Highlife: The Sound That Built Modern African Music

Before Afrobeats. Before hiplife. Before any of the African music that dominates global charts today, there was highlife.

Highlife is the foundation. It is the music that my grandparents danced to. It is the music that shaped every African genre that came after it. And most people outside of West Africa have never heard of it.

That needs to change.

Where Highlife Began

Highlife started in Ghana in the early 1900s. The name comes from the fact that it was initially played at high-society events, the kind attended by the Ghanaian elite and British colonial officials. But music has a way of escaping the rooms it was born in.

The sound was a fusion. Ghanaian musicians took the rhythms and melodies of traditional Akan music and mixed them with the brass band music that British colonists had brought to West Africa. They added guitar styles influenced by music from Sierra Leone and the Caribbean. The result was something that felt both deeply African and completely new.

By the 1930s, highlife had spread from the elite ballrooms to the streets. Dance bands were playing in clubs and hotels across Ghana and Nigeria. The music was joyful, sophisticated, and irresistibly danceable.

E.T. Mensah and the Golden Age

The man who took highlife to the world was Emmanuel Tetteh Mensah. Born in Accra in 1919, E.T. Mensah learned to play the fife in a school band before moving to saxophone and trumpet. In 1948, he formed the Tempos, a dance band that would become the most influential group in West African music history.

The Tempos played a refined, sophisticated highlife that drew on jazz and Latin music while remaining rooted in Ghanaian rhythms. They toured across West Africa, playing to packed dance halls in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast. They were the first African band to record for a major international label.

Louis Armstrong heard the Tempos play when he visited Ghana in 1956 and called E.T. Mensah the King of Highlife. The name stuck.

Highlife and Independence

The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of highlife, and not by coincidence. This was the era of African independence. Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957. Nigeria followed in 1960. Across the continent, African nations were claiming their sovereignty.

Highlife was the soundtrack to this moment. It was music that said: we are here, we are proud, we are modern, and we are African. All at the same time.

Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, understood the cultural power of highlife. He used it as a tool of national identity. Highlife was played at state functions. It was broadcast on national radio. It was the sound of a new nation finding its voice.

From Highlife to Hiplife to Afrobeats

In the 1990s, a new generation of Ghanaian artists took highlife and mixed it with hip hop. Reggie Rockstone started rapping in Twi over hip hop beats and called it hiplife. It was controversial at first. Purists said he was destroying highlife. But hiplife opened the door for a generation of Ghanaian artists who would go on to influence global music.

Sarkodie, the most decorated rapper in Ghanaian history, came from the hiplife tradition. So did Stonebwoy, who mixes dancehall with Ghanaian rhythms. So did Afrobeats (the Ghanaian artist, not the genre), whose real name is Nana Richard Abiona and who has collaborated with some of the biggest names in global music.

And in Nigeria, the highlife tradition fed directly into Afrobeats. The guitar patterns, the rhythmic structures, the call and response vocals. All of it traces back to highlife.

Highlife and Afropop Socks

When I think about what Afropop Socks represents, I think about highlife. Not just the music, but the spirit of it. The idea that African culture can be sophisticated and joyful and modern and deeply rooted in tradition all at the same time.

The Kente cloth patterns on our socks carry the same energy as highlife music. They are ancient and contemporary. They are Ghanaian and universal. They are the kind of thing that makes you feel connected to something much bigger than yourself.

E.T. Mensah died in 1996. But every time I hear a Burna Boy song with that rolling guitar pattern, I hear highlife. The music never really ends. It just keeps finding new forms.