Fela Anikulapo-Kuti died in 1997 but his memory would be kept alive as long as there are music lovers, as long as people value the virtues of the perennial outsider, the avant-garde artist and the political rebel.
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti died in 1997 but his memory would be kept alive as long as there are music lovers, as long as people value the virtues of the perennial outsider, the avant-garde artist and the political rebel.
Fela was all of these and more. After training as a classical musician in London and learning the rudiments of jazz in his free time, he made his way to Los Angeles in the late 1960’s during heady days of the civil rights movement. There, he met Sandra Smith, an African-American anthropology student who steered him forcefully towards the philosophy of black consciousness. Once he returned to his native Nigeria, he was ready to meld all these cultural influences into a potent brew of radical politics, hypnotic beats (drawn from a mix of James Brown’s funk, West African highlife grooves and indigenous trance music) and African spirituality.
As his fame spread, he rapidly became a thorn in the flesh of corrupt military administrations of Nigeria. He was further radicalised by their gross incompetence, lack of foresight and criminal brutality. But these very sins, were precisely what defined his oppositional ideology, his irrepressible resolve to undermine questionable authority and its culpable agents. Fela Kuti was not merely an enemy of the state, he was also a foe of the bourgeois values that partly produced him being the scion of a prominent educator and a courageous feminist. He spat in the face of middle class good sense at every given opportunity that it often became impossible for his original social class to appreciate his musical genius. What it saw instead was a betrayer of the class, a gadfly who needed to be taught a severe lesson. Within the context of myopic politics, he was seen a social irritant. Fela did all he could to offend the class of his parents. He also offended all manner of powerful people in the country such as Olusegun Obasanjo, Shehu Yar’Adua and Moshood Abiola. And he paid dearly for his unremitting irreverence. His house was stormed by armed guards and razed to the ground. Female singers and dancers were raped and mutilated by soldiers and his aged mother thrown out a window upstairs. She later died as a result of the injuries from the fall. After a bizarre court battle during which his land was seized by the government, Fela emerged from the tragic ordeal with yet another masterpiece of music and protest; Unknown Soldier.
As I mentioned, Fela was not only an opponent of the Nigerian state and African dictatorships generally. He was also at war with society. He was at war with any known conventional way of doing things. He later turned his back on the institution of marriage which he saw as an artificial imposition on natural human relations. He maintained an open house and anyone could literally walk off the streets and become part of his fluid and extended family. Of course miscreants, hardened criminals and neighborhood thugs took advantage of his openness in carry acts of criminality. Underage girls ran away from home attracted by the intoxicating sense of freedom that came with his personality. For society’s intractable drop-outs he had a powerful messianic appeal which many of his followers did not completely understand because no one could really say who drove him or how he had concocted his unique brew of Africanity, dissent, showmanship and musical vision. They were in part seduced by the jumbo-sized marijuana joints he smoked incessantly for his private pleasure and perhaps also as a slap on the face of society for what he perceived to be its idiocy and hypocrisy.
But what we must also understand that it is only Africa that could have produced Fela. The virulence of his form of dissent could never have festered in Europe or North America. It is certain that the brew he was able to concoct would been squashed in those regions. He would have been administered baleful courses of electroshock convulsive therapy to correct his waywardness. He may have ended up been institutionalised as a paranoid schizophrenic. Every establishment of normalisation would have clamped down on him. He would have plied numerous corrective kinds of medication to douse his fire and keep him silent. It should not be a surprise that in spite of the torture, imprisonment and injustices Fela suffered in the hands of various Nigerian governments, he refused to emigrate. He remained firmly on Nigerian soil even when he found so much that annoyed and disgusted him. Where else could he be allowed to nurture countercultural communities that thrived beyond the confines of law? Which other society could tolerate his band of outlaws who sought to undermine constituted authorities at every turn? Fela could only have forged his identity in a hesitant and transitory postcolonial milieu such as Nigeria where everything was up for grabs.
Merle Haggard, the American country music maverick recently complained that America has become so sanitised that it was now illegal to smoke a cigarette in a pool room. He mentioned that American penitentiaries during the 1960s were much freer than the larger American society today. The spots of New York that produced rebellious punk rock have since been cleared out and gentrified. It is impossible to see Fela thriving in such a clinical ambience. Fela could only have functioned on the margins of society and no matter how progressive a society could be, he could never have a found place within the mainstream culture in his lifetime. There something really deep-seated about his outsiderdom and searing sense of opposition to all forms of normality or convention.
But in Africa, he was able to bloom like a strange wild flower. His strangeness was what in turn made him a uniquely developed individual such that nothing about him- ideology, personality, music and dress sense- seemed normal. He often called himself ‘abami eda’, meaning the weird one when in jest. But we are not to be deceived. He truly meant it.
Sanya Osha is a writer who had lived in South Africa for many years. He has published pieces on diverse subjects such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.Y. Mudimbe and colonialist anthropology. He is now trying to put into better use what he has learnt over the years from reading poetry. His first novel, Naked Light and the Blind Eye released in 2010.
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