Photo Courtesy of Niels de Vries Kopie van Wilde weide
Togolese
Lomé, Togo, by way of Washington, D.C.
The West African nation of Togo is a bit of a musical black box, long overshadowed by nearby musical powerhouses like Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire. But Togo has an untapped wealth of music traditions, as well as a few breakout artists, including singers King Mensah and Bella Bellow. Singer and guitarist Serge Massama Dogo, aka Dogo du Togo, is the latest Togolese artist to bring his country’s musical traditions to international stages, mixing alagaa trance music with contemporary African pop sounds to fashion a distinctive sound rooted in Togolese music and ritual.
Togo is long and narrow, wedged between Ghana to the west and Benin to the east, running from the Gulf of Guinea in the South to Burkina Faso in the North. The country is home to 40 ethnic groups—with the largest being the Kabye in the North and the Ewe in the South—and the wealth of indigenous music runs deep. Local instruments include kologo and goje lutes, gyill xylophones, and various flutes. But drums dominate across all regions and styles—especially among the practitioners of Vodun, a religion whose rituals gave rise to the unique Vodun sound. Driven by intricate polyrhythms pounded out on a battery of hand drums and punctuated by distinctive percussive iron bells, Vodun music is ecstatic and trance-inducing, and animates the sound of Dogo du Togo.
Massama was born in the capital city of Lomé in 1972 and was drawn to music early on, learning from elder musicians and playing in various bands as a teenager, despite his father’s opposition. In 2000, he moved to the United States, landing in Washington, D.C., where he founded the band Elikeh in 2006. Known for their high-energy live performances and original sound, Elikeh combines Afrofunk and rock with Togolese polyrhythms. The band garnered a loyal local following and released three albums and an EP to date, receiving rave reviews from The Washington Post and NPR.
Prior to 2020, Dogo began splitting his time between D.C. and his homeland, digging deeper into its musical traditions and reconnecting with the local music scene. There he recorded his first solo album, Dogo du Togo, in 2022, topping radio charts at home and attracting critical acclaim in Europe and the U.S. For his next album, 2024’s Avoudé, Dogo assembled the Alagaa Beat Band, recruiting his former guitar teacher Oya Yao and other old friends with whom he grew up playing music on the streets of Lomé.
Dogo draws from a deep well of sounds from across Togo, including bobobo, kamou, and kpanlogo rhythms, melodies, and scales drawn from Vodun religious rituals and others. But the bedrock of his band’s sound is the driving alagaa rhythm, a dizzying dance between snare drum and rhythm guitar, modeled on gankogui kinka bells. Alagaa means “trance” in the Ewe language, and its driving, irresistible beat is transporting. “When you listen to this music, if you don’t get in a trance, then something’s wrong with you!” Dogo explains. “The alagaa beat brings the energy right away. As soon as you bring it in, it just feels different; it takes you somewhere else.”