The Centre for African Popular Culture at Ashesi University has announced the revival of its annual conference series following a brief hiatus.

Scheduled for August 6, 2026, this year’s conference is titled "Daddy Lumba Lives On: Music, Mourning, and the Cultural Life of Death in Ghana."

Prof Emeritus Kwesi Yankah will serve as the keynote speaker for the event, which centers on the life, music, and enduring cultural presence of the legendary Ghanaian highlife musician Charles Kwadwo Fosu, popularly known as Daddy Lumba, who passed away in 2025 at the age of 60.

Death as an Analytic Lens for Ghanaian Culture

Rather than approaching the musician's passing as a closed biographical endpoint, the conference treats Daddy Lumba’s death as a methodological entry point and analytic lens into the study of Ghanaian public culture.

According to the organizers, the event presents a critical opportunity to examine how affect, authority, and memory converge in moments of collective loss, and how popular music mediates emotional life and social power.

Within this framing, mourning is examined not simply as an expression of grief, but as a cultural practice through which values are articulated, relationships are negotiated, and public narratives are authorized.

Participants will explore the intersections of:

- Popular music, celebrity, kinship, ritual, and media in moments of national mourning.

- Funerals as simultaneously affective and political events—spaces where grief is performed, intimacy is staged, kinship authority is exercised, and competing claims over legacy, voice, and remembrance emerge.

- How Daddy Lumba’s music continues to circulate as a living archive of social life, shaping how individuals and communities remember, feel, and make sense of their own histories.

Additionally, the conference seeks to examine the mediation of Daddy Lumba's death through radio, television, and digital platforms, analyzing how these media environments shape public feeling, debate, and cultural authority.

Taken together, these perspectives position popular music as a central site through which Ghanaian public culture is organized, contested, and renewed.

Call for Submissions

The Centre for African Popular Culture has issued an open invitation for submissions. Organizers warmly welcome contributions from scholars, practitioners, and cultural critics working in fields such as:

- Anthropology and ethnography of communication

- (Ethno-)musicology

- Media, communication, and cultural studies

- Religious studies and history

- Musicians and independent researchers