In 1981 Professor Hindu was brought to Nigeria at Fela’s expense. On that first visit, Hindu remained for some days, performing rituals designed to protect Fela and his household from attack and treating his infertility with a special diet. Enchanted with the magician, during performance intermissions Fela presented him to the crowds as the only human being with the power to “kill and wake.” Hindu became a regular attraction at the Afrika Shrine club, nightly entertaining a wide-eyed public with the most extravagant stunts and extraordinary tales.
In no time, Fela would elevate Hindu to the status of spiritual adviser, eclipsing all the members of his entourage—wives and children, childhood buddy J. K. Braimah, and trusted political aides—who now saw themselves relegated to the background. But no sooner did Hindu assume his new function as Fela’s guru than truly bizarre happenings began to occur. First, several of Fela’s wives experienced states of trance that made them prophesy untold events, mostly cataclysmic and threatening to Fela. Second, Fela himself began to have visions, hear voices, and feel strange presences in the household—spirits! Soon the entire household was taken over by what appeared to be collective hysteria. One of Fela’s aides, ID, explains the scene:
“Spirit” men and women started to spring up within the organisation, most of them claim[ing] to have been possessed by Hindu’s “spirit” or that of Fela’s late mother. Randomly, people were falling into all kinds of “spiritual trance” and making outrageous “prophecies.” With these came personal witch-hunting and vendettas. If you had any bones to pick with someone, all you needed to do was fall into a “trance” and you could accuse the person of anything from being a spy to practicing witchcraft. Outrageous claims of clandestine involvement became the order of the day. Suddenly, people were claiming to have been sent to the organization for various clandestine reasons; some of them even claimed to work for America’s CIA…. [T]hus, the “spirit” saga gained more legitimacy and those who did not believe had to leave the organization or join in the game.1
The growing phenomenon made Fela grow ever more paranoid. He threw aggressive tantrums and conducted himself in an increasingly bizarre manner that made many suspect he was suffering from a psychological disorder. He exerted undue influence on his entourage to embrace his flight into the irrational and thereby legitimize it. Under pressure, one after another of his wives, assistants, and hangers-on began to report falling into a trance, experiencing sightings of spirits about the house, or testifying to having heard the voice of Fela’s mother. At one point he accused two of his wives of attempting to harm him with witchcraft.2 As it happened, he woke up one morning with an upset stomach, and one of his wives, Sewaa—known as the Spirit Woman—accused two other cowives (most likely rivals) of employing witchcraft on his food. The problem is that Fela believed it and almost went berserk. At the time, this particular wife had empowered herself by “claiming she was spiritually possessed by Hindu to continue the spiritual vigil while the Ghanaian was absent.”3
It was in such circumstances that in the spring of 1981 a French promoter hastily put together what would be Fela’s second European tour. Everyone agreed that Fela needed to relaunch a career that was badly floundering. Years of confronting ruthless governments, their armies, and police, had left him financially broke and politically boxed in. Emotionally and physically bruised, Fela welcomed a respite that would allow him to breathe some fresh air away from the foul politics of Nigeria.
But here, too, Professor Hindu’s influence would be felt; no sooner was the tour announced than some of his wives began to prophesy all manner of doom scenarios for the trip. “As expected in an atmosphere filled with superstition,” ID recalls, “all kinds of prophecies were being foretold, especially regarding the outcome of the tour.” Adejonwo, one of the cowives, began to report “visions” and claimed that during a trance she had seen “an international conspiracy to assassinate Fela” during the tour. Therefore, “chickens were slaughtered to appease the gods to give Fela victory over his alleged enemies.”4
Fela’s European tour took place in the midst of such tensions. And even though prior to departure sacrifices had been made to the appropriate spirits, while in Europe Fela and his entourage were on a constant lookout to ward off the prophesized attempt on the musician’s life. On airplanes, at airports, in the hotel, and even onstage, Fela and his entourage were on the watch for an assassin. Anyone who came into contact with them—especially journalists—was suspect.
