E.T. Mensah: The King who invented cool
How a Ghanaian pharmacist with a trumpet became Africa's first pop star
By V. L. K. Djokoto
Before Fela. Before Afrobeat. Before any of your favourite artists even thought about fusion, there was E.T. Mensah in a sharp suit with a trumpet, literally inventing what pan-African cool could sound like.
Picture this: Accra, 1940s. Emmanuel Tetteh Mensah is working as a pharmacist by day, but at night? He's out here creating the blueprint for modern African pop music. We're talking about a guy who took local Ghanaian rhythms, mixed them with jazz, calypso, and swing, then served it back so smooth that entire nations couldn't stop dancing.
His band, the Tempos, weren't just musicians—they were architects of the sound that would define West African independence. While politicians were drawing borders, E.T. was drawing crowds.
Highlife wasn't just a genre; it was a whole vibe. Horns that could make you cry and dance simultaneously. Guitar lines sweeter than palm wine. Rhythms that felt ancient and futuristic at once.
E.T. took everything—the palmwine guitar music from Ghana's coast, big band jazz from America, calypso from the Caribbean sailors passing through—and alchemized it into something completely new. This was fusion before fusion was even a thing people did on purpose.
Tracks like "All For You" and "Day By Day" still hit different. That's music that's survived 70+ years and hasn't aged a day.
Here's what you need to understand: E.T. Mensah was doing in the 1950s what everyone from Burna Boy to Wizkid is doing now—proving that African music doesn't need to be "exotic" or "traditional" to be authentically African. It can be cosmopolitan, sophisticated, sexy, modern.
He took the Tempos to Lagos, to Liberia, to Sierra Leone. Everywhere they went, they weren't just performing—they were showing people what post-colonial Black excellence could sound like. This was soft power before we had a term for it.
Fela Kuti literally cited him as an influence. King Sunny Adé studied his arrangements. Osibisa, Manu Dibango, the whole African music explosion of the '70s—they're all standing on E.T.'s foundations.
The man understood presentation. White dinner jackets. Immaculate bow ties. The Tempos looked like they could headline the Apollo or play a state dinner—and they did both. This wasn't music to be fetishized or anthropologized. This was sophisticated pop for a sophisticated new Africa.
E.T. Mensah died in 1996, but his frequency never left the airwaves. You hear him every time a Nigerian artist adds horns to an Afrobeats track. Every time someone calls music "Afro-fusion." Every time contemporary African artists refuse to be boxed into "world music."
He proved that you could be uncompromisingly African and globally appealing—not by watering anything down, but by being more yourself, louder, with better horns.
The King of Highlife didn't just make music. He made a template for how African artists could move through the world: confident, stylish, innovative, and utterly undeniable.
Long live the King.
E.T. Mensah (1919-1996) recorded over 500 songs and toured across West Africa, the UK, and beyond. His music remains foundational to understanding modern African pop.