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

3. The Friction on the Floor: Negotiating Nightlife in Accra, 1940–1960

100 On Saturday Nights in the mid-1950s, a young Alex Moffatt would sneak out of his family house so that he could go to the Tip-Toe, Seaview, or anotherofAccra ’smanynightclubs.Topreparefortheseexcursions,Moffatt would raid his uncle’s closet, select a suit, tie, and pair of black shoes, and inform the other members of his family that hewas retiring to bed. When it was clear that everyone else had fallen asleep, Moffatt got up, changed clothes, and quietly made his exit. When he returned home hours later, he took extreme care to open the front door, replace the borrowed items, and enter his room without alerting his unsuspecting parents, uncle, or grandmother. On Sunday morning, Moffatt awoke to a household that had no idea that he had ever left. For the next few years, Moffatt and his equally devious peers used these secretive methods to gain access to one of the city’s most exciting spheres of musical recreation. At that time,manycityresidentsupheldnightclubsas the placetogoonSaturday Nights. Withintheir walls,large crowdsgatheredto enjoy the offeringsof a new generation of highlife dance bands, such as Accra’s Rhythm Aces, the Black Beats, and E. T. Mensah and the Tempos, that had taken the colony by storm. But nightclubs offered patrons more than an evening of music and dance. Like many other residents, Moffatt and his friends sought out these venues not simply to revel in highlife’s vibrant sound; they did so in order to actively participate in a wider struggle concerning the colony’s social and cultural future.1 thr ee The Friction on the Floor: Negotiating Nightlife in Accra, 1940–1960 101 The Friction on the Floor While certain components of Moffatt’s musical outings mirrored the popular musical exploits of earlier generations, they were distinctly postwar phenomena characterized by different venues, musical influences , and audiences. Unlike their predecessors, Moffatt and his peers did not take part in an impromptu musical performance or an elaborate ball dance catered by a large dance orchestra. Instead, they sought out a new kind of dance band: a small combo that performed a revised form of highlife alongside a variety of imported musical styles including ballroom, jazz, calypso, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and rock ’n’ roll. His destination,thenightclub,wasalsonew.Unlikeprivatesocialclubs,these werecommercializedspacesopentoawideswathofcityresidents.Established elites, desk workers, and other middle-class people now attended such venues, but so did manual laborers, apprentice workers, youth and students, and newly arrived migrants from other rural and urban areas. From time to time, even members of the colony’s crumbling colonial administration and rising crop of nationalist leaders entered their gates, where they rubbed shoulders and shared the dance floor with the rest of the assembled crowd. Asnightclubswerediverseenvironmentsofrecreationandexchange, they also became spaces of formidable friction. In the years following the Second World War, Accra was a city of considerable, and often intense, political and social transformations.2 The most obvious concerned the fate of British colonial rule. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, large numbers of people voiced adamant calls for self-government and political independence. While the emerging movement for decolonization was spearheaded by public protest and the rise of Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP), the city became so politicized that relatively few spaces, including nightclubs, remained exempt from the movement’s reach. Outside of party politics, many residents embraced popular music as a means of inculcating and celebrating the prospects of independence. The links between the music and the political transfer were particularly salient on March 6, 1957, when thousands of men and women marked the official birth of a sovereign Ghana by congregating together and dancing to highlife’s jubilant sounds. At the same time, men and women flocked to nightclubs in order to negotiate more subtle, but no less important, transformations. Throughout the 1950s, individuals hit the dance floor to contest the continuities and changes that would accompany the abolition of colonial rule. For those who held positions atop the city’s existing hierarchies—including members of the middle class and older residents of gendered and 102 Highlife Satur day Night generational standing—the ousting of the British was an opportunity to retrench, even expand, their influence. On Saturday Nights, they perpetuatedhighlife ’sprewarforminordertocommunicatetheirintentions. They donned elaborate attire, favored learned forms of dance, and insisted on the maintenance of formal etiquette. But for others, the postwar years were a time to set aside past arrangements in favor of something new...