Originally published @afropop.org
John Collins has lived a life in African music that few of us can
imagine. Born in the UK, he started playing with traveling bands in
Ghana in 1969, at a time when few Westerners had even heard the word
“highlife.” John went on to play with many bands in Ghana and Nigeria.
He befriended and worked with Fela Kuti, become a bandleader himself,
launched Bokoor Band and then Studio (later an archive) where he
recorded important music of the late highlife era, wrote a number of
books on West African music, and, ultimately, became a professor of
popular music at the University of Ghana in Legon.
Afropop’s Banning Eyre first met and interviewed John at Bokoor
in 1993. Twenty years later, he returned with Sean Barlow and Mark
LeVine for a follow-up conversation. What follows is excerpts from both
interviews, starting with John’s account of how he got his start in
Ghanaian music.
John Collins (1993): My father came here in 1952 to
set up the philosophy department when the university was first opened.
So I came with my father and mother. My mother didn’t like Ghana. My
father did. So they divorced and I went back to Europe with my mother. I
did all my education there. I did a science degree, partly in Bristol,
partly in Manchester, partly in London. And I was a musician before I
came back to Ghana in 1969. Actually I started as a classical guitar
player, and then I joined some rock bands and jazz bands. And I came
back in Ghana in 1969 to finish a medical degree that I had
discontinued, . because I had wanted to go to Cuba for my student
elective , and I got in a lot of trouble with the authorities who were
very conservative.
B.E.: Why did you want to go to Cuba?
J.C. (‘93): Because I was basically a communist. In
the mid-60s the medical profession wasn’t very radical. But as the
Medical School in Ghana had only just been established I realized I
would have to go back to the beginning of the medical programi, so I
switched to the social sciences and got a Sociology and Archaeology BA.
degree at the University of Ghana at Legon instead..
And then, by coincidence, my father had married a Ghanaian woman, my
Auntie Amma, and he built a house for her about twenty miles north of
Accra. And in the house was a tenant called Mr. Bampoe who was the
leader and main comedian “Opia” of the Jaguar Jokers Concert Party. So I
told them I could play rock music, and it was kind of a quid pro quo
situation. I taught them to play rock music, and they taught me to play
highlife. And that’s how I fell into the music, and since then, I can’t
even remember how many bands I’ve played with in Ghana. I wasn’t in any
way thinking about writing about music or anything, just playing music. I
didn’t really start writing until 1974, ‘75, which meant I’d been
playing already for about five years. But I’ve always been inquisitive.
B.E.:What was it like then? What were people playing?
J.C. (‘93): Well, the main foreign star at that time
was James Brown. I mean, everybody was crazy over him. And that song,
“I’m Black and Proud” was everywhere.But for me, the first band that I
played with was this concert party band. One thing is, in that for that
sort of music, there wasn’t anybody that was the star of the music, I
mean everybody played their part. They had about three guitarists, but
there was no problem with me joining in as a guitarist. They didn’t have
what we would call a lead guitarist. They had a guitarist that would
play a tenor guitar, and they were playing the guitars rather like
Africans would play drums, in interlocking parts. It was always dance
music. It was never people watching you without doing anything, or just
clapping. So I liked the whole feeling of the band. And also, these guys
were really intelligent. They knew everything that was going on in
Ghana. We went to villages, I met princesses, hunters, farmers, chiefs
and all sorts of mind-blowing people and situations for an Englishman
coming to Ghana for the first time, or rather returning to Ghana as an
adult. The only way I can describe it—and this is thinking
retrospectively—is, it would be like an Englishman joining a Comedia
D’el Arte in the 17
th century Europe, a roving band of
troubadours moving from village to village, town to town . But this
type of itinerant art form (that included local clowns and even female
impersonators) was still going in Ghana and it still had a real
meaning. It was an actual genuine folk form, which had incorporated a
lot of black and American and European music as well.
Straight away, if I played rock music and jazz music and rhythm and
blues and stuff like this, I had an instant rapport with them, because
they were also very interested in anything from outside. A lot of their
music consisted of western music but filtered through their own
sensibilities. For instance, the first time I ever saw or heard ragtime
played really live was with this group. And tap-dancing. Because this
artform, the concert party, has been going since the 1920s, and they’ve
absorbed all sorts of black American styles of music, and preserved
them. They haven’t died out. They still use them now. There are some
concert parties even now that do the fast stepping, tap dancing ragtime
sketches and wear the minstrel makeup. But it wasn’t like walking around
in a museum. It was a living thing. And it was all through my father,
and the coincidence of Mr. Bampoe , happened to be living in my
father’s house.
hen I played with student bands (like the Deep Blues Feeling of
Achimota School), more pop music. And I met and recorded with Koo Nimo
[the great palm wine maestro of Kumasi]. And then I met E.T. Mensah, who
was a dance-band musician, and I played with his second band, and he
and I became very friendly and he took me around and introduced me to a
lot of old-time musicians and I started interviewing people. This would
be around about 1973. So around then, I began accumulating information
about the background of highlife music. And I went to the university,
and only one or two people at the university were interested in it. They
were basically antagonistic to highlife. They said it was “a hybrid
music,” and that the only genuine types of music were European classical
music or African traditional music, and that nothing could exist in
between. So I sort of fell out with these people for a while, although
things are different now. The university actually teaches highlife. But
that’s only since 5 or 6 years ago.
