The most beautiful flower can be found growing on the rankest dunghill, Manu Dibango was given to pointing out. It was a phrase that became his maxim as Africa’s most celebrated jazz musician.
The dunghill was the slavery into which his forefathers had been sold, he explained. “The flower is jazz, the fruit of which was pollinated from the West, on the one hand, and from Africa on the other.”
That flower blossomed prolifically for Dibango during a career lasting seven decades in which his burnished saxophone-playing and reverberating voice created a uniquely cosmopolitan blend of global styles.
Born in Cameroon, he spent much of his life in France, but his music never lost touch with his African roots. Nowhere was this more evident than