I’ve got a soft spot for Togo, that thin sliver of land which looks squeezed between Ghana and Benin as it licks like a tongue northward from the Gulf of Guinea. Its capital Lomé is a city of palm-lined beaches, vibrant open-air markets and a genuine, unforced warmth.
Admittedly I spent much of my time there either dodging the zémidjans, the feral motorbike taxis that buzz around the dusty streets of Lomé, or fearing for my life while riding on the back of one as it would slalom through the traffic. But maybe that adrenaline-inducing wildness adds to the charm of the city and the whole country.
Togo is one of the smallest nations in Africa, home to more than forty ethnic groups, dozens of languages, and a music scene that, for decades, the rest of the world has rarely heard. So I take great pleasure today on Sunny Side Up in celebrating its great lost daughter, Bella Bellow.
The Girl from Tsévié
In the late 1960s, she was arguably the most compelling voice to come out of West Africa. She was born in 1945 in Tsévié, a town not far inland from Lomé, in Togo’s Ewe-speaking south. Her rise was startlingly quick. By 1966, aged just 21, she was representing her country at Africa’s premier arts festival in Dakar, Senegal, a landmark gathering of African and diaspora artists that put her on the international map almost overnight.
Three years later, her debut album Rockya arrived with serious firepower behind it: a Cameroonian backing band featuring a young Manu Dibango, years before „Soul Makossa“ would make him a global name. Bellow’s sound was rich, dramatic, unmistakably rooted in Ewe musical tradition, but open to the funk and soul currents moving through West Africa at the time. She performed at the Olympia in Paris, an iconic venue for francophone musicians. She was, by any measure, on her way to becoming one of the defining African voices of her generation.
„Dasi Ko“ comes from 1973, her final year. Recorded in Paris and produced again by Dibango, it’s a heavier, more psychedelic record than her earlier work, all simmering low-end and aching vocal repetition. The title is a fragment of Ewe, and the recurring line that gives the song its name, „Ɖe asi le nunye ko“, is a plea, something close to „just let go of me“, repeated until it becomes less a lyric than an incantation. The song closes on cries of „Novi, novi, novi“, „sister, sister, sister“, as if she’s calling out to someone, or to all of us.
Later that year, Bella Bellow died in a car accident in Togo. She was just 28 years old.
A Country Still Waiting to Be Heard
There’s a doctoral thesis, cited in the small amount of academic work that exists on Togolese music, that describes the country’s popular music history as having been „largely excluded from ethnomusicological inquiry.“ That’s a polite way of saying: almost nobody bothered to document it. Togo’s music sits in the shadow of its bigger, louder neighbours, Ghana’s highlife, Nigeria’s Afrobeat, without ever getting the same archival attention. Records like Bellow’s only resurfaced for international ears through compilations like Togo Soul 70, released decades after the fact, rescuing recordings that had all but vanished. That’s, admittedly, how I first became aware of Bella.
What’s striking listening to „Dasi Ko“ now is how alive it still sounds, how little it needs any historical footnote to work as music. But the footnote matters anyway. It tells you about a young woman who, in a handful of years, went from a provincial Togolese town to sharing stages and studios with some of the biggest names in African music, and who was gone before she turned thirty.
Togo remains, to most of the world, a name on a map rather than a place with its own sound. Bella Bellow’s voice is a reminder that it always had one, extraordinary, and worth more attention than it ever got.