Richard Bona was born Bona Pinder Yayumayalolo on October 28, 1967, in Minta, a village in Cameroon's Centre region, into a family where music was inherited rather than chosen: his grandfather was a griot and percussionist, his mother a singer. He started on the balafon at four and was singing in the village church at five. Instruments were not something the family could buy, so he built them, guitars strung with whatever wire came to hand and stretched over a scavenged motorcycle tank. He took up guitar at eleven, and at thirteen he assembled his first band for a French-run jazz club in Douala. The club's owner handed him a record by Jaco Pastorius. Bona switched to electric bass and has named that single encounter as the hinge of his career ever since.

In 1989, at twenty-two, he left Cameroon for Germany and studied at the Düsseldorf music institute, then moved on to Paris. The French years were his apprenticeship as a working sideman, and several of those jobs left a paper trail rather than just a publicity line. His earliest documented jazz date is trumpeter Eric Le Lann's Cap Fréhel (Musidisc, 1992), where he plays bass throughout, and he is credited on bass and double bass across Jacques Higelin's Aux Héros de la Voltige (EMI France, 1994). Paris also put him on club and festival stages alongside Manu Dibango, Salif Keita and violinist Didier Lockwood. He stayed until 1995, when French authorities declined to renew his work papers, and left for New York.

New York rewired the career within two years. He joined Joe Zawinul's Syndicate, appearing on My People (1996) and then across the live double album World Tour (1998), where he shares the bass chair with Victor Bailey and contributes vocals and two compositions. In 1997 he recorded Spaces Revisited with Larry Coryell, a quartet date with Billy Cobham on drums and Biréli Lagrène on second guitar, and he moved close enough into Harry Belafonte's circle that An Evening with Harry Belafonte & Friends (Island, 1997) carries two Bona compositions. He was Belafonte's musical director for the 1998 European tour. Columbia signed him as a leader, and Scenes from My Life, cut at Manhattan Center Studios between November 1998 and January 1999, introduced the model he has worked in ever since: a Douala-language vocal melody carried in unison with his own bass, with the rest of the arrangement built outward from that pair. Michael Brecker guests on one track, Jean-Michel Pilc and Edsel Gomez split the piano, and Ari Hoenig and Omar Hakim are among four drummers who split the record between them.

The 2000s were the decade of the phone call. He produced and played nearly everything on Sadao Watanabe's Sadao 2000, then returned for Wheel of Life (2003) and the co-billed "One for You" Sadao & Bona Live. He held the bass chair through most of George Benson's Irreplaceable (GRP, 2003), sang and played across Danilo Pérez's Motherland (Verve, 2002), and became a fixture of Mike Stern's bands, on record from Voices (2001) through All Over the Place (2012) and co-billed on the concert film Live: The Paris Concert (2006) alongside drummer Dennis Chambers. He joined Kazumi Watanabe's New Electric Trio with Horacio "El Negro" Hernández for the Mo' Bop records. In 2002 he joined the Pat Metheny Group for Speaking of Now and its world tour, arriving with drummer Antonio Sánchez and trumpeter Cuong Vu in the band's generational turnover; his credit on that album is vocals and percussion rather than bass, Steve Rodby keeping the bass chair, and the same holds on The Way Up (2005), where Bona appears as a guest voice, percussionist and member of the record's toy-instrument ensemble. Speaking of Now won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Jazz Album in 2003. He also spent part of the decade in Mike Mainieri's Steps Ahead, taking the bass chair Eddie Gomez had held for most of the group's life, in a 2005 touring lineup with Mainieri, Mike Stern, saxophonist Bill Evans and drummer Steve Smith.

The leader catalogue kept widening. Reverence (Columbia, 2001) set his voice against Gil Goldstein string arrangements, with Pat Metheny guesting on acoustic guitar on one track. Munia: The Tale (Universal and EmArcy, 2003) was cut at his own Bonayuma studio in New York, with Salif Keita's guest vocal recorded separately at Moffou Studio in Bamako. Toto Bona Lokua (No Format, 2004), an acoustic trio of voices and guitars with Gérald Toto and Lokua Kanza, was recorded across five days in December 2003 and became his most quietly durable record, revisited thirteen years later on Bondeko (2017). Tiki (2005) brought in Djavan, Susheela Raman and Toninho Horta, closed a circle with a Jaco Pastorius composition, and was nominated for Best Contemporary World Music Album at the 2007 Grammy Awards. Its 2006 edition added "Please Don't Stop," a duet with John Legend that was also issued as a single. The Ten Shades of Blues (2009), which traces the blues back toward West Africa, was recorded partly at Blue Frog Studio in Mumbai. Te Mesia (2011) put him in front of the Danish Radio Big Band in charts by Jesper Riis. Bonafied (2013) was certified gold in France.

Since the mid-2010s his own work has leaned into the Caribbean corner of the Atlantic triangle. Heritage (2016), issued on Quincy Jones's Qwest label, is a full Afro-Cuban band record made with Mandekan Cubano: Osmany Paredes on piano, Ludwig Afonso on drums, Luisito and Roberto Quintero on percussion, and a two-horn front line of Dennis Hernández and Rey David Alejandre. In September 2015 he opened Club Bonafide at 212 East 52nd Street in Manhattan with restaurateur Laurent d'Antonio, running it as a small room for jazz, Latin, funk and soul until it closed. He has taught jazz improvisation at New York University. His current working group is a trio with Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodríguez and Cuban drummer Michael Olivera, billed across European stages from 2022 onward and still touring in 2026.

Bona is the rare bassist whose signature is a voice. He sings a wordless or Douala-language line in near-unison with what his hands are playing, so the bass reads as a second voice rather than as support, an effect frequently compared to what George Benson does with a guitar. Underneath that, the playing descends directly from Jaco Pastorius: fretless tone, singing upper-register melody, a light and forward-leaning time feel, and a fondness for harmonics. The comparison has followed him since his first records, and the two nicknames that stuck to him early, "the African Jaco" and "the African Sting," say more about how hard critics found him to place than about the music itself. What separates him from the Pastorius line is where the material comes from. His writing is built on Cameroonian song, on balafon patterns and on the makossa and bikutsi rhythms of the Douala coast, then routed through jazz harmony, Brazilian song on Tiki and Afro-Cuban clave on Heritage, rather than through the blues. He is also a genuine multi-instrumentalist on his own records, playing bass, guitar, keyboards, percussion, balafon and mbira across most of them and producing all of them himself. Recognition has come as much from the world-music side as from the jazz side: Best International Artist at the 2004 Victoires du Jazz, the Antonio Carlos Jobim Award at the 2010 Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, and the SACEM Grand Prix du Jazz in 2012.