They had these groups in the ‘70s called cultural groups, which were
basically highlife musicians going acoustic, going back to their roots.
And a lot of Europeans actually, in recent years, when they see a
cultural group, they think it is a forerunner to highlife, but it’s
actually highlife gone back to its roots.For instance, there’s this
borborbor
music that we were recording today in the studio. If you see a
borborbor group, like the one I was recording, it’s all drums, and all
highlife rhythms. So you might think this is ancestral to highlife
music, but it’s quite the reverse. It was a traditional Ewe music that
was influenced by highlife, and incorporated highlife elements.
So these cultural groups were the Ga equivalent to borborbor groups, and they played music like
kpanlogo,
which, again, looks like traditional music, but it has been modernized
with highlife elements, and even elements of rock and roll, there are
elements of the twist in there that came in through Chubby Checker in
the early ‘60s.
Now these bands were very popular in the early ‘70s, so when I
founded my own band, which was called Bokoor, it was modeled on that,
which is basically a lot of African percussion with one guitar. And I
also played the harmonica.
[John was married to the the Ghanaian singer- dancer in this
band, Gifty Naa Dodoo for a while. He later married his present wife
Dovi Helen and had a son colled Thomas Kojo Collins ]
My first wife was a fire-eater and snake dancer. We even kept snakes under the bed.
I was the leader of the band, I was the financier, but I didn’t have
to be the star. African bands, or Ghanaian bands, particularly the
highlife guitar bands, they tend not to project one certain individual
over other people, because they take certain elements from a traditional
way of playing music. If you listen to a traditional African group, the
guy who plays least is probably going to be the master drummer, and the
guy who plays most is the apprentice. So it is in reverse order to a
lot of European music, where the man who is the star plays all the time,
and everything is focused on him or her.
B.E.: What does Bokoor mean?
J.C. (‘93): It means something like cool or
collected or calm. At first I just liked the name. Also I was playing
with the Bunzus band at the Napolean Club in Accra and Faisal Helwani
(the properieter) had another band there called Bassa Bassa (hot hot
or pandemonium ) . So I chose a name opposite to this.
[John went back to the UK for awhile, but returned to Accra in 1981.]
I’d brought recording equipment, because I had done a lot of
recording in Ghana and Nigeria, and I wasn’t very happy with the
quality, so wanted to do my own recordings. But in 1982, there was the
revolution in the country, and there was curfew for two years, so it was
impossible to run a band, especially traveling around, especially as a
foreigner. So I decided to just switch to recording. So the Bokoor Band
then became Bokoor Studio. So that’s what I’m still doing.
B.E.: So the basic rig you have there, the Tascam 4-track cassette unit is basically what you’ve been using for the whole time?
J.C. (‘93): Yeah. I’ve got a 10 channel mixer, but I basically use a 4-track recorder. And I’ve recorded in the region of about 300 bands.
B.E.: Most of these cassettes that go out into the cassette market ?
J.C. (‘93): Yeah, when I first started in the early
80s, it was records, so at first records came out of my studio. The
early ones I marketed them in Britain. Like
The Guitar and the Gun.
B.E.:That’s a great record. Was it a particularly successful one?
J.C. (’93): It wasn’t successful financially, but
people did like it in Europe. I think they liked it because it was
rather raw. They were looking for some raw sound.But in recent years,
the record industry collapsed here, around about the early ‘80s, and it
switched to cassettes, so everything now is done on cassettes. So what I
do now is I do the recording and I make the cassette master, and that
goes straight onto the market for duplication, but I don’t actually do
productions any more. I just go as far as making master tapes. Basically
I’m a recording engineer.
B.E.: And you’ve written books.
J.C. (‘93): In 1974, I wrote a book about
E.T.Mensah, I gave it to State Publishing here, they sat on it, and
finally when Retro-Afric released an album of E.T.Mensah some years ago,
I think about ‘86, and they also produced this book or booklet. And
then there was another book about the Jaguar Jokers, I also gave that to
State Publishing, they’re still sitting on it, but I’m using it as the
basis of my PhD now, in fact.
