Highlife Saturday Night, African Expressive Cultures

The story of highlife music and the culture that revolved around it in Ghana, before and after independence—includes links to audiovisual content.

Highlife Saturday Night captures the vibrancy of Saturday nights in Ghana—when musicians took to the stage and dancers took to the floor—in a penetrating look at musical leisure during a time of social, political, and cultural change.

Framing dance band “highlife” music as a central medium through which Ghanaians negotiated gendered and generational social relations, Nate Plageman shows how popular music was central to the rhythm of daily life in a West African nation. He traces the history of highlife in urban Ghana during much of the twentieth century and documents a range of figures who fueled the music’s emergence, evolution, and explosive popularity. This book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.