Francis Bebey was born the son of a Protestant pastor in French-ruled Cameroon. During his childhood, his family and teachers sought to alienate him from the roots culture around him. As he told Liberation in France in 1984, "I was schooled to ignore, and even to detest, traditional African styles." Bebey's musical family did surround him with a variety of Western instruments, accordion, violin, piano, mandolin, and--the instrument he settled on at age nine--guitar. Despite the efforts of his colonial-era instructors, Bebey did discover Africa, which of course was all around him. A traditional doctor and musician Eya Mouéssé led Bebey to his first African music love affair: the local harp and mouth-bow, which the boy would seek out all night celebrations in order to hear.

As a teenager in Douala, the capital, Bebey played guitar and drums in an ashiko--Cameroonean highlife--band. The experience led inevitably to his discovery of international dance styles of the era, especially Afro-Cuban music and American swing jazz. Bebey went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne in the mid '50s, and there his musical path was altered yet again when he discovered the classical guitar of Andre Segovia and began to study the instrument. Upon graduation, Bebey took a producer/journalist job at Paris's Radiodiffusion Outre-Mer. He led a jazz band in the city, and has the distinction of giving future Afropop superstar and saxophonist Manu Dibangu his first professional gig.

In 1958, Bebey came to the United States to continue his studies at New York University. There, he began composing music for the guitar, but journalism would continue to dominate his work as he returned to Paris in 1960 and became a popular radio personality broadcasting to francophone Africa as host of the program "Jazz Train." This accomplishment led directly to a job tracking and researching traditional music for UNESCO. As Bebey traveled in Africa and learned more about its traditions, he began creating original works, including socially aware and sometimes satirical poems set to the music of traditional instruments like the West African kora. In 1967, Bebey won the Grand Literary Prize of Black Africa for his novel "Le Fils d'Agatha Moudio."

For all his successes, Bebey never stopped expanding his horizons. It was only in the 1980s, when he was widely renowned as a novelist, poet, composer and performer, that Bebey began to play traditional African instruments himself. He recorded African Sanza in 1982, a set of original compositions for the central African lamellophone (sometimes called hand piano or thumb piano). Bebey's forays into sanza and also ndewhoo (Pygmee flute) paralleled dramatic changes in his approach to guitar. Inspired by his explorations in African music, Bebey's developed distinctive new techniques: tapping the guitar to produce the sound of a talking drum, and wrapping one bass string around the next to produce a percussive snare drum effect. Bebey's performances now included singing in French, English, and various Bantu languages.

During the years when Afropop rose to international attention, Bebey was often cited as a guiding force, a kind of father figure in the global spread of African music. In 1994, he composed a piece for the adventurous Kronos Quartet. Musical icons as diverse as composer and conductor John Williams, and South Africa's kings of acapella music Ladysmith Black Mambazo worked with Bebey during his final years. A visionary and a humanist, Bebey used his art and his literary platform to preach universal love, and reconciliation between the world's races. He often made the argument that art is not simply a diversion, but an essential feature of life--a civilizing force. He donned the mantle of a universal griot, a traditional West African councilor, musician, and historian. Indeed, Bebey was a griot for the entire world.

Francis Bebey continued to tour as much as six months a year with sons Patrick Jr (Toops) and Patrick, and also to record new works right to the end. He died in Paris at 72 following a sudden heart attack. It was a great loss. Few in the extended Afropop community have given so much. (John Storm Roberts' notes for the excellent CD Nandolo/ With Love provided the most important source for this biography. The CD is reviewed in Bebey's discography on this site.)

Contributed by: Banning Eyre