Bebey was a poet. He sang, composed, wrote novels, played multiple instruments and told stories. He harboured the gentle ways of the wise and the dreams of the young, peppered with wondrous fervour and starkly realistic outbursts. He was a poet of the pygmy flute, suffused with mysteries and nocturnal perfume. He was a poet of the sanza (a metal lamellophone from Africa), and the guitar, with something of both Baden Powell and Narciso Yepes in his playing, a style that evoked the balafon with lovely impetuous rhythms. His singing was charged with nostalgia, laughter, tenderness and solitude, occasionally lit by a spark of mischief.

© pierre rené-worms Read the biography

The Cameroonian was born in1929 to a Baptist minister who played hymns by Bach and Handel on the harmonium and accordion. Home was a village on the outskirts of Douala, where he was fascinated by a neighbour who, “…used to play instruments at night, and people said he was using them to call the devil. So we weren’t allowed to listen to him. But our place was just over the road, and because he played late into the night and everyone’s door was open, I used to go and listen to him while my parents slept. Whenever I got caught, I used to get a right beating.” It was through this neighbour that he discovered the simple but infinitely versatile instruments, the sanza and mouth bow.

“I didn’t want to become an engineer, a doctor or a teacher. What I wanted was to be a musician, but that wasn’t considered a proper job. A lot of people were making music but it wasn’t their career. So I started studying English to become a teacher, but I realised that, because I’d never liked school, I would never make a good teacher.” So he tried out different lines of work, doing journalism and radio studies in the United States, creating a radio in Ghana (where he was told they didn’t need such free-speaking journalists), then returning to Paris, where he worked at Sorafom (the radio broadcasting service for overseas French territories that later became RFI), before joining UNESCO, where he trained managers and technicians to work in radio in developing countries and ran a collection of traditional music records. At the same time, he wrote novels, essays on African music and, “As soon as I got a bit of money and a studio together, even in difficult technical conditions, I would make a record.”

Career in the making

A écouter La Condition masculine Francis BEBEY "LA CONDITION MASCULINE" (Ozileka) 1976 Listen Lambarene Schweitzer Francis BEBEY "LAMBARENE SCHWEITZER" (Ceddia) 1993 Listen

In 1974, tired of fighting bureaucracy and inertia, and hungry for music and creation, he left UNESCO to focus on a full-time singing career. At a time when countries round Africa and African immigrants were getting into electric instrumentation and big bands, Francis Bebey opted for simple instruments and acoustic recordings. He got interested in the one-note pygmy flute while most of his contemporaries were raving about electronic keyboards.

He was unusually prolific, recording over thirty albums in total, many of which were hits in France and French-speaking countries, like Agatha and La Condition masculine. As the new millennium turned, he also composed for the Kronos Quartet and wrote a piece for cello and sanza at the request of the French cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton. In doing so, he was refusing to simply paint himself in the colours of Cameroon or Africa. As he told us on the release of his remarkable album, Lambaréné-Schweitzer, in 1993: “Some people irritate me when they play non-African music and pass it off as African. They should be humble enough to say ‘this is my music,’ and not ‘this is African music,’ simply because it’s being played by an African. Today’s Africans are very different from the Africans of five hundred years ago. They are hybrids, whether they like it or not. For years the African music I’ve been making isn’t necessarily commercially viable but yet it’s the truest mirror of myself – a man born in a town, whose roots are in the villages of Africa.”

Bebey was seen as a pioneer by his juniors, he sat on the Haut conseil de la francophonie and was invited to speak at universities and world music festivals. He made no secret of the fact that his songs were as likely to be inspired by Georges Brassens and European classical music as they were by his African roots. This made him one of the first to identify a middle way between cultural assimilation and sticking to a type of absolute African identity. The music that sprang from this original path is charming, moving, rich and happy, and remains some of the most unusual music to have emerged since the African colonies gained independence.
 
Box Francis Bebey, la belle époque (Celluloïd/coedition RFI) 2011
Libretto Kidi Bebey and Olivier Rogez. Photos that illustrate this article are extracted from this set. On sale from 14 June on the shop RFI (La Boutique)