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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Orphans in Highlife: An Anthropological Interpretation
Author:Geest, Sjaak van der
Year:2004
Periodical:History in Africa
Volume:31
Pages:425-440
Language:English
Geographic term:Ghana
Subjects:songs
popular music
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Architecture and the Arts
History and Exploration
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/4128537
Abstract:'Highlife' songs are important in the dreariness of daily life in Ghana. The most common reception of Highlife is not a live performance or a concert party. Highlife is first of all music and words blasting from amplifiers in shops, bars, lorry parks and cars, during funerals and other festivities. While carrying out anthropological fieldwork in Kwahu-Tafo, a rural town on the Kwahu plateau in the Eastern Region of Ghana in 1971 and 1973, the author recorded a number of these songs in Twi, had them transcribed in Twi and then translated into English. Most of the Highlife songs deal with the familiar problems of life, but a frequently mentioned theme appeared to be the plight of orphans in Akan society. The author noticed that these Highlife songs with their loud emotions seemed to contradict the official Akan kinship ideology, which claims that orphans in the Western sense of the term do not exist in Akan society, as every child has several mothers and fathers. The author presents and discusses a number of (English) texts of Highlife songs on orphanage, understanding them as an expression of the fear of 'the quintessential disaster that can befall a human being': to be without close and caring family members, an anxiety that is real for many, orphan or not, in the social and political reality of present-day Ghana. App., bibliogr., notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]
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