UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY AFROBEAT! Fela and the Imagined C ontinent S o l a O lo runyom i Co-published with Institute Fran^ais de Recherche en Afrique IFRA-Ibadan Africa W orld Press, Inc. P O . Box 1892 P.O. Box 18 Trenton. N| 08607 Asmara. ERlTRfcA UNIVERSITY F IBADAN LIBRARY Africa World Press, Inc. P.O. Box 1892 P.O. Sox 48 Trenton. Nl 08607 Asmara, ERITREA Copyright ©2003 Sola Olorunyomi First Printing 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. Book and Cover Design: Roger Dormann Cover Art: Gafar A jao& Stella Fasanya Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Olorunyomi, Sola. Afrobeat!: Fela and the imagined continent / by Sola Olorunyomi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p .) and index. Discography: p. ISBN 1-59221-071-6 (hard cover)-ISBN 1-59221-072^ (pbk.) 1. Fela, 1938- 2. Musicians—Nigeria—Biography. 3. Afrobeat—Nigeria—History and criticism. I. Title. ML410.F2955O45 2002 781.63’092—dc21 2002007687 ■ Co-published with Institute Franfais de Recherche en Afrique University o f Ibadan Post Office Box 21540 Ibadan, Nigeria Telephone/Fax: 234-2-810-4070 Email: iffa@skannet.com http:/www.skannet.com/ifra UNIVERSITY OF IBA AN LIBRARY T he author gratefully acknowledges th at T he French Institu te for Research in Africa (IF R A ), Ibadan, Nigeria, supported this w ork w ith a research grant. UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY To the fond memory o f Soladegbin Anikulapo-Kuti and Frances Kuboye; Seun and members of the Egypt }80 Rand; and Beko Ransom e-Kuti— who dared to dream UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Contents Acknowledgments.................. .xi Glossary....................................... .................................................... xv Preface..............................................................................................xxi 1. Tradition and Afrobeat ................................... .................... 1 2. Bard o f the Public Sp h ere..................................................33 3. The Empire Sounds Back...... .............................................81 4. Iddn, or a Carnivalesque................................................... 127 5. Alterity Afrobeat and the Law .......................................173 6. The Afrobeat Continuum .............................. 211 Bibliography............................................................................ ,.221 Appendices.......................................................................... 237 Discography.........................................................................237 Excerpts from the Constitution o f the Movement o f the People (M O P ).........................................................254 Biodata/Inventory o f Sonic Censorship......................... 256 Index............................................................................................. 265 i IX UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Acknowledgments The early completion o f this book was facilitated through an initial grant from the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA), Ibadan. Subsequent complementary research and travel grants were offered by the following organizations: Committee for the Defense o f Human Rights (C D H R), Nige­ ria; The British Council, Nigeria; The Danish Writers Association, in conjunction with the Liter­ ature Information Center, and the Danish Center for Culture and Development (CKU). Too many people than can be mentioned in the world-wide Afrobeat community contributed to the realization o f this work, and I ’d like to mention, in particular, some o f Fela’s friends: Rasheed Gbadamosi, M .D . Yusuf, Femi Falana and Jiti Ogunye (who also facilitated some o f my research trips). For taking time o ff to look at drafts, at different stages of this book, I feel greatly indebted to the following friends and colleagues: Jonathan Haynes o f Long Island University Southampton, New "fork; Akin Ovetade of the School o f Ori­ ental and African Studies, University o f London and Zagba Ovortey o f the Pan African Dance Ensemble, London; Odia Ofeimun— erstwhile President, Association o f Nigerian Authors; and Dele Layiwola o f the Institute o f African Studies, University of Ibadan. Makin Soyinka’s dispassionate criticism, far into too many London nights, sent me back to the reading table quite often; so also were the excellent editorial sugges­ tions by Darnola Ifaturoti and Bose Shaba. Yet, others like Lemi Gbolahan, Harry Garuba, Nigel Henry Charles Ogu, xi UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and th e Imagined Continent Funmi Adcwole, Eki Gbinigie, Ogaga Ifowodo, Simeon Berete, the late Bayo Ogunjimi and Esi Kinni-Olusanyin insist­ ed that every claim be justified! The duo o f Emevwho Biakolo and Ademola Dasylva supervised my initial effort at the subject as an undergraduate and graduate thesis, respectively and were, in this sense, the first “gate keepers”. A few friends did not mind hurting their good friend through candid, even if sometimes unrestrained, comments; this unruly lot includes Remi Raji, Dipo Irele, Sanya Osha, Chiedu Ezeanah, Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju, Gbenga Aroyehun, Kim Ady Pius Omole, Lolade Bamidele, Pius Adesanmi & Doyin Odcbowale. I express appreciation to the following for general support and encouragement: George Herault and Yann Lebeau (as friends and directors o f IFR A ), Beatrice Humarau-Lebeau, Elizabeth DeCampos, Abdul Rasheed Na Allah, Kofi Anvidoho, Pascal Ott, Jean-Michel Rousset, Reuben Abati, Taiwo Akins etc, Lola Shonevin, M oji Obasa, Mary Qgu, Yetunde Adelugba and mum Firinne, Simidele Awosika, Tosin Olarinmoye, Yemi Owolabi, Muyiwa Ojo, Yinka Ogunyomade, Margaret Omokeni, Chris Uroh and Segun Oladipo. Others include Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi and Kay- ode Fayemi, Atiti and Dele Sosinmi, Nike Adesuyi, Rikki Stein, Duke Anoemuah and Michele Avantario. Eugenia Abu, I got your letter from afar! So also were those o f Julius Ihonvbere, Benjamin Babatunde Iyiola, Tony Allen and Lewis Olugbenga Kehinde. Deep appreciation also to Tunde Aremu, Ben Tomoloju, Sola Balogun, Jahman Anikulapo, Nduka Otiono, Babafemi Ojudu, Olayiwola Ademji,. and the trio o f Dapo Adeniyi, Ktmle and Toyin Tejuoso—who afforded me space to test out some o f these ideas in their various media. For sparing time for my often long interview sessions, I especially wish to thank Steve Rhodes, Benson Idonije, Ike Oza, Niyi Osundare, Femi Osofisan, Abdul Okwechime, Great Acheampong, and members o f the Ransome-Kuti/ Anikulapo-Kuti family xii UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY A cknow ledgm ents Afrobcat lovers dot the West African coast, and some o f I them have been particularly inspiring with the amount o f information they shared on the subject. This is also for all the good folks in Togo, Renin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Burkina Faso. The management o f Hotel Cumberland at Nkrumah Circle, Accra, turned me into a fam­ily member and struggled to retrieve my stolen manuscript from a fleeing thief on that terrible night in March 1998. In that connection, this is also for you: Kwaku Duah, WilliamKyei-Bafow, Daniel Acheampong, Francis Kwame Onvinah and wife Gladys. At the University o f Ghana, Legon, Willy Anku, John Collins and Kwesi Yankah gave freely of their time to bounce o ff some o f these ideas, while Gerard Pescheux, Kwesi Pratt, Chido Onumah and Faisal Helwani also made insightful comments on the subject. In between Cardiff and Brixton, Muyiwa Adekeve and Ike Okonta provided answers to the ever shrinking living space of London. Noimot Ogundele and Dele Oluvewa served as research assistants, while Bunmi Ajibade gave me access to her husband’s library, even while he was away in General Sani Abacha’s gulag. Christopher Ola— for excellent indexing and suggestion; Gafar Ajao, Stella Fasanya and Opeyemi Olagun- ju -fo r design and graphics; Akin Akingbulu, Moses Ishola, Idowu Obasa, Deolu Ademoyo, Cathy Feingold, Owei Laken- fa, Baiye Malik, Ladi and Dapo Olorunyomi— I am indeed short o f words to express appreciation for your continued sup­ port. Listen, too, and listen good-1—Wumi Raji, Shenge Rah­ man, Segun Jegede, Ina and Knud Vilbv; Suzanne Brogger, Maria Korpe, Ole Reitov; Kitte Fenncstad, Fash Shodeinde, Mik Aidt, Linda Horowitz, Gudrun Hoick, Ola Gerlach Hansen, Alfred Tamakloe and Vera Wedesen— I feel greatly overwhelmed by your spirited support. And to Rola, wife-sis­ ter-prankster and recovering tomboy, your constant encour­ agement did the trick. I xiii UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined C ontinent Above all, however, three communications firms— Infor­ mation A id Network (IFAnet), M arketing M ix and Set and Sell— aided the final conclusion o f this book through produc­ tion assistance. UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Glossary Afrika Shrine Fcla’s place of worship and nightspot. The aspect o f worship started at the Empire Hotel (Fela’s former shrine), but was given full expression when he moved to Pepple Street. During musical interludes, Fela breaks o ff to worship with band mem­ bers and acolytes. Afrobeat This is the name by which Fela’s music came to be known start­ ing in the late sixties. And though the name survives, in a 1992 interview I had with him, Fela denounced the nomenclature as “a meaningless commercial nonsense with which recording labels exploited the artist.” Alagbon Street where the Criminal Investigation Department is locat­ ed; it also became the title track o f one o f his albums—Alagbon Close. Area Boy Term used to describe urban unemployed youth, prone to forming gangs and extorting money as a way o f “coping” with city life. According to Mr. Jiti Ogunye, one o f Fela’s attorneys, the origin of the term can be traced to Fela'- kalakuta Repub­ lic and the Afrika Shrine, where members o f the commune used the phrase to make a distinction between their group and rascally actions embarked upon by neighborhood gangs— the boys in the area, or “Area Boys.” Chiwota Female godhead o f some nationalities in Malawi. xv UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent Chop Primarily ro cat; can also mean to embezzle funds. Comprehensive Show Performance on Saturday nights at the Afrika Shrine. It is also the “Divination Night”—day of worship when the Egypt ’80 Ensemble dancers come on stage. The outdoor “Comprehen­ sive Show” does not include the worship ritual. C orrect Person Persons considered ideologically in tune or simply positively dynamic. Egypt ’80 Band The name o f Fela’s band. Fela constantly changed the name to reflect its musical and ideological orientation at different points in time; hence, from the early sixties, the band had evolved through H ighlife Rakers, Koola Lobitos, 'Nigerian 70, and A frican 70 . After Fela's death, the original band was briefly renamed F ela ’s Egypt 80 Band but has now settled for Seun Anikulapo-Kuti and the Egypt 80s. Felagoro A home-made alcoholic drink at Kalakuta Republic and the Afrika Shrine; it is brewed by boiling marijuana leaves with sodium. i FESTAC Acronym for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. Itan foruba word for history story or fiction. Wl UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Glossary JJD and JJC Acronyms for “Johnny Just Drop” and “Johnny Just Come.” The JJD is a cultural pervert, one who is alien to his own cul­ ture or at times feigns ignorance o f local customs. JJC implies the unpracticed steps o f the newcomer, who is generally the uninitiated. Jump Sunday shows when he could jam with other musicians— including his son, Femi. Kala-kusa The “cell” where