If you want to understand Ghanaian culture, start with highlife. Not as background music — as a document. Every era of Ghanaian history is preserved in the highlife of its time, pressed into 78s and LPs and cassette tapes, sung in Twi and Ga and Fante and English, and passed down like an oral tradition with a backbeat.
Origins at the coast
Highlife emerged in the early 20th century along the coast of what was then the Gold Coast. It was a collision: the rhythms of traditional Akan music, the harmonies European missionaries brought, the instruments sailors traded, and the urban energy of port cities like Sekondi and Cape Coast.
The name itself tells the story. Early highlife was associated with the elite — the "high life" — played at formal dances for the educated class. But music has a way of escaping its intended audience. By the 1950s, highlife belonged to everyone.
The golden era
The 1960s and 70s were the peak. E.T. Mensah's Tempos Band. The African Brothers. Pat Thomas. Ebo Taylor. These were the architects of a sound that was distinctly Ghanaian and internationally recognised. Kwame Nkrumah understood the power of culture; state-sponsored music programmes put instruments in the hands of a generation.
The guitar became the defining voice of the era. The highlife guitar style — intricate, melodic, rhythmically sophisticated — is one of the great contributions to world music. If you have ever wondered where the guitar lines in afrobeats come from, trace them back here.
After the golden era
Economic hardship, political instability, and the arrival of foreign sounds in the 1980s hit highlife hard. Many of its greatest artists emigrated. But highlife never died. It went underground, adapted, merged with new influences, and re-emerged.
Today, artists like Amakye Dede — still performing, still vital — carry the tradition forward. A new generation of producers is sampling classic highlife and building something new from the architecture of the old.
What you hear on Sankofa Sessions
Every morning from 6 to 9, Sankofa Sessions plays through this history in real time. Sankofa is the Akan concept of learning from the past to move forward. We pick the music that earns that name. Come listen.