Afro-beat legend, the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti, ‘resurrected’ at the screening of a feature documentary, Meu Amigo Fela (My Friend Fela), in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. The film, which won the Paul Robeson Award for best film in the Diaspora at the 26th edition of The Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), was written and directed by Brazilian filmmaker Joel Zito Araujo, Chinyere Elizabeth Okoroafor reports.
Inside the cosy Neerwaya Cinema, international and local cinema lovers filled the 300 red fabric seats to watch the 92-minute documentary that resonates around the complexity of Fela’s life. The film teases with infectious rhythms and disappears too swiftly, while other repetitive melodies dig in for the long haul.
My Friend Fela as mediated through Carlos Moore’s narrations combines good present and past footage, interviews, images and music to present a comprehensive, intimate description of Fela, as seen