The German who owns what is probably the world’s largest collection of rare, vintage, West African vinyl on how he got a hold of some of his rare possessions, some of which he will be playing in Hanoi this weekend
On 3 and 4 October Frank Gossner, a man with one of the most famous and rarest collections of West African records in the world, will be spinning tunes in Hanoi. He calls himself “a DJ with no skills”, so his way to shine is through playing records that nobody else has.
Frank spent most of his life in Germany, but in 2005 his life took a turn when his wife was offered a job in Conakry, the capital of Guinea. He ended up occupying his time living there with buying records from Guinea, Ghana, Benin and Nigeria, a task not as easy as it might originally sound.
To get an impression of some of the things he had to go through to bring you these records, here are a few pictures and excerpts from his blog that give you an inkling of what he went through to bring some of the most obscure African vinyl all the way to Southeast Asia.
Words & Images courtesy of Frank Gossner ● Video by Seen in Saigon
My first trip outside of Guinea took me to Freetown, the capital of neighbouring Sierra Leone. My digging guide and friend Amadou Baldé and I left town early in the morning in a bush taxi.
Freetown used to be a bustling town. The nearby beaches, endlessly long, white and lined with palm trees are considered to be amongst the continent’s most beautiful, some claim they would make the worldwide top ten. This is why Freetown, before the 10 year long civil war that plagued the country up until 2001 had enjoyed its fair share of tourism. Then it became the favourite playground for international dealers in firearms and diamonds. The fighting during the first 6 years was limited to the border region to Liberia in the East and the diamond fields in the North but in 1997 one of Africa’s most gruesome civil wars of the last decade engulfed the capital.
After a couple of ice cold Star beers (the surprisingly good local brew of choice), we took to the center of town where we found our first “recording studio”. The owner refused flat out to sell any of his records even though he didn’t use them anymore. After he left, his employee told us to meet him after work at the kiosk inside Victoria
Park. We headed for another spot called “Topman Recording Studio” where we met Abrahaman, our future main connection to various private record collections.
Abrahaman told us to search for “old sailors”. He explained how it had always been the sailors who brought the new records to town. They were traveling up and down the West African coast, buying records in the harbours of Lagos, Cotonou and Abidjan – the cities with pressing plants, and sold them to local recording studios and nightclubs once they would get back to Freetown.
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I bought my first records on the African continent at Mr. Mafa’s little record store at Marché Niger. Record stores or “recording studios” in Africa usually aren’t places where records are sold but where you can order custom made mix tapes put together from the owner’s record collection. Luckily for me, the sounds I was after weren’t amongst the favourites of Mr. Mafa’s clientele and so he let go of some of the first pieces for my ever since growing collection of African records. Sadly, the little store by the name “Syli-Musique” has now vanished.
Guinea is a very poor country, for the majority of people. However, there is a strong minority of government officials and their enlarged families that are very, very wealthy. You can regularly see them cruising around with their Hummer or Rover Limousines amongst the shacks and clay huts of their next door neighbours. This is because the small country (look it up on the map to see exactly how small) is extremely rich in natural resources. Guinea sits on one third of the entire world reserve of bauxit – the stuff needed to make aluminum.
The government has its hands free to hassle their population with activities like the one that cost dear Mr. Mafa his record store: For a few weeks, special police dressed all in black took to the streets after nightfall and painted red crosses on houses and stores that were built illegally and too close to the road. After a week or two, they came back with trucks, automatic weapons, clubs, whips made off power lines and car-mounted machine guns. Shacks, houses and businesses got looted, torn down and the rubble looted again by crowds of impoverished children who followed the mob in hope of perhaps finding something edible or otherwise usable. Mr. Mafa’s store also
had received a blood red X. In his case even paying off the authorities wouldn’t have been an option, he was located on one of the hotspots where new houses for “real” businesses are destined to be built and so he tore down his place himself before anybody else could.
“Real” businesses by the way sell Grade-C imports from China shipped in via Dubai to ensure that even the small traditional handicraft businesses like tailors, shoemakers and the like are having a hard time trying to survive. After he lost his store, Mr. Mafa became one of my best resources for vinyl in Guinea, he now proudly calls himself “ambassadeur des disques” and is constantly finding new records for me.
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The gasmask is a dustmask with micro-filters that stop all dust but also fungus and mold spores. I have sometimes fallen sick with respiratory infections. Some forms of mould can be seriously toxic, even deadly, when you inhale it.
This place was in Enugu in South East Nigeria. My most effective Nigerian buyer Damian Iwuagwu had sent me pictures of the place. I immediately bought a plane ticket to Lagos when I saw the pictures. When I arrived local elections were underway in Enugu and during election times in Africa there is always a lot of violence and insecurity.
I forced Damian to take me there anyway and the atmosphere was very tense. At one time we were stuck in traffic and next to us a military unit had surrounded a hearse. There was a lot of shouting and yelling and the people from the funeral were all very upset. Even the other passengers in our minivan bus were getting nervous and were telling our driver to get us away from there, but we were surrounded by other vehicles and could not move. Outside the soldiers were aiming their AK47 rifles at the funeral guests. The other passengers in our mini-bus explained to me that sometimes armed robbers or rebels use coffins to smuggle weapons and that the soldiers
suspected there might be arms hidden inside.
Some soldiers opened the back door of the hearse and pulled out the coffin which fell down, and the lid fell off. Everybody could see the dead body inside, the funeral guests were screaming in terror. Thankfully a gap opened in the traffic and we took off.
We finally arrived at our destination. In the 1970s this man had owned a recording studio and a chain of record stores. In the early 1980s he closed down all of his stores and filled an empty warehouse with all the remaining records. He did not put them in shelves or even in boxes, the records were just filled the room up to the ceiling. We had to take out all of the records you can see me sitting on top of before we had space to enter the room. Inside it was total madness. We had hired 2 local workers and all of us worked very hard for 5 long days. The workers were joking because they had worked for white construction people before who were always staying inside air-conditioned camper vehicles and never did any physical work. They said that I was the first white
man they ever saw do any real work and they asked if I was from a different tribe of white people, because of my tattoos. In Africa, different tribes identify themselves with scars and tattoos.
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CAMA ATK will be hosting Frank for two nights. The first will dedicated to Voodoo Funk, the second to Lagos Disco Inferno. Be prepared to dance to afro-beat songs you have never heard, and will never hear again.
