A hundred and fifty thousand people or so gathered in Tafawa Balewa Square to pay their last respects. Bands played, people queued endlessly to file past his glass coffin. We then ran with the coffin to a hearse (there were still thirty thousand people queuing up) to make the 20 mile journey to the Shrine where Fela’s children were to carry out a private ceremony for family and friends. In a cavalcade of vehicles we rode through Lagos City behind a band in the back of a pick-up truck playing Fela tunes. The road was thronged with tens of thousands of people, until we came to the brow of a hill. I looked down across the valley to the distant horizon. The road was filled with people from one side to the other and as far as the eye could see. A million people or more, and even more came as we passed through each neighborhood. Seven hours to cover 20 miles and the band never dropped a note.27
Fela was laid to rest at the compound that symbolized his twenty-seven years of running resistance against all that he perceived as wrong in society. At last, Kalakuta had truly become a sort of new mecca. Appropriately, in June 1998—eight months after the rebel musician’s death—General Abacha, the tyrant, suddenly collapsed and died of a heart attack in office, leaving behind a reported personal loot of four billion U.S. dollars stashed in several foreign bank accounts. How much sharper could the contrast be?
The Ultimate Social Rebel
Fela: This Bitch of a Life lays bare the soul of an extraordinary man whose innovative, infectious, and inimitable Afrobeat rhythm was already influencing world music when it caught the ear of internationally celebrated musicians—Miles Davis, Hugh Masekela, Gilberto Gil, the Beatles, Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, James Brown, the list goes on and on. But Fela—more mythical than real—for most people remained an unknown quantity.
His lengthy compositions were danceable, hypnotic incantations that induced a trancelike state in rapturous audiences, but the words riding atop the earthy sounds were always rocks hurled at the ruling classes. The record moguls found it difficult to admit that this was no mere eccentric pop star but a passionate Pan-Africanist, a rebel with an eminently political cause whose protest resonated well beyond the borders of Nigeria and Africa. His repeated clashes with politically immoral and repressive military regimes made him a hero at home; his colorful, iconoclastic behavior and radical views caught the attention of antiestablishment rebels across the globe.
Throughout his career Fela released seventy-seven albums and wrote one hundred thirty-three songs, many of which he never lived to hear on disk. But he died broke and in isolation. A government-imposed ban on his music being played on the airwaves; the destruction of his communal compound and property after ceaseless raids; countless violations of his civil liberties that prevented him from engaging in tours; his own refusal to kowtow to the demands of the music industry—the government succeeded in holding him down and keeping him at bay.
At the height of his career, Fela was an anomaly even when compared with other iconic musical rebels, such as his contemporaries Bob Marley and James Brown. Brown and Marley were the only twentieth-century musicians to have electrified the world with explicitly anti-establishment and unapologetically ghetto-inspired black music. But the Godfather of Soul and the Pope of Reggae confined their subversive onslaught to metaphorical allusions. Marley’s attacks on Babylon were couched in cryptic philosophical allusions. Brown’s black power invocations were conveyed in a suggestive nonverbal language: earthy groans, unabashedly ethnic body movements, and suggestive, catchy phrases (“Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud”).
Marley effectively used the hypnotic sounds of reggae laced with poetic lyrics to protest injustices, creating an entirely novel philosophical discourse through music. Brown’s aggressive funk, which became the backbone of Fela’s Afrobeat, placed the reviled, feared black body and features on the map of the world in a positive, sensuous light. But neither Brown nor Marley tried to organize popular resentment into a political party, as Fela did. Neither went as far as Fela in identifying in unmistakably graphic terms the elites that were responsible for the oppression of African peoples all over the world. Nor did Brown or Marley confound the recording industry multinationals with the barrage of ideologically motivated self-entitlements and demands that Fela did. Fela was notoriously “undiplomatic”: he graphically explained to millions, in and out of Africa, how the multinationals were raping an entire continent with the active complicity of local tyrants whom were designated by their very names. These he attacked frontally as “Beasts of No Nation” while deriding their armies and police as “Zombies.”
Throughout the 1970s and into the mid-1980s, the wind was at Fela’s back; no other musician in Africa—a continent superlatively rich in musical traditions and trends—was as prolific, ingenious, and admired as he was. Along with the South African singer Miriam Makeba, Fela was the African artiste who did most to place Africa on the world map, internationalizing the political and social issues that the African peoples had to grapple with. Like Makeba, his career was compromised by a refusal to become the sort of celebrity who turns his or her back on the plight of Africa and its out-of-Africa descendants. As a consequence, the Nigerian government, its military, and its police smashed his promising career.
