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.

If Highlife Music was our Long Lost Uncle …

Ghanaian Highlife Band Image

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