Throughout the tour, Fela reported having visions and hearing voices. He was convinced that these unsettling events were induced by his dead mother’s attempts to communicate with him. As a consequence, his musicianship suffered. “For the first time I saw Fela perform without the precision and the particular attention he gave to the presentation of his shows,” remarked ID. “Members of the organization who had nothing to do on stage were standing there in the name of protecting him from an alleged assassin’s bullet. On the final leg of the tour we had a week’s stay in Paris to record the album Original Suffer-Head for Arista Records in England. Despite all the ’prophecies’ there was no attempt on Fela’s life.”5
From his Paris hotel, Fela anxiously phoned his former girlfriend and confidante, Sandra, in California. “He felt that they were trying to kill him,” she later recounted. “I just jumped on a plane. I went to Paris for three days. The scene at that hotel was unreal. He had some heavy, wicked people around him at that point. I don’t know how he could have remained sane in such an insane environment.”6 In an attempt to bring some levelheadedness into play, ID sought out Fela’s first wife, Remi, who had accompanied Fela on the tour along with their two daughters, Yeni and Sola. But ID was faced with a dilemma, as Fela had begun to suspect the mother of his children of being an undercover agent of the CIA. “I would have to tell Remi what Fela whispered in my ear in Lagos airport,” he recounted. “How could I tell a woman that her husband for twenty-one years thought she was a CIA agent?”7
The disclosure shook Remi, who decided, forthwith, to return to Lagos with her daughters. Her mind was made up to leave Fela. When he returned to Nigeria and found that Remi had moved out of the house, it was a huge blow. Remi had always been the anchor of his life, the objective link with reality; now that, too, was gone. The musician turned his fury on ID. “I felt he considered my [having divulged] the CIA accusation pushed Remi to finally leave him. He held me responsible for her departure,” he explained.8 The episode introduced an unbridgeable chasm between ID and Fela. Ultimately, in 1983, the loyal ID, too, would quit the organization.
In the commune was a season of madness, with “evil spirits” threatening Fela’s well-being, “ghosts” tormenting his sleep, and his dead mother’s “spirit” advising him—through Professor Hindu—on how to deal with both. Fela would uncover “spies” and “agents” all over the place, sometimes accusing members of his entourage, or even some of his spouses, of plots against him. As the deleterious effects of the spiritual saga raged like a brushfire, it began consuming the political tissue of his organization. Fela himself seemed to have lost his ability to think rationally. Only a few people—such as his trusted friend J. K. Braimah, ID, or bandleader Lekan Animashaun—seemed to escape the wild phenomenon, but none enjoyed the authority to intervene. Braimah, in particular, was alarmed. “I don’t know what’s really going on,” he told me gravely in 1982. “I’ve never seen Fela acting that way!” In 1984, after Fela was jailed, Braimah, like ID, would separate himself from the organization.
As intimate friends who loved him dearly and respected him, but who knew there was something wrong, were singled out as being CIA agents, Fela began to lose once-loyal supporters. (Jamaican-born novelist Lindsay Barrett, who’d already distanced himself over an earlier incident, in 1979, was one of them.) Wives who had exposed their lives and suffered for him now separated from him, and several of his best musicians fled. It is only thanks to Fela’s own creative genius and the rare loyalty of bandleader Animashaun that Fela’
s band rebounded over and again to rise from its ashes.
Rumors that Fela was losing it began to spread, but the artist reacted by becoming even more detached. His younger brother, Beko Ransome-Kuti, a medical doctor, became alarmed. Reportedly, he tried to no avail to convince his famous brother to seek professional assistance—outside Nigeria, if need be. The artist was highly distrustful of Western medicine, which he regularly denounced as “chemical poison.” Moreover, he insisted that there was nothing wrong with him; he was simply following the voice of the spirits and obeying the commands of his deceased mother.