[John had already written seven books when we met in 1993, and he
made a point about how they were mostly focused on the stories of
specific musicians.]
I mean, basically, history is made by individuals. It’s not an
abstract processes. Rather historical, cultural and musical process
can often be pinpointed down to certain particular biographies.
[At the start of 1993, John was in shock at the changes he was
seeing in Ghanaian popular music. The CD had just arrived, and was not
yet recordable, and so appeared as a power grab by record companies
determined to crack down on the easy possibilities of the cassette
format. More troubling still, the very concept of the band, deeply tied
to notions of family, village, and community in Africa, was vanishing
before his eyes. John’s reflections are interesting to consider with 20
years hindsight. He was witnessing the dawn of the digital age, and was
not impressed.]
J.C. (’93): Well, it’s a worldwide phenomenon: it’s
the disappearance of live music. What’s happening in Ghana, and it’s
basically happened within the last 7 or 8 years, is that all the studios
now, except mine, and Ghana Films, no longer do live recordings. It’s
all a series of overdubs, sequencers, drum machines, synthesizers—this
type of thing. Even in the studio situation, they don’t have living
groups of human beings playing music with each other any more. It’s all
spaced out in time. The bass player comes in on Saturday afternoon and
somebody else comes on Tuesday…
On top of that, the television is also doing the lip-synch thing. I
mean, one of the reasons they are doing this, I think, is that if you
create a totally artificial music, you can’t reproduce it live, because
maybe you’re doing all sorts of harmonizing and this type of thing. So
you have to lip-synch it, because you’ve got no alternative.
In Ghana, specifically the pop music here, live bands have basically
disappeared. It’s very difficult to find a live band in Accra. If you
want to find live music in Ghana now, there’s three main areas where you
can get it. There’s the traditional music, which is still in existence,
and this is very lucky for Ghana that the traditional music hasn’t been
wiped out, because it means that there can be a re-birth at any time of
live music through the interaction with modern technology and so on
producing new styles of popular music. That’s very, very important.
Second, there’s the concert parties, which still exist, but because
of this lip-synching, and the spinners—that’s the mobile discos that
have taken over the all the city nightclubs—the concert parties are only
found in the rural areas now.
And thirdly, there’s the church. The African separatist churches
broke away from the orthodox Christians, because, you know, the whites
didn’t allow dancing in the church. It’s forbidden, or so the whites
say. That’s the European version of Christianity. Of course, if you read
the new testament and the stories of the last supper, you will find
that they
did dance. Even Jesus danced. But it was forbidden by
the European Christian idea that the body and flesh are evil and so
you shouldn’t move your body when worshipping God. So a lot of Africans
started to break away from the Christian church because of this.
Traditionally in Ghana, they worship God or their gods on their
feet. It’s unknown to actually kneel to worship God. In fact, when you
are amongst the Akan, you point upwards, you don’t get on your knees. I
mean, if you’re getting on your knees, it means maybe there’s a god
under the ground, but it’s not the Supreme God. So they broke away from
the Christian churches, these separatist churches, and started using
percussion and dancing; actually very much like the Black American
churches. Then very recently, about ten years ago, the local churhces
started to bring in the guitar bands. So then you have this evolution
of gospel music, which is basically a synthesis of gospel, or singing
about God, Jesus, and playing highlife and dancing to it. And this came
at exactly the same time when the music industry in Ghana was falling to
pieces: a military induced economic slump. So the church was becoming a
patron for a lot of popular dance-music musicians. So if you want to
see a lot of very spiritual live music, go to the churches.
So there are these three areas: the traditional music, the concert
parties, and the churches. But the popular music as such has become
totally artificial.
And one of the problems right now is that, in all the studios, live
drummers hardly ever appear anymore. It’s all done with drum-machines. I
myself have got a drum machine. I didn’t want to get it. I got it about
three years ago, because I was told by the musicians that they would
boycott my studio if I didn’t . Then, synthesizers replace horns, so
what you’re getting actually is the demise of live drummers and live
horn players, which Ghana is actually famous for. And, although you can
still find them in some places, like the church…I mean, if not for the
church, I don’t know what would have happened to a lot of musicians.
What I’m worried about it, is you only need another five or ten years
of this, and you’re going to get a whole generation that doesn’t know
about live drummers in studios, a whole generation of engineers who
don’t know how to mic up drums, who don’t even conceive of doing live
recordings.