Fela was an anticelebrity celebrity. In today’s market-driven global economy where a premium is placed on material excess and social status, his was an authentic nonconformism that stood in stark contrast to the image of the modern popular artist. Indeed, he could easily have made a fortune, living and creating abroad and basking in the adulation of a growing worldwide army of fans. Nevertheless, he refused exile. “No one will force me out of this country,” he warned. “If it is not fit to live in, then our job is to make it fit.” Instead, he chose a life on the margins that rejected all the material excesses of Africa’s postindependence elites. He saw the Africa that he and his parents inherited as “not the real Africa.” The Kalakuta Republic he set up in the heart of a large, sprawling ghetto was his attempt to reinvent and reimagine another Africa: a space of belonging for all, especially the dispossessed.28
In the early 1970s, when he abandoned a life of ease and took up residence in the heart of one of Africa’s most sordid slums, sharing the hardships of the poor, whom he called “my brothers,” Fela made perhaps the most powerful statement any social reformer could make in rejecting the very things that the postindependence elites stood for: material greed, individual selfishness, class snobbery, puritanical mores (both Christian and Muslim), and submission to the world standards laid down by the West. As aptly summed up by Michael Veal, Fela was “one of the most irrepressible and profusely creative African spirits of the late twentieth century.”29
The mainstream international media, with a voyeuristic focus on what it regarded as Fela’s “exotic” eccentricities, attempted to reduce him to the vacuous caricature of an erratic hedonist, frolicking polygamist, and dope-smoking misfit. The elite-dominated African press fantasized his commune as an orgiastic harem—a nihilistic refuge of thugs, drug addicts, and prostitutes. However, both symbolically and pragmatically, Fela’s commune was a flicker of freedom in a society reduced to a minimalist concept of the survival of the fittest.
The man obviously had chinks in his armor; at times, these could lead him way off mark even by his own revolutionary standards. Perceptively, Fela sided with the secessionist Ibos in their attempt to set up an independent nation called Biafra, but he misguidedly supported the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, a despot who paraded as a Pan-Africanist. Despite his refreshingly unconventional approach to life, he rejected nonheterosexual orientation and believed in supportive roles for the female gender. In that sense, he echoed both traditional African views and the patriarchal views still dominant worldwide. Yet he championed women’s quests for authenticity in their own right and encouraged the fullest self-expression of the women who sided with his cause. Clearly, Fela too was hemmed in by his own idiosyncratic limitations.
But when everything is considered, Fela’s was certainly o
ne of the most remarkably courageous voices of libertarian protest heard on the African continent in the twentieth century. His message that solidarity was humankind’s most precious achievement may be the reason why, in this century of global interconnections and concerns, his memory and music refuse to go away.
Notes
1. Mabinuori Kayode Idowu (aka ID), “Fela: Phenomenon and Legacy,” 2006, pp. 168–69. (Unpublished manuscript, graciously communicated to the author with permission to quote.)
2. ID to the author, August 12, 2008.
3. Ibid.
4. ID, “Fela,” pp. 168–69.
5. Ibid.
6. Sandra Izsadore, quoted in Jay Babcock, “Fela: King of the Invisible Art,” Mean (Oct./Nov., 1999).
7. ID, “Fela,” pp. 168–69.
8. Ibid.
9. Fela, quoted in Babcock, “Fela,” Mean.
10. Fela, quoted in ID, “Fela,” p. 176.
11. Fela, quoted in Babcock, “Fela,” Mean.
12. Fela, during interview with Roger Steffens, “Free at Last—Now That the Nightmare Is Over, Fela Has a Dream,” OPTION (Sept./Oct. 1986).
13. Another version was that during his younger years Fela had become sterile as a result of repeated venereal infections. Nonetheless, Fela sired a total of seven legally recognized children, four born during the 1970s and 1980s. Paradoxically, in the 1990s, after having been infected with the AIDS virus, Fela sired three more children—Shalewa, Motun, and Seun. Seun became a singer-artist; her mother, Fehintola, died of AIDS a decade after Fela.
14. For a nuanced explanation of Fela’s complex relationship with women, see LaRay Denzer, “Fela, Women, Wives,” in Trevor Schoonmaker, ed., Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), pp. 111–34.
15. Fela, quoted in Michael Veal, Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), p. 207.
16. Fela, quoted in Carter Van Pelt, “Africaman Original,” Beat 16, no. 5/6 (1997), pp. 52–59.
17. Denzer, “Fela,” in Schoonmaker, ed., Fela, pp. 131–32.
18. Femi, quoted in Babcock, “Fela,” Mean.
19. Ibid.
20. ID, “Fela,” pp. 11–12.
21. Veal, Fela, p. 220.
22. Sandra, quoted in Babcock, “Fela,” Mean.
23. Van Pelt, “Africaman,” Beat.
24. Fela, quoted in Babcock, “Fela,” Mean.
25. Femi, quoted in Vivien Goldman, “The Rascal Republic Takes on the World,” in Trevor Schoonmaker, ed., Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003).
