‘Sweet Mother’: The African hit that outsold The Beatles
Despite their time in the spotlight as an active band lasting less than a decade, The Beatles were seemingly incapable of underperforming with any of their releases. Thrust into the spotlight in an instant with singles such as ‘Please Please Me’, ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘She Loves You’ becoming roaring successes, the band never seemed to fall from this position throughout their career until they infamously called it quits after the release of Let It Be in 1970.
It wasn’t just singles that they had immense success with, going to number one at virtually every given opportunity, but they also had major success with album sales throughout their career as well, reaching number one in the UK on every occasion bar the soundtrack for Yellow Submarine. The Beatles, one might say, were an unstoppable force in popular music, celebrating success across the globe.
However, despite this, plenty have managed to eclipse some of the sales records that were set by the Liverpudlian group in the years since, with rock acts like AC/DC and Pink Floyd both managing to sell over 40million copies of single albums and pop artists such as Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston achieving the same. In the world of single sales, no Beatles tracks have ever sold more than ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, which sits at approximately 12 million physical sales since 1964.
This means that plenty have seized the opportunity to claim that they’ve sold more singles than the Beatles, and while some of the usual suspects have achieved this very feat, there are a handful of more obscure names to have outsold the band in the past. However, none are more unusual to the Western world as Prince Nico Mbarga, the Cameroonian-Nigerian one-hit wonder whose 1976 track ‘Sweet Mother’ managed to outdo every single released by the Fab Four.
Shifting approximately 13million copies, Mbarga’s track remains one of the most popular African songs ever released and arguably put the highlife style on the map, although it almost didn’t see the light of day due to having been rejected by EMI two years before due to it having a “childish” sound. While this isn’t a remotely accurate description, the song is a joyous track that celebrates motherhood and showcases the best of West African culture, with its lyrics being sung in Nigerian Pidgin English.
However, despite being the best-selling song to have come from the continent, the story behind the track is one filled with tragedy and suffering, and Mbarga is a name relatively forgotten about when discussing the wealth of important music to have come from Africa. His father died when he and his siblings were still children, leaving his mother to care for the family, and he later fled from his country of birth due to the Biafran Civil War in 1967, becoming exiled and forced to live in neighbouring Cameroon, where he pursued his career in music.
His life would tragically end in 1997, aged just 47, when he was involved in a motorcycle accident, and while he held the honour of having produced one of the biggest-selling records of all time, he remains a somewhat obscure figure that few ever take note of. Let it be known that Prince Nico Mbarga was, indeed, bigger than the Beatles.
