, the Intimate Art of Oríkì

Cuban music’s influence on African sound is almost impossible to ignore. It runs through Congolese rumba and soukous, through kizomba and semba, and further back still, through the deep roots Yoruba indigenous religion put down in Cuba itself, carried there against every wish of the people who carried it, by way of the transatlantic slave trade. None of this is new information to anyone who has spent time with the music.

But there is one place where this exchange rarely gets talked about, and it is not the place most people would guess. It is Dakar, Senegal.

Before Youssou N’Dour, before the sound that would come to define Senegal on the world stage, Dakar had another obsession entirely, and it came from six thousand kilometers away, across the Atlantic, in Cuba.

It started with a club owner named Ibra Kassé, an impresario who understood before almost anyone else in the city that Dakar’s nightlife needed a house sound. His venue, home to a band called the Star Band de Dakar, became the training ground for a generation of Senegalese musicians who had grown up on imported Cuban records and decided, almost as an act of quiet rebellion, to make that sound their own.

Out of that scene came Orchestra Baobab, a rival band, named for the hotel that gave them a stage and, eventually, a following that belonged to the city’s elite. This was music for an audience that had, for years, treated its own traditional sounds as something to outgrow. Latin horns, guitar lines, and Wolof melodies met somewhere in the middle, and the result did not sound like an imitation of Havana. It sounded like something new that only Dakar could have made.

What made Baobab unusual, even among their peers, was how far they reached beyond a single regional style. Several of the band’s members had grown up in Casamance, in Senegal’s south, and brought with them a warmer, more melodic guitar tradition that folded naturally into the Cuban framework. The band was, in the truest sense, a meeting point, Wolof melody, Cuban rhythm, and Casamance harmony, held together by a guitarist named Barthelemy Attisso, whose playing would later be called among the finest to ever come out of West Africa.

For most of the 1970s, this was simply what Senegal danced to. Then a younger sound arrived, harder-edged, more percussive, carried by a singer who had come up through the same Star Band lineage. Youssou N’Dour’s new direction pulled the city’s attention away from Baobab almost overnight, and by the mid 1980s, the band that had once ruled Dakar’s clubs found itself without much of an audience left to play for. In 1987, they quietly stopped.

That might have been the end of the story, if not for a cassette from 1982 that eventually found its way to London under the name Pirates Choice, and a producer named Nick Gold who understood exactly what he was holding. When Gold and Youssou N’Dour reached out to the original members, fifteen years after the band had scattered into other lives, one had become a schoolteacher, another a lawyer in Togo, they said yes. The reunion show at the Barbican in 2001 ended in the kind of ovation that does not want to stop, and a new album followed the next year, coproduced, fittingly, by the same singer whose rise had once eclipsed them.

It is a rare thing in music history, the artist who displaces you becoming the one who helps bring you back. But that is the story of Dakar’s Cuban heart, a sound born from records that crossed an ocean, nearly lost to the very city that made it famous, and returned to the world by the hands of the man who had once made everyone forget it.

The recent image of Orchestra Baobab, a music band, that was established in 1970 as the in-house band of the Baobab Club in Dakar, Senegal.

Orchestra Baobab

The Cuban Heart of Dakar

If highlife music was our long lost uncle, we would not remember exactly when he left. Only that one day the house felt a little quieter, and nobody quite explained why.

He would return unannounced, the way relatives from abroad sometimes do, standing at the door with a guitar slung over one shoulder and horns trailing behind him like an entourage he had picked up somewhere on the way back home.

We would not recognize him immediately. Not his face, not his voice, not the songs he hummed under his breath while taking off his shoes at the door. But our grandmother would. She would look up from whatever she was doing and say his name before he said hers, because some people you never really forget, you only misplace for a while.

Uncle would be impeccably dressed, but not stiff, the way people dress when they have been away long enough to miss home on purpose. A well-tailored shirt, open enough to breathe. Elegance worn like a private joke between him and the years.

He would definitely speak in a language half ours and half his own, fluent in nostalgia before fluent in words, able to make heartbreak sound like a celebration, because he understood joy and sorrow were never as far apart as the family had pretended while he was away.

