(The love affair between Edna, a beautiful Ashanti woman, ...)
The love affair between Edna, a beautiful Ashanti woman, and Spio, a handsome government worker, an affair complicated by Edna's iron-willed grandmother, leader of Accra's marketwomen, typifies the clash between Ghana's educated elite and traditional Ashanti life.
Francis Bebey was a Cameroonian musician, composer, poet, and author. He is one of Africa's most legendary and prominent electronic music artists.
Background
Francis Bebey was born on July 15, 1929, in Douala, Cameroon. He was the son of a Christian minister. He grew up learning the French language and western musical traditions in school. As a youth, Bebey sampled the accordion, violin, piano, and mandolin before settling by age nine on the guitar. As a teenager living in the capital city of Douala, Bebey played guitar and drums with a popular Cameroonian dance band and became acquainted with such international musical styles as Afro-Cuban and American swing and jazz.
Education
Francis Bebey won a scholarship to study languages at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) in Paris, where he also studied literature and discovered the works of Cameroonian novelists Ferdinand Oyono and Mongo Béti. Moving to the United States, he continued to study broadcasting at New York University.
By the end of the 1950s, Bebey was a radio journalist/producer with Radiodiffusion Outre-Mer (now Radio-France Internationale) in Paris and the leader of a Parisian jazz band. When he moved to the United States in 1958 to study mass communications at New York University, Bebey continued his musical career, composing guitar music. Upon his return to Paris three years later, he helped create a radio station in Ghana and became the host of the popular radio program "Jazz Train" at Radiodiffusion Outre-Mer. Bebey then began researching and tracking traditional African music for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), traveling around sub-Saharan Africa to make field recordings of native music. While working as a program specialist for UNESCO, Bebey realized that there was no literature on the history of radio in Africa. He filled the gap himself, writing his first book La Radiodiffusion en Afrique Noire, published in 1963.
Soon after the publication of La Radiodiffusion en Afrique Noire, Bebey began to produce poems and novels that reflected his experiences and observations in Africa. In 1967 he published a critical, yet humorous, novel, Le fils d’Agathe, translated as Agatha Moudio’s Son in 1971, which recounts the misadventures of a young Cameroonian man who makes a series of bad marriages.
In 1974 Bebey retired from UNESCO to concentrate on his writing and musical activities. Bebey began performing for as many as six months of the year. To produce his own recordings Bebey founded his own record label in the 1970s, Ozileka, which he ran from a home studio at a time when home studios were rare. In addition to making his own recordings, he produced some twenty works of other artists.
He wrote music for a variety of instruments, ranging from classical guitar to the Pygmy flute, and recorded a number of his own compositions, often performing with his son Toups. His music also blended African rhythms with musical forms from around the world.
In the early years, Francis Bebey was influenced by classical guitarist Andrés Segovia. Unlike his contemporaries in African music, Bebey also said he was greatly influenced by American jazz musicians Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. "The first time I heard Louis Armstong, I went crazy," Bebey said in a 1979 interview. "I bought his records like smokers buy cigarettes."
Membership
Francis Bebey is a member of Cercle Renaissance, Association des Ecrivains de Langue Française, Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (S.A.C.E.M.).
Connections
August 14, 1956, Francis Bebey married Jacqueline Edinguele. They had children: Patrick Bebey, Francis Bebey, Kidi Bebey.