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.

The Cuban Heart of Dakar

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.

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