MMANUEL Teteh 
of Africa's forelusidans 
passed on early 
in August, 1996. By his demise 
the West African subregion 
which he influenced more directly 
and indeed all of Africa 
lost yet another giant, an innovator, 
composer, singer, multiinstrumentalist 
and band 
leader. 
Born in Accra, Ghana where he 
also died at 78, E.T Mensah was directly 
involved in the pioneering and formative 
processes of highlife music. His earlier 
years were spent i n the vortex of the crosscultural 
currents which pervaded colonial 
Ghana and the west coast of Africa and 
thus helped to forge these influences to 
develop a trado-modern African musical 
expression that became highlife. 
His music career started in 1932, 
when he played piccolo in school with a 
vibrant big band formed and led by Joe 
Lamptey, ET's school master and mentor. 
Called the Accra Orchestra, the band 
played imitative foreign music that was in 
vogue at the time - ball room, ragtime, 
swing and rumba. ET developed a burning 
passion for the sax and learnt to play 
it alongside the piccolo, and by 1936 
moved to collaborate with drummer Guy 
Warren, one of the most resourceful of 
Ghanaian musicians of the time, ET's alto 
being one of the fiercest and most proficient 
of the five saxophones that the fifteen 
piece band paraded. Much as Guy 
Warren's drums were pr/ominent, the music 
saw the beginning of African flavoured 
dance music. 
Mensah qualified as a pharmacist 
in 1943, a profession which interfered 
with his music for some while. 1940 
however had been the beginning of his 
musical accomplishments, the year he 
joined the Black and White Spots, a 
highly professional band led by a Scottish 
soldier, Jack Leopard who acquired dance 
band musicianship at the professional 
level in London. Sergeant Jack Leopard 
led by far the greatest, most promising 
band at the time and playing with the 
Black and White Spots was like training in 
a college of music. Here ET had his first 
induction to harmonic progression and 
big band arrangement. Successful though 
this turned out to be in terms of musicianship 
and financial reward ET still thirsted 
for a popular music type based on 
African rhythms, an alternative to the 
foreign dance music that was prevalent. 
1947 brought Guy Warren and ET together 
again, this time under the leadership 
of pianist Joe Kelly, thus, the original 
Tempos band was born. The band played 
sophisticated and adventurous Ghanaian 
songs. The band was a musical success 
but lacked commercial viability. 
ET realised himself in 1948 when 
he went his separate way and founded 
his own Tempos band. By now he had the 
experience and musical ability to accomplish 
his dream, that is, evolving a popular 
African-oriented type of music in a 
scene dominated by Western dance mu- 
A broadcaster's tribute to Highlife King, E.T Mensah 
Benson 
Idonije 
Highlife immediately caught on and 
spread in influence to other West African 
countries which already were more than 
eager to be freed from cultural imperialism. 
Nigeria was the first to be liberated 
in 1 949, through the late Bobby Benson, 
himself a leading band leader in Nigeria 
at the time playing the Glenn Miller - 
Count Basie - Benny Goodman type of 
swing.
Mensah's first visit to Nigeria converted 
Bobby Benson who eventually recorded 
Taxi Driver' the big highlife hit 
later to be popularised in America by 
pianist Randy Western. 
Mensah became highly elevated 
when Ghana attained independence in 
1957 under Kwame Nkrumah. Ghana 
extended the territories of highlife firmly to 
Cote d' Ivoire, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. 
Highlife was played before heads of state 
and African musicians were influenced 
across different national borders. ET 
Mensah was proclaimed the king of 
highlife, and his recordings were instant 
hits selling beyond West Africa. 
The top musicians in Ghana in the 
Fifties and Sixties were graduates of the 
Tempos Band sticking out on their own 
after serving their various terms of apprenticeship. 
King Bruce left the Tempos Band 
to form the Black Beats, Joe Kelly deserted 
for the Red Spots. In 1 961, Jerry Hansen 
left to form the Ramblers Dance Band. The 
list is very long, and even though some of 
these individuals often deserted with prominent 
members of the Tempos Band, it was 
not difficult for Mensah to regroup and 
maintain the same Tempos sound that 
was unique and easily identifiable 
A major landmark in the life of 
Mensah was the visit of Louis Armstrong to 
Ghana in 1 956. As the foremost trumpet 
player and band leader, he performed 
with satchmo's all stars and received 
standing ovations from large audiences 
who held them both in high artistic esteem. 
The highlife music era began to 
decline in 1 969 when ETMensah took the 
Tempos Band to England. Most of the 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 1/ NO 4
regular Tempos musicians had by then left 
and so the band consisted of new members 
whose orientation was different. Instead 
of sticking to h'ighlife for which he 
was well acclaimed, ET succumbed to the 
pressures and demands of the time, and 
played a mixture of soul, reggae and 
calypso. 
He was invited to Lagos, Nigeria in 
1 986 by some of his old friends, among 
which was club owner Victor Olaiya, 
himself a graduate of the Tempos Band. It 
was a fruitful and memorable visit, culminating 
in the recording of a monumental 
album, Giants of Highlife, a collector's 
item that brought him and Olaiya jamming 
together and evoking the memories 
of the Sixties. 
