Ghana’s celebrated Highlife track and dance were formally added to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity for 2025.

The multinational popularity marks one of the crucial vital cultural milestones within the country’s contemporary historical past and honours greater than a century of musical modernization.

It additionally secures Highlife’s standing as a secure cultural treasure with multinational relevance.

UNESCO’s list covers highlife as practised in Ghana, acknowledging its musical buildings, efficiency types and social roles.

Ghana’s National Folklore Board submitted the nomination file previous in 2025 and guided it throughout the formal evaluate procedure.

The inscription puts Highlife amongst different vital traditions already safeguarded beneath the UNESCO conference.

Highlife emerged alongside the West African coast within the overdue 19th and early 20th centuries.

It combined Akan rhythms, palm-wine guitar types and exterior influences equivalent to brass band and jazz components presented by means of sailors, squaddies and traders.

The earliest recordings seemed within the Nineteen Twenties, and then the style grew into unique guitar-band and big-band types.

Legendary musicians together with E. T. Mensah, Ebo Taylor and C. Okay. Mann helped outline highlife as Ghana’s maximum enduring fashionable track and a basis for lots of recent African genres.

How Ghana secured the popularity

The push for UNESCO inscription intensified between 2024 and 2025 as Ghana’s cultural establishments collaborated on an in depth nomination.

The National Folklore Board showed {that a} partial submission was once filed in April 2025, adopted by means of public bulletins because the file complicated thru nationwide and multinational analysis.

The procedure trusted archival subject matter, instructional analysis, group testimonials and contributions from musicians and cultural custodians.

Why it issues to on a regular basis track fans

While the inscription does no longer regulate Highlife’s sound, it brings each symbolic and sensible advantages.

The popularity raises multinational visibility for the style, helps long-term safeguarding, and makes Ghana eligible for multinational enhance for coaching, documentation and cultural sales strategy.

It might also draw in cultural tourism and encourage new tasks that maintain Highlife for more youthful generations.

Experts explain that the purpose is energetic preservation quite than treating the track as a museum relic.

This comes to strengthening track training, selling are living performances, supporting mentorship between veteran musicians and younger artists, archiving ancient recordings and serving to communities get advantages when Highlife is utilized in business areas.

Ghana’s cultural companies have already indicated plans to amplify gala’s, documentation tasks and artistic programmes that stay Highlife colourful and evolving.

What this popularity approach for Ghanaian track

Highlife’s inscription affirms a cultural legacy that has formed Afrobeats, hiplife and far of West Africa’s fashionable sound.

For many Ghanaians, the inscription represents an impressive second of nationwide delight and a reminder that the rustic’s on a regular basis inventive traditions lift significant multinational importance.

To the broader track group, it reinforces highlife’s enduring have an effect on on recent African sounds and its power as a colourful, evolving artwork shape.

The popularity additionally invitations cultural vacationers and track fans to revel in the style anew, from its unique horn strains to its rhythmic guitar paintings and wealthy storytelling.

For the musicians and communities who stay highlife alive, it stands as a revered multinational endorsement and an very important instrument for keeping and advancing one in every of Ghana’s maximum valuable cultural traditions.

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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by means of Readers and Contributors in this platform don’t essentially constitute the perspectives or coverage of Multimedia Group Limited.