Female Highlife Performers in Ghana: Expression, Resistance, and Advocacy.

• Author: Mcleod, Nicholas C.

AFRICA

Amoah-Ramey, Nana Abena. Female Highlife Performers in Ghana: Expression, Resistance, and Advocacy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

If one were to glance at the music industry in Ghana today, with several top selling female artists, all-female bands, and women serving multiple tenures as president of the Musicians Union of Ghana, it would be hard to imagine that women were not allowed to perform on musical stages before the 1950s. Assessing the foundations of Highlife music and culture, Nana Abena Amoah-Ramey's Female Highlife Performers in Ghana: Expression, Resistance, and Advocacy examines the critical contributions, ideological transformations, and industry struggles of women to the Highlife musical tradition. Amoah-Ramey addresses the total neglect of the contributions of female Highlife musicians by arguing that Ghanaian women revolutionized music through their use of Highlife as a medium of resistance, advocacy, and empowerment. Making use of available archival sources, interviews with various individuals and groups, and cultural evidence from audio and video media, Female Highlife Performers in Ghana documents the challenges and subjectivities of female trailblazers in Highlife music.

In its opening chapter, the monograph charts the early origins of Highlife music from interactions with emancipated African soldiers serving the British in the Asante-Anglo wars of the 1880s, up to the genre's significance in Ghanaian culture being demonstrated in the 1960 Constitution, which proclaimed Highlife as the country's "national" dance music. Chapter two explores the obscured roles and profound contributions of women in Highlife music. It highlights female artists' struggles against restrictions on their performances, the stigmatization and low regard of women as musicians, and male domination of the country's music industry. The third chapter, entitled "Resistance and Survival," uses narrative analysis to examine her extensive interviews with female Highlife artists, producers, and managers, demonstrating the unique backgrounds and shared experiences that drove these trail-blazing women to stimulate change through their music.

Delving into the musical compositions of these female artists, chapter four analyzes their creative processes. Here these artists' lyrics are deployed as historical artifacts by Amoah-Ramey to engage themes of forced marriages, motherhood, traditional gender-related proverbs, and the lasting implications...