an erring member o f the Kalakuta Republic is kept. More o f a designated space than a conscious architecture; in the seventies, it was indicated with twine. Kalakuta Republic Fela’s communal residence created out o f the desire to accom­ modate “every African escaping persecution.” “Kalakuta” was derived from the name o f his prison cell o f 1974; he also noted and justified its Swahili interpretation o f “rascally” The word “republic” was later added to it “because I didn't agree with that your Federal Republic o f Nigeria created b\ Britishman.” The exigency o f political activism led to his having to live in many places, but his more notable residences after Surulere, in Lagos, are named chronologically here: Kalakuta L number 14A Agege Motor Road; Kalakuta II, number 1 Atinuke Ola- banji Street, Ikeja; Kalakuta III, number 7 GbemisoL Street, Ikeja. Kurukere Used as a refrain or chorus but denoting insidious moves and motions— whether in the boardroom or in interpersonal rela­ tionships. UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent Lady’s Night Tuesday shows when females could enter free o f charge. Nko What? (as question); So what (as an offensive rebuttal). NNG Nigerian Natural Grass— a parody o f Nigerian Natural Gas — meaning marijuana; Fela’s counter lexicon to the non- “Indianess” o f his variant o f hemp. No Jonesing An omnibus phrase initially used as a form o f reprimand against drug addicts who might be unable to control the effect o f their drug intake or its withdrawal symptoms. Marijuana is declassified as drug at the Afrika Shrine and the Kalakuta Republic. Oga Patapata The overall boss. Opposite People Persons considered reactionary or anti-revolutionary Orisa Yoruba word for a deity or deities, but in its common usage, an Olonsk also implies a worshipper of divinities that might neces­ sarily not be deities. O f all the ancestral forms o f the Black Diaspora, Orisa worship remains the most popular Oyinbo A Caucasian or persons with light pigmentation. Shakara Posturing, or feigning an offensive mood. UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Glossary Short break N ot an interlude; on the contrary it implies the end o f the day’s performance. Wuriiwuru A shady deal. Tabbis and Tabbing To declaim. Verbal rebuttal that could move from light-hearted banter to a crude ribaldry; but Tabbis is its own limit and its license goes only as far as there is no physical assault, following the Kalakuta dictum: “Tabbis no case, first touch na offence.” Tanga Being “guyish” or trying to appear modern in a brash manner Zombie Name given to the military; denotes the regimentation and lack o f personal initiative associated with the military ethics o f “obey before complain” and “order from above.” f xix UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY I Preface always knew that I had a date, someday to describe Fela’s Afrobeat musical innovation. However, the inclination to examine this musical and cultural practice only began earnestly during the Harmattan semester o f 1982 , even though, as a high school student, I had experimented with some o f Fela’s compositions with our tardy band, Rim m er Kids— so named after an English principal had died in a plane crash. A couple of events led to the 1982 event, one of which was the crisis in Nigerian institutions o f higher learning that year. It started when, early one morning, students o f the Uni­ versity o f Ilorin were aroused by the whiff o f a choking tear-gas smoke. The police had struck, apparendy anticipating a protest against the federal government over what the students in an earlier press statement had tagged “the government’s centrist position on the apartheid question.” A ding-dong situation ensued until about noon when stu­ dents attempted to break through the barricade and the police, feeling their patience had been over-stretched, fired live bul­ lets. I counted three students spattered in blood. A stampede ensued, increasing the casualty figure. Without waiting for an official announcement o f the university’s closure, students vacated their halls o f residence in droves for fear o f further assault by the police. I thought o f where to go. “Where” for me meant anywhere in die country but onlv one place imme­ diately came to mind: Fela’s ‘Kalakuta Republic’ 1 residence at House Number 1, Atinuke Olabanji Street. His residence, usually a commune, was styled ‘Kalakuta’ after the name given by inmates to the cell in which he was detained in 1974. This was ‘Kalakuta IF after Fela had moved from an earlier resi­ dence. His first ‘Republic’ was situated at Number 14A, Agege M otor Road inLagos but was burnt down on February 18, xxi UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent 1977 by a detachment o f soldiers from the Abalti Barracks, also in Lagos. This event came to be known as the ‘Unknown Sol­ dier’2 episode— after the tribunal’s ruling that the mayhem was perpetrated by unknown soldiers. Lucky to have escaped arrest, I arrived at the commune and met an “Ideological Education” session, where the day’s topic was the “impending revolution.” This was usually an occasional session when residents and fans— more often made up o f members o f the Young African Pioneers (YAP), universi­ ty students, and idealists o f various hues—gathered to discuss social and political issues with the hope of arriving at some kind o f “what is to be done.” My report o f the police raid on cam­ pus further incensed the atmosphere and some youngster clutching a copy o f Che Guevera’s Bolivian diaries murmured something about the inevitability o f an armed insurrection against the Nigerian state. Someone else at the far end coun­ tered that an armed struggle was simply not feasible yet, and, gesticulating rather vigorously pronounced that the revolu­ tion would come only when there was a balance between what he called “the subjective and objective conditions.” Then he led'the discussion through a winding disquisition on “Foco Theory” and “the Bonapartist State,” concepts which ran­ domly flew out from his assorted baggage o f opposition regis­ ters. I began to show more interest in this group, in part for the allure o f its naivete, but in the main for its visionary energy Merging the experience o f this group with Fela’s performance at the Afrika Shrine3 (Fela’s nightspot), a clearer picture o f a cultural event that was as liberating as it was potentially obscu­ rantist began to emerge. I sensed the need to interact with this reality in a more contemplative fashion, and thus started the process o f information gathering. However, a long interval in the research effort ensued as I was handed an expulsion order at the university7 for heeding, as the union president, a nonviolent national class boycott in xxu UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY P reface response to the collapse o f higher education in the country A few months later I was clutching a longhand version o f my ini­ tial drafts as a harvest volunteer, while also doubling as a free­ lance reporter behind Sandinista lines in the Matagalpa region o f Nicaragua, during the 1984-85 Contra offensive. And o f all places, it was here that a Danish friend, obviously out o f mis­ chief, had referred to me as “the guy from Fela’s country” We went over the subject for a while in the coffee fields and, then, I knew the work had to go on, even if only as an affirmation of the creative will o f this Afrobeat community and the conti­ nent’s other silenced subcultures. Much as in our adult life, Fela had always filled the average Nigerian child’s airwaves. Airwaves? Hardly so, more o f an “aural wave”, for once the “musical warrior” 4 drew the battle­ line with the Nigerian state, he promptly got the “N TBB”— Not-To-Be-Broadcast— label slammed on his albums. By that singular act o f exclusion from the legal airwaves, the state unwittingly aided the emergence o f an alternative airspace that would later acknowledge Fela’s contestatory sonic. The partly atomized listener o f the radio now gave way to discussion groups and coteries around record shops, especially in urban Nigeria, that sought to interpret, and would later reinvent, the meaning o f his lyrics and activism. But Fela was not always an open subject, especially when it came to writing a book on him. “Not quite a book, but a final year undergraduate essay” I tried to explain. It turned out that my graduate thesis and a good measure o f my doctoral dissertation also would be exploring aspects o f the aesthetics, particularly the theatrical elements and the mask dramaturgic modes o f his performance. When I finally decided to write this book on the art and cultural practice o f the Afrobeat musician, it was due to one main compelling reason: there were far too few critical works on Fela’s immense contribution to social change and the evolution o f a new musical idiom. xxiii UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afroreat! Fela and th e Imagined Continent Nothing in my entire experience o f cultural fieldwork pre­ pared me for an encounter with “die Fela People,” What one thought was an embarrassing question, they answered gleeful­ ly; but flew into a rage at an apparently innocuous inquiry Quite often, I found myself in situations similar to Deirdre Bair’s in the course o f her biographical research on Samuel Beckett. Like Beckett, too, Fela granted me die right to follow my impulses, but was neither going to help nor hinder me. Could he see that he was some sort o f romantic poet, and could we not return to these early impulses, I had once asked. It did not seem like a good day and his reaction was rather sharp: “That term ‘poetry’ could be verbose, this is why you university people bore me.” Yet, I knew that I needed a compass to navigate the subject in spite o f my knowledge o f the fact that such an expressive art form as I had set out to study had not become o f mainstream interest in our academia, at least not in our departments o f English and literary studies, even with the pioneering efforts of the likes o f Michael J.C . Echeruo and Isidore Okpewho, with Victorian Lagos (1977) and M yth in Africa (1983) respective­ ly; and subsequently Biodun Jcyifo’s loruba Travelling The­ atre (1984). This invariably meant a dearth o f relevant literature. Indeed, the bulk o f the earlier works on Fela, most often biographical notes, are to be found in the review sections o f newspapers and magazines scattered across the globe, with a few others lurking in obscure journals. Against the back­ ground o f this general dearth, rhe works o f Carlos Moore (1982), Idowu Mabinuori (1986), Ivorchia Ayu (1985), Ran­ dal Grass (1986) and Tam Fiofori (1998) provide tentative ref­ erence materials. While the ethnological aspect in Moore is played to the fore, tracing, as it does, Fela’s genealogy’ to the third generation in his three-dimensional narrative approach that brings into sharp focus Fela’s complex personality Mabin- XXIV UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY P reface uori’s contribution takes the tone of advocacy; detailing the musician’s cultural and political practice, while also providing biographical information. Fiofori’s essay provides a historical appraisal o f Fela’s musical development and the evolution o f the Afrobeat form. It is with both Avu and Grass that the art- society dialectic is given substantial preeminence, besides a treatment o f the future o f an art form that confronts a domi­ nant, hegemonic power. Ayu, however, highlights the poten­ tial for obscurantism and the problem o f drug abuse and nudism for a musical and cultural practice that he acknowl­ edges as essentially emancipatory But for me, the question persisted: What is Afrobeat? As conceived