ET Mensah was honoured by the 
government of Ghana in an appreciation 
ceremony in 1 989. It turned out that the 
colourful ceremony was to be his last 
official outing. Since then old age has 
made him inactive, in the face of ill health. 
The overflow of tributes in Ghanaian and 
Nigerian newspapers as well as on radio 
and television which has allocated generous 
space and air time to vintage highlife 
hits stoked the memories of those of us 
who saw the glory and the ebb of highlife 
through the Fifties and the Sixties. Hopefully 
they will provide an occasion to 
rekindle interest in the music. 
Highlife may indeed be enjoying a 
fresh popularity seizing on the topicality 
that the occasion of ET's death has provided. 
The odds against a highlife revival 
are many however. And they can be as 
fundamental as they are far-reaching. 
Before the advent of colonialism, 
African music was singing and drumming 
- singing that is patterned along the call 
and response structure. A lead voice took 
the song, and a group vocal harmony 
session replied, thereby establishing a 
question and answer session. Drumming 
was done in various usual and unusual 
time signatures even though their exponents 
were totally oblivious of the rudiments 
of formal Western music. 
Highlife was a product of Western 
cultural influences - a combination of 
ceremonial music provided by marching 
bands for the continental colonial administrators 
in addition to church hymns introduced 
by missionaries, theguitar, brought 
to African soil by the Portuguese traders, 
swing and ballroom played essentially for 
the white and eventually, African elite. 
Early highlife as played by ET 
Mensah was based on common meter 
hymn structures occasioned by the influence 
of church hymns whose simple chord 
progression was easy to adopt. Even 
though the songs were in African languages, 
the melodies were foreign. The 
non-Africanness of highlife origins and 
form has, to my mind, more than contributed 
to its failure to make a lasting impact 
within Africa. 
Fela Anikulapo Kuti of Nigeria took 
highlife to America in 1969 with his 
Koola Lobitos band. His entrance point 
into the music was however through jazz. 
Back home Fela quickly established his 
brand of highlife because it was regarded 
as a revolutionary departure from the 
•'drab' nature of pristine highlife. He had 
a big band which struck a five-part harmony, 
establishing question and answer 
sessions with riffs but the music did not go 
down well with Americans who were 
looking forward to 'African music'. The 
tour was in consequence a failure and in 
order to save the day, Fela gave his music 
a heavy African feeling on the spot and 
Koola Lobitos became 'Africa 70' and 
highlife transformed into 'Afrobeat' giving 
birth to the LP Jeunko Ku, his first big 
hit. 
In Ghana, the veterans including 
Guy Warren who collaborated with ET on 
the first Tempos Band, saw this odd against 
the music way back in 1948, and went 
abroad to play explosive African percussion, 
some of which were recorded for 
Columbia records, sessions for which he 
is still collecting royalties. Guy Warren is 
better known in Britain and American 
than Africa. He is more internationally 
recognised than Mensah who pioneered, 
played and championed highlife in Africa. 
The odd which conspired against 
highlife in Nigeria was the civil war. For 
reasons that are not easily recognisable, 
the east of Nigeria paraded more highlife 
exponents than other parts of the country. 
Bands were concentrated in Lagos and 
Port Harcourt, so when the war broke out 
in 1967 the musicians went home to be 
recruited into the Biafran army. By 1 970 
when the war ended, only one highlife 
band survived in Celestine Ukwu and the 
Philosophers National 
In Ghana, the economic recession 
of the late Seventies and the Eighties led 
to a mass exodus of Ghanaian nationals 
abroad. Mass emigration and economic 
recession thus weighed heavily against 
the development of highlife and also 
contributed significantly to its decline in 
popularity. 
Also the late 1 960s saw soul music 
invading the entire West African region 
and gave highlife a tough competition. 
James Brown and his imitators likeGeraldo 
Pino played the music with great finesse 
employing the showbusiness techniques 
as well as multi-micro and stereophonic 
sound devices, a modern facility that was 
new to West Africa. Consequently, a 
great number of musicians travelled 
abroad and converted to pop-oriented 
music, namely Joe Mensah, Eddie Kwansa, 
George Lee, George Dako, all of Ghana; 
and Remi Kabaka, Donald Amechi, Mike 
Odumosu, of Nigeria, among others. 
We were yet to see music in Africa 
as a vehicle for propagating culture despite 
the foresight of leaders like Kwame 
Nkrumah but whose vision unluckily did 
not survive to their successors. African 
media policies did not protect African 
music and as a result the electronic media 
gave preference to American pop. 
Highlife's future lies in its strength 
fulfilling a vital cultural role as one of the 
first examples of a fusion, a marriage of 
foreign and African forms; it remains as 
the genre that has helped to forge an 
African popular music form to which all 
musicians in Africa can relate. Highlife 
can also be said to have influenced the 
popularisation of other African musical 
forms.
The credit for this achievement 
goes to ET Mensah's pioneering work 
and enduring vision - hatched in the 
Thirties, developed in the Fifties and Sixties, 
evolving into the future GR 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol.1/ NO 4