Soul Makossa

The song crossed the Atlantic in 1972 when DJ David Mancuso found a copy in a Brooklyn West Indian record store and started playing it at his Loft parties in downtown New York. Word travelled fast. The few imported copies in Manhattan sold out within weeks. Atlantic Records picked up US distribution in 1973; the single went gold and Dibango received two Grammy nominations at the 1974 ceremony — Best R&B Instrumental Performance and Best Instrumental Composition. To this day, Soul Makossa is widely cited as a foundational record of the proto-disco era.

Then came the sampling. In 1982 Michael Jackson lifted the chanted hook for "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" on Thriller — without permission, without credit. Dibango sued; Jackson acknowledged the borrowing and settled out of court for one million French francs. In 2007 Rihanna interpolated the same line via Jackson on "Don't Stop the Music." Dibango filed a follow-up lawsuit in 2009, but it failed because he had already secured a writer's credit on the Rihanna track in 2008 — which the court found exhausted his claim.

The sample lineage continues. Hip-hop, R&B, house, Afrobeats: the "mama-ko, mama-sa" cadence has been quoted, reworked and re-sampled across more than a hundred records. The most-sampled African song in history began as a B-side anthem for a football tournament — and it remains the single clearest example of why a platform that documents the filiation of African music matters. When the credit travels with the sample, the value can travel home.