He would tell us where he had been. Palm-wine bars in Accra, dance halls in Lagos, parties in the Eastern part of Nigeria, ships and radios and record sleeves crossing oceans he never personally had to cross. He would carry a passport stamped with other people’s rhythms, jazz horns here, Latin guitar lines there, and wear every stamp without apology, because to him, being away was never abandonment. It was gathering things to bring back home.

He would notice, almost immediately, that our family had grown without him. New voices in the house he did not recognize at first, Afrobeat, Afrobeats, Igbo Highlife, even the worship sessions in church on Sunday mornings. And instead of feeling replaced, he would simply smile, because he would hear himself faintly in all of them, whether they knew it or not.

He would not ask for an apology for the years he missed, and he would not need one from us. 

He would only ask that we sit with him a while, let him hum something familiar, and let the room remember how it used to feel with him in it.

If highlife music was our long lost uncle, he would be worldly, quietly wounded, unhurried, and certain, in the end, our home would still know his face.

And even after everyone had gone to bed, maybe one of us would find him in the sitting room, still humming, in no hurry at all to be gone again.

Ghanaian Highlife Band

If Highlife Music was our Long Lost Uncle …

Today we tell a story about Faran Maka Boté, a hero from the Niger river region, as if we were sitting together by the river, listening to the drums and the griots’ voices. It is about his life and the legends that surround him in West Africa.

Faran Maka Boté’s story embodies the deep connection between humans and the divine, inspiring respect for our shared cultural roots.

There came a time when the rice fields along the Niger were dying, and Faran Maka Boté knew exactly who to blame.

Somewhere beneath the river’s surface lived Zinkibaru, blind spirit and Master of Fish, who never needed his eyes to see. He had a guitar strung with something older than wood and gut, and when he played it, every fish in the river answered. Night after night, Faran watched his rice plants stripped bare by creatures that should have had no reason to come near dry land. He knew a song was doing this before he ever saw the instrument that made it.

So he went looking for Zinkibaru, and when he found him, he did not politely ask him to stop.

The fight that followed is remembered as one of the great battles of the river, giant against spirit, strength against sound. When it ended, Faran stood over Zinkibaru with the guitar in his hands, and the river’s creatures now answered to him instead. He had wanted his rice fields safe. What he got was mastery over the entire Niger.

Faran’s belief that he was invincible highlights the importance of humility, reminding us to honor tradition and stay humble before the divine.

Dongo noticed. The god of thunder and lightning did not send a warning first; he sent fire. Villages along the river burned, one after another, until the people had nowhere left to look but toward the man who had made himself Master of the water and done nothing to earn peace with the sky.

Faran was summoned before Dongo, and whatever pride still remained in him had to be set down at the god’s feet. Dongo did not ask for gold or blood. He asked for music. Praise poems, sacrifice, and festivals where he could descend into the bodies of dancers and move among the people he had just spent weeks burning out of their homes.

Faran agreed, and that agreement became the first Songhai possession ceremony, still carried on today. Imagine a tehardent lute plucked slowly, a calabash struck for rhythm, singers calling out the names of ancestors and warriors into the night air. The dancers start seated, shoulders swaying, barely moving, and then, without anyone announcing the shift, they are on their feet, carried the rest of the way by rhythm alone.

Faran’s own ending came without ceremony. He died fighting a wizard named Fono, a battle fought over Nana Miriam, who is remembered as his wife by some and his daughter by others. Nana Miriam went on to become a legend herself, once outwitting a giant hippo that had the river settlements living in fear, symbolizing resilience and cunning in the culture.

The dance, though, never stopped. It is still there at weddings, at naming ceremonies, at festivals that have nothing to do with gods and everything to do with keeping something alive. Its rhythm has slipped into desert blues, into Tuareg guitar lines, into music made by people who may never have heard Faran’s name and are carrying his truce forward anyway.

The AI generated image of Songhai empire legend known as Faran Maka Boté and also, the progenitor of Takamba dance.

Faran Maka Boté

The Dance Born from Anger of a Thunder god

Samori Toure was born in 1830, the son of a weaver. Nothing about his birth suggested he would one day command an empire. Yet by the time he turned forty, he ruled a territory stretching across West Africa, and for sixteen years he held the full weight of the French colonial army at a standstill.

