Highlife music occupies a central place in Ghana’s cultural history, often described as the soundtrack to the birth of modern Ghana.
But Dr Eric Sunu Doe of the university of Ghana in an interview with Frema Adu Nyame on Channel One TV, cautions against casually defining highlife as “indigenous Ghanaian music.”
According to him, scholars must be precise with language. The term indigenous typically refers to music that is ethnic, rooted in a particular tribe, and tied to traditional settings — such as Adowa and other community-based forms. Highlife, he argues, does not neatly fall into that category.
Rather than being purely indigenous, highlife is a hybrid popular music form, a fusion shaped by colonial contact, missionary education, urban migration and African creativity. It emerged from popular culture, not from a single ethnic tradition.
Dr. Doe explains that highlife has “no one engine.” It developed in towns such as Accra, Cape Coast and Winneba during a time when educated Africans, known as the “Akrachifo” formed a new middle class. Living away from their traditional homes, they blended their native musical identities with Western instruments and urban social life.
In this sense, highlife is uniquely Ghanaian, not because it is ethnically pure, but because it reflects Ghana’s encounter with modernity.
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