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Michi 2 from Son Palenque T


he role of makeshift sound systems or picos (from the English ‘pick up’) is central to the development of the music. These first emerged in the 1950s to play local music for party-goers, then in the early ‘70s the sounds got a little more far-reaching. “African music first came to Colombia by coincidence,” Lucas tells me. “Some travellers brought back some music, but no-one expected that this African music would become such a big influence in Colom- bia.” It’s not surprising that African sounds struck a chord in the Palenques which had been isolated until the 1920s and there- fore retained a strong African identity. But Afro sounds proved popular across racial lines, the determiner being class. “It was exclusively a phenomenon of the poor, lower class people.”


There are real parallels with the emergence of sound systems across the Caribbean in Jamaica in the ‘50s. But whereas the JA sys- tems initially sought out the latest R&B records from the US, the Colombian DJs were after Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeat, Congolese soukous and South African tunes, as well as music from other parts of the Caribbean (Haiti, Guadeloupe, Trinidad). DJs would set off on musical safaris to search out new sounds from the source countries. “These people were the pioneers of African music in Latin America and kind of the pioneers of the world music movement. I mean in ‘72, ‘73, no-one was talking about world music. These people were really poor but they were getting music that even the rich in Europe couldn’t get!”


And was mainstream Colombian society proud of this pioneer-


ing work? Was it heck! “Colombia is a racist country,” states Lucas. “There is a lot of discrimination. That’s why, when champeta music came to light, there was a crazy movement that forbid sound sys- tems to play. They said this music was not Colombian, it was African and Africa was no good! This music was coming from crim- inals, because at the very beginning it was a ghetto thing and so society was really afraid of that. They said sound stystems were making too much noise, too much violence. So the authorities fought against the sound systems, they wouldn’t give them autho- risation to do parties. We’ve been fighting for this for about 30 years and now Colombia is finally beginning to understand a bit that this is all about culture, and music.”


By the mid ‘70s, local labels started cottoning on to the potential market for African sounds and tried to recreate them at home. First to do this was the venerable Discos Fuentes label who put together Wganda Kenya, a group of session musicians, led by Colombia’s leading salsa producer Julio ‘Fruko’ Estrada. Featuring members of the Latin Brothers and singer Joe Arroyo, WK are the only group on the compilation I’d come across before (via Shalaode, their version of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat classic Shakara, which has cropped up on Colombian and Afrobeat com- pilations over the years).


“Most of the songs they played were covers, old standards from Africa and the Caribbean,” says Lucas. ”They did about five records which are all incredible, because some top musicians


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