Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how one of Ghana's most prominent genres of popular music, dance band highlife, which is often lauded as a medium that catpured everyday urban realities, also reveals much about state efforts to create a "Ghanaian" identity and arbitrate a "national" past.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which one of Ghana's most prominent genres of popular music, dance band highlife, encapsulates both "on the ground" realities of everyday life in mid-twentieth century urban Ghana as well as the newly independent state's efforts to create a "Ghanaian" national identity. In particular it engages 1) the intimate, yet subjective, importance that the music had for urban residents during the middle decades of the 20th century; 2) the ways in which the Ghanaian state coopted highlife in order to buttress its own attempts at consolidating social, political, and cultural power. In the process, it asserts that the music warrants recognition not simply as a form of "popular culture" that can be read to access "ordinary" persons' consciousness or identity, but a politically charged, elastic, and deceptively complex medium that can be used, like other archival sources, to arbitrate the past.

The paper's reflections on highlife's suitability as a kind of historical "repository" are important for several reasons. At one level, they demonstrate how the music's ability to embody a diverse array of concerns, including those of male musicians, urban audiences, and government authorities, makes it a promising source of information. More importantly, however, they unveil that highlife can be used not merely as a way to reconstruct the past, but to arbitrate its contents, importance, and meaning.