In the studio now, I’ve always got to use the “ tweeters,” as they
call them, it’s basically the hi-hat on the drum-machine, and many of
the musicians always want me to make it loud using equalizers,
ridiculously loud. And it spoils the music; it’s cutting the music
unnecessarily. And because of things like the tweeters and this heavy,
emphatic downbeat and the upbeat, which is all totally mechanical
because it’s played on a drum machine, the voices are therefore being
cut by instruments. And in fact, because of that, in a lot of Ghanaian
music now, the voice is very low in the mix. And it’s not even a natural
voice any more. It’s a harmonized voice, or a double-tracked or
triple-tracked voice. It’s almost like people are losing the confidence
in the human voice.
So the drummers are out, the horn players are out, keyboards are in,
computers are in, and the human voice is kind of slowly sinking down
into the mix. And I think it’s exactly like the expression the: ”Ghost
the Machine” about western individuals getting lost over the centuries
in their mechanistic vision. But it’s happened so quickly here, that’s
what’s shocking to me.
It’s happening in Europe too, but because it’s happening more slowly,
there’s sort of an organized resistance or response to it. I mean in a
recording session of an orchestra you can’t take the first violinist on
Saturday, the second violinist on Sunday and so on. Or if you went to a
good jazz group and asked them to do everything via overdubs, they
would just laugh in your face. They would say, “No, it will remove the
spirit of the music, the dialogue between the musicians.” So despite all
their technology westerners s keep their most important music as live
music.
The one thing that gives me hope in Ghana is the fact that the
traditional music isn’t dead. So there’s always this possibility, that
from the traditional musicians, a new type of music can evolve. But even
that, it’s not going to be there forever.
[Fast forward twenty years. John’s Bokoor archive has withstood a
devastating flood in 2012, caused in large part through bad land
management by a neighboring saw mill. John is a senior professor at
University of Ghana now, no longer involved in music production, he
co-runs the Local Dimension highlife band (with Aaron Bebe Sukura) but
is still a savvy observer of a scene that has completely transformed
itself since our first meeting. Meanwhile, Ghana’s popular music has
been reinvented in the era of “hiplife” (a blend of highlife and hip hop
that has now diversified into several subgenres) and the Azonoto dance
craze. We start by listening back to John’s 1993 comments about the
voice “sinking into the mix.”]
J.C. (2013): Yeah, sinking into the mix. The ghost
in the machine. This did go on for about 5 or 10 years, actually. You
know, that process of synthesizers and drum machines started with Burger
highlife, the disco style created by Ghanaians living in Germany. And
it continued even more in the hiplife generation, because you didn’t
have bands at all. You just had either one singer or two singers. That
problem about the voice—I mean, one of the interesting things about
rapping or hiplife is at least the voice had to be louder again. It came
back. It was predominantly of poetic mode.
And of course, lots of bands these days are using Autotune and so on.
Ghanaians tend to use it at 101%. It’s not used subtley because it’s a
gadget, and its new, so some Ghanaian musicians want to overdo it. But
that problem is still with us. There weren’t that many studios. And
even now, there are very few studios that can do a live recording. It is
all overdubs.. And the hiplifers, they don’t really have bands. They
have studio bands. So that problem is still with us.
B.E.: But has there been a learning curve with the development of hiplife?
J.C. (2013): Yes. One of the things is they have
started to introduce live percussion with hiplife groups. With
traditional rhythms, they will bring in the
odonno or kpanlogo drums. For instance, Okyeame Kwame will use
fontomfroms or something like this, sort of humanizing the beat boxes with human drum beats.
You know, there’s nothing wrong with using a metronomic beat if you
then weave around it a live drum beats. It’s quite a good way of
recording. I personally prefer an acoustic drum. But I think even in the
West, when they started with drum machines, they started adding live
percussion to humanize it, and then adding other things like traditional
instruments, and so on. I mean, when I spoke to you back then, I was
extrapolating a situation at that time that was very negative, but it’s
sort of picked up.
B.E.:Back in 1993, you did also talk about the fact that
traditional music was alive and well, and that always leaves open the
possibility of a Renaissance.
J.C. (2013): Yeah. A re-linking. And now, that is
happening. That’s why the northern factor is so important these days.
Because in areas like the north, there is still a strong tradition of
music.
Mark LeVine: Speaking of the north, Ebo Taylor told us that
Islam in Ghana was just another aspect of life, not a determinative
identity. How do you view the role of Islam in the development of
Ghanaian culture in music?
J.C. (2013): Until recently, I would’ve said was a
disconnect between southern Ghana and northern Ghana that is heavily
Islamic , both traditionally and in the modern era. The northern
Ghanaian Sahelean traditional culture is quite distinct from the
southern forest culture in its singing, its instruments—everything. Even
after independence, you don’t get any significant northern Ghanaian
popular music until about 10 to, 15 years ago. There were just a few
exceptions. But now, the big reconnect is happening. And it’s because
Jerry Rawlings put electricity into the north 15 or 20 years ago, and
you’ve now got the beginning of a northern Ghanaian popular music,
industry, recording wise. You’re getting a massive flood of music from
the north, artists like Atongo Zimba and King Ayisoba and, Sheriff
Ghale. And this includes hip life, reggae, local music. Samini, the
hiplife artist, for instance, is a northerner, as is the reggae star
Rocky Dawuni.
