Africa goes to Munich for African Music Days concert

Coinciding with Africa Day, the concert brought together seven bands representing eight African countries to the Bavarian capital. The musical acts – coming from Togo, South Africa, Mali, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, DRC and Senegal – took the crowd on an eclectic and unforgettable journey of African sounds and expressions at the Muffatwerk live venue.

The music complex, known for programming artists from a wide spectrum of genres, features two venues: Ampere, a smaller space with an overhanging gallery, and Muffathalle, a sizeable hall that is set to host in 2023 musicians like Kurt Vile & The Violators, Monster Magnet and Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog – all well-known and relevant alternative bands coming through a city that has the prejudicial reputation of being more ‘provincial’ and somehow less open-minded about culture and the arts than the hulking Berlin in the north. “Munich is like a big village,” a local told me outside Muffathalle on the first night. If this is a village, I thought, then all the cultural capitals in the world are hamlets. Later in the week, I went museum hopping to stand in front of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Gauguin’s The Birth as well as two Basquiats and two De Koonings. Very village-like...

The Munich crowd, including the locals and the many African expats living there, have an affinity for alternative music as well as for the not-so-mainstream sounds of Africa, which was the general geist of African Music Days. Even German music journalist Jonathan Fischer, who has done extensive musicological research in Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and others, in his preview for Süddeutsche Zeitung praised African Music Days for its astutely curated line-up of alternative African musicians whom many other festivals in Germany won’t consider to book but who signify the pulse of their home cities. 

For instance, Sholo Mwamba and his crew of seven brought down the house on Day 2 at Muffathalle with singeli, the fast-paced, quivering urban sound of Dar es Salaam. His show includes a heavy dose of acrobatics and induces zealous audience participation when the show spills over to the floor. Then there was the equally captivating Fulu Miziki, a collective from Kinshasa with an Afrofuturistic aesthetic that uses ostentatious costumes bearing LED lights, insect-like eyewear, Mad Max armour, and instruments knocked together from literal garbage, including a contraption made of two long plastic PVC pipes played with old flip-flops.

At Ampere the night before, Ghanaian-Belgian multi-instrumentalist Esinam (kalimba, flute and sound design) and South African singer and guitarist Sibusile Xaba, an unlikely yet highly symbiotic duo, opened the concert with a minimalistic but emotive show steeped in fine electro and maskandi-inspired inflections. Xaba, lauded for making “extraordinary” music by world-famous tastemaker Gilles Peterson, has been involved in a few fascinating projects of late, most notably IzangoMa, a 15-piece avant-garde ensemble at the forefront of African musical expressionism. 

Arka'n Asrafokor, a Togolese five-piece band from Lomé that fuses local rhythms with different heavy metal subgenres, was another crowd favourite on Day 1. This band’s relentless energy comes from the musicians’ sharp feel for polyrhythms and intimate understanding of layering sounds at fast tempos and in loud contexts.

Like Arka'n, many of the musicians who performed at African Music Days have appeared on other Music In Africa Foundation platforms, mainly as speakers or showcasing artists at the ACCES music conference. Arka'n turned heads in Accra, Ghana, during ACCES’ 2019 edition, where event organisers and other music industry professionals began talks to work with the band. This resulted, albeit with a delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in a nine-city tour to France and an appearance at Morocco’s Boulevard Festival in 2022.

Sholo Mwamba and Sibusile Xaba have also appeared on the ACCES showcase stage, while Blinky Bill, who closed African Music Days with a soulful and funk-driven set replete with his signature take on electro, took part in a panel discussion with Nigerian superstar Mr Eazi at ACCES 2018 in his home town Nairobi. At African Music Days, Blinky Bill also participated in a discussion that took a deep dive into African music and the music industry on the continent. The discussion was attended by local music industry players and media practitioners, and featured Fischer, Arka'n manger Beatrice Manigat and Arka'n singer Elom Ahavi, who spoke about the realities of working as an alternative musician in Africa and the influence of African music on the rest of the world.

Upcoming R&B/electro female duo Defmaa Maadef from Dakar was another well-received act to take the African Music Days stage with a convincing performance that rode on high energy and peppy stage movement, while the outstanding Ami Yerewolo, who is Mali’s biggest female rapper based in Bamako, gave the local audience a taste of the power of hip hop to shift stereotypes and perceptions on the continent.

The Music In Africa Foundation will continue its 10-year anniversary celebrations throughout 2023 with various events, including the ACCES 2023 music conference, which returns to Dar es Salaam for a second consecutive year in November.

African Music Days was made possible with the support of Goethe-Institut, Muffatwerk Munich and Siemens Stiftung.