But something was indeed sorely wrong; Professor Hindu, the magician who supposedly held the keys to life beyond death, had taken over control of Fela. “He’s the man who started showing me the way to truth, to myself, to my mission and to … my mother!” the artist would explain. “He tells me what to do, what not to do, who my friends are and who are my enemies.”9 Suffice it to say, during the long period Fela spent under the spell of his spiritual adviser, his career came perilously near to ending. Indeed, Fela now insisted on having the magician along on his international tours, and presenting him to audiences otherwise ill acquainted with black magic. As a result, his third European tour, in 1983 to 1984 was an unmitigated public relations disaster.
Prophet Unarmed
In power since 1979, Alhaji Shehu Shagari was Nigeria’s first civilian ruler since 1966, and he sought to convey an image of statesmanship and civility. For the first time in ten years, Fela enjoyed a spell of immunity from government assault. But he had not been duped; Shagari’s administration was tainted by the same corruption and inefficiency as its predecessors. In 1983, Nigeria was indeed in the midst of a grave financial crisis, and unemployment was hitting new heights. Even the middle classes were feeling the economic pinch. The stage was set for a triumphant return of the men in khaki, who indeed struck on New Year’s Eve 1983, catapulting to power a dull, dour despot—General Muhammadu Buhari.
The operation was the typical cosmetic transfer of power that Fela immortalized in “Army Arrangement,” a hard-chopping tune released in 1985; for Fela, it was back to square one. Again he was politically encircled, but this time his own libertarian commune was traversing its gravest crisis ever at a moment when a big door of opportunity had opened up. The recording moguls were in search of a charismatic successor to Bob Marley, dead since 1981, and the Nigerian rebel fit the bill.
Marley’s antiestablishment reggae had tapped a worldwide market while Fela’s equally defiant Afrobeat remained cloistered in the steamy slums of Lagos. Marley’s stardom epitomized the triumph of the message of Jamaica’s ghettoized Rastafarian underdogs; Fela’s continued marginalization thereby seemed an anomaly. A frustrated Fela came to view the Jamaican’s global success as the result of his having sold out and, in tune with that view, continued to refuse a compromise with the musical cartels.
In the mid-1980s, the musician again attempted to relaunch his embattled artistic career through a number of foreign tours. The first was to have been in America where he would coproduce an album; the artist had not set foot in the United States since his ten-month stint there in 1969, which had opened his eyes to Pan-Africanism. But on September 4, 1984, as the artist and his forty-piece band were about to board their plane, he was detained under the accusation of “foreign currency violation,” and his passport was seized. The charge carried a sentence of up to ten years’ imprisonment.
Dragged before a court that handed him a stinging five-year sentence, he was interned in the maximum-security prison at Kirikiri, Lagos, then moved far away to the Maiduguri penitentiary in the Muslim North, totally cut off from his relatives and friends. In Fela’s absence, his Shrine nightclub continued to put on its regular shows to support the large commune comprising Fela’s household, his musicians, their dependents, and the numerous hangers-on that drifted ceaselessly into Kalakuta Republic. Fela’s son Femi, who was asserting himself as a saxophonist, took charge of the band and also tried to reorganize the commune away from the esotericism into which it had fallen.
This time the victimization of the maverick musician caught Amnesty International’s attention, which began to campaign for his release. Fela’s worldwide fans swung into action; “Free Fela” benefit concerts and rallies were staged internationally, and Nigerian embassies in Europe’s principal capitals were besieged by demonstrators demanding the artist’s release. In frustration, the Nigerian police again raided the rebel’s home in January 1985; soon after, the landlord had the entire Fela household evicted.
The prospect of Fela’s long-term imprisonment threw his family into disarray; there seemed to be no end in sight to their suffering. After years of being harassed and demeaned for their loyalty to Nigeria’s Public Enemy Number One, some of the cowives were understandably weary. They had withstood three major attacks on the compound, during which the soldiery had sexually assaulted many of them. With Fela locked into a long prison sentence and no obvious hope for his early release, some of his wives looked for individual solutions to their dilemma.
Fela’s amazing luck would again save him. Ironically, this time it came in the shape of yet another military coup, which in July 1985 ushered in Major General Ibrahim Babangida. He accused his predecessor of the same ills that General Buhari himself invoked to depose the civilian Shagari: incompetence, corruption, inefficiency, the breakdown of law and order. This time, however, the military appointed Dr. Koye Ransome Kuti—Fela’s own brother—as minister of health. (He retained the portfolio until 1993.) The regime change would therefore force a review of Fela’s case.
