Afrym
Music & Dance

Makossa: The Sound of Douala That Got the World Dancing

Born in the bars of Douala, Cameroon, makossa mixed local rhythms with rumba, funk and brass. One 1972 song, "Soul Makossa", carried it to New York dance floors and into pop history.

By Amos Hope Jnr · · 4 min read

Illustration of Cameroonian musicians playing guitar and bass as people dance at a lively night party in Douala, for a story on makossa music

If you have ever heard a crowd chant "Ma-ma-ko, ma-ma-sa, ma-ko-ma-ko-ssa", you already know a little makossa. That catchy line comes from a song recorded by a Cameroonian saxophonist in 1972. It crossed the Atlantic, filled New York dance clubs, and was later borrowed by two of the biggest pop stars in history.

But makossa is much more than one famous chorus. It is the urban dance music of Douala, Cameroon's largest city and busiest port, and for over fifty years it has been the soundtrack of Cameroonian parties, weddings and nightclubs.

Where makossa was born

Douala sits on the estuary of the Wouri River, and its original inhabitants are the Duala people. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as Cameroon moved towards independence, the city's bars and dance halls were full of new sounds. Musicians played local rhythms such as ambass-bey and assiko, alongside the Congolese rumba that was sweeping Central Africa on the radio (we told that story in Congolese Rumba) and the highlife coming from Ghana and Nigeria.

The name is usually linked to a Duala word for a kind of twisting dance. One early singer, Emmanuel Nelle Eyoum, used to call out "kossa kossa" to get dancers moving, and the cry helped give the new style its name.

What makossa sounds like

Makossa is built for dancing. Its key ingredients include:

  • The bass guitar. More than almost any other African style, makossa puts the electric bass at the front. Bass lines are busy, melodic and funky, often doing as much work as the singer.
  • Bright guitars that pick out quick, interlocking patterns, inherited from rumba.
  • Horns. Saxophones and trumpets punch out short phrases between verses.
  • Drums and percussion that keep a steady, driving beat.
  • Singing in Duala, and later in French, English and Cameroonian Pidgin, often about love, money, city life and gossip.

In the 1980s, keyboards and drum machines joined the mix, and the music became slicker and faster, perfect for the dance clubs of Douala, Yaoundé and Paris.

Manu Dibango and "Soul Makossa"

The man who took makossa to the world was Manu Dibango, a saxophonist born in Douala in 1933. As a teenager he was sent to France to study, fell in love with jazz, and spent years playing in Belgium, Congo and Paris before returning home.

In 1972, Cameroon was hosting the African Cup of Nations football tournament, and Dibango was asked to record a song for the national team. On the other side of the single, almost as an afterthought, he put a funky instrumental with a chanted hook. It was called "Soul Makossa".

The football song was soon forgotten. The B-side was not. Copies reached New York, where DJs in the city's underground clubs began playing it. Demand grew so fast that the record was reissued in the United States, and it entered the American pop charts in 1973, one of the first African records ever to do so. It is often described as one of the songs that helped give birth to disco.

A chorus that travelled

The "ma-ma-ko, ma-ma-sa" chant had a remarkable second life. Michael Jackson used a version of it at the end of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" on his 1982 album Thriller. Twenty-five years later, Rihanna sampled Jackson's version in "Please Don't Stop the Music".

Both uses led to legal disputes, and Dibango's claims were settled out of court. The episode became a well-known example of how African music shaped global pop, often without its creators being properly credited or paid at first. Dibango continued to record and perform around the world until his death near Paris in 2020.

The golden age and beyond

Dibango was not alone. Through the 1970s and 1980s, singers and bands from Douala turned makossa into Cameroon's most popular music. Artists recorded in Paris studios with the best session musicians in Africa, and makossa records sold across Francophone Africa.

Later stars, such as Petit Pays, from Douala's Bepanda neighbourhood, gave makossa a harder, more playful edge, while others blended it with Caribbean zouk, Congolese soukous and, more recently, hip-hop and Afrobeats. Today, you will hear makossa influences in Cameroonian pop, and the old classics still fill dance floors at weddings and family parties.

Makossa and its neighbours

Makossa grew up in conversation with the other great African dance styles of its time. It shares the guitars of rumba, the brass of highlife and the funk that also shaped Nigeria's Afrobeat. In turn, its bass-heavy grooves fed into the African pop that would one day become Afrobeats.

Why it matters

Makossa shows how a city's music can travel. It started as the sound of Douala's bars, became the pride of a newly independent country, and then, through one unexpected B-side, changed the sound of New York's dance floors and entered the history of pop.

Next time you hear that famous chant, remember where it came from: a port city on the Wouri River, and generations of Cameroonian musicians who knew exactly how to make people dance.

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