Highlife Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana by Nate Plageman (review)

Highlife Saturday Night is an impressive monograph that should remind scholars of the porous nature of disciplinary boundaries, and reaffirm the important perspective symbolic-aesthetic forms like music offer the humanities and social sciences, and in this case, the construction of West African social history. “Highlife,” a “slippery term” (13) encompassing multiple Ghanaian popular music styles whose relevance continues to be marked in contemporary forms like “gospel-highlife” or “hiplife,” is central to the focus with the aim at demonstrating how popular music evolved as a site for sociopolitical transformation and contestation at the intersection of gender, generational norms, and shifting power relations in urban Gold Coast/Ghana. Essential to Plageman’s conclusion is the pendulum-like way highlife and urban recreation swung back and forth between asserting youth aspirations and modifying gendered rules, to periods of retrenchment and the reestablishment of more conservative social relations by those in positions of power.

The significance of Plageman’s research resides in a perceived lacuna in the scholarly record privileging highlife’s musical or aesthetic features over performance venues, lyrics, and the dynamic forms of physical, visual, and nonverbal display characteristic of “Saturday Nights”—the temporal context when highlife is experienced as a vital part of urban life. Although some may find him guilty of overstating the lack of attention to generational, gender, and power issues through a highlife prism (17), he has gone well beyond such studies (which he identifies) in depth and historical scope. This is clearly evident in the forty-five pages of footnotes, an impressive discography, an extensive bibliography including archival research carried out in Ghana and the UK, and 110 formal interviews with notable artists and connoisseurs. Highlife Saturday Night is lucidly written and an important scholarly contribution for music enthusiasts interested in ethnomusicology, African history, and anthropology.

The introduction, five chapters and epilogue roughly adhere to a chronological flow. The first two chapters focus on the colonial period. Music’s established history of reinforcing existing hierarchies and promoting particular values in pre-colonial societies continued during the early colonial period as an effective tool for British indoctrination efforts. This period in Gold Coast history was marked by intensive periods of rural–urban migration to southern coastal towns, which was stimulated by the introduction of wage labor and development of new forms of social mobility. With the establishment of Saturday Night as a time of leisure within a fixed workweek, and proliferation of European instruments in the region, social drinking at local gatherings or drinking bars became the context for new forms of music and dance to a newly established demographic of Gold Coasters. Young people embraced this earliest form of “proto-highlife,” called adaha, as a novel vehicle for self-expression, but after spreading into the hinterlands was seized upon by traditional authorities and elites to assert their status and political authority. New musical forms combining European brass and local instruments such as osibisaaba, ashiko, and konkoma emerged to fill the void, but traditional and colonial authorities had succeeded in enacting legal measures to undermine or control them. By the 1920s local akrakyefoɔ (clerks), the well-educated rising middle-class in Gold Coast towns, drew on music and dance as a means to garner political control, social mobility, and redefine gendered norms. Through the development of literary social clubs, which as part of their activities included elaborate ballroom dances featuring popular styles like the foxtrot and quadrille, came the establishment of dance-band highlife that colonial authorities embraced, and that promoted middle-class values and behavioral norms. In the wake of economic hardship during the Great Depression, these events opened up to wider audiences thereby leading to the expansion of highlife’s popularity and performance in more diverse and socially stratified contexts.

Chapters 3 and 4 chart the social transformations and contestations connected with highlife’s development from the late colonial to the early independence period. The urban nightclub increasingly became the...