by Fela, is it merely another musical form or also a cultural and political event? How do wc account for the nuances o f his performance subtexts—what are our aesthetic criteria in measuring them and, above all, what is the relation­ ship between popular music and social change? From the outset, the multidisciplinary imperative o f such a venture had dawned on me, and I felt somewhat compelled to heed the warning o f Houston A. Baker concerning the need for a theoretical approach that would be cognizant o f an “Improvisational flexibility and a historicizing o f form that are not always characteristic of academic responses to popular cul­ tural forms.”5 My inclination in this bid is two-fold. One is to explore the theoretical overlaps that are implicit in such a dis ­ course; and, also, to bring into focus the theorizing o f the ‘self ’ by the aesthetic subculture, in order not to foist arbitrary theo­ ry on a form that can express a subtle but most profound mode o f signification. In other words, I have adopted a method of cultural criticism, and the indefinite article a is here empha­ sized to show the “model” as a method and not the only method o f reading this text, or any other for that matter. It does not take too long, for instance, for any Fela reader to dis­ cover the potential o f an implicit plural reading o f conceptual xxv UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fe ia and th e Imagined Continent and actual experience as essential to his aesthetic and political practice. This is not, however, to suggest that literal and nor­ mative meaning that I have encountered in the course o f this research are necessarily overridden by willful interpretation. Rather, and somewhat akin to Stanley Fish’s suggestion on how to read a text, here too it is not so much a case o f indeter­ minacy or undecidability but o f a “determinacy and decidabil­ ity that do not always have the same shape and that can, and in this do, change.” 6 Generally I have translated non-English words and pas­ sages— especially those in Pidgin English. Lyrics are rendered in the normal text, while their translation (also given except where their English approximation is obvious) is in italics. Tone marks reflecting current usage in Yoriiba orthography have also been used. Yoriiba is a tonal language, with three underlying pitch levels for vowels and syllabic nasals: the low tone is marked with a [ ' ] grave accent; the mid tone is unmarked; and the high tone is indicated with an [ ' ] acute accent. Subscript marks such as e and o are also used; e approx­ imates to the e in the English word “yet”; the o is close to the o sound in “dog”; and the s is close to the English sh. The first chapter, “Tradition and Afrobeat,” traces the antecedent cultural and political contexts that shaped Fela’s innovative Afrobeat music and performance. At the political level, I describe the evolution o f the Nigerian state and the process o f a post-independence elite formation and the recon­ stitution o f a patronage system. The aesthetic-cultural dimen­ sion describes both the lyrical content and structural pattern o f Afrobeat, detailing such early influences through neo-tradi- tional forms, Highlife, and his London and American experi­ ence o f the early sixties. Chapter Two, “Bard o f the Public Sphere,” situates his musicianship in the context of his ideological evolution and the choice o f a variant ofNkrumahist Pan-Africanism to define dif- XXVI UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY P refa ce ference and contest the dominance o f center cultures. In the same breath, it details how his song texts serve as metonyms of the social history o f post-independence Africa. The “Empire Sounds Back,” which constitutes Chapter Three, appraises the African performance stylistic strategies with which Fela transposes folk aesthetic forms into the idiom of urban, popular (musical) performance. It also explores the crisis o f neo-tradition and late modernity besides other salient issues o f his development o f a counter-hegemonic social dialect o f Pidgin English, which is becoming increasingly popular, par­ ticularly among the urban subcultures o f West Africa. Chapter Four, “ I d an , or a Carnivalesque,” narrates and analyzes the performance context at the Afrika Shrine. It also highlights a counterculture group-bonding experience through music, ritual worship, drugs and resistance politics in the ambience o f a Lord-of-Misrule festival. Chapter Five, “Alterity Afrobeat and the La\y” extends the interpretation of the Afrobeat form, as one that is an all-inclu­ sive performance mode, o f which music is only a part. It stress­ es Afrobeaf’s other political and ideological group practices. The chapter also explores Afrobeat’s relationship with other alternative (musical) cultural practices, such as reggae, the African-American and French rap traditions, with examples taken from Bob M arley , the 2 Live Crew and Nique la M ere respectively Also here, Fela’s vision o f an imagined (African) continent, his micro-African commune, the Kalakuta Republic, its style of living, and organizational structure, are evaluated. The “Afrobeat Continuum,” which is Chapter Six and also the concluding chapter, integrates certain salient observations earlier noted on the wider issue o f the future o f Afrobeat in the post-Fela era, and poses questions about cultural and ideolog­ ical retention and continuity The various appendices are meant to provide the cultural and political contexts o f Fela’s performance, and have also xxvu UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! E ela and th e Imagined Continent been developed to include the following: a comprehensive annotated discography o f the artist; an excerpt o f the constitu­ tion o f the Movement o f the People (M OP), fela ’s political party which was refused registration prior to the 1979 elec­ tion; a schematic bio-data, including an inventory o f sonic cen­ sorship. Perhaps this work could still have benefited from some more prolonged waiting—say a month, a year, or even a decade— but to what effect? I did not set out to deliver a Torah to poor cultural earthlings. The ‘ultimate,’ eternal text, I’ve tried to remember, is the purveyor o f the anti-intellect! And so, may this not be the last word on a cultural practice that, we hope, promises to play an influential role in twenty-first centu­ ry black and African popular culture discourse. As we are apt to say the ball is now in the reader’s court. Sola Olorunvomi Brixton / Bodija ? xxviii UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY P refa ce Notes 1. “Kalakuta Republic” is the name given to anywhere Pel a lived after his 1974 detention; it is styled after the name given by inmates to the cell where Feb was detained. Fela conceived o f his Republic as a micro pan-African village where all fleeing from institutions o f containment were wel­ come. 2. The attack was ostensibly precipitated by soldiers who claimed that a teenager who had insulted their colleague fled into Kalakuta, and they demanded that Fela hand him over to them. Fela refused, saying it was the jurisdiction o f the police to effect such an arrest. Moments later, fully armed soldiers had cordoned o ff Fela’s residence. This incident stands out as perhaps the most violent encounter between the Nigerian state and the artists5 commune. In tire after- math of tire attack, the commune was razed by fire and some female residents testified to having been raped bv the marauding soldiers to an Administrative Board o f Inquiry set up afterwards by the military governor o f Lagos State, Commodore Adekunle S. Lawal. Many others, including children and visitors, were brutalised and hospitalised, and Fela’s seventy-year-old mother—Mrs Olufunmilavo Ran- some-Kuti (who later answered to Anikulapo-Kuti with her son when the latter changed his name)—was thrown down from die first floor of die building. Her health declined after this incident and she died a year later from the shock. Cou­ pled with this, Fela lost the sound track o f Inis film— The Black President — and the Board o f Inquiry could only repri­ mand the artist for waxing the track Zombie which, it noted, unduly caricatures the military institution. The Board com­ prised the following: Chairman, Honourable Mr. Justice K.O. Anyah; Member, Wing Commander Hamza Abdul- lahi; Legal Secretary Mr. TA.O. Ogundeyin; and Adminis- • XXIX UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Ajfrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent trative Secretary Mr G.A. Oshunmakinde. 3. Fela changed the name o f his performance venue from ‘Afro Spot’ to Afrika Shrine’ once he began to conceive o f his music and venue as distinct from the sheer revelry that char­ acterises a regular night club. He gradually began to empha­ size a deeply spiritual experience, where fans and acolytes were expected to dance only after appreciating this dimen­ sion. From die Empire Hotel o f the late seventies, he started incorporating ritual elements into his performances and increasingly ribald political pronouncements. 4. This was how John Collins, the (Highlife) music scholar at the University o f Ghana, Legon, described a tendency in Fela’s music in my interview with him in May 1998. 5. See Houston, A. Baker, Rap and the Academy (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1993), p.34. 6. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 306. i XXX UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Idem pa Qhi Oye mu A Confounding experience this; Yet the buffoon hollers: a mere harmattan haze Ookun - Yoruba aphorism i i XXXI UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY 1 Tradition and Afrobeat That voice sprouted again and Crawled into their skulls and began to howl His voice walked ahead and came behind And rocked the earth like storm ... They did not return The voice survives. . . — O lu O guibe1 Cloud without shade Cumulus without shower Saturday night a t the bard’s An overcast o f cannabis — Sola Olorunyomi2 1 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent Far beyond the Pepple Street venue o f his performance, the bass drum’s deep throbbing and the wailing horns o f Fela’s Egypt 80 Band could be heard resonating into this silent Lagos night. As we inched into the swanky marijuana-fumed atmos­ phere o f the Afrika Shrine (Fela’s nightspot), an all-female cho­ reography could be seen attempting the impossible task o f duplicating the rather racy rhythm, the twists and turns o f the track Arm y A rrangem ent. A chorus in the background kept crooning: One day go be one day One day go be one day Those wey dey steal-i money for (Africa) government One day go be one day A day o f reckoning is coming A day o f reckoning is coming For those plundering (Africa's) governm ent’s resources A day o f reckoning is coming 3 Then the beat descended into a repose, as the singers also took a cue by stretching out the last Imc—“One-dav-go-be-ooone- daaaaay” I eagerly turned to a colleague and asked: “Did you see that?” I had meant the fusion o f die choreographic idea with die lyrics. “Kind o f funky” he replied after pondering for a while, and I knew he was only trying to be polite though a very dynamic moment had been losr in thar short phrase. Many other gestures, too, by both African and Western ‘expert’ observers who seek to describe Fela’s Afrobeat per­ formance and context remain largely breezy and faddish. Quite often, these experts have been too content to gloss over Afrobeat’s definitive moment simply with the usual refrain, “jazzy and African-Latin flavor,” without giving it the benefit o f its nuances. 