Olaiya’s highlife band around 1960. Fela sang with them occasionally in the 1950s. Olaiya is in the center of the picture on trumpet.
Nigerian highlife itself originally came from Ghana in three waves. First was the 1938 Nigerian tour of the Cape Coast Sugar Babies dance orchestra; this was followed by the low-class konkoma (konkomba) form of highlife brought by Ghanaian migrant workers that did away with expensive Western instruments by using local percussion and voices; and finally the 1950 tours by the Tempos dance band that will be referred to again below.
Although the term “highlife” was not coined in Ghana until the early to mid-1920s, the origins of it go back much earlier. In the late nineteenth century British-trained Ghanaian regimental brass-band musicians at Cape Coast and El Mina Castle began creating their own syncopated and polyphonic style of brass-band music, with the catalyst being the 5,000 to 7,000 West Indian soldiers who were stationed at these castle forts during the Ashanti Wars of 1873–1901. The Afro-Caribbean tunes and syncopated rhythms that these colonial black troops from the English-speaking Caribbean played in their spare time provided an alternative model of brass-band music, as compared to the British marching songs done in strict time. As a result, coastal African brass musicians first copied Afro-Caribbean rhythms and melodies and then, within ten years or so, went on to invent a proto-form of highlife called adaha music in the 1880s.
Around the same time, African sailors (and in particular the coastal Kru or Croo of Liberia) employed on British and American ships during the nineteenth century adopted sailors’ instruments and on the high seas created a distinct African way of playing the guitar that they spread down the western and central African coast. These guitar techniques fed into the emerging popular “palm-wine” guitar music of Sierra Leone (Krio maringa music), Ghana (Fanti osibisaaba), and Nigeria (Yoruba juju music).
Juju music itself was a fusion of sailors’ palm-wine guitar music, Sierra Leone derived ashiko music and local “native blues,” and Yoruba praise singing. It first appeared in Lagos and Ibadan in the 1930s and was pioneered by the likes of Tunde King and Ayinde Bakere. Later Bakere and Akanbi Ege Wright introduced amplified guitars, and during the 1950s to 1970s this guitar-band music was developed by Tunde Nightingale, I. K. Dairo, Ebenezer Obey, Sunny Adé, and others.5
The word highlife emerged in Ghana after 1914, when many ballroom-dance orchestras were set up by and for the local elites; these included the Excelsior Orchestra, the Jazz Kings, the Accra Orchestra, and the Cape Coast Sugar Babies. At first these musicians did not play local music, but by the early 1920s they began to orchestrate some of the adaha, osibisaaba, and other local street songs. In fact, the name “highlife” was coined not by the well-to-do performers and audiences of these prestigious orchestras but rather by the poor who gathered outside for free shows on the nearby streets and pavements: the sailors, fishermen, ex-soldiers, migrants, and area boys who were the original purveyors, and audiences for, the existing forms of local popular music.6
Cape Coast Sugar Babies Orchestra and fans in Enugu in 1938.
British officer training a Gold Coast marching band in the early 1900s.
The Ghanaian Kumasi Trio guitar band in 1928, composed of three Fanti musicians based in Kumasi. The leader, Kwame Asare (a.k.a. Jacob Sam), is on the right.
Juju band at Lido nightclub opposite the old Africa Shrine, 1974.
Tempos band with its leader E. T. Mensah seated in the middle.
During the Second World War Allied troops were stationed in many African countries and they brought swing-jazz records with them. In Ghana this resulted in a new type of highlife band modeled on a small swing combo that replaced the earlier large and mostly symphony-like ballroom-dance orchestras. It was the wartime Tempos dance band that pioneered this development.
The Tempos initially consisted of Ghanaians and white army musicians who played swing for the thousands of Allied troops stationed in Ghana between 1939 and 1945. But when the white soldiers left, the Tempos survived as an all-Ghanaian band, and under the leadership of Kofi Ghanaba (Guy Warren), and then E. T. Mensah, this outfit made the breakthrough into a new sound, which fused highlife music with jazz, calypso, and Latin music. By the early fifties other dance bands modeled on the Tempos were appearing in Ghana, such as the Red Spots, Joe Kelly’s Band, the Rhythm Aces, and Black Beats. In 1951 the Tempos, now under the leadership of E. T. Mensah, made their first trip to Nigeria.
It was largely through the 1950s tours of the Tempos that highlife dance-band music spread from Ghana to Nigeria. There musicians like Bobby Benson, Rex Lawson, Victor Olaiya, Bill Friday, Roy Chicago, Eddie Okonta, and Zeal Onyia quickly Nigerianized highlife, which became entrenched in western, midwestern, and southeastern Nigeria.
All this development of dance-band highlife in Ghana and Nigeria was going on in the early fifties and was being put together by young musicians who supported the independence struggle. As a result, their new sound that employed Western jazz instrumentation but played African music became the “sound symbol” or “sound track” for the early independence era of both of these two countries.
For instance, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah used highlife music for state and international functions, set up government highlife bands, and encouraged these bands to Africanize their music.7 On the eve of Nigeria’s independence in 1960 irate Nigerian musicians marched with their union through Lagos to demand that highlife be played at the National Independence Dance, rather than the planned performance by the British Edmundo Ross band. According to the Ghanaian guitarist Stan Plange,8 who was in Lagos then as guitarist with Bill Friday’s Downbeats band, almost a thousand members of the Nigerian musicians’ union marched from the Empire Hotel, Idioro, to Government House to petition the prime minister, Tafawa Balewa. He agreed that local highlife rather than imported Latin and swing music should be played. So local highlife artists such as Victor Olaiya, Zeal Onyia, and Chris Ajilo played at this important national event.
Bobby Benson and E. T. Mensah in the early 1950s.
During the 1960s Western pop music began to be picked up by the youth of Ghana, Nigeria, and other countries in Africa. First came rock ’n’ roll and the associated “twist” dance, followed by soul music of James Brown and Wilson Pickett. At first local artists simply copied this imported music. Rock bands in Ghana included the Avengers and Psychedelic Aliens; then from Gambia came the Super Eagles (led by Badou Jobe and Paps Touray); from Sierra Leone, Geraldo Pino’s Heartbeats (that included Francis Fuster); and from Nigeria, the Clusters, Segun Bucknor’s Hot Four, and Sonny Okosun’s Postmen. Local soul artists and bands included Elvis J. Brown, Pepe Dynamite, and Stanley Todd’s El Pollos of Ghana and the Hykkers and Tony Benson’s Strangers of Nigeria, with Joni Haastrup being acclaimed as Nigeria’s James Brown. Even earlier, in Sierra Leone, Pino’s Heartbeats switched from pop to soul music and became West Africa’s first homegrown soul band. They then promptly left Freetown for Ghana and then Nigeria, taking live performances of this black American dance music with them.