Sean Barlow: At this point, we’ve had over 15 years of hiplife music. What has been your experience of that development?
J.C. (2013): There were three things going on at
the same time really: generation change, technology, and identity. The
early hiplifers had to stick their nose up at their parents, like every
young generation has to. Second, there were the changes in technology
resulting in techno-pop styles like burger highlife and hiplife. And
third there was a change in musical identity that was a byproduct of
the military era, which not only destroyed most of the live bands and
role models for the youth, but they also took music out of the education
system. So basically, by the early ‘90s, we have had a generation
going through school, , who are not familiar with Western band
instruments as the bands that used them had died off. Then the
technology came in to save them, because the youth can use a ghetto
blaster or beat box and do some rap over them . In some ways, it was
like what happened in the states with Reagan when he demoted music and a
lot of the black youth couldn’t get access to musical instruments. One
of the triggers for rap and hip-hop in America was a byproduct of the
demotion of music in the school system. Something very similar happened
in Ghana when the Rawlings government decided in the late 1980s to
make the education system more technical and therefore marginalised
music.
So live musicians had gone to the churches. But in the early days, I
really think hiplife was a statement of by the youth against their
parents. So it was decontextualized. It wasn’t American, ghetto, black
oppression music. It was simply music to get up the nose of their
parents. They would sing very fast, double-fast singing. Nobody could
understand it, not even their own parents.
And because their parents were dancing to live bands, the youth
decided to not dance. There was a time when hiplifers didn’t dance at
shows. This has changed now, of course, because of Azonto. Finally! But
it took it 15 years to get a specific dance attached to hiplife . You
know, in Ghana, highlife, Afrobeat, everything comes with its
accompanying dance. So there was this disconnection between hiplife and a
recognized form of dance that went with it. You could freestyle of
course. In fact, the style in early hiplife was to jump up and down in
front of a rap hero who himself was lip-synching.
So these were all experiments in alienation—but not like western
punk music where experiments with alienation (like noisy music, black
clothes, cadaverous make-up) were meant to prove society had become
decadent or decayed, like what Margaret Thatcher had done to Britain.
For Ghanaian youth the use of alientating techniques such as miming
etc was more a statement against the older generation.
Reggie Rockstone created the term “hiplife” in about 1994 or , 95. I
guess the style had been around for about five years. But it was sung in
American English. Then he made that first transformation by rapping in
the local language. But the music itself lagged behind. And also the
format of performance was usually mimed.
You know, in about 2000, I played at a Reggie Rockstone show with
Aaron Sukura. This was a terrible experience we had playing for 5000
hiplife youth. It was us (the Local Dimension highlife band) and the Pan
African Orchestra, led by Nana Danso Abiam. We had known Reggie
Rockstone’s father, Osei. So when he died, as a courtesy, we older
generation opened up this hiplife show in honour of Rockstone’s dad. We
played along with about 10 hiplifeacts, and in front of 5000 youth. And
when we started playing, there was almost a riot. But because of our
lyrics–we were singing a song in Twi about corruption–half the crowd
sang with us, and were able to stop the other half booing us, simply
because of the lyrics. Basically the last thing the youth wanted to see
was a live band. They are the young generation, and live bands are
dead. That’s for the older generation.
I think we managed to play one song. Fine. And then Nana Danso came
on stage, but he was playing instrumental. He was booed and couldn’t
even finish one song. Reggie had to stop the show and politely get them
off the stage. To make way for the hiplife groups
Sean Barlow: Looking at the hiplife scene now, do you find
any of these artists reaching into the traditions of the past in Ghana?
J.C. (2013): Oh yes, a whole bunch of them. Take
Obour, the head of the musicians union. He did an album with AB
Crentsil some years ago. You see, what happened was, in the beginning,
hiplife was very derivative of American music, except for the words. Not
much African music material. Reggie Rockstone, I think he used some of
Fela’s rhythms. But basically, it was more American funk music, with
African lyrics, or Twi lyrics. So about 2002, about 10 or 11 years ago,
there was the beginning of a shift towards performing live and
integrating African rhythms, and collaborations with highlife stars, for
instance Pat Thomas. I can’t remember which hip lifer made a song with
him. But Pat Thomas actually took him to court for copyright
infringements as he never aksed Pat Thomas for permission .
