Chapter 24 - Bo Diddley and a Beat from West Africa

Photo Credit: Reba O'Neil

In 1980 I joined Peace Corps and began three years in the tiny West African nation of Togo. I didn’t think much about Chuck Berry during that time. I didn’t have room for him. Arriving in Africa was like being reborn in a world I hardly understood but loved to experience. On my first morning in the capital city, Lomé, I took a short walk from the hotel to the big market—le Grand Marché—about a half mile away. The roads and sidewalks near the hotel were quiet and sunny and nearly empty, but the closer I got to the market the more people there were. A block or so from the market building the roads seemed impassable. Thousands of people were squeezing through streets lined with vendors. Little girls carried trays with one or two boxes of matches on top. A man with a sing song voice and an umbrella hat sold “Essiiii glaceeeeeeee!” (ice water). Tougher customers yelled “Ago!” as they pushed through from behind. The only way to get to the market was to become part of it. I slid into the crowd. All around me were vegetables and fruits; essentials like lipstick, nail polish, cigarettes, balm; sandals and “jimakpla” (a pejorative name for rubber flip flops, which nearly everyone wore); cassette tapes with music from around Africa and the world (I never heard mention of Chuck Berry in Africa, but an American country singer named Gentleman Jim Reeves was surprisingly well known); bicycle parts, towels, canned mackerel, dried fish, smoked fish, clothing, chickens, beads, tomato paste, shoes, drums. Young women peeled oranges with razor blades then cut a hole in the top so that you could squeeze the juice into your mouth. Others sold fritters or French fried yam slices with hot salsa, or peanuts, or bread with butter. As the newest potential source of income they all summoned me. “Yovo!” It was a word I would hear every time I went outside for the next three years. “White guy!” “Foreigner!” “Foolish and sweaty looking person!” Kids sang it and danced. Old women snickered it. Sliding through the ever tightening crowd I found all of it nearly overwhelming and completely wonderful.

And then the market itself—a huge, three story concrete building that looked something like an American parking structure. First a gauntlet of red meat and machetes (softened by tables covered in tomatoes, onion, garlic, peppers, tiny eggplants, assorted greens, lettuce, potatoes, cucumbers, oranges, limes, grapefruit, mangos, papaya and pineapple). Then, climb the stairs and you are in a cathedral of cloth from Jakarta, Dakar, Ghana and Holland. Fat women nicknamed “Mama Benz” lay on concrete tables in front of shelved bolts of wax prints and kenté. And a floor above that, everything else: bicycle chains, beads, hammers, saws, radios, batteries, you name it, the best hardware and variety store I have ever seen. I spent a few hours pushing my way through and found myself physically and mentally overpowered. I went back to the hotel and tried to nap, but when I closed my eyes I heard and saw everything that I’d just experienced.

And that’s more or less how it was for the next three years. It was usually quieter, but for three years everything was new, and every time I thought it wasn’t, every time I thought I’d figured it out, I’d be slapped with a new revelation that I understood nothing at all.

Photo O'Neil/Young

I didn’t expect it. When I had first been assigned to Togo I did some research and was a bit disappointed to learn that Togo wasn’t famous for art—at least not the sort of art that finds its way into museums. But it turned out that art was everywhere, as much a part of daily life as food and water. It was there in the way people dressed, the way they walked, the way they did their hair. There was art in the way they displayed pyramids of fruit and vegetables to sell and in the way market women stacked cans of sardines and mackerel, nail polish, soap and cigarettes. There was art in the way villages rose from the red earth like something alive. There was art in the carved walking stick of an old man and the homemade toys that children made—tiny bicycles built from bailing wire and cars carved from soft bits of raffia. There was art and magic in the broken, flat stone that sat beneath an old tree at the center of my village, drenched with dried blood and history and stuck with feathers, and there was art and danger in the “gri-gri” or ju ju, (Muddy called it “mojo”), fashioned out of roots, beads, and feathers and wired to a stick at the edge of a corn field. There were beautiful kenté cloths woven from colorful silk and cotton; fantastic embroideries around collars and cuffs; wonderful fabrics. There were paintings, too. Hair braiders advertised different hair styles with hand-painted signboards. Wall paintings on bars and restaurants showed suave men in bell bottoms and afros sipping beer with beautiful, long-necked women. Togo wasn’t known for art, but art was everywhere.

The Black Star Band from Ghana arrives in Kougnohou to the delight
of a hundred kids.  Photo credit Rooney O'Neil.

