Highlife has a UNESCO Plaque. Afrobeats has the playlist.
Ghana built much of the furniture in west Africa’s musical house, then let someone else sell the sofa. Whose sound are we actually exporting?
A shop attendant in Dubai hears a Bisa Kdei song and calls it Nigerian. A crowd in Arusha does the same with Camidoh. Mark Okraku-Mantey, then a deputy minister, told this story on radio in 2023 and drew a blunt conclusion: Ghana had made a mistake by agreeing to perform under the Afrobeats banner. It is the sort of anecdote that makes a nation laugh for a second and then go very quiet. Ghanaian music is travelling. It is simply arriving with the wrong passport.
Start with the lineage, because it is not in dispute. Highlife was born in the Gold Coast, wedding Akan and Ga melodies to guitars, horns and brass. E.T. Mensah was crowned its king across the continent. Osibisa filled stadiums far from West Africa when most of the world could not find Accra on a map. Reggie Rockstone then rewired the language of the street into hiplife, and a generation of Ghanaian rappers learned to sound like themselves.
In December 2025, UNESCO inscribed highlife on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The pedigree is real, and it is framed and mounted on the wall.
That is exactly the problem. A plaque is what a country gives a genre when it stops being a living market and starts being a memory. Afrobeats, meanwhile, has no plaque and does not need one. It has Wizkid, Burna Boy and Davido, a global streaming machine and a label that now covers half a continent. Nigeria currently owns the export machinery the way empires usually win, with scale, distribution and an unembarrassed confidence in its own export. Sound was only part of the story. Packaging did the rest.
So, Ghana is told it has two roads. Option one: plant the flag, rebrand around highlife, and insist the world learn our word. That is the road behind the Barcelona launch of “Highlife to the World,” where Stonebwoy, Obrafour and Nat Brew played in August, with a full rollout planned for March 2027, Ghana’s 70th independence anniversary. It is a respectable instinct and a late one.
Option two: join the Afrobeats party and smuggle Ghana in through the side door. Artists like KiDi and Kelvyn Boy have taken that route, and nobody serious can blame them for wanting an audience.
Both roads share a flaw, which is that they treat the label as the prize. The label is the wrapper and the evidence suggests Ghana’s best export has never needed one. When Black Sherif’s “Kwaku the Traveller” went to number one on Apple Music in Nigeria, the first Ghanaian record to do so, nobody there asked what genre it was. It sounded like Konongo, grief and grit, and Lagos heard it anyway.
Amaarae charted on the Billboard Hot 100 by sounding like nobody’s definition. Sarkodie and Stormzy-adjacent London collaborations travelled on voice, not on lineage papers. The things that crossed borders were specific, strange and unmistakably Ghanaian, and they crossed because they were good.
Look at the home scoreboard for confirmation. At the 2026 Ghana Music Awards in May, Black Sherif took Artiste of the Year and Best Afropop Song. Kofi Kinaata took the highlife categories with “It Is Finished,” a song that proves the genre has not retired. Wendy Shay won Afrobeats and Afropop. The three pillars of the debate all stood on one stage in one ceremony, and the sky stayed in place. The categories are not at war. Only our discussion of them is.
What is at war with Ghana is infrastructure. Ghana does not merely need better songs; it needs rights data, transparent royalty collection, and enforceable sampling compensation. A catalogue that cannot be paid, tracked or protected is a charity.
Ask who owns the masters, who collects the royalties when a Ghanaian riff is sampled abroad, who builds the touring circuit beyond Accra and who trains the managers and lawyers who turn a hit into an enterprise. Nigeria’s advantage is as much ledger as it is rhythm.
Ghana can keep honouring its heritage with ceremonies and stage backdrops, or it can fund the boring things that make heritage pay archives, credit and compensation for sampling, Ghanaian-owned distribution, and a live circuit that does not stop at the Accra Sports Stadium.
There is also a plain cultural truth to admit. Highlife’s revival is quiet because it has been asked to be polite. A genre treated as a museum piece gets museum audiences. If it is to compete, it must be allowed to do what it always did, which was to borrow, mutate and flirt with the new sound of the day.
Highlife in its best years was the Afrobeats of its time, a hybrid that unsettled the purists. Honouring that spirit means letting today’s artists remix it without a customs inspection.
So here is the answer to the question. Ghana is exporting a lineage and a voice, and it is doing so without a good enough bank, a loud enough brand or a settled enough nerve. The sound is not the weak link.
The sound has been to Lagos, London and Dubai on its own legs. What Ghana still has to learn is how to arrive with its name on the ticket, its money in its own account and its heritage on the dance floor rather than on a shelf. Until then, a stranger in Arusha will keep guessing the wrong country, and we will keep writing editorials about it.
By Hannah Agyemang
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