Kofi Agawu is regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on African music. The Ghanaian scholar, teacher and researcher has changed how the world hears and studies it.
I am a scholar of indigenous African music. I have researched and written extensively on African indigenous knowledge systems and worldviews.
I also know Professor Agawu personally. He has visited my institution, the University of Venda in South Africa. In this article, I pay tribute to his pioneering work in African musicology while taking issue with one finer point in his theories. This, I think, makes for a more useful tribute than unbroken praise.
The invention of African rhythm
Kofi Agawu, who turns 70 on 28 September 2026, was born in Hohoe in Ghana’s Volta region. He is Ewe, which is the dominant group of the region. He finished school at Achimota in Accra, studied in Britain and completed a doctorate at Stanford University in 1982. After many years at Princeton, he now teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Across six books he has made it very hard to go on saying that African music is something that is “felt” rather than something that is thought about analytically.
For most of the 20th century, writing about African music circled a single word: rhythm. Africans were said to have it in abundance, and Europeans analysed it. Harmony and form belonged to Bach and Brahms. The tools used to explain their music were seldom applied to Ewe drumming or Akan court song. Harmonic analysis, for example, which names each chord and its function. Formal analysis maps a piece’s sections, and motivic analysis follows a short musical idea as it develops.
African music received description. European music received theory. That difference was never neutral. It decided who counted as a thinker and who counted as raw material.
Agawu’s answer was patient and, I am convinced, deliberate. His first book, Playing with Signs (1991), had nothing to do with Africa. It read Mozart and Haydn as a system of signs and won the Society for Music Theory’s award for an emerging scholar. A Ghanaian had explained European music to Europe on its own terms, and the discipline could not dismiss him. Only then did he turn the same equipment towards home.
His book African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective (1995) named its village, its performers and its occasions, and located the engine of Ewe rhythmic life in spoken language rather than in drums. That same year he published an essay called The Invention of ‘African Rhythm’. It showed the phrase to be largely a European commonplace, assembled over a century of writing about the continent and handed back to Africans as a description of themselves.
Read together, the book and the essay make one argument. Europe invented “African rhythm” as a badge of difference. Listened to closely, the Ewe make their rhythm out of speech, and so out of thought.
Representing African Music (2003) gave the problem its name. Agawu called it an ideology of difference: the habit of treating African music as permanently other, which flatters and diminishes in the same gesture.
Not everyone agreed.
Groove theories
The ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann called the book “the most powerful theoretical intervention in African musicology in a decade or more”, then resisted it. Agawu, he argued, questioned ethnomusicology fiercely but treated music theory, his own discipline, as if its tools were neutral. In defending African languages, ethics and aesthetics, Agawu, he argued, also sometimes presented them as fixed, risking a return to the very space of difference he sought to escape. The second objection has force. Agawu’s later work goes some way towards answering the first.
The African Imagination in Music (2016) went further. “Does African music have a specifiable essence?” Agawu asked. “The answer is yes.” He meant all of it: the traditional repertoires he calls the backbone of Africa’s musical thinking, as well as popular and art music. The outward sign of that essence, he argued, is groove.
I part company with him over its reach. Groove is the steady cycle of interlocking patterns that repeats beneath the music and draws everyone present into movement. You can hear it in this performance of Agbadza, the Ewe dance with which Agawu tells readers to begin, recorded at Abutia in Ghana’s Volta Region. Groove convincingly describes much sub-Saharan practice. Agawu claims church and concert music for Africa too, but whether groove holds there, or in the Islamicate repertoires of North Africa, remains open.
Agawu’s book won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s prize named after J.H. Kwabena Nketia, who founded the field.
Western tonality as a colonising force
On African Music (2023) is the summation of his work. Its sharpest claim concerns tonality, the system of keys and chords governing most western music. In tonal music, one chord is home. The others pull away and create a desire to return, while the ear waits for the cadence that brings it back. From the 1840s, missionaries carried this system to Africa through the Protestant hymn, sung in four parts over three basic chords. Agawu argues that it acted as a colonising force, reorganising musical consciousness so thoroughly that most of us no longer hear it working. To the Bible and the gun, he writes, “we can now add diatonic tonality as an instrument of colonial domination”.
South Africans can hear the point in their own anthem. Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika began in 1897 as a hymn by Enoch Sontonga, a Methodist mission school teacher. It became a song of liberation, and it still sings in the harmonic language of the mission station.
In 2024, On African Music won the Wallace Berry Award. In 2026, Britain’s Society for Music Analysis awarded Agawu its Pascall Medal. The five scholars honoured before him had built their careers on European music.
There is a reason to read Agawu even if you never think about music. Scholars in economics, history and literature face the same forced choice between analytical standards that came with the coloniser and the cultural specificity that resists them.
Agawu declines the choice. Theory can come out of the meeting of two traditions rather than out of a loyalty test.
He does not stand alone, and a tribute that forgets his company fails him. Nketia laid the ground. The late Nigerian scholar Akin Euba developed a theory of African pianism; master drummer and scholar Meki Nzewi theorised from within Igbo creative practice; composer Joshua Uzoigwe gave one drumming tradition full theoretical weight; ethnomusicologist Jean Kidula opened Kenyan Christian soundscapes; and musicologist Kwasi Ampene brought Asante court music into the seminar room.
Agawu won African music its place in theory. Whether the musicians themselves are ever seated there is the question he put to us two decades ago, and his 70th year hands it back. His late work reads like a career summing itself up. I would rather hear it as an interrupted cadence. We still need more from him.