Banning Eyre: Did he win his case?
J.C. (2013): I think he did.
B.E.: But this sounds like an improvement overall, right?
J.C. (2013): Well, as you know, I got very depressed
because the musicians were moving towards robotic music, or alienated
forms of music. I thought, then what is the future of Ghana? But they’ve
come completely out of that now. Well maybe not completely, but I’m
trying to be optimistic. There are signs that they’re coming out of it.
And don’t forget. I went through the punk thing in Britain. But there
were reasons for that. Those experiments in alienation, sticking pins in
the face. cadaverous looks, anti-establishment lyrics and all these
types of things was a reflection on the state of UK decay. You’ve (i.e.
the ruling class) created hell on earth for us, so we’ve come to create
the background music of hell. That’s what it was about, always wearing
black and looking very somber and so on.
But in Ghana the alienation of lip-synched shows, super fast (kasa
harri) lyrics baggy trousers etc was simply a generational thing.
Sydney was the first hiplifer to attempt to play live. I’d love to find
out what was the trigger. I personally believe that he went to Britain
or America and tried to mime in front of an international audience, and
realized you can’t. Anyway, there started to be this experimentation
with highlife crossovers and taking highlife loops. And it led to a
breakaway.
B.E.: In 1993, you tied the breakdown of live bands as
popular entertainment to the breakdown of the family unit, and the
village unit, communalism generally.
J.C. (2013): Yes, that is the great disaster,
actually,one of the biggest disasters that has befallen Ghana in the
last 50 years. And luckily enough, we have a running commentary on this
because of highlife songs and concert party plays from the 1950s through
‘80s. One of the big themes in these linked performing arts was the
breakup of the family–broken homes. There were no such things as broken
homes traditionally. If you were orphaned, you were dead. You couldn’t
be a rugged individualist – if you were, you were a witch. So everyone
belonged to a social network. And what Europeans brought in through
education, modern economic stratification, urban migration, the cash
nexus and Christian norms about a nuclear family, was the destruction of
the extended family. And as you know, when anyone gets a divorce, love
turns into hatred. And when whole extended families break up it’s the
same thing and its very bitter. So actually, a ‘civil war’ broke out
among Ghanaian families, particularly in the Southern cocoa cash-crop
areas.
There were inheritance disputes, witchcraft accusations, orphaned
children. And this became a dominant theme in highlife and popular
theatre from the 1950s on as Ghana moved towards the small nuclear
family. So in popular text there were themes like ‘agyanka” (orphan)
and “abusua bone ,” bad family and witchcraft within the family.
Witchcraft in Ghana was traditionally connected with unusual wealth
and power of an individual, in a relatively egalitarian society. When
Western ‘civilization’ capitalist competition and modern social classes
came to Africa there was a massive increase in the growth of
witchcraft accusations, because witchcraft was the African metaphor for
evil stemming from excessive egoistic power and wealth. During colonial
times there were even uprising agains witches, , who were the ‘warrent
chiefs’ imposed on Africans by the British. In fact, Christianity and
colonialism, far from reducing witchcraft, rather encouraged
witchcraft accusations and anti-witchcraft movements in Ghana and
elsewhere in Africa.
I’m not saying there weren’t demonic or evil forces in traditional
Africa, but they had ways of controlling it. However, the
anti-witchcraft shrines were banned by the colonialists who at the same
time introduced capitalist inequalities and ultra individualism which
were seen in traditional African eyes, as a case of massive witchcraft.
With social stratification some people within the modern economy became
very rich and powerful whilst others become very poor. And this all
impacted the families. Families broke up. . Sociologists and
developmental people might call the breakdown of the traditional
extended family system as ‘ progress’, but in fact it led to a loss of
security and growing anxiety. So we’re lucky we have a running
commentary on this disaster through the highlife songs and concert
party plays of the very people undergoing this trauma.
B.E.:Is this running commentary continuing in today’s music?
J.C. (2013): Not in hiplife,as these are the
product of the nuclear families. Infact hiplife started in the 1990s
with middle-class urban youth. The hiplifers are the new people of the
Ghanaian individualized and consumer society. Broken homes and
witchcraft were the themes of an earlier epoch when the extended
families were still breaking up, and they hadn’t reached the modern
nuclear family state.
One of the problems with hiplife in connection with individualism is
that it’s from an urban generation who want to become famous fast. So
they’re very prone to go onto radio and television and make themselves
famous artificially. The DJs are their own peer group and so there’s a
lot of exposure on the radio to hiplife. But this is not so for the
church. The church is operating in a more organic way. But that’s where,
the future of Ghanaian popular dance music is really being determined.