The same was true for music. Togo didn’t produce many recording stars when I lived there, but every shop and bar had a loudspeaker blaring High Life from Ghana, Reggae from Jamaica and Ivory Coast, or “Zairoise” from the former Zaire. I heard faint similarities between the lilting African guitar styles and Chuck Berry’s music, and also in the way that African pop singers incorporated the names of different cities and countries in their songs— a clever marketing ploy that may have first been used by the author of “Sweet Little Sixteen” whose fans were “rockin’ in Boston, and Pittsburgh, PA.” (Deep in the heart of Africa chears would erupt when dancers in my village heard the Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou sing the name of the Togolese capital, Lomé.) Those connections to American rhythm and blues were probably coincidental, but when I walked past rows of Muslim money changers near the Grand Marché in Lomé I heard music from the edges of the Sahara that sounded like the hard blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker, and I don’t think that was a coincidence. I was hearing the roots of the blues. Nor was it a coincidence that men in both Togo and Detroit pour a part of their drink onto the ground in honor of those who’ve “gone before.”



Dance was everywhere, too. Mothers rocked their babies to complex polyrhythms. Kids played dancing games to old chants. In the 1980s, all night dances with barnstorming bands from Ghana were regular events at the local “club” in my village. Dance was so omnipresent in Togo that sometimes even I got on the dance floor to express my stiff and awkward physicality. My favorite night spot in the capital was a dance bar called The African Queen. I described it for a local Seattle music magazine.

(Here's 12 seconds of children fresh from the internet.)

The African Queen is a typical Togolese dance bar—battered white tables and chairs, red and black fluorescent lights, funky wall paintings, all year Christmas decorations, and a sandy concrete floor that goes “swish-swish” when 200 feet start moving in unison. No live bands play there, but the music—a cosmopolitan mix of Soukous, High Life, Makossa, Reggae, Juju, Salsa and Funk—is fine. On one wall there’s a painting of Sonny Okossuns, the Nigerian singer who’s appeared in the Northwest a couple of times. On another there’s a painting of the good life—a man and woman surrounded by scattered empties, with a full case of Togo’s delicious Biere Benin by their side.

Probably Sokode

The African Queen puts on no airs. An unkind observer might call it a dive. The signs out front are old and fading. The “urinoire”—a stinking, shower like cubicle that becomes less revolting after a few beers—is marked by a painting of a man pissing towards its door. There’s invariably one downhearted soul, head on the table, surrounded by empties. Although a tad of bleached white looks fine under the black lights, there’s no dress code. There are seldom any Togo-Yuppies or fancy folks. The African Queen is just a place to dance.

You can bend at the waist, like the taxi driver from the North, or you can do it Southern Togo style and bend at the knees, arms akimbo, and jerk your shoulders to the beat. A man from Ivory Coast, in Lomé on a construction job, dances bow-legged. His Togolese friend does just the opposite, keeping his feet together and moving with tiny, Latin-flavored steps. Another man, after a few too many, invents a style all his own, mixing muscleman poses with karate moves he learned at the Cinéma le Togo down the street. A German expatriate bobs up and down and back and forth in artless ecstasy. Injustice of the third world, he’s with the most beautiful woman in the place. 

Fat women dance with their butts, scarcely moving their feet except to execute spins that are both elegant and seemingly impossible, given the mass. Young girls in hot pants, jump suits and skits, strut, bob, jump, kick and spin more often. Afro-Wave kids, hip and misunderstood, push both feet forward at once and dance Makossa in a jerky style of their own. Boys in second hand sport coats dance disco. Men in traditional garb dance a complex Latin style. The elderly, rare at the African Queen, dance with a spare elegance that marks their wisdom. Little kids, on the other hand, just stand by the door and dance dance dance until some adult runs up to shoo them away. Even out on the street the passerby and the women selling cigarettes nod their heads or add a step or two to their walk.

When my sister Ann visited Togo we once found ourselves avoid a March heat wave by getting a drink at a tiny buvette in some northern village. A small boy approached wearing nothing but a smile and a white bandage around his penis. When a song came on the bar’s little record player he began to slowly gyrate his pelvis and slide across the floor, smiling coolly. Michael Jackson would have been impressed (alas, perhaps in more ways than one!)

An elegant dancer at the opposite end of life was the local Chef de Canton, the paramount chief of the dominant ethnic group in my village. He was in his mid 70s, overweight by Togolese standards, and hobbled by an ugly growth on his foot. But once, when a “fahn-far” band came to town and played High Life music on battered horns, (my guess is that “fahn-far,” which I write phonetically, meant “fanfare,” which The Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “a brief musical formula played on trumpets, horns, or similar “natural” instruments, sometimes accompanied by percussion, for signal purposes in battles, hunts, and court ceremonies”) I watched him step and glide elegantly, hardly moving, yet moving perfectly, the visual, rhythmic definition of “cool” in a golden crown and kenté cloth.

