Dossiers Africa

The Polaris Music Prize today unveiled its Short List for 2020… and we’re unveiling ours too!

A Cameroonian of Douala and Yabassi descent, Manu Dibango was the first great African musician to perish from Covid-19 at the venerable age of 86. Flagship artist of pan-African culture, he was at the forefront of all forward motion, from his connecting with compatriot Francis Bebey in the 1950s until his tragic death on Tuesday 24 March 2020. At the turn of the 1970s, Papa Groove (one of his nicknames) was already uniting the main African styles in vogue at the time – afrobeat, highlife, soukouss, etc. – and he was a pioneer in the development of a new style. This funkadelic groove, post-James Brown and contemporary to George Clinton, with its jazzy and Afro-Caribbean flavours, was also marked by an authentically pan-African approach developed by the Cameroonian multi-instrumentalist.