26. Rikki Stein, “Fela Was Sweet” (March 5, 2008), on http://en.afrik.com/articlel2745.html. Accessed Aug. 18, 2008, and quoted with the author’s permission.
27. Ibid.
28. This point is convincingly made by Sola Olorunyomi, Fela and the Imagined Continent (IFRA-Ibadan/Africa World Press, 2003).
29. Veal, Fela, p. 240.
Carlos & Fela
Photo: Chico
1. Oluwadolupo Ransome-Kuti: presently head nurse in private hospitals in Lagos.
2. Olikoye Ransome-Kuti: pediatrician and medical professor at the University of Lagos.
3. Bekololari Ransome-Kuti: surgeon in one of the largest hospitals in Lagos, and Secretary General of the Nigerian Medical Association.
* At the time, the colony of Sierra Leone actually served as an embarkation port from where the slaves captured all along the coast were either destined to the Americas or the West Indies.
* “Give Me Happiness.”
* On 28 February 1957 the British colony of the Gold Coast became independent under the name of Ghana, with Dr Kwame Nkrumah as President.
* West African School Certificate: equivalent to High School diploma.
* Remilekun: “Wipe My Tears”.
* General Odemegwu Ojukwu, Commander-in-Chief of the secessionist Biafran army and President of the shortlived Republic of Biafra.
* Mushin: A sprawling “ghetto” of nearly half a million people on the outskirts of Lagos city.
* Pidgin: “I haven’t yet talked about that one (America) for that’s a helluva story, enough to fill an entire book.”
** “America is like hell-o!”
* The surrender of Biafra was announced on 12 January 1970 by Major-General Phillip Effiong, Chief of General Staff of the Biafran Armed Forces, ending a two-and-a-half-year war that left one million people dead.
* Alagbon Close – an album title hit of Fela’s in 1975, along with the others mentioned above – is the central police station of the Nigerian CID, located in the residential area of Ikoyi, Lagos.
* Chief of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of Nigeria at the time.
* This and another similar experience which Fela had that same year, 1974, inspired his hit “Expensive Shit”. (See Discography.)
* Born in Abeokuta, Ogun State, on 5 March 1937, Olusegun Obasanjo joined the Nigerian Army in 1958, after completing secondary studies at Baptist Boys’ High School in Abeokuta. During the Biafran war he was Commander of the third Marine Commando Division. He became Head of State in February 1976 after the assassination of General Murtala Mohammed in an abortive coup.
* The album title, ITT: International Thief Thief, is a play on words. The tune “ITT” is a violent indictment of the multinational company International Telegraph and Telecommunications, represented in Nigeria by Chief Abiola, owner of the record company Decca. “Shuffering and Shmiling”, the title of this
* chapter, is another of Fela’s hits, composed right after the sacking and burning down of Kalakuta by soldiers of the Nigerian army.
* General Ignatius Acheampong governed Ghana as a dictator from 1972 to 1978. He was executed in 1979 by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), led by Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings.
* Experiences such as the one related above are the source of Fela’s ’78 hit “V.I.P.” – again a play on words, for instead of “Very Important Person”, it stands for Vagabonds in Power.
* The Yoruba divination cult dedicated to the orisha of the same name. The Ifà Oracle is a divination done with sixteen palm-nuts.
* A sprawling “ghetto” on the outskirts of Lagos.
* The queens’ parlance differs depending on whether they attended Western schools or not. Some only speak their mother tongue plus pidgin. But for all of them, speaking pidgin is a way of stressing their Africanity. None of them see it as a “bastardized” creole.
* Six-months pregnant at the time of this interview, Funmilayo gave birth in August 1981 to a boy, Olikoye, who died suddenly in April 1982.
* Police Headquarters of Lagos State.
* Pidgin meaning child.
* Two of Fela’s big hits, which sum up his ideas about women. “Mattress”: the woman’s function in life is to serve as a mattress for man who lies on top for … rest! “Lady”: a satirical attack on “modern” African woman (who refuses to cook and insists on eating at the same table as men); while praising the virtues of the traditional African woman (passivity, submissiveness, obedience, etc.).
* “Coffin for Head of State”, Fela’s composition and album title, relates the day when he took his mother’s coffin in broad daylight to lay it at the front gate of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s residence, the day before the latter left power.
* Femi Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela’s oldest son.
* It was after this experience that Fela changed the name of his organization from Africa 70 to Egypt 80.
* Fela was about to leave on a concert tour in Europe (end-June, early July 1981). At the last minute it was cancelled by the concert promoters.
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