But the most powerful dancing I saw in Togo happened at funerals, elaborate affairs that involved several consecutive nights of eating, drinking, and visiting, finally culminating in a long night of drumming, singing and dancing. It took me a couple of years to work up the courage to attend one of these funerals. I’d listen nights to the far off chanting and drumming and wonder what was going on—another of so many mysteries that I met with every day in Africa. But eventually I went. It was the funeral of a neighborhood big shot. The homemade palm wine and sodabi (a local white lightning) were strong and good. I drank enough that, to the delight of the crowd, I followed willingly when someone grabbed my hand and pulled me into the center of a large circle. When I bent down and tried to snap my backbone in the local style you could have heard the cheer five miles away.

Kids dancing Azohoun at a school comedy show.

The locals from my village had a dance called “azohoun” in which men and women bent at the waist, arms akimbo, and stamped their feet rhythmically while jerking their elbows and shoulders backward. The women bent in what looked almost like a curtsy. Men crouched and snapped their backs powerfully from a concave arch to a convex one. Usually groups of two or three people would walk towards the center of the circle, link up visually, and then burst simultaneously into a dance that would last about ten seconds. At the end of their dance they would jerk into a pose as if to say “Top that!” If they were especially good, people would let them know by cheering or pressing money to their brow. What distinguished it, for me, from similar dances of neighboring people was the sheer force and power of it. I remember standing 10 or 15 feet from an old woman and feeling the ground shake while she danced.

There could be hundreds of people at a funeral. Six or eight might be serious musicians who played drums, rattles and bells. Everyone else was given sticks of pampranku, a light wood from the raffia plant, to tap out a beat. The musicians beat rhythms I loved to hear but could barely comprehend. The entire assembly chanted choruses. The final element was a lead singer, who usually played an iron bell called the gong-gong. The gong-gong played a variety of different rhythms, but there was one that I knew from back home— the shave and a haircut beat we call “hambone.” It’s a beat that can be found in music from Latin America to New Orleans, and that was made famous by Chuck Berry’s Chess Records label mate, Bo Diddley.

Once my neighbors had a funeral for an elderly family member. It was before I started attending, so I stayed home and eventually fell asleep despite the loud drumming and singing. But of course it kept going all night, till the break of dawn and a little beyond. That night I dreamed that Bo Diddley had shown up in our village like one of the barnstorming Ghanaian dance bands that occasionally appeared in town and that he was performing at my next door neighbors’ house. I woke up a little disappointed. I could have used the homespun comfort of Bo Diddley about then.

Years later I saw a documentary about how African traditions had survived in the United States. A kid played a homemade instrument similar to what I had seen kids in Togo make from a wooden bow, a can or gourd, and a piece of string. The announcer was one of those serious public television types. He said, without wonder, irony or, any mention of the Chess/Checker Records star and co-founder of rock and roll: “The children call their instrument a ‘diddley bow.’”

Much of what makes us great came from Africa.

And as I say, though I didn’t think about him much while I was there, it’s not too far-fetched to say that Chuck Berry played a role in getting me to Africa. His music brought me to the blues, and jazz, and gospel, and they, in turn, lured me to West Africa, where they have their roots. I wanted to know the place where so much of what I love in America came from.

And if Chuck Berry helped get me to Africa it’s also not wrong to say that he led me to my daughters Jade and Gemma, whose mother I met there, and decades later to Jade’s little daughter Tulane. (In a different sense he even led me to my little Rafferty, since it was the early gift of a signed photo of Chuck Berry from Rafferty’s mother that may have sealed that deal for me.)

Funerals in Togo are held outside. Rain can spoil them. One cloudy day, just prior to a funeral for an important man, I sat at a bar and listened as local priests fired a magical cannon in a ceremony to ward off rain. Huge thunderheads were approaching the village. I sipped my beer and joked. But as soon as the cannon rang out, the clouds began to break apart and disintegrate before my eyes. Within minutes the afternoon turned to brilliant, muggy sunshine, and there was no rain that night to spoil the funeral.

Reflecting on some inexplicable event like that my Togolese friends would often sigh: “L’Afrique et ses mystères!” Thinking back on my on my own life, and how it changed forever at a poorly attended rock and roll show in a third rate town, I know that a least a little bit of magic survives back home.






(Although it strays into Bo Diddley and friends here this is part of a "book" about the weird affect Chuck Berry had on my life from the age 14 until now. You can find the next chapter below, or read from the beginning in the "Pages" section to the right.  Hey, it's free, and what can I say?  Best stuff written about CB that I know of except his own book.)

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