House of Cultures of the World/Photo: AfricaNewsAnalysis/AM
Berlin, 7 September 2026
At Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of Cultures of the World) this October, Ghanaian highlife meets Berlin’s Afrobeat memory work in an evening that treats Fela Kuti’s legacy not as an exhibit, but as a living argument about sound, politics and public life.
On paper, the listing is straightforward: Santrofi, the Accra-based highlife band, will perform at Haus der Kulturen der Welt on 15 October 2026 as part of A Felasophical Gathering, the Berlin programme staged on Fela Kuti’s birthday.
The cultural charge of the evening, moreover, lies in what sits beneath those details. It is a concert built around inheritance: how West African popular music travels, how political memory moves through rhythm, and how Berlin, the capital of Germany, continues to host conversations that begin elsewhere but acquire new meanings in the city.
Highlife after nostalgia
Photo Credit: Santrofi
Santrofi’s music belongs to a tradition often described in the past tense, as if highlife were a golden-age sound preserved in archive photographs, sleeve notes and stories of post-independence nightlife. Santrofi’s appeal is that it refuses that museum logic.
Led by bassist and producer Emmanuel Kwadwo Ofori, Santrofi treat highlife as a working language: flexible enough to absorb funk, Afrobeat and older dance-band arrangements, but specific enough to retain its Ghanaian pulse.
That distinction matters. In Europe, African popular music is still too often framed through rediscovery: the rare record, the reissue, the revival, the festival set that promises access to an elsewhere.
Santrofi complicate that script, such that their Berlin appearance is not simply the return of an older sound, but evidence of a contemporary highlife scene that knows its history and plays forward from it. The guitars shimmer, the horns punctuate, the percussion pushes, but the deeper story is one of continuity without stillness.
Fela as method, not monument
A Felasophical Gathering has always implied that Fela Kuti’s afterlife is larger than tribute.
To gather around Fela is to gather around questions of artistic freedom, state power, pleasure, protest and the social function of the bandstand. Santrofi’s presence widens that frame. They arrive not as imitators of Afrobeat’s familiar architecture, but as musicians from a neighbouring West African tradition whose relationship to Fela’s world is historical, rhythmic and conversational.
That is why the evening’s programme on 15th October, with The Berlin Afrobeat Company opening before Santrofi, reads less like a double bill than a map. Afrobeat and highlife share more than instrumentation; they share a belief in duration, repetition and collective participation. Their songs make room for bodies, for call and response, for politics that do not have to announce themselves as slogans. On a Berlin stage, those affinities become audible across geography.