Infact some estimates put the gospel music of the Ghanaian churches
as 60 or even 70 percent of the total output of the countries popular
music.
Only 15% of the Ghanaian population is Muslim (quite different from
Nigeria) whilst 65% is now Christian. Black forms of Christianity have
very beneficial effects. Look at America and the black churches with
the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King. And don’t forget what
Karl Marx said.about religion being the ‘opiate of the people’.
Sensible enough and we all know that. In the same phrase from his
Communist Manifesto
of the 1840s he continues that religion is the ‘sigh of the
oppressed’.. He’s getting a little bit deeper there. Then he goes really
deep when he ends by saying that . religion is the ‘heart of a
heartless world’ . It is the last part of that statement, that’s always
truncated. And his observation applies right now to Ghana. The ‘heart’
of Ghana, was embedded in its live performance, traditional music and
highlife. But Ghana has moved towards a ‘heartless world’ , of
military governments, hi-technology and neo-liberalism. So, one aspect
of the heart of a Ghanaian, in terms of music performance, has gone
into the African churches with their dancing to live gospel music. But
not so much into the commercial popular music sector because there is
little live performance and only few clubs that cater for this form of
music ,.. But there are thousands of churches.If you really want to get a
sense of how lively and spirited the popular music was in Ghana, say 30
years ago when the center of everything were live shows, then go to a
Ghanaian church.
B.E.:You seem to have mixed feelings about the effects of these Protestant churches.
J.C. (2013): Because in Ghana, it was back to
front. Europeans introduced Western capitalism to a country that still
believed in family connections, ,and communal taboos and so on.
Collective punishment,collective responsibilities and not individual
rights. In traditional Africa, it wasn’t the individual that was the
unit of society,it was the family. But these ideas were depicted
negatively by Europeans – as nepotism, superstition and against personal
liberty and individual rights,
What we’ve seen in the last 30 years is the failure of the African
alternative to modern technological development. It’s different from
what we’ve seen happen in China, or Japan, or India that survived
colonial balkanization . With the or destabilization or even overthrow
of the early Pan African socialist leaders (like Nkrumah and Lumumba),
this wasn’t allowed to happen in Africa. So they’ve gone to the Western
model. But to do this, African have to go now through a Protestant
Awakening, just as Europe did in the 18
th and 19
th
centuries with it resulting ‘work ethic and heightened sennse of
individualism. But Ghanaian are going into an individualistic mode
years after the creation of a capitalist society set up by the
colonialists , So it’s back to front as compared to the West where a
Protestant Reformation and Awakening had to occur before the forces of
capitalism and private property could be unleashed . So these days many
African want to become like the West, not just in the system of rule,
but in the way they think and play music, individual rights, egoism and
the solo super-star. So, obviously, the Protestant religion is very
favorable, because it boosts individual rights and responsibilities,
instead of the collective responsibilities and punishments of the
traditional gods and so on. Nevertheless, the African churches do
retain some of the old African principles such as spiritual healing,
posession (by the Holy Ghost) exorcism (of witchcraft) and dancing as a
form of prayer
B.E.: So even though so many of these churches have become
“Africanized” in various ways, you see an underlying problem with the
whole ideology of individualism?
J.C. (2013): It’s worse for the Africans.
Because when they develop their systems, they have to compete with
advanced capitalist systems, and when they create geniuses, they flow
out of the countries in a ‘brain drain’. Like all the doctors who are
in striking in Ghana now. Out of let’s say 2000 doctors who have been
trained at Ghanaian universities over the last 30 years, there’s only
about 600 and Ghana. My figures maybe a little out of date, but it’s
something like that. How could Isaac Newton and James Watson and all the
mentors of the Industrial Revolution have created their inventions if
they were being sucked out of their countries by a superpower?
So in fact, it’s impossible for Africa to develop independently,
unless they come together like China or India. I mean the great miracle
of the modern world is China and India in that they have survived
colonialism without becoming balkanized. They weren’t divided up into
little estates like as has happened Africa or Latin America. And it’s
because of that there there’s the world’s center of gravity is shifting
in the world to these powers. Whether they make a better job of that
than the West, I don’t know. But if you look at China or India, they
have both put two things together which the West was prepared to destroy
the planet over. That was capitalism and communism which westerners
considered diametrically opposed and so were ever ready to destroy the
world in a Cold War. But with India and China you have communist areas
and capitalist areas operating side-by side in the same country They’ve
done what was impossible for the Western powers.