2 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY T radition a n d A fro bea t Africa, then, in the logic o f this stereotype, comes over merely as a repository o f the call and response and improvisa­ tion, while the West, ostensibly supplies the premeditated notations. It is the sort o f generalization that presents even a formally trained musician such as Fela as incapable o f enduring processuaiity just as the Euro-American is consigned only to the cold calligraphy o f sheet-scored music without the capacity for “life” and spontaneity I argue against this primarily from an ideological point o f view even though such assertions are equally technically false. The likes o f Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven were all renowned not only as composers but also improvisers , whose works, according to Philip Tagg, were canonized (scored) as the music’s purest form o f concretion— and were later suffocated by being locked ininstitutional pre­ serving jars called “Conservatories.” 4 We may attempt to limit the scope o f the Afrobeat genre by a definition based on its intrinsic musical qualities, but its ulti­ mate meaning can hardly subsist without a consideration o f its reception, which, as Karin Baber notes o f the popular arts in general, are based on conventions—-and those conventions are seldom obvious by looking at the art object alone. This theme is further expanded in Chapter Five. The intervention o f the audience in a canon formation o f this sort can be quite insistent as the examples o f Afrobeat and Highlife have shown. Although Fela had used the term “Afrobeat,” he eventually denounced it as “a meaningless commercial nonsense” with which recording labels exploited die artist.5 The name persists only due to the insistence o f Afrobeat’s audiences, spanning the avid fan to music reviewers and die media, such that, at the present, varieties o f this form continue to foreground Fela’s “roots” Afrobeat as its grounding metaphor. In the case o f Highlife, Graeme Ewens notes: cYebua Mensah, brother o f E.T Mensah and a co-founder o f dance band in highlife, told the writer John Collins how the varne caught on in Accra. UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY r Aprobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent “The term highlife was created by the people who gathered around the dancing clubs such as the Roger Club, to watch and listen to the couples enjoying themselves ... the people outside called it highlife as they did not reach the class o f the couples going inside, who not only had to pay a relatively high entrance fee of about seven shillings and sixpence, but also had to wear full evening dress, including top hats if they could afford it.55’6 Each musical idiom, like every cultural production, has always evolved from antecedent forms, and in an electronic age such as ours, the question to pose is how this or that form is :- appropriated to create a new musical register. O f jazz, for instance, Esi Kinni-Olusanyin notes that although it “descend­ ed from the blues and ragtime, many elements o f the work song, spiritual, and ring shout are incorporated into it.” 7 In the same way that Highlife drew its form as “one o f the first exam­ ples o f fusion between the old world and the new; and a proto­ type for all African pop,”8 Fela’s Afrobeat also tapped a myriad o f sources ranging from basic Nigerian traditional rhythms, Highlife, jazz and Latin elements— over a structure that is essentially a criss-cross African rhythm. However, this process is quite tenuous and the attempt here is not to define his artis­ tic production in relation to an ostensibly foreign mainstream “corpus which constitutes the canon against which it [his form] is measured.”9 In many traditional African cultures, including the Egba Yoruba in which Fela was raised, music and dance are intrinsi­ cally tied to everyday experience. This process could be o f a sacred event, thereby incorporating ritual elements, or a secu­ lar one, involving music and dance as accompaniments to social gatherings such as sport, general entertainment and, at times, an instrumental jam session. Some o f the following have been identified as general practices o f the tradition: call-and- response pattern of vocal music; the bell rhythm of the gong, 4 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY T radition a n d A fro b ea t which denotes time lines; the predominant use o f the penta­ tonic scale; the speech rhythm growing out of tonal inflections of African words and chants; the use o f polymeters and polyrhythms, and musical instruments used as symbols,10 Some traditional mythologies guiding both instrumenta­ tion and musical presentation, in certain instances, continue to serve as cultural survivals and forms o f retention, even with the current dispensation o f popular music. This is at times made manifest in the animist conception o f musical instruments and the attempt by musicians to emboss on them a vernacular idiom, so to speak, to make them “talk.” This attitude is true o f many African communities, and Sam Akpabot alludes in this connection to a Yoriiba mythology “that only trees located near the roadside are suitable materials for the construction o f skin drums because they overhear humans conversing as they walk past and are therefore able to reproduce their lan­ guage.” 11 Whatever the validity o f this claim, the ancient Yoriiba dictum, Ay&nikgalu, asorti fgi (Ayan o f Agalu, who speaks through the medium o f wood), is suggestive o f the kin­ ship o f music and the reconstitution o f speech pattern.12 Therefore, drums— in particular— and other musical instru­ ments are deemed to be repositories o f language, with the differ­ ent Orisa (deities) expressing marked preferences o f drum decoder for invocatory purposes. Hence, Obatala’s quartet includes Iyanla, Iva Agan, Keke and Afeere which form die Igbin ensemble used by its devotees,13 while Sango’s preference is the Bata ensemble o f Iya Hit, Omele abo, Kudi and Omele Ako. With these are the Ipese, Otunmila’s special drum, and Agere; Besides Agogo (metalophone) andsekere (traditional rattle) of 6 gun. Beyond the fact of the drum’s centrality7 in most of Africa’s orchestra, this aesthetic-religious function probably explains the prevalence, among the Yoriiba, o f teasion drums with their wide range o f tonal configuration and a cultural addiction to “talking with musical instruments since \briiba is a tone language, musi- 5 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the I magined Continent cians have been able to develop a highly sophisticated use o f musical instruments as speech surrogate.” 14 The complexity of this form Ls most noticeable in the traditional all-drum orchestra which may have between two to twelve drummers, with each assigned parts, and which together create a musical rhythm that exhibits syncopation, polymeter and polyrhythm—in an atmos­ phere where all the other arts could be aptly represented. While neo-traditional forms such as Apala and Sakari were part o f Fela’s growing experience, it was in the direction o f the more broad-based Highlife that he moved, having also played with Victor Olaiya’s band, a prime exponent o f Highlife in Nigeria from the 1950s. However, the features o f protest and rebellion that later characterized his art predate this era. As early as the 19th century Lagos was the hub o f “pop” concerts which the nascent cultural nationalists would later take as an important reference point. Although the “pop” concert in Europe was, historically a lower middle class affair, and had quite distinct features from the Lagos concert of this period,15 the Lagos elite showed considerable interest in this entertain­ ment genre. But the pivot o f this early concert was the Mission House, so much so that there were open conflicts between the Catholic Mission and the Church Missionary Society (CMS ) as regards poaching o f members o f the congregation through the lure o f concert. The Catholic Mission was once accused o f try­ ing to lure Protestant members to its fold on this account. 16 However, once these concerts took a secular tone, they were disparaged as heathen. 1'he Lagos Observer of January 18, 1883 criticized this trend, which it described as “exhibition of low forms o f heathenism.” Shortly after this, it was further described as “rude expressions in the native language and danc­ ing o f a fantastic kind.” The Lagos street o f this era was rich and ebullient with drama festivals, masquerades, bards and musi­ cians, and the colonial government was constantly in conflict with tire artistic communin’ and had to ban local drumming ar 6 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY T radition a n d A fro b ea t a point.17 Echeruo notes that this cultural event helped to develop a culture of art review with a level o f sophistication that could only have been the result of exposure to music and music criticism in Europe, or else through Lagos and Abeokuta.18 As often happened then, the attempt was primarily to approximate the standard o f the European center. Echeruo further details the pronouncement o f a reviewer o f St. Gregory’s Grammar School’s chorus rendition o f Fanfare ofMirlitous in the Observ­ er of December 3 and 17 ,1 8 8 7 , which stated: “Orpheus could not have done better.” Another factor outside the missions that was favorable to the growth o f the concert in Lagos, writes Echeruo, was the presence o f a small, well-educated and “cultured” elite made up mainly o f the expatriate colonial civil servants and the Brazilian community, which increased in number after the emancipa­ tion.19 There is no doubt that the existence o f a Western-type music school in Abeokuta as far back as 1861 and the launch of die Lagos Musical Journal in 1915 served as important precur­ sors. The enthusiasm of the Brazilian community in these con- certs has also been located in their earlier African experience prior to the slave period in South America. Whatever may be said of outside influence in stimulating awareness o f these con­ certs, interest in concerts by Nigerians was evidently a carryover of a rich indigenous culture o f love o f song, dance, ritual and theater.20 By the early and middle 20th century the cultural ground was already shifting from a mere attempt at imitating European forms to seeking an authentication of what was con­ sidered as indigenous; a ground which in part had been paved by one “Cherubino” who, in the Lagos M usical Journal o f 1916, asserted: The legends o f Troy it must be admitted, for interest, stand pre-eminent; but what can equal for beauty and poetical embellishments the legend o f lie Ife, that cra- 7 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela .and the Imagined Continent die o f mankind as tradition relates. It was in the context o f this cultural undercurrent that Nigeri­ ans started seeking alternative musical forms. Having learnt that tire colonial explanation o f Christianity was one in which only Victorian hymns could be sung, the Nigerian independ­ ent Baptist, Mojola Agbebi, subsequently rejected all forms of European music in worship. Other Nigerians followed this path o f indigenization. John Collins and Paul Richards note in this respect: Fela Sowande (b .1902), having established a reputa­ tion as Nigeria’s leading ‘symphonic’ composer, subse- quendy argued the case for grounding Nigerian musicology in the study o f African religion. Akin Euba has moved in the direction of works, more accessible to mass audiences in which ‘Western’ influenced ‘intellec- tualist’ procedures o f composition are rejected. 