Fela had already served twenty months of his five-year jail term for crimes he had not committed, when, in April 1986, a popular local magazine revealed that the judge who had sentenced him to jail paid the rebel a secret visit and confessed to having acted under duress. This sensational revelation, heightened by the international commotion over Fela’s imprisonment, prompted the Babangida regime to grudgingly review the case. Still, the musician would be kept in prison for yet another ten months.
No sooner was Fela free than he publicly distanced himself from his brother’s participation in the new regime, which he vowed to continue fighting. “I won’t thank government for releasing me but I thank all Nigerians, Africans, Europeans, Asians and Americans who have in one way or the other called for my release,” he told the press. “To all of you, I thank from something more deep than the bottom of my heart.”10 His politics were as defiant as ever.
If anything, the long spell in jail further entrenched Fela’s belief in black magic and African witchcraft. He claimed having emerged from his prison experience stronger and wiser. He was now “half Spirit and half Man” and, accordingly, began to designate himself as the Ebami Eda (the One Touched by Divine Hand), which his awed followers loosely translated as “the Weird One.”
Fela’s communal compound was sacralized, for, as he claimed, “Kalakuta is not an ordinary place, it is the center of the world.”11 The Afrika Shrine was also turned into a sort of spiritual heartland, where complex rituals and sacrifices to ancestral spirits were performed before each performance. Now permanently “possessed” by spirits, Fela began experiencing states of trance in which he believed he could see into the future. During one such trance, he reported having seen the future of the entire world:
[I]n that trance I saw the tide will change, that this whole earth was going to change into something different, into what people call today the Age of Aquarius. I saw that… [it] was going to be the age of goodness where music was going to be the final expression of the human race and musicians were going to be very important in the development of the human society. And that musicians would probably be presidents of different countries. The artists will be the dictators of society. The mind will be freer, less complicated institutions; the revelations to less complicated technology, all these things I saw in the trance.12
Simply, Fela had now placed responsibility for Africa’s renaissance squa
rely into the hands of spirits, for whom he was merely an emissary. However, an important shift had taken place in his own household, which bore no relation to spirits. While in jail, Fela had been assailed by rumors that several of his wives had taken lovers, and some were even reportedly pregnant. On his release, he found the rumors to be accurate. These women were young and eager to be mothers. Their famed husband was suspected to be sterile as a result, some believed, of blows to his groin sustained during the brutal sack and burning of his commune in 1977.13
In an uncharacteristic move for someone who upheld many patriarchal views but totally to the credit of his sense of fairness, Fela refrained from accusing his wives for having “strayed.”14 On the contrary, he said he understood them; in prison he had come to the realization that marriage was both dysfunctional and an aberration. “Marriage is an institution [and] I condemn the institution of marriage,” he said.15 Marriage fostered sentiments of possessiveness that limited the options of the partner and thus created tensions. “Marriage brings jealousy and selfishness. . . . I just don’t agree to possess a woman. I just don’t want to say: ’This woman is mine, so she shouldn’t go out with other men.’” He therefore concluded that
The marriage institution for the progress of the mind is evil. I learned that from prison. Why do people marry? Is it to be together? Is it to have children? People marry because they are jealous. People marry because they are possessive. People marry because they are selfish. All this comes to the very ugly fact that people want to own and control other people’s bodies. I think the mind of human beings should develop to the point where that jealous feeling should be completely eradicated.16
In tune with this, Fela announced his decision to end his collective marriage. The divorce was as simple as had been the collective marriage to those twenty-seven women eight years earlier. Without acrimony, he thanked them for having stood alongside him throughout those harrowing years. Those who chose to remain could do so and would be free to conduct their individual lives as they chose (half a dozen took that option). As remarked by LaRay Denzer, that entire episode pointed to a key characteristic of Fela’s otherwise patriarchal worldview:
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