From Highlife to Afrobeats: The Sound of Ghana from E.T. Mensah to Black Sherif

The story of Ghanaian popular music begins in the ports and forts of the Gold Coast, where African rhythms first collided with European instruments. In the late nineteenth century, Fante communities along the coast developed "adaha" — brass band music adapted from the instruments of colonial military bands. Groups like the Cape Coast Sugar Babies blended European marches with indigenous Fante rhythms, creating a new hybrid sound that was neither purely African nor European.

Simultaneously, a parallel tradition emerged in the palm wine bars of Accra, Sekondi, and Cape Coast. Sailors and dockworkers, exposed to Trinidadian calypso and West Indian guitar styles through the maritime trade routes, picked up the acoustic guitar and adapted it to local melodies. This "palm wine music" — named for the fermented sap served in the bars where it was played — featured finger-picked guitar, frame drums, and vocals in Fante, Ga, or Twi. Kwame Asare (known as Jacob Sam), who recorded some of the earliest palm wine tracks for Zonophone Records in London in 1928, is often credited as one of the genre"s founding figures. His recording of "Yaa Amponsah" became one of the most enduring melodies in Ghanaian music, covered and reinterpreted for nearly a century.

The term "highlife" itself emerged in the 1920s, reportedly coined because the music was played at exclusive dance venues that ordinary Ghanaians could not afford to attend — it was the music of the "high life." The early highlife bands were large orchestras modeled on European dance bands, complete with trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and double bass, but playing distinctly West African rhythmic patterns. The Accra Orchestra, founded by Teacher Lamptey in the 1930s, was among the most popular. These bands played at hotel ballrooms and colonial-era social clubs, serving an emerging African middle class that wanted modern entertainment rooted in local identity.

By the 1940s, two distinct streams of highlife had crystallized: the guitar-band highlife of the rural areas, featuring smaller acoustic ensembles, and the dance-band highlife of the urban centers, featuring full orchestras with horn sections. Both would feed into the explosion that was about to come.