ManuDibango
“Avant Fela, avant Salif Keita, avant la diaspora afro-pop des années 2010, il y a eu Manu. Il a donné au makossa son passeport mondial.”
- Base
- Local / African based
- Active
- The Architect of Makossa
- Sound lane
- Makossa
- Languages
- english / french / duala
Cultural Snapshot
A fast read of the artist's place in the archive before you enter the songs.
Avant Fela, avant Salif Keita, avant la diaspora afro-pop des années 2010, il y a eu Manu. Il a donné au makossa son passeport mondial.
Local / African based
Douala, Cameroon
english / french / duala
6 cultural annotations across the catalog
Soul Makossa
78 reads
Popular Lyrics
2 most-read lyric pages · 85 total reads.
Discography
3 albums
Albums
1 releaseLegacy albums
2 albumsCredits & Network
The artist network is still being mapped.
Network under restoration
Roles, collaborators, credits, and music-actor data will appear here.
Timeline
Biography as a sequence of origin, catalog, and museum milestones.
Emmanuel N'Djoké "Manu" Dibango (12 December 1933 – 24 March 2020) was a Cameroonian saxophonist, songwriter and bandleader whose 1972 single "Soul Makossa" became the most-sampled African song in history and a foundational record for global club culture. Born in Douala to a civil-servant father and a fashion-designer mother, he was sent to France in 1949 at age 15 for school, took up piano at 17, then switched to saxophone after discovering Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong. He spent two decades performing across Africa, Belgium and France before returning to Paris in 1965 to begin his international ascent. Dibango fused jazz, funk and traditional Cameroonian rhythms — makossa above all — into a sound that bridged continents. He was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2004 and died in a Paris hospital from COVID-19 in March 2020, aged 86.
- 1933
Origin
Manu Dibango is connected to Douala, Cameroon.
- 1956
Active era begins
Documented active period begins here and runs through 2020.
- 1972
Earliest song in Culture Legacy
Soul Makossa is the earliest dated lyric page currently attached to this artist.
- 1972
Museum record established
Culture Legacy curator metadata marks this record as part of the museum archive.
- 2026
Latest canonical release
neo makossa is the newest project currently restored in the discography.
Adjacent Voices
Other artists in the African catalog you might want to visit next.
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