Ziglibithy

Ziglibithy is the first distinctly Ivorian style of modern popular music, created in the 1970s by singer-guitarist *Ernesto Djédjé* of Daloa from the tohourou roots music of his Bété people, fused with the Congolese rumba that then dominated francophone Africa and touches of disco and funk. It is highly syncopated dance music in which sinuous, interlocking guitar lines are punctuated by fat horn phrases and call-and-response singing in Bété and French. For a decade it functioned as Côte d'Ivoire's national sound, the deliberate answer to the 'Congolisation' of the Abidjan scene that Djédjé campaigned against.