“As soon as he saw me, he jumped on me because he wanted to knock me down. It was just his way of showing his love!” The musician Cheick Tidiane Seck, a close friend of Manfila Kanté from the seventies, still remembers the last time he met up with the “big brother”. It was at Salif Keita’s place, at the Moffou studio in Bamako. The partnership between the albino singer, who went on to become a Malian star, and his Guinean acolyte made an impression on people’s minds and the continent’s music. On the back cover of the LP they recorded in the United States in 1981, one is described as a “band leader” and the other as “the Domingo of African music.”

Ladji KANTE MANFILA, SORRY BAMBA "CLASH MANDINGUE" (ORIKI MUSIC) Listen

Manfila was born in a village close to Kankan in the east of Guinea, but his career really got going in Abidjan, where he moved when he was about twenty. He had already learned some guitar, encouraged by a cousin who played in regional bands at the time of President Sékou Touré’s cultural policies, and the young Manfila continued his musical education in Côte d’Ivoire with the Malian saxophonist Moussa Cissoko.

He also became close to one of Cissoko’s compatriots, from Mopti. “I met the Guinean Kanté Manfila, guitarist with the famous N’Douba Koidio band. He said he wanted to form a group and we agreed that we would work together. He was to be band leader, solo guitarist and singer. I would be the flautist, trumpeter and singer. Together, we recruited musicians and named our band African Style,” wrote Sorry Bamba in his 1996 autobiography De la tradition à la world music. “Thanks to African Style’s success, both Manfila and I released many records […] [We] had relations with the Nigerian producer Djima Yanda, the elder brother of the famous producer Bademos. We both created our work and did the musical arrangements together. We released a single every three months. One record brought in a flat rate of 50,000 CFA Francs, plus copyright,” he continued.

The style of that time was often Latino, but they didn’t lose sight of their own culture, like on Horoya, a single from 1968 attributed to Kante Manfla (sic) and his band on the cover, which features the group posing in suits and ties in front of the lagoon with the brand new Hôtel Ivoire in the background.

Sorry Bamba convinced him to come with him to his country and play with Mopti’s Kanaga band, but the Guinean quickly returned to Bamako, where he joined the ranks of the Ambassadeurs du Motel around 1972. Cheick Tidiane Seck remembers taking Amadou Bagayoko (best known for his duet with his wife Mariam) to Manfila’s in 1974 “so that he would teach him to play musette, waltz, tango and paso doble,” and so prepare the partially sighted guitarist to vie for a place with the Ambassadeurs.

Numbers also swelled with the arrival of the singer Salif Keita, when he defected from the competing Rail Band. They started to release singles from 1975, and produced their first album in 1976, followed by several more. The Ambassadeurs adventure continued in Abidjan from 1978, where the musicians, who lived in the same villa, considered working conditions to be better and opportunities more numerous.

This was the period of Mandjou, one of their greatest hits. Their paths separated at the start of the following decade only to cross once more in Paris in the mid-eighties. Manfila recorded Kankan Blues under his own name, in which “his way of singing was nothing like a griot’s,” affirms Cheick Tidiane Seck. “He had a talent for composing songs and that’s what fuelled Salif’s career.”

The man so often pigeon-holed as a griot in reality possessed a much wider vision. One of his numbers, Nterike, also contributed to building Fodé Kouyaté’s reputation. While developing his personal projects during the nineties, including the CDs N’na Niwalé and Back To Farabanah, he remained present alongside Salif Keita and did the arrangements for his album Moffou, as well as working for the Senegalese Baaba Maal.

More recently, he offered his experience to the Guinean singer Sia Tolno to help her put together her first album Eh Sanga. He was decorated in 2005 by president Amadou Toumani Touré, who named him chevalier de l’ordre national du Mali. Manfila Kanté was without doubt one of the great figures of African music. 

Translation by: Anne-Marie Harper