Long before Afrobeats filled stadiums, there was highlife. It grew up in Ghana in the early twentieth century, blending Akan rhythms and melodies with brass bands, guitars and the music of sailors and soldiers passing through the coast. By the 1950s, bandleaders like E.T. Mensah — often called the King of Highlife — were filling dance halls across West Africa.
The sound of independence
Highlife became the soundtrack of a hopeful moment. As Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957, its dance bands carried a sense of glamour and possibility across the region. In Nigeria, the style took on its own character, and a young Fela Kuti cut his teeth playing highlife-jazz before inventing Afrobeat.
Every lilting guitar line in modern Afropop owes a little rent to highlife.
Reinvention, again and again
The genre kept moving. Guitar-band highlife thrived in the countryside; in the 1980s, Ghanaian musicians in Germany created “burger highlife”, pairing the old melodies with synthesisers and drum machines. Hiplife in the 1990s fused it with rap, and its echoes run all the way through the azonto era and today’s Afrobeats.
So when you hear a bright, interlocking guitar riff over a relaxed groove in a new hit, listen again. Highlife never left — it just changed its clothes.
