Highlife Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana

4. “The Highlife Was Born in Ghana”: Politics, Culture, and the Making of a National Music, 1950–1965

147 On July 1, 1960, the independent nation of Ghana became a republic, enshrined with a new draft constitution and office of the president, which was assumed by the prime minister and leader of the CPP, Kwame Nkrumah . That same day, his government made two important announcements concerning dance band highlife. The first was that highlife was Ghana’s “national” dance music: a pronouncement that many listeners interpreted as either a confirmation of its wide popularity among individuals of different ages, ethnicities, and occupations or recognition of its prominence in the years surrounding the country’s independence. The second declaration was that this national form needed to change. More specifically, the government called upon dance band musicians and patrons to relinquish their embrace of international elements and make the music into something that was more “Ghanaian” in composition and character. Nkrumah asked performers to enhance the genre’s local meaning by utilizing a regular tempo, by limiting, and over time eliminating, foreign numbers, and by encouraging a standardized set of dance steps that all residents could adopt. He also insisted that the music needed a new name. As an English-language title, “highlife” did not befit a musical genre that was essentially “Ghanaian in character and African in content.” Although he ultimately charged the National Association of Teachers of Dancing with the task of selecting a new moniker, Nkrumah proposed rechristening the music osibi, an Akan term that made explicit four “The Highlife Was Born in Ghana”: Politics, Culture, and the Making of a National Music, 1950–1965 148 Highlife Satur day Night reference to osibisaaba, the proto-highlife that had flourished many decades earlier.1 Although these proclamations had little immediate impact on dance band highlife’s form or character (Nkrumah’s proposed name change never took hold), they demonstrate the music’s importance to the wider realms of national politics and culture in the years surrounding Ghana’s 1957independence.2 Asmanyscholarshaveshown,thenewAfricancountries of the 1950s and 1960s were places of nation-building: a project that attempted to privilege local, instead of colonial, elements and inculcate a shared patriotic sentiment among diverse populations. Although nation -building was not a process confined to the formal political sphere, it was one that many newly independent governments hoped to direct and control. In Ghana and elsewhere, optimistic officials used a wide range of cultural forms to foster a shared sense of belonging, allegiance, and cultural unity. By fostering this sense of “we-ness,” they hoped to engineer a cohesive nation in which culture and politics were intimately intertwined. Nation-building was not, as Thomas Turino emphasizes, a project concerned with the political aspects of nationalism, but it was a way for newly independent governments to outline and legitimize the scope of their desired political control.3 Over the course of its tenure as Ghana’s main political force, roughly the period from 1950 to 1965, the CPP leaned especially hard on dance band highlife as a means of outlining and codifying what it meant to be “Ghanaian.”Atthesametime,itseffortstonationalizehighlifewereoften riddled with tensions and inconsistencies. By the time of the proclamationsmentionedabove ,mostGhanaiansapproachedthemusicasanopen arenawheretheycouldpursueindividualratherthancollectiveaims.The state could easily proclaim highlife to be a national cultural form, but it could not easily refashion or repackage it as a component of communal practice. As a result, Nkrumah’s government had to expend a considerable amount of energy attempting to alter how, and why, men and women shouldhitthedanceflooronSaturdayNights.Thisuphillbattlewasmade all the harder because of the government’s own shifting needs, concerns, andfuturevisions.AlthoughCPPofficialswereconsistentlyeagertoconsolidate , even extend, their political authority, they approached highlife differently in the years before and after Ghana’s independence. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the CPP engaged highlife as a way to enter an intimate sphere of social interaction, improve its ability to supervise urban populations,andgainincreasedleverageasasocialandmoral,ratherthan simply political, force. Realizing that it was too weak to alter the music’s 149 “The Highlife Was Born in Ghana” recreational culture, it changed its approach. In the years leading up to 1957, it employed the music to mobilize broad publics and perpetuate its popularity among diverse groups of people. Following independence, a newly empowered CPP rekindled its ambitious approach to highlife. Eagertocarryoutitsownplansfordevelopmentandmodernization ,itused dancebandhighlifetotranslateofficialrhetoricaboutabstractideas—the nation, citizenship, and the African Personality—into clear domains of individual practice and communal identification. It also rallied the assistance of various state institutions and coercive tactics to force popular musical enthusiasts to abide by its...