"Everybody should try as much as possible to live an independent life and be proud of himself as an African. That's all." Fela Kuti
There were a number of things I admired about Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician who died of Aids on 2nd August. First and most important was his music. Fela introduced a completely new sound, Afrobeat, which was at once non-traditional and recognisably African. It consisted of Fela himself, alternating between organ and sax, plenty of horns, a strong percussion section, bass and lead guitars, and a chorus of female singers. (When you hear the opening bars of any Fela song you know immediately whose it is.) He was also an intensely political man who hated injustice; he wanted to use his music "to change the whole system." In order to reach a mass audience, he stopped singing in standard English and his native Yoruba in favour of pidgin English, Nigeria's lingua franca.
I once saw for myself how successful Fela was in this. It was 10th November 1995, the day the current military government of General Sani Abacha executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow Ogoni activists in spite of near-universal condemnation. I was travelling by coach to Lagos from Port Harcourt, where the hangings took place. Someone asked the driver to play a tape of "Beasts of No Nation," one of Fela's pieces from the mid-1980s. The song was written in response to a previous military dictator's claim that he had seized power to protect Nigerians' human rights. Fela argued that human rights are not a commodity to be given or withheld by an "animal" in uniform, but the "property" of every person: "Human rights na my property/You can't dash me my property." More than three quarters of the passengers on the coach, all of them ordinary Nigerians, knew the words of the song from start to finish. That was why the authorities could never leave Fela alone.
Fela's first run-in with them was in 1974. He was arrested for possession of marijuana and held for two weeks in a cell nicknamed kalakuta (Swahili for "rascal"). After his release he cut an album, Kalakuta Show, detailing his experiences in detention, which included being flogged daily on his bare buttocks. In response to this, the police invaded his house later that year and beat him so badly that his left arm was broken and he had to have 11 stitches to his head. Most notoriously, on 18th February 1977, about 1,000 soldiers from the local barracks in Lagos attacked his house, the self-styled Kalakuta Republic, and burned it to the ground. The reason was another song, "Zombie"-an attack on the soldiers who had by then been in power for over a decade: "Zombie no go unless you tell am to go/Zombie no go think unless you tell am to think... Go and kill/Go and die!"
The soldiers' act of destruction, in the course of which Fela's 77-year-old mother was thrown from a first floor balcony, caused sufficient disquiet for the government to set up a tribunal to investigate. Despite overwhelming evidence of premeditation, the tribunal concluded that the fire was started by "an exasperated and unknown soldier." (Fela's next album was Unknown Soldier.) The tribunal also held that Fela had been deliberately provocative by calling his house a republic. When, two years later, he had made enough money to build another one, he also named it Kalakuta Republic.
I admired this swaggering refusal to be cowed by Nigeria's thieving rulers. (This is a country with no public records, and where journalists who ask too many questions are incarcerated by military tribunals.) I do not recall his response to Saro-Wiwa's death, but I doubt that he was surprised. From the early days of its independence from Britain, Fela understood the nature of Nigerian politics. But his political acumen was rarely appreciated by a public more interested in his outrageous antics. He insisted, even in the early 1970s, that no African government had the moral right to criticise South Africa's and Rho-desia's apartheid regimes, because they did the same or worse: "Between April and May 1978 the Nigerian police and army opened fire on demonstrating students, killing more than nine. Yet the liberation of South Africa is a major foreign policy issue for the Nigerian military government. Is the killing of students by Nigerian police and soldiers not worse than the action of John Vorster or Ian Smith?" This was vintage Fela.
Yet despite his political sophistication, Fela revelled in his country's authoritarian, patriarchal habits. He actively encouraged the personality cult among his followers. I witnessed this when I visited him at Kalakuta in late 1989. The London-based magazine I worked for at the time had published an outspoken interview with him, following the break-up of a concert in front of 20,000 students in Abeokuta, his home town.
I found his house without much difficulty: a white three-storey building in a quiet suburb. Some young women sat on benches in the courtyard, plaiting each other's hair and smoking ganja. I recognised some of them as the wives he had married en masse in 1978 because, he said, "the society was calling them prostitutes," and subsequently divorced en masse in 1986 because "I don't believe in marriage any more." One of them took me up to the first floor lounge, a large room with matching brown sofas along the walls and a television set in one corner. The walls themselves were bare except for two pictures: one of Fela's mother, regarded as Nigeria's first feminist; the other of Thomas Sankara, the radical leader of neighbouring Burkina Faso, who was assassinated in 1987.
