My belief that music is the greatest leveler was strengthened during my travel to Africa last year. I landed up with an assignment for my NGO in Tamale, the capital of the northern region of Ghana. My dream of Africa travel in general, and visiting one of the West African countries in particular, was finally fulfilled.

 In Tamale, I heard a so called ‘guitar band’ playing at a place close to my hotel. There are very few guitar bands still around, as highlife and hip-hop dominates the music scene of Ghana. A guitar band is now, in all sense, retro. But I liked this band. The sound was very 70s: amplified, bluesy, rhythmic and soulful. But the content of the music they were playing was pure Mande stuff: traditional African music with roots that go back to more than seven hundred years.

 I was forced to think of the times when the music of West Africa reached the American shores with the slave trade. The Africans who reached there adopted the guitar and modified its sound to make it sound like their instruments. The Blues were ultimately born, followed by Jazz, the electric guitar, rock, and history.

 As time would have it, the electric guitar came back to West Africa in the 1960s. And by the seventies, the circle was full. Now the music was back to where it all began. Interestingly, the guitar was now preferred over the kora, the nkoni and the balafone, and the foreign sound was adopted for the native rhythms. It happened in other West African countries too. It was like a homecoming for the prodigal sound. I realized that history can chart strange circles: because culture knows no boundaries.