This is why there’s still some hope for us. And I would advise any
African country to tie their laces to the Chinese and Indians, not to
the West. Because the West is actually counter-developing Africa, not
just because they are extracting raw materials but because they’re
sucking up many of Africa’s intelligent and successful; people, Also
the West has divided Africa into fifty small countries. None of them,
except maybe Nigeria and South Africa are big enough to sustain an
independent economy. So I think the problem is trying to create a modern
technological society when you’ve got advanced technologies that want
to keep you at the level of producing raw materials, stealing your
brains and interfering in your political systems . That’s really the
problem.
Luckily, there is China and India — I mean, what a miracle. And we
owe this to two of the greatest men in the world Ghandi and Mao Tse
Tung– they both made sure their countries survived colonialism intact
– and have gone on to become continental powers. This is why the
Chinese colonialism is different from the American British or French
one. The Chinese don’t interfere with the politics of the country that
they are investing in, whether it’s a dictatorship or democracy. That’s
not their business. But America and Europe want to invade countries and
overthrow governments, like Ghana and the Congo in the sixties, or
Somalia, northern Mali and Libya today. All this does is unleash a
destabilization process in Africa.
B.E.: Coming back to music in Ghana, I get the feeling that,
overall, you are feeling more positive about what is going on than you
were twenty years ago.
J.C. (2013): Yes
then people like me Koo Nimo, E.T.Mensah, King Bruce and Kwaa Mensah
were so worried that that youth were not interested in highlife that we
set up the BAPMAF archives to preserve this music. But things are now
changing and many young musicians and media people are becoming
interested in both highlife and folkoric music
. If
you want to know, there were two people—and you can tell them this if
you see them—of the modern generation who made me realize I was not on
my own. I won’t say that I saw them as sons exactly, but I knew that
something good was going to come in Ghana. The two people were Paa K..
Holbrook-Smith and Panji Anoff. In the early 1990’s. I saw nothing on
the horizon except more miming and machine music. And then, Paa K put
the first specialist highlife program on Groove FM, and later he
collaborated with BAPMAF in various highlife festivals . He really
knows his onions about the history of highlife and in the early 1990s
it was just a joy to be able to sit down and listen to a Ghanaian DJ
talking in depth about highlife. I thought, “What a relief!”
And then there is Panji Anoff, the same sort of thing, He did an
in-depth study of why live music is more important than machine music.
He did quite serious research on this using oscilloscopes and visiting
analogue recording studios in Jamaica. He proved that you cannot
actually do away with live music and he also helped the hiplife
generation re-connect with highlife and folkloric music. I also did
highlife projects with Panji
And then there were other positive developments like the interest of
the French and German Embassy cultural organisations in highlife and
live music and the upsurge of Ghanaian festivals that project highlife,
such as Music of African Origin. Here’s another extraordinary story,
in connection with radio stations. When you came to the country in 1993
, we thought that the GBC—the Ghanaian Broadcasting Corporation—had no
record collection. Because at that time even a German researcher called
Dr. Wolfgang Bender had brought some German government music
preservation money and discovered that there was none to be preserved.
Working with this German and using this same money, we digitizeds
six-hundred hours of field recordings made by Professor Nketia and
others of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana
‘. That’s why we did it, because there was no GBC archives. We have now
discovered that, in fact, they had a secret stash of 20,000 records in a
room that had been locked and sealed. Nobody had been able to get to it
until a German called Marcus Coester , about two years ago, managed to
get into the place. He brought more German money (via Dr. Bender) , and
set up a place where they can digitize the radio records and tapes,
catalogue them , and air some of the music on programs,every
Saturday. So this is a huge resource, which we didn’t even know about.
They were sitting on it, and we thought it had disappeared into smoke.
So this is another very positive thing..
And also, we should never forget Charles Wereko-Brobbey who set up
the very first private radio station in Ghana. This was just like Radio
Caroline. You know the story about Radio Caroline in Britain? It was
illegal in the sixties to have a private radio station, so the station
was put on a boat near the British coast . And of course, the British
government stormed this pirate radio boat and. But in the end, the
government had to change the law and allow private radio stations .
Well, we have a Ghanaian who did the same thing. Wereko-Brobbey. He set
up a Radio Eye , an illegal private radio station. And of course, he
was arrested, and it was closed down. But after that, the Ghanaian
government was forced to open up the airwaves. Now we have around 240
radio and TV stations in Ghana. He’s a very contentious character, but
he really did something wonderful for Ghana.
B.E.:Amazing. What year was that?
J.C. (2013): That would have been about 1993 or
‘94?. And then the government had to de-regulate the airwaves. In short,
Borbbey was willing to take on the government an as a result opened up
the airwaves . He’s an interesting man, because he’s also the only
person here who has ever published books on highlife. My two books on
highlife published in Ghana were published by him and his Anansesem
Press in 1996. These were “Highlife Time” and “E.T. Mensah the King of
Highlife.”
Originally published @afropop.org