Although it was past 3pm, Fela was still asleep. Over the next hour or so, half a dozen men dropped by and quietly took their seats, as did some of the inhabitants of the house, mainly the dancers and singers who lived in bunk beds on the ground floor. (Someone once told me that 200 people lived at Kalakuta, but this seemed hard to credit.) At 5pm a man dressed in white entered the room and asked who wanted to see "baba" and why. I showed him the magazine interview. The man nodded, left, and all went quiet again. About ten minutes later there was a sudden commotion and Fela appeared in the doorway wearing only a pair of white underpants. He held a huge spliff in his right hand and walked over to the sofa reserved for him. He was in good shape for a man of 51.
"Yes, who wants to see me?" he said, not looking at anyone in particular. The man in white beckoned me forward. I went over, sat next to Fela and immediately realised that I had done the wrong thing. There was a sudden tightening in the atmosphere at my presumption. Fela let it pass. I introduced myself and showed him the magazine; he was obviously pleased and asked if he could have it. I said that I had come especially to give it to him. There was nothing else to say, so I thanked him and stood up; but as I turned to go he called: "Are you coming to my club, Afrika Shrine?" I said I would, but in the event I didn't make it. It was another four years before I did.
Going to the Shrine meant staying until dawn because Fela arrived well after midnight, by which time you risked being attacked by armed robbers in the streets of Lagos. When Fela appeared, surrounded by attendants, there was always a near-riot around the narrow entrance. His costume was straight out of the early 1970s: tight-fitting trousers, tight-fitting shirt with a high collar, sneaker-type shoes, all matching colours. He paused at the foot of the stage for a few minutes to listen to the band, which had already been playing for three hours, and then slowly ascended the steps and sauntered over to the microphone at the front of the stage. He looked slowly around without saying a word. The audience, who knew the routine, went wild, with shouts of "Baba 70" and "Abami Eda" (strange being). Fela pulled long and hard on the spliff in his hand, looked around again and said: "I beg, make I smoke first make my head correct." The audience went wild again. At a sudden signal, the band struck up a number: "Big Blind Country" or "Suffering and Smiling."
Saturday was my favourite night because you got the yabis and the worship along with the music. Yabis is pidgin English for abuse. Fela spared nobody, not even Chief Moshood Abiola, presumed winner of the annulled 1993 elections and currently in detention on a four-count charge of treason, nor General Olusegun Obasanjo, the former head of state who was sentenced to life imprisonment two years ago for allegedly plotting a coup. The only sacred cow in Fela's pantheon was his mother, whose photograph adorned the shrine proper, a flimsy wooden construction about four foot square, to the right of the stage. It also held a photograph of himself blowing the sax, some wooden gourds and a sort of altar before which he prostrated himself while one of his fellow worshippers handed him a glass of schnapps to drink. (I heard, but never saw for myself, that he sometimes sacrificed a chicken and mixed its blood with the schnapps.) This whole event lasted about 15 minutes. Fela credited his mother with showing him the way-her ghost visited him after she died, apparently from injuries sustained in the attack on his first house: "I went into a trance for over three hours. When I came round I understood myself much better. Since then I have worshipped at my shrine. I worship the creator."
The most controversial part of the club's show was the women dancers: six altogether, each of them occupying a cage three foot high. They were dressed in the skimpiest skirts and tops which barely covered their breasts; one of them famously kicked off her knickers and bared all to the men crowded below her. Towards the end of the show Fela would beckon them, one at a time, to dance with him on stage to the accompaniment of a soloist. This was Fela's opportunity to show off his harem, to play the "original" African man who knows what women are for. He would push them gently to the ground and simulate sex with them.
In the end Fela will be judged by his contribution to music, not by his stage stunts. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate (incidentally, Fela's cousin), once identified Nigeria's problem as "the betrayal of vocation for the attractions of power." Fela remained faithful to his vocation—his best bid for immortality.