21 Therefore, as Echeruo has apdy noted, when Highlife eventual­ ly developed more confidendy in both Ghana and Lagos in the 1920s and ’30s, it was an attempt, long after Juju, at cultural self- assertion after an era that had been dubbed as schizophrenic. This pull and tension between the forces o f “Europeanization” and “authenticity” would later be manifested in the musical practice of Fela (then Ransome-Kuti). This cultural identity cri­ sis was not immediately resolved though, at least not during the Highlife days of his Koola Lobitos band. Oh! H igh, Highlife While a criss-cross o f African traditional rhythms constitutes the background to Fela’s beat, 22 the immediate beginnings o f 8 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY v T radition a n d A fro b ea t Afrobeat are to be located in Highlife. It would take until after World Wir II for Highlife to become the most influential dance - j music in Anglophone West Africa, with “the influx o f the return­ ing demobilized Black soldiers with their newly acquired tastes o f Western-style live music and night-club entertainment.” 23 This process was also aided by rapid urbanization. As a measure o f cultural-self representation, local musicians attempted to play their diverse folk music with a guitar back­ * ”, ; ground. lam Fiofori suggests that the guitar styles that intro­ duced the instrument to British West Africa were the rhumba-merengue and samba music of GV-70 rpm records that came via the Spanish territories of Africanized Cuba and Latin America.24 Prior to this encounter, however, West Africans have always had the more complicated 20-string instrument known as the kora. This factor, most probably explains the ease with which the musicians embraced “modern guitar,” while also adapting it to the principle o f the pentatonic scale to which tra­ ditional string instrumentalists had grown accustomed. Highlife, which had started o ff as “palm-wine” guitar music—so called because o f the social occasion o f palm-wine refreshment during performance—was soon transformed into an orchestra which, apart from guitar, included in its typical ensemble brass instruments such as trumpet, trombone and € , tuba, as well as reed instruments. Other Western-style instru­ ments o f this form are the trap drum and cymbals, accordion, xylophone and keyboard, with the brass and reed instruments now carrying “the tones, in harmony led by the trumpet.” 25 These were also the general features o f the jazz-Highlife hybrid era o f Fela’s music, which was fused with a melange o f West African traditional styles. Some o f the Highlife titles to i : his credit in this period include O nifere, Teshe Teshe, Lagos Baby, L a i Se, TO Dele, M i O Mo, Ajo, A lggbara, Onidodo, Keep N igeria One and A raba’s Delight. Others are M oti Gborokan, Se E Tun De m dA ko— all produced between his Koola Lohitos 9 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela .and the Imagined C ontinent Band and the Highlife Jazz Band (1958-1969), although Ray Templeton (see discography) had tracked down Aigcma to the “Highlife Rakers” production of 1960. The musical influences on Fela at this point ranged from soul and blues, Geraldo Pino’s style (including the reciprocal influences with James Brown), through a number o f Highlife musicians, notably E.T Mensah, Victor Olaiya and Rex Lawson. In terms o f structural pattern, it was Rex Lawson’s brand o f Highlife with its emphasis on the musical complexity o f tradi­ tional Nigerian drum rhythms— combining die three-mem­ brane drum,26 two/and one-membrane conga drums,- and the Western trap drum set with cymbals— that would serve as the immediate catalyst for Afrobeat.27 Besides tins, however, High­ life had somewhat served its time as a cultural tool for African “authenticity” as it was wont to be presented in the early decades o f the century By now, independence had been achieved and the new nation had to confront issues o f develop­ ment and the post-independence elite who, to a large measure, bestrode the landscape with the air o f internal colonizers. The new elite, like its colonial forebears, promptly put a leash on the anticipated democratic project. With a restive population, its organized labor sector and die student movement finding itself confronted by an increasingly diminished “public sphere” for alternative visions (in Nigeria the civil war was already raging), a period o f disillusionment would set in and the status quo had by the mid-sixties begun to be challenged on these terms. And with its breezy generally covert political themes, obsessively hedonistic Ivrics— o f transcendental love, o f women and wine— and a rather sedate rhythmic structure, Highlife was simply not best positioned as the medium for the brewing post­ independence confrontation, at least in Nigeria; it was a task that would have to be shouldered by Afrobeat, a subversive musical and cultural practice. UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY T radition a n d A fro b m t Continental Crisis as Muse This development, however, did not occur by happenstance, as even the choice o f some cultural preferences earlier discussed have their roots in the overall attempt of Africans, as part o f the anti-colonial struggle, to evolve discursive strategies o f Other­ ness— on whose plank the twin concepts o f negritude and black personality' would later rest. The political and ideological subsoil that would later characterize Fela’s overall oeuvre was grounded in this amalgam o f spiritual quests. Early in the century peoples o f African descent had fash­ ioned and projected ways o f being ‘black5 — in efforts that were both scholarly and artistic. The negritude movement, which “aimed initially at recognizing the black personality (la personalite nigre),”28 was one such effort, largely because the colonial project had created a dichotomizing system. It was a structure that brought to the fore the tensions o f reconciling the past with the present while also orienting activist Africans toward the future. As VY. Mudimbe has pointed out, these paradigmatic oppositions were— and still are— evident in the binary differentiation o f “tradition versus modern; oral versus written and printed; agrarian and customary communities ver­ sus urban and industrialized civilization; subsistence economies versus highly productive economies.” 29 The conferences o f Bandung, Paris, and Rome, with their sharp polarizing views on the African condition, had actually been preceded by the negritude initiative, the fifth Pan-African Conference, and the creation o f Presence Afncaine , all within the first half o f the century Mudimbe copiously details an intellectual engagement by African precursors in certain repre­ sentative domains o f this era: In anthropology; studies o f traditional laws were car­ ried out by A. Ajisafe, The Laws and Customs o f the 11 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent lorubd People (1924), and J .B . Danquah, Akim L am and Customs (1928). Analysis o f African customs were published; for example, D. Delobson’s Les Secrets des Sorciers Noirs (1934), M. Quenum’s Au Pays des Pons: us et Coutumes du Dahomey (1938), J. Kenyatra’s Fac­ ing M ount Kenya (1938 ), J. B. Danquah, The A k m D octrine o f God ([1944] 1968), and the excellent researches o f K.A. Busia and 1? Hazoume, respectively The Position o f the C h ief in M odern Political System o f the A shanti (1951) and L e pacte du Sang au Dahomey ([1937] 1956). In the field o f history the most promi­ nent contributions to African nationalism were J .C . de Graft-Johnson’s A frican Glory: The Story ofldmished Negro Civilizations (1954) and Cheikh Anta Diop’s Nations negres et culture (1954), in which he analyses the notion o f Hamites and the connections between Egyptian and African languages and civilizations.30 The third leg o f this influence came from African descents o f the Americas such as Marcus Garvey W E.B. Du Bois, Mal­ colm X, Langston Hughes, Claude Mackay George Padmore and Richard Wright, among others, whose writings and lifestyles helped to shape the quest for an African identity On a broad ideological and political platform, there was the strong intellectual current represented by Marxism which, especially between the 1930s and 1950s, was undoubtedly the greatest influence on the activist African intelligentsia and even nascent statesmen. It was in this context that Sartre’s 1948 essay Black Orpheus, and Aime Cesaire’s Discours sur le colonialisms, could have such profound impact on the negritude movement in par­ ticular and Africanist theoretical paradigms in general; a boost would be given to this a little later when, at Sorbonne in 1956, a meeting of the First International Congress o f Black Writers 12 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY T radition a n d A fiv b ea t and Artists was held. Although the events o f these times could only have had a remote impact on Fela, his unique family back­ ground, with highly politicized parents (Fela’s mother was a socialist and women’s activist, while his father was an educa­ tionist and labor activist), did greatly help the retention in later life of those values he could not have fully comprehended in his childhood. Two other thinkers that would later influence Fela were Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney with their seminal works: The Wretched o f the E arth and the more recent H ow Europe Underdeveloped A frica , respectively31 The anti-colo­ nial and anti-imperialist intellectual mood o f this period aided the evolution of an aesthetic engage that rubbed on African lit­ erature (written and unwritten), music, and the other arts, even if Fela would later quarrel with aspects o f the negritude outlook. The general intellectual and potentially emancipatory thrust o f Fanon’s works became an important rallying point for (black) African dissonant voices, even after asserting in The Wretched o f the E arth that there wall not be a black culture because, for him, die black problem is o f a political nature. Yet, there were other voices like Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Renais­ sance Africa, Obafemi Awolowo’s Path to Nigerian Freedom , and particularly Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah—with their several treatises on African socialism. By the time Nyerere made the Arusha D eclaration in 1967, the creed o f Ujama was finally spelt out in an explicit manner— showing a rather non- aligned path in the ideological divide between capitalism and communism. Nkrumah however underwent several phases, at the end o f which he concluded that the essential contradictions o f the political economy were those between labor and capital, on one hand, and, on the other, the colony and imperialism. 32 It is evident that a consistent trend by the ‘native’ other during this phase, was the general sympathy for socialism, albeit rein­ terpreted in several ways to express African identity ; it was also a factor which informed Fela’s accommodation o f the ideology 13 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the I magined Continent as an important tool for the broad anti-imperialist coalition when he noted that; Although Marx, Lenin and Mao were great leaders o f their people, it is however the ideology o f Nkrumahism, regarded as an African socialist system , that is recommended because it involves a system where the merits o f a man would not depend on his ethnic background.33 In the context o f the performing arts such as theater and music, three major moments o f relating artistic reaction to political processes can be delineated; first, “domestication o f politic?.’ power,” second, “criticism of colonial life,” and third, “celebra­ tion o f the African sources o f life.” I am here borrowing Mudimbe’s classification— applied only to literature— but which is equally apt to the other arts too. The manner o f these aesthetic reactions were, however, not necessarily chronologi­ cal. O f significance here is the experience noted by Colin Grandson since the William-Ponty Teachers’ College days (in Senegal since about 1933), which was then Francophone West African “nursery” o f its political elite. O f its theater, Grandson observes that “the historical Chief and his present equivalent, the political leader, appear as the main character in more than fifty per cent o f the Black African plays o f French expression since independence.” 34 It took a while before plays o f the William-Ponty influence could frontally challenge, in any fun­ damental sense, the colonial heritage although they evoked a pre-colonial past based on legends and myths, an indication that reactions to colonialism were not always uniform. On the other hand, in Anglophone West Africa, while the theater prac­ tice o f the earlier Hubert Ogunde o f Nigeria straddled the first and second moments, it was the third phase that Fela’s per­ formance predominantly came to articulate—even while taking 14 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY T radition a n d A ftv b ea t retrospective glances at die earlier two phases. Werewere Lik­ ing’s Village Kiyi performance project and Bernard Zaorou ZacLi’s Didiga Theatre (both Ivorien post-independence forms) were also cast in this latter mold. The Nigerian story itself dates back roughly to 1914 when the then Governor-General, Lord Lugard, amalgamated the Northern and Southern protectorates o f a geographical expanse that incorporated some 250-plus ethnic groups. The British government introduced indirect rule, ostensibly for administrative convenience, but had by that act also entrenched a divisive factor that would continue to distract the attention o f the new nation. While the anti-colonial move­ ment—especially those grouped around the Zikist move­ ment35-—sought to unify the country along a broad anti-imperialist coalition, the country that emerged after inde­ pendence was largely balkanized along regional groupings with the new political elite unwilling to tap, even as a symbolic reference, the resistance efforts o f the Aba Women’s Revolt (1929), the Iva Valley Coal Miners Massacre (1949), the pan- regional coalitions o f the Cost o f Living Allowance (COLA) led by Chief Micheal Impudu (1941), and the general strikes of 1945 and 1964. The consistent disrespect for the rule o f law even after independence has its roots in the attitude to the constitution. A consistent pattern in constitution-making in the country is characterized by the twin factors o f its elitist formulation and the lack o f an inclusive process o f sufficiently accommodating the anxiety' o f its diverse citizenry Hence, since the first 1922 Richards Constitution, Nigerian constitutions have always been handed down either by colonial officers or military offi­ cers, with the inescapable attitude o f a benefaction from a benevolent despot. The 1951 Macpherson Constitution drove the most decisive wedge in the way o f a national labor perspec­ tive through its introduction of a “tripartite division o f Nige­ 15 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined C ontinent ria , b reak -u p o f n a tio n a l u n io n s to co n fo rm to n ecessities o f n ew p o litic a l se t-u p an d th e d e v e lo p m e n t o f n ew re g io n a l o rg a n iz a tio n s re s tr ic te d in m e m b e rsh ip an d ju r is d ic t io n to reg io n a l bou n d aries.” 36 T h e p o litica l m an ifesta tion o f a d ep en d en t e co n o m y th a t e m e rg e d at in d e p e n d e n ce , as n o te d b y R ic h a rd Jo s e p h , w as o n e that played up a p atro n -clien t relationsh ip w ith in tire civil p o lity su ch th a t ev en tw o decad es a fterw a rd (in 1 9 7 9 ) , th e p o litic a l parries th a t em erg ed in vested in su ch g ran d p a tro n fig u res as th e fo llo w in g : N a tio n a l Party o f N ig e r ia (N P N )— A lh a ji M a k a m a B id a ; U n ity P arty o f N ig e r ia ( U P N ) — C h ie f O b a fe m i A w o lo w o ; Peoples R ed em p tio n P arty ( P R P ) — M ai- lam A m in u K a n o ; N atio n a l Peoples Party (N P P )— Dr. N n am - d i A z ik iw e ; G re a t N ig e r ia P eop les P arty (G N P P ) — A lh a ji V%ziri Ib rah im . C h aracteriz in g th e n atu re o f th e em erg en t s ta te , R ich a rd Jo s e p h co n te n d s th a t any fru itfu l d iscu ss io n a b o u t N ig e r ia m u st take in to accou n t d ie “natu re , ex ten t and p ersistence o f a c e r ta in m o d e o f p o litica l b eh avior, and o f its so c ia l an d e c o ­ n o m ic ra m ifica tio n s” 37 and su g g ests a co n ce p tu a l n o t io n o f “prebend alism ” to explain the centrality7 in th e N ig erian polity7 o f th e in tensiv e and p ersisten t stru g gle to c o n tro l and exp lo it th e o ffices o f s ta te .38 A ccord in g to Jo sep h , the h istorical association o f th e term “ p reb en d ” w ith th e o ffices o f ce rta in lords o r m o n a rch s , o r th ro u g h o u tr ig h t purchase b y su p p lican ts, and th en ad m in is­ tered to generate in co m e fo r their possessors, arose in an cien t G reece. H e n ce , the adjective “prebenda” is used to refer to “pat­ terns o f political behavior w hich rest o n the ju stify in g princip le th at su ch o ffices should b e co m p eted fo r and th en u tilized fo r th e personal benefit o f the o ffice holders as w ell as o f th e ir refer­ ence o r su p p ort g ro u p ” 39 T ills background helps to explain w hy F ela d evoted en o rm o u s a tten tio n to th e p o litica l “ p atro n ” in ord er to underm ine its sym bolic figure, since it w as precisely the 16 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Tradition and Afrobeat patron-client relation that provides a sustaining framework for the manifestation o f prebendal politics in Nigeria. This patron-client ties reflect a social relationship which has become a crucial element— perhaps even the defining form— of governmental process in Nigeria under which lies an economic stratum that has been variously described as a “gov­ ernment by contract” and a “rentier state, in which revenues derive from taxes or rents on production, rather than from pro­ ductive activity”40 and an “inverted pyramid, tearing precari­ ously on a hydrocarbon pinnacle.” 41 In thus case it was the oil revenue, the mainstay o f Nigeria’s economy that was at stake. The centrality o f the state in deciding who becomes the patron— since state power conferred the ability to control enormous economic resources— turned Nigeria’s politics into warfare, “a matter o f life or death.” 42 In other words, the emergent “national” bourgeois class is one whose claim to that appellation is not necessarily derived from any productive venture as such, but merely in relation to agency commission doled and received from transnational cor­ porations. Broadly speaking, its outlook is neither national nor market-driven, as it also shows a marked preference for alloca­ tion derived from oil wealth as middlemen, import-export agents and commission-takers. As a divided, sectionalized— even tribalized—group, this comprador alliance with foreign capital has been unable to forge and crystallize an enduring national identity This critical element in the nature o f national class formation, especially the narrow and particularistic pursuit of the elite, has substantially distorted the crust o f the working class and other ancillary sectors, foisted a false consciousness, and reduced the emergence o f a self-conscious opposition with­ out reference to primordial allegiances. This attitude survives even in recent history such that when General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the national elections o f 1993, won by Chief Moshood Abiola, it was not too difficult for the General 17 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and th e Imagined Continent a raise the bogey o f a potential southem/Toruba domination or the polity if the result o f the elections were honored. This blurring o f class-referenced attitude, which cuts across the h ard, has been assisted by an interconnected patronage system (\\ ith varying degrees o f influence among the different nation­ alities), which allows for a member o f the working class stratum tt '.mage himself as participant in the sharing o f national eco­ nomic largesse. Hence, a member o f the working class suffi­ ciently angered in a quarrel may retort: “Do you know me? Do you know who I am?” The silence in the altercation here carry­ ing the unspoken undertone: Do you know whom I am con­ nected to? Usually such a hidden scarecrow is some member of the armed forces, connected to the brag by no more than, “We come from the same village.” Such is the strength o f the image o f the new patron— the Nigerian military Invariably it is the civil society' that has had to bear the effect T the elite in-fighting that has characterized the years spanning 1 60 to the present, having, as it does, to live with urban chaos in. housing, transportation, health services and the phenomenal increase, among others, o f “the Area Boys” 43 syndrome, occa­ sioned by economic hardship and the anonymity' bred by inter- urban migration. Lagos, Fela’s predominant site of performance, is the worst hit by the contradictions engendered by the political economy primarily because it is the center o f the nation’s industrial and financial sector, and the main port of entry into and exit from the nation, even after 1976 when Abuja became the capital city Coupled with this cosmopolitan ambience, Lagos emerged with a much stronger working class arid protest tradition, but also took on board a variety o f social crise s j such as youth drug-addiction, mental disorder, alco- u lism, unemployment, displacement and violence. A 1996 n Idwork reveals that about 17.5 per cent o f households in I gos experience frequent occurrences o f urban violence, wi itch implies about two households in every ten; and a quarter 18 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY T radition a n d A fro b ea t (24 .7 percent) o f all households have fallen victim to at least one residential burglary—with the prospect o f the form of vio­ lence being armed robbery which accounts for 47 .37 percent o f such attacks.44 The middle class response to this phenomenon, which had become rampant by the 1970s, was to withdraw into fortress­ es, behind high-wall fenced apartments. And because there was hardly ever any long-term approach to solving these social problems, the military governments since the 1966 coup have often resorted to a task force operational method that sought to whip the population back to the “correct path.” The urban poor became the immediate target o f the marauding soldiers who charged at them in a manner reminiscent o f the brutality with which the colonial West African Frontier Force (WAFF) soldiers maimed protesting Nigerian women during the Aba Women’s Revolt o f 1929. This “season o f anomy” as the title o f Wole Soyinka’s novel published in 1973 pictured it, contin­ ued unabated through the civil war period, the oil-boom and post oil-boom era o f the seventies— including the structural adjustment phase and the rise o f military autocracy and “maxi­ mum” leadership after the overthrow o f the Shehu Shagari regime in 1983. The spate o f urban violence rose to even higher heights in the nineties with the new dimension o f bomb-throwing as a means, apparently to settling political scores. After the death of General Sani Abacha, who ruled between 1993 and 1998, his Chief Security Officer (CSO) Major Hamza Al-Mustapha confessed to having knowledge o f bomb-planting engineered on the instruction o f his former boss.45 Besides this, it became public knowledge that the late dictator had a special “hit- squad” which eliminated the political opposition and hounded the press. In 1994, the residence o f Dan Suleiman, an anti-mil itary-rule activist, in Victoria Island, Lagos, was petrol- bombed and his personal effects set ablaze. This was followed 19 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent by a bomb blast in the Ilorin Township Stadium in 1995, venue o f the launching of the Kwara State Chapter o f the Fam­ ily Support Program (FSP), a pet project o f the then First Lady Maryam Abacha.46 It was not until 1996, however, that incidents o f bomb explosion became a statistical bi-monthly with six explosions recorded during the year, three o f which occurred in the single month o f January under a military dispensation that had con­ tinually triggered coups, countercoups, and phantom coups since 1966. This, in a sense, was a product o f the military’s bit­ ter internal contradictions and an attempt to use state power for personal benefit. This was the political environment to which Fela reacted. Some Sort of Egba Boy Against the anxiety and idealism of a young man, the home that Fela returned to in 1963, after his training at Trinity Col­ lege to study music, was one that would be taken over by the rule o f the jackboot and martial tunes. Born into the Egba- Iforiiba Family o f Reverend Ransome-Kuti and nee Thomas on October 15 ,1938 , Fela was the fourth offive children. Anum- ber o f antecedent factors helped to shape his musical and cul­ tural practice. The Egba, since about 1830, have been concentrated in the metropolis o f Abeokuta and along the districts around River Ogun in present-day Ogim State,47 Even though hemmed between the 0y o Empire and the British who would soon arrive on the coast, the Egba quite early sought autonomy and, led by Lisabi their national hero, rebelled against 6yp domination and fought into retreat a reprisal team sent from the Oyo Kingdom. From this point on, the Egbd state attempted to, and did, make real its independence. A new constitutional order was 20 1L UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Thidition and Afrobeat introduced into the state, along with a national anthem and flag, and trade with the coast and the hinterland was intensi­ fied. Soon, the missionaries would arrive in Abeokuta, and with their entourage, cultural assets such as printing presses, educational institutions, factories, and a new literacy—which will further make visible (even when attacked by the missionar­ ies) certain cultural elements such as the all-female G eled6 mask and its satirical agency the E ft. Though he was deprived of interacting with the tradition as a youth (his paternal family of clerics disparaged it), Fela would later reach back into this cultural antecedence much later in his musical and artistic career, and rework substantially traditional, even cultic, codes into his performance. O f particular interest to Fela was the Ifa system o f thought and aesthetics. Ifa is the Yoruba divination system through which its priests try to decipher shrouded events: past, present or future— of whole communities and individuals. The teach­ ings o f Ifa are embodied in the Odu—usually a collection o f anecdotes that refer to the theme in a narrative detout A prac­ tice that predates Islam and Christianity the Odu o f Ifa are o f two types: the Oju Odu (principal Odu)—sixteen in number and represented by Ikin sacred nuts o f the same number— and die Omo Odu (minor Odu)—which are 240. Both the princi­ pal and minor Odd are arranged in a specific order o f seniority and the hierarchical ordering is o f great significance in the interpretation o f Ifa’s (also known as Orunmila and Agbonnuregun) message. Regarding the world as a vast math­ ematical pattern (a trait which the Pydiagoreans, Hebrew Cab­ bala and other equally ancient cultures share with it), the Ifa priest combines these numbers and configures their result. The process o f deriving the Odu may be effected by casting cowry shells or pieces o f kola nuts. The Ifa divination process is quite hierarchical with the Babalawo and Iyim'fa at the apex. Unlike the Babalawo and Iyarufa, who are the oracular priests o f Ifa, 21 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent the Omesgun and Adahunse are less specialized and therefore do not have a ritual procedure as elaborate as the former. Beyond this cultural flux of his formative years, there was also the repressive atmosphere of colonial district officers and tax collectors extorting money for and on behalf of the colonial government. Even as a child, his activist mother took him along to political rallies; and he would recall the incident which led to his dad being stabbed in the eye with a bayonet by a trig­ ger-happy soldier as a reprisal against the activist Reverend Father who had presumably “disrespected” the British Crown. These early exposures had a profound effect on his cultural and political attitude later in life, as Fela was wont to constantly allude to the events. Fela’s mother would later visit the Soviet Union and China, meeting Mao Tse Tong at a time when such an action was con­ sidered highly treasonable. A foremost activist and human rights advocate, she organized women groups across the coun­ try and mobilized Egba women toward the deposition o f Sir Ladapo Ademoia II, the Alake of Egbaland. When the latter was later reinstated, she was said to have withheld her recognition and support.48 Her choice of political party was the National Council o f Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), led by D t Nnamdi Azikiwe whom she considered a most forthright pan- Africanist of that era. Fela later met the late Osagyefo, D t Kwame Nkrumah, who preached Pan-Africanism. In the early sixties Fela studied music at Trinity College, London, though he had always played music at home given the fact that his parents and grandfather were themselves accom­ plished musicians. Both in Britain and the United States, Fela had played in salons where he had a series of encounters with white racists. Furthermore, the sixties were years o f many unusual social and economic events with their devastating effects on the psyche of conscious black youths like Fela. Such events included the Black Panther era, the invasion of the Bay 22 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Tradition mdAfrobeat of Pigs by the United States, and the assassination of Pat* *. Lumumba, whose memory had lingered. Sandra Smith . African American girlfriend, lent him the biography of r colm X by Alex Haley and this simple event became a dan- maker o f his ideological initiation as a Pan-Africanist. * complement to his musical engagd, Fela later formed t Young African Pioneers (YAP) in 1976 and die Movement the People (MOP), in order to pursue this vision, although * n latter was refused registration for the 1979 election. Musical Afrobeat: Cultural and Political Evolution Translating his Pan-Africanist vision into music, however, took a while after many false starts that included experiments!;, with American soul style music and Highlife. The strivi- evolve other layers of contemporary African styles of m always been part of the effort of that generation of voung rians who enrolled in music schools in England in the . and early sixties. While the older generation compn• c Fiberesima, Akin Euba, Sam Akpabot and Laz Ekwc “chose to study classical music and returned to Nigeria as : r academics ... or worked in radio and television stations as rr. directors ... another group of students chose to studv daw - popular music.”49 In this latter set were the likes o f VNfcie K knor, Briddy Wright and the then Fela Ransome-Kuti *T others like Mike Falana, Lasisi Amoo, Fred Coker and Dele Okonkwo—who also went to Europe to further their car. they got involved in diverse musical forms: European Lu, y Rhythm and Blues, Rock i f Roll and the emerging pop rr of the sixties.50 As a remote influence, the jazz music of Me s Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Charles Mingi with whom they occasionally had jam sessions—came to ) r re an imprint on their musical style. This would be noticed lars i 23 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and toe Imagined Continent vela’s composition. All the while, however, their attempt was to infuse the new experience with Highlife, an attitude informed by their conviction that the new musical form had to be rhythm-driven, and as noted by Tam Fiofori, “with a strong percussive section.”51 For Fela, the solution to this search did not emerge until many years later when he suddenly realized that he was playing to empty halls and that his music did not reflect his new con­ sciousness. It was during his 1969 American visit that he final­ ly decided on a new rhythm, as he recalls; “I said to myself, ‘How do Africans sing songs? They sing with chants. Now let me chant into this song: la-ia-la-laa...’ Looking for the right beat I remembered this very old guy I’d met in London— Ambrose Campbell. He used to play African Music52 with a special beat. I used that beat to write my tune, man ... I didn’t know how the crowd would take the sound, you know I just started. The whole dub started jumping and everybody start­ ed dancing. I knew that Fd found the thing, man. To me, it was the first African tune Fd written till then.” 53 Meanwhile, this decision had also been preceded by his increasing interest in black studies and African cultural forms. He changed the name of his band from “Fela Ransome-Kuti and the Highlife ] azz Band” to “Fela Ransome-Kuti and the Nigeria 70,” under which he produced the new rhythmic experiment of My Lady’s Frustration in the 1969 Las Angeles sessions. Far away in the United Kingdom, another contemporary and friend of Fela, Peter King, had also started a similar fusion described bv Tam Fiofori as “Afrojazz, with faint elements of Highlife, a very dis­ tinct flavour of modern jazz and a predominant emphasis on percussive rhythms.”54 It was however in Jeun K ’oku , and more determinedly with W hy Blackman Dey Suffer that we get the definite shift to the structural pattern of contemporary Afrobeat. Withje u n K ’oku one gets the sort o f ‘bold’ and assertive vocalization, struc­ 24 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Tradition andAfrobmt tured in an upbeat, fast tempo reminiscent of James Brown’s lines, “Say it Loud/I’m black and proud.” The instrumenta­ tion of the ensemble—now called The Africa VO— also reflect­ ed this transition that included in its percussive section, a trap-drum set o f bass drum, snare drum and cymbals, two tom-tom drums, then a three-membrane drum. Later in the Egypt ’80 Band he added the gbedu, the ‘big conga drum ,’ basically a Baoule-tvpe Attoum gblan , two-a-piece interlocking membrane drums and a second bass section that intensified the rhythm. Together with an amplified rhythm machine, two key­ boards, ratdes, metal gong, sticks, the bass and tenor guitars, he had defined his rhythm section. The horn section was made up of a trumpet, alto, tenor (first and second) and baritone (first and second) saxophones. The basic format of most of Fela’s compositions is easily identifiable in his percussion that usually starts off with a signa­ ture rhythm that introduces rhythm messages. This could be with the keyboards, “the two guitars in unison or counter points,”35 the trap drum or even the two membrane drums in unison or counterpoint. In many of his compositions, usually die rhythm is kicked off with a double, regular-interval beat on the bass drum, and against this bass drum, a snare drum beat interlude breaks the monotony and thereby serves as antiphonal to the defining bass drum. Against this general background, the rattle, gong and rhythm guitars come in to