As is well recognised now, the notion that African societies were static and that the
so called “Dark Continent” had no history is a colonial invention. In Ghana and
other parts of British Imperial Africa this idea was particularly associated with the
indirect rule period of the late 19th century when the British began to control their
African colonies through traditional chiefs and emirs rather than the educated coast-
al African elites. The fact that there had been numerous African nations and empires
with their own historical dynamics was quite ignored. They became relegated to
mere tribes and static village systems that had to be guided and civilised. Thus the
emphasis of the ethnographers of the period was to freeze African social systems into
a timeless “ethnological present”.

The comparative musicologists of the period likewise considered “authentic”
African performing arts to be archaic and unchanging. This was, however, far from
the truth and as professor J. H. K. Nketia discusses in the case of Ghana, there was
musical syncretism going on between the Hausa, Dagomba, Akans, Ewe and Ga
people through trade, war and migration long before European contact. ¹

Another form of traditional musical dynamic was generational change and con-
flict. For example youthful age-sets (secret initiation societies and warrior associa-
tions) could, through innovative performance, ridicule members of the older
generation, question priests and even overthrow chiefs. Likewise the youth continu-
ally modified recreational drum-dance styles, which was often initially frowned
upon by elders, thus acting as an identifier for each new generation. ² The young in
turn became elders and new recreational styles emerged in the next generation in
much the same way as popular dance-music styles in the West mark out the waxing
and waning of youthful sub-cultures.

Because recreational music and dance styles are continually open to generational
modifications, it is from these, rather than the more conservative and slow-changing
ritual and court performance, that so much of Ghana's acculturated or transcultured
popular dance-music arose. ³ During the pre-colonial era novelty in recreational
music was purely an internal African affair, being the combined result of the contin-
uous youthful re-interpretation and re-cycling of older styles, and of the absorption
of new elements from neighbouring ethnic groups contacted through proximity,
trade, migration and warfare. However, during the 19th and 20th centuries novelty

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