At El Grito we’ve always been drawn to the musical currents that slip back and forth across the Atlantic — rhythms leaving Africa, mutating in Cuba, and washing home again carrying new shapes, new accents, and old memories disguised as something modern. We didn’t set out to become obsessed with this loop; the loop caught us. But Richard Shain’s Roots in Reverse gave that obsession its spine. His book didn’t just clarify the Afro-Cuban moment in Senegalese music — it named the thing we’d been feeling without fully understanding.
Shain’s recent passing casts a long shadow, but also a kind of clarity: if there is one band that makes his thesis ring with cinematic force, it is Orchestra Baobab, and if there is one track that crystallises it, it is “Utrus Horas.”
A song that somehow feels like Dakar dreaming of Havana and Havana dreaming of Dakar — a melodic Möbius strip where origin and return blur. It’s the tune that first made us stop, stare at the speakers, and think: this is the Atlantic talking to itself.
The Band Beneath the Tree, Born from a Musical Heist
Baobab emerged in the late 1960s at a nightclub built around a towering baobab tree in Dakar’s Medina, a detail too perfect to be fiction. But their birth wasn’t just romantic — it was political, even mischievous. The club’s owners lured musicians away from the mighty Star Band of Dakar, the city’s premier musical institution and talent factory.
From that grafting came the lineup that would later record “Utrus Horas”, a track where Attisso’s guitar lines seem to slide between claves, where Wolof phrasing curls around a bolero skeleton as if it grew there naturally. Even in their earliest days, Baobab weren’t imitating Cuba; they were articulating an African memory filtered through Caribbean light.
Star Band, with its rotating cast of prodigies, had effectively become Senegal’s musical civil service: it trained everybody who would later define the country’s pop history. Baobab was assembled from its brightest pieces — a deliberate, cheeky breakaway that instantly signalled ambition.
From this clandestine grafting grew a band that sounded like no one else: Rudy Gomis’s soft, bolero-ready vocals; Barthelemy Attisso’s guitar lines, more Havana than Dakar; Issa Cissoko’s saxophone, unspooling phrases that hovered between griot lament and Cuban nightclub croon. They weren’t imitating Cuba. They were breathing in a sound that already fit their internal grammar.
Their 1970s run — Baobab à Paris, Gouygui Dou Daanou, Sibou Odja, and especially Ken Dou Werente — captured a Dakar that felt open-armed, cosmopolitan, sunlit but nocturnal at its core and culminated in 1980 with the beautiful Mouhamadou Bamba, which we found, here, in classic Senegalese TV.
And there’s a pleasingly messy irony in the band’s history: Baobab were originally poached from the Star Band of Dakar — one of the city’s great musical factories — but the wheel turned fast. The Star Band’s own young protégé, Youssou N’Dour, would soon rewrite the entire script of Senegalese music. With the rise of mbalax, he didn’t just steal the spotlight; he stole the mantle of what “modern” sounded like. Baobab, once the shiny new breakaway, suddenly found themselves the old guard.
Négritude, the Intelligentsia, and the Dream of an Indigenous Modernity
To understand why Baobab mattered — and why their Afro-Cuban palette carried such intellectual weight — you need to look at the cultural mood of the Senegalese elite in the decades after independence.
The ideas of Négritude, shaped by Léopold Sédar Senghor and others, cultivated a belief that African cultural expression wasn’t something to be rehabilitated or modernised through Europe — it was already modern, already elegant, already universal. The Senegalese intelligentsia yearned for an indigenous modernity, a cultured alternative to European models that didn’t shed African identity.
Afro-Cuban music fit this yearning perfectly. It was modern yet African-rooted, glamorous yet familiar. Cuban son and bolero offered an African cosmopolitanism without the colonial shadow. In that sense, Baobab were not just a band — they were a living embodiment of a philosophical project, blending Africa’s diasporic reflection with its continental heartbeat.
Nick Gold, the Great Accidental Bridge
When Baobab faded in the 1980s under the tidal wave of mbalax, their elegant Afro-Cuban cosmopolitanism seemed destined to become a beautiful relic. But then, out of the blue, British producer Nick Gold stumbled across an old copy of Ken Dou Werente. He reissued it on World Circuit as Pirate’s Choice, and in doing so, revived the band.
Gold is often remembered for Buena Vista Social Club, but in truth his career has been an extended love letter to the African–Cuban relationship. Reviving Baobab, recording the Cuban veterans in Havana, later realising the long-delayed AfroCubism project — he kept tracing the same musical fault line Shain had described academically.
Gold didn’t create Baobab’s legacy; he simply amplified it at the exact moment the world was ready to hear this music as part of a larger Atlantic story. Check out this 2015 clip, featuring a late Rudy Gomis performance.
A Night at the Barbican: Where the Atlantic Collapsed
We saw Baobab at the Barbican Centre in London — a venue so pristine it sometimes feels like it’s been acoustically disinfected. But as soon as Baobab took the stage, the space retextured. The first tumbao-inflected guitar line didn’t just sound good; it rearranged the room. The Barbican, so often stiff-backed and reverential, softened. People began swaying. Shoulders loosened. That peculiar Baobab warmth settled in — the warmth of a sound drawing two continents into the same breath.
And this is where Shain’s thesis stops being theory. Sitting there, you felt the recognition: Cuban rhythm as an African memory returning home; Wolof melodic sensibilities sliding effortlessly into structures that were born in the diaspora; the Atlantic not as a barrier, but as a resonant chamber.
For a few hours, London was Dakar, and Dakar was Havana, and the ocean between them briefly vanished.
Tropical Cosmopolitans, Still Standing
Shain called the musicians of Baobab’s era tropical cosmopolitans — West Africans who embraced the world without shedding themselves. Baobab embody that spirit completely. Their sound was never nostalgic; it was forward-looking, urbane, a vision of Senegal as a cultural capital that didn’t need European validation.
Their 2000s renaissance, tours that circled the planet, and the forthcoming Made in Senegal album show the loop is still open, still humming. New members have refreshed the lineup, but the essential thing — that elegant Afro-Cuban lilt — remains untouched.
Baobab aren’t just important; they’re significant. They represent an alternative arc of African modernity, one where diaspora and origin embrace each other without hierarchy.
When Baobab Play, the Loop Closes
Richard Shain argued that Cuban music resonated in Senegal not because it was exotic, but because it was family. Orchestra Baobab make that truth audible. In every horn flourish, in every guitar lick, in every unhurried groove that seems to float above time, they collapse the distance between continents, philosophies, histories.
They are the sound of roots running in reverse — and of Africa responding, knowingly, beautifully, to its own reflection across the water.
El Grito 