Readers recommend: songs about Africa

Readers recommend: songs about Africa

Some pieces of music are so thoroughly wrong-headed that, in retrospect, you wonder whether they really existed, or were just some kind of bizarre aural hallucination. One such piece is the jingle for a 1980s soft drink. "Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo," the cartoon animals chanted, because nothing says fruity refreshment quite like a century or so of slavery, tyranny, genocide and war. Amazingly, it's still available on the brand's website, although claims of Um Bongo consumption in the Congo region remain unconfirmed.

I was reminded of it this week while YouTubing the video to Toto's soft-rock calamity Africa. As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti, it stinks. It would seem that it took Stephen Biko's murder to persuade white musicians that Africa was not, in fact, a giant safari park. There are good records which use the continent as an exotic locale without making your toes curl, but to exclude an African song to make room for, say, Madness's Night Boat to Cairo doesn't seem right.

The first song dates back to 1897. Written by Xhosa schoolteacher Enoch Sontonga, Nkosi Sikelel'i Afrika (God Bless Africa) is the national anthem for no fewer than three countries: Zambia, Tanzania and (partially) South Africa. It knocks God Save the Queen into a cocked hat, but then what doesn't?

Lord Kitchener, a Trinidadian with a calypso for every occasion, celebrated Ghana's 1957 declaration of independence under president Kwame Nkrumah. A shame he (Nkrumah, not Kitch) was deposed nine years later by a US-backed coup. Working in Los Angeles in 1969, Fela Kuti surveyed his troubled homeland (the Biafran war was in full swing) on Viva Nigeria, an unusually concise example of his nascent afrobeat sound. He sounds concerned but optimistic. The anger would come later.

Few records are as redolent of the British left in 1985 as Latin Quarter's Radio Africa, the musical equivalent of an earnest student meeting in the Nelson Mandela bar. The brisker version they later recorded with Zimbabwe's Bhundu Boys has aged better. Consequently, the playlist's token white face belongs to Peter Hammill, who recites a fractured history of African despotism over mechanised post-punk which grumbles like a knackered engine.

Jamaica in the 1970s saw a rash of so-called repatriation songs, seeking spiritual salvation in a return to an idealised motherland. Billy Paul's exquisite East is the Philly soul equivalent: half lament, half prayer. The Congos' Lee Perry- produced Congoman goes one better by sounding like central Africa: dense and humid. A decade earlier, Art Blakey and his crack squad of jazz drummers tried to evoke the continent on a fine album called The African Beat.

We should end with something from African music's current purple patch. Canadian-based rapper K'naan acidly contrasts strife in his native Somalia with the gangsta boasts of American MCs, while Sahara bluesmen Tinariwen hymn the nomadic Tuareg lifestyle with what Andy Kershaw described as "roll'n'roll music". Somebody send Toto a copy.

This week's playlist

1 Nkosi Sikelel'i, Afrika Soweto Gospel Choir

2 Birth of Ghana Lord Kitchener

3 Viva Nigeria Fela Kuti

4 Radio Africa Bhundu Boys (with Latin Quarter)

5 A Motor-Bike in Afrika Peter Hammill

6 East Billy Paul

7 Congoman The Congos

8 Obirin African (Woman of Africa) Art Blakey & the Afro-Drum Ensemble

9 What's Hardcore? K'Naan

10 Amassakoul 'n'ténéré Tinariwen

· Next week: songs about heat.