Manu Dibango

On 24 March 2020, Cameroonian musician and songwriter Manu Dibango (1933-2020) died from Covid-19. He "had been making music for 60 years, traveling constantly between styles and genres, Africa and Europe, continuously escaping categorization. A brilliant saxophonist, who also mastered the vibraphone, he was most comfortable with jazz, adopting and adapting different African musical traditions throughout his life. It was the song “Soul Makossa” (1972) that brought him global popularity. (…)

 

Dibango lived in France almost all his life, having left Cameroon at the age of fifteen. The early departure made him a foreigner, as he wrote in his autobiography published in 1989 (English version 1994), both in France, where he stood out due to his skin color, and in Cameroon, where the privilege to leave the country was such a big step, that it distanced him from his fellow Cameroonians (…).

 

When asked in 2018, aged 84, if he planned to retire, he answered: “Why do you want me to retire? I am still in love with music. I will play music up to the end” (“Manu Dibango – Last”). And so he did. (...)."
 

(Cited from Anja Brunner: Manu Dibango 1933–2020, in : Rock music studies. Published online: 07 Dec 2020, open access.)