In 1853, when Samori was still a young man, his mother was seized by a rival clan. He had no money to pay her ransom, so he did something few would consider: he walked into enemy territory and offered himself in her place. The offer was accepted, and Samori spent the next seven years as a servant to his captors.

Those seven years became his education. He learned to handle firearms. He learned military discipline. He learned the arts of war, absorbing everything his captors could teach him, even as a prisoner. When he finally won his freedom, he left with a single purpose: to build something that could never again be taken from him.

By 1878, he had done exactly that. Samori had assembled an empire of thirty thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry, spanning territory that today makes up Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Cote d'Ivoire. He achieved this not through brute force alone but through a blend of military genius and careful diplomacy, binding together peoples and territories that might otherwise have resisted a single ruler.

In 1882, French Colonel Borgnis-Desbordes marched on Samori's territory carrying the most advanced weapons on earth. Samori's soldiers, known as sofas, charged in their traditional formation and were slaughtered. It was, by any measure, a massacre.

But Samori adapted almost immediately. Within days he abandoned traditional battle formations in favor of guerrilla warfare: hit-and-run cavalry strikes, carefully laid ambushes, and a scorched earth policy that denied the French any resources as they advanced. He harassed French forces all the way back to the Niger River.

Word of this began to spread across West Africa. There was a man who could fight the French and win. Recruits poured in to join him.

What set Samori apart from other resistance leaders was his foresight about weapons. He understood that he could not depend on purchasing arms forever, so he put his blacksmiths to work studying captured French rifles. Over time, those smiths learned to build the weapons from scratch.

By 1887, Samori's army operated on a three-tier weapons system. His elite troops carried modern repeater rifles. A second tier, armed with bolt-action rifles, pushed the empire's borders eastward and conquered new territory. A third tier, equipped with older flintlocks, held the interior. In the middle of an ongoing war, Samori had built a functioning arms industry.

In 1891, France ran out of patience. Colonel Archinard marched on Samori's capital expecting a swift and decisive victory. Samori refused to give him the fight he wanted.

Instead, he made what may be the most extraordinary decision in the history of African resistance. He picked up his entire empire and moved it. Roughly one hundred and twenty thousand people marched east together, burning everything behind them so the French would inherit nothing but ash. At the same time, Samori fought a rear-guard war against his pursuers while simultaneously conquering new territory ahead of the march.

He sustained this campaign for seven years. The French could never manage to pin him down.

Samori was finally captured on September 29, 1898. A French captain, working from information supplied by deserters, located his camp at dawn and took him without a fight. Samori was sixty-eight years old at the time, having spent sixteen years at war.

The French exiled him to Gabon, to a prison camp on a small island in the middle of the Ogooue River. Locals called it the dry guillotine, a name earned by the sheer number of prisoners who died there. Samori Toure died of pneumonia on June 2, 1900, less than two years after his capture.

Samori Toure became a symbol of resistance across the African continent, and his legacy did not end with his death. His great-grandson became Guinea's first president after independence. Generations later, author Ta-Nehisi Coates named his own son Samori, explaining the choice in his book Between the World and Me.

A man born to a weaver, with nothing to his name, held the most powerful colonial army on earth at bay for sixteen years.

The image of Samori Toure, the Weaver's Son, who turned adversity to education and built a functioning arms industry during a war.

Samori Toure

Samori Toure, the Son of a Weaver Who Defied France

If there is one thing Africans have always done, it is honor those who have crossed into the great beyond. Across the continent, ancestors are not merely remembered; they are revered. Many communities believe the departed continue to exist in a spiritual realm, watching over the living, offering guidance, protection, and, at times, correction. Over centuries, this reverence has shaped festivals, rituals, belief systems, and, perhaps most profoundly, music.

Music in Africa, especially traditional music, has never existed merely for entertainment. It is ceremony, memory, spirituality, and communication. Through rhythm, chant, drumming, and dance, communities commune with their ancestors, retell their stories, and keep their presence alive. In many cultures, music serves as a bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds.

