This is the coolest shit I've heard in a very long time. It's almost how I imagined funk before I actually heard any - entirely free, loose, snappy, and upbeat. Pure. There's a jazz edge here too, but not a massively noticeable one once you look past the instrumentation. In fact, regardless of the chronology, if anything I hear more dub in this, in the way that the rhythm is always king as the snippets of melody and improvisation rise and fall around it. For that reason, it's aged remarkably well.
"Soul Makossa" is sometimes credited as one of the first disco records, which is....interesting, I suppose. I'm not sure I agree too much, although it's worth noting that the song did reach the Billboard top 40, a creditable achievement for an African recording music in Africa. If you want further historical importance, compare the track to Michael Jackson's "Gotta Be Startin' Something" (and by extension Rihanna's "Don't Stop The Music"), which takes the refrain and coverts it from Duala into Swahili, in much the same way that Las Ketchup converted "Rapper's Delight" into Spanish on "The Ketchup Song".
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