pave way for the piano and later the horn section, after which the chorus and cantor take over The bass drum rhythm has been identified by Steve Rhodes as Egbaesque, with its roots reminiscent o f certain rhythms of the Oro cult.56 What is equally incontrovertible is the choice o f most of his simple Egba chants such as “tere kutc” or “joro jara joro,” which are built on harmonics based on the pentatonic scale. It is a format Fela respects and does nor depart from in any fundamental sense. Even the choice of 25 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent playing in the pentatonic scale can be seen as not only musical­ ly but also ideologically motivated. Schooled, as he was, in the Western musical tradition, his preference is shown in an atti­ tude to music that incorporated the improvisational and oral with its accompanying limited strictures. Unlike Highlife music which followed the European harmonic structural pat­ tern, the structure of Fela’s Afrobeat, in the main, gravitates toward traditional modal scale. His African musicianship is fur­ ther exhibited through the use of such West African traditional techniques like ensemble stratification, modalism and hocket- ing, a point such scholars as John Collins and Michael "Veal have also noted.57 By reflecting the tonal character of the African speech pat­ tern in the instrumental section, Fela invests his total ensemble with the power of a speech surrogate that serves as the ‘inner voices’ one often gets in his music. Besides this, the structure made it easier for the commentary of the cantor—a role assumed by Fela in the mold of the tradidonal griot and the “Chief Priest,” as he was later styled, who must make pro­ nouncements. To understand the universe of Fela’s thought on this and his imagined (African) continent, a paraphrase of his diverse readings is given in the opening of Chapter Two. At the level of lyrical content, he constantly questions received notions through his strident political commentaries, rude jokes, parodies and an acerbic sense of humor and satire. The predominant persona of his narrative is a troubadour in quest of justice and fair play trenchant and uncompromising in exploring the nuances of everyday life and depicting the sub­ ject as victim of authoritarian constructions, while at the same time seeking to reposition him from this status to that o f a gen­ uine creator o f culture through his diverse social roles. The subject (in Alagbon Close ), even as a night-soil man sings: “I be agbepo; I dey do my part; without me your city go smell like shit,” to which the chorus responds: “Never mind, I dey do my 26 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY 'tradition andAfivbeat part, I be human being like you.” \bcal: I am a night soil man. T play my social role; with­ out me the stench in your city would be unbearable. Chorus: Never mind. I am only playing my role. I am as human as you. Even when his lyrics acknowledge the transcendent, he is quick to introduce the conscious, mediating role of human agency so as not to depict a helpless humanity in a naturalistic state. Drawing on a romantic African past in In terna tiona l T h ie f 'Thief (IT T ), he concludes that the current status of the under­ privileged class is alterable provided he is ready to fight Inter­ national Finance Capital: KWe must fight dem (transnationals such as FIT) well well”. Shortly before this, in O riginal Suffer H ead , he cautions: “Before we ail are to jefa head o, we must be ready to fight for am o sufferhead must stop.” Before we can attain a life of comfort W m ust be prepared to fig h t fo r it The status of being die victim must stop Coupled with this, he evolved a choreographic idea that sought to in terpret the ideological underpinnings of his song texts. This theme is given full treatment in Chapter Four And once Afrobeat took a definable character, it created the basis for experimentation by several other masicians. Many including Roy Ayers, Lester Bowie, Manu Dibango, Hugh Masekela, Paul McCartney and Ginger Baker, had visited and jammed with Fela by the seventies and later cloned his form. Old precursors of the form with Fela such as Johnny Haastrup and Segun Bucknor, with a later convert like Blackman Hakeem Karim, continued to play in the background while a crop of younger Nigerian artists such as Femi Anikulapo-Kuti and his UNIVE SITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent brother Seun, Charly Boy Yinusa Akinbuosu, the masked Lag- baja (Bisade Ologunde), KunNiraN (Kunle Adeniran), Dele Ogunkoya, Dede Mabiaku, Amala, Bodun Ajayi, Bright Chimezie and Funso Ogundipe are introducing new forms. While Gudrun Hoick, in Denmark, Dele Sosinmi’s “Gbedu Resurrection,” in Britain, Dele Ogungbe’s “The African Con­ nection” and Tony Allen’s “Afrobeat Revenge” in France are extending the frontiers of the form, Saiif Keita of Mali and Ybussouf N ’dour of Senegal are also drawing on the inspiration of Afrobeat while giving it their respective local flavors. Notes 1. See Olu Oguibe’s “The Voice,” an excerpt from the collec­ tion, A Gathering Fear (Yaba-Lagos: Kraft Books, 1992), p. 10. 2. From the poet’s unpublished collection, “Whispers of the Dust.” 3. Unlike in the recorded album, the word ‘government’ is occasionally substituted for ‘Africa’ in live performances. 4. See Philip Tagg: “Open Letter: ‘Black Music’, ‘Afro- American Music’ and ‘European Music’” in Popular M u sk , A frican Issues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. B, no. 3, October, 1989), p. 290. 5. This view was expressed by Fela in a 1992 interview with the author 6. Graeme Ewens in “The Highlife Zone,” A Celebration o f A frican M usic (London: Guiness Publishing Ltd., 1980), p. 80. 7. See Sylvia Esi Kinni, “Africanisms in Music and Dance of the Americas,” in Goldstein (ed.), Black Life and Culture in the United States (New York: Crowell and Sons, 1971), p. 55. 8. Graeme Ewens, A Celebration , p. 80. 28 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Tradition and Afrobeat 9. In a similar vein, Abiola Irele notes of a tendency in literary criticism to define Africa’s creative process mainly in rela­ tion to a presumed European corpus against which it must be measured. See his introducction to A im e Cesaire Cahi- er D ’un Retour A u Pays N atal (Ibadan: New H orn Press, 1994), p. xiii. 10. Samuel Ekpe Akpabot in Foundation o f N igerian Tradi- tionalM usic (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1986), preface. 11. Ibid., p. 58. 12. Akin Euba suggests that Ayan may be regarded as the ulti­ mate ancestor o f all drummers. See Essays on M usic in Africa (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, 1988), p. 7. '■\ Ibid.,p. 5. 4. Ibid., pp. 9-11. 15. Cited from Use Oxford Companion to M usic by Michael f. C. Echeruo, in Victorian Lagos -.Aspects o fN ineteenth Cen­ tury Lagos Life (London: Macmillan, 1977). 16. 'Ellis charge was made by Rev J. \fernal in Church In te lli­ gence and Record of J anuar y 1889. • 17. See Echeruo Aspects o f N ineteenth C en tury Lagos L ife (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 68. 18. Ibid., p. 70. 19. Michael J. C. Echeruo in “Concert and Theatre in Late Nineteenth Century Lagos.” See Nigeria M agazine , no. 74 of September 1962. ’, 20. Ibid. 21. See John Collins and Paul Richards, “Popular Miiiic in West Africa: Suggestions for an Interpretative %^me- work,” in David H orn and Philip Tagg (ed.) Ptibtdar M usic Perspective (Sweden: The International Association of the Study of Popular Music, 1982), p. 122. 22. Fela is quite conscious of this cross-cultural borrowirtg, and he informed me that his inspiration derives primarily from traditional music. Once, I pressed for specificity and 29 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeax! Fela and the Imagined Continent he replied, saying: “Everyone (of the traditional musi­ cians) has got something to say” Tunji Oyelana also con­ firmed that he had on occasions been incited to the Shrine by Fela for some interaction on folk forms in which Oye­ lana specializes; this was corroborated by band members. The Gbagado Gbogodo series is a product of such interac­ tion. 23. See Tam Fiofori’s article, “Afrobeat: Nigeria’s Gift to World Popular Music (1)” in The Post Express, August 16, 1997. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Tam Fiofori identifies the three-membranophone drum as a pivotal instrument also in Ijaw masqurade music. 27. Ibid. 28. See YY Mudimbe’s The Invention o fA frica : Gnosis, P h i­ losophy, and the Order o f Knowledge (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, and London: James Currey 1988), p.87. 29. Ibid., p. 4. 30. Ibid., p. 89. 31. Fela constantly alluded to these works in his numerous public lectures. 32. This is the general thrust of Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colo­ nialism: The Last Stage o fI m perialism (London: Fleine- mann, 1965). 33. See section on aA Felasophy” in Chapter 2. 34. Ci ted m “Theatre in die Niger Valleys,” Glendora Review: A frican Quarterly on the A rts , 1995, pp. center spread. 35. The Zikist movement was formed on February 16,1946 and named after Nnamdi Azikiwe whose exemplary nationalism inspired the youth in the first place. The founding members were Dr. Kola Balogun (president), Chief MCK Ajuluchukwu (first secretary), Mokwugo 30 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Tradition and Afrobeat Okoye, Abiodun Aloba, Nduka Eze, Habib Raji Abdallah, Oged Macaulay and Harry Nwanna, Source: “Anonimity of Matyrdom” by Kavode Komolafe, Sunday Concord , Sept. 27,1998), p. 8. ' 36. See Wbgu Ananaba in The Trade Union M ovement in Nige­ ria (London: C. Horst and Company 1969), p. vii. 37. Richards A. Joseph in Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall o f the Second Republic (Ibadan and Cambridge: Spectrum Books and Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1991), p. 1. 38. Ibid., p. 8. 39. Ibid., p. 8. 40. This observation was made by Terisa Turner, in “Petrole­ um, Recession and die Internationalization of Class Strug­ gle in Nigeria.” Labor; Capital and Society 18(1): 1985. 43. See Crawford, Young, Ideology and Development in A frica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 219. 42. Excerpts from the presidential address by Claude Ake to the Annual Conference of the Nigerian Political Science Association in Hist A frica , May 25,1981, pp. 162-3. 43. Term used to describe urban unemployed youth, prone to forming gangs and extorting money as a way o f ‘coping’ with city life. 44. General referencing from Tunde Agboola’s Architecture o f Fear (Ibadan: IFRA/African Book Builders, 1997). 45. See Tell magazine no 5,1998. 46. See details in Tell magazine, no. 6, February 5,1996, and The G uardian of December 22,1996. 47. See Robert Smith in Kingdoms o f the Torubd (London: > Methuen 8c Co. Ltd,, 1969), p. 94. 48. See Johnson-Odim, Cheryl and Mba, Nina Emma in For | ! Hbmen and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti o fN ige­ ria (Lagos: Crucible Publishers, 1997), p. 6. 49. See Tam Fiofori’s “Afrobeat; Nigeria’s Gift to World 31 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent Music (2),” in the Post Express of August 17,1997. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. This was Fela’s preferred name for his style of music after his rejection of the title “Afrobeat,” 53. See text of interview in Carlos Moore’s Fela, Fela this bitch o fa L ifr (London: Allison and Bugs by 1982), pp. 85-88. 54. lam Fiofori (2). 55. Ibid. 56. The view was expressed in an interview with the musician Steve Rhodes in Lagos, November 1997. 57. This has been observed by the music scholar John Collins. See also, Michael Veal, “And After the Continentalist” (