Among the Yoruba people of Nigeria, the Egungun masquerade tradition embodies this relationship between the living and the dead. During festivals, masked performers are believed to represent ancestral spirits returning temporarily to earth. The bata drums, chants, and dances are not simply performances; they are acts of spiritual invocation and communal remembrance. Similarly, among the Akan people of Ghana, funeral ceremonies are deeply musical occasions where talking drums “speak” praises of the departed, recount family lineage, and guide souls into the ancestral realm.

In Southern Africa, the Shona people of Zimbabwe use the mbira, often called the “thumb piano,” in Bira ceremonies meant to communicate with ancestral spirits. The repetitive, hypnotic melodies of the instrument are believed to invite the presence of ancestors into the gathering. Among the Zulu of South Africa, music and dance remain central to ceremonies honoring lineage and communal memory, while in East Africa, spirit possession ceremonies among Swahili communities often rely on rhythmic drumming and chanting to connect participants with unseen spiritual forces.

The late Nigerian writer and poet Chinua Achebe captured this worldview powerfully in Things Fall Apart. In the novel, ancestors are central to community life, morality, and order. They are consulted, feared, and respected. Their voices echo through proverbs, rituals, and ceremonies, reminding the living that they are part of a continuum rather than isolated individuals. Achebe’s work reflects a broader African philosophy: life does not simply end with death; it transforms.

As Africa continues to celebrate its departed elders, one of the most enduring ways it does so is through music. Drums announce ancestral presence. Songs recount heroic deeds and family histories. Dances reenact journeys between worlds. In many communities, certain rhythms are reserved exclusively for funerals, memorial rites, or sacred festivals because they are believed to summon spirits or guide them safely onward. Even instruments themselves are often treated as sacred objects imbued with ancestral power.

These ancestral threads continue to exist in contemporary African music. Modern genres may sound different sonically, but many still carry spiritual and cultural DNA inherited from older traditions. In Senegal, griot traditions remain alive through artists like Youssou N'Dour, whose music draws from centuries-old oral traditions of praise singing and historical storytelling. South African genres like Amapiano and older styles such as Isicathamiya continue to borrow communal chants, call-and-response structures, and rhythmic patterns rooted in traditional ceremony. Even globally celebrated Afrobeats records often sample indigenous percussion, folk melodies, and spiritual cadences inherited from the past.

To listen closely to African music is to hear history breathing. It is to hear voices that refuse to be silenced by time. Beneath the drums, chants, and melodies are generations speaking across centuries. Through music, ancestors remain present, not as distant memories, but as active participants in cultural life, reminding people who they are, where they come from, and the responsibility they carry forward.

The blog post cover for the write-up titled, "Africa, its Ancestors and their Role in the Music."

Africa, its Ancestors and their Role in the Music

Africa, Its Ancestors, and their Role in the Music

Across the savannas and Sahel grasslands of West and Central Africa, a lone figure on horseback watches over a herd of long-horned Zebu cattle as the sun settles across the horizon. It is an image that has endured for centuries and one that has come to represent the Fulani, among the most historically significant and widely dispersed peoples on the African continent.

The Fulani, also known as the Fula, Fulbe, Peul, or Peuhl depending on the country and language, are estimated to number between 35 and 40 million people spread across more than 20 African nations. From Senegal in the west to Sudan and the Central African Republic in the east, they form one of the largest and most geographically widespread ethnic groups in Africa.

Their origins remain debated. Some theories connect them to North African Berber populations, while others point to ancient populations of the Sahara before desertification transformed the region. Linguistic and genetic studies more commonly trace Fulani roots to the Senegambia region around present-day Senegal and The Gambia, where communities may have existed as early as 1000 BCE.

What defines Fulani history as much as origin is movement. Over centuries, Fulani groups migrated gradually eastward with their cattle herds in search of pasture, water, and trade opportunities. This steady expansion carried them across the African savanna belt where they negotiated with kingdoms, participated in regional trade networks, and in some cases established states of their own.

Cattle sit at the center of traditional Fulani life. Among pastoral groups such as the Mbororo, livestock shaped not only the economy but also social identity and spiritual values. Zebu cattle, well adapted to dry savanna climates, became symbols of wealth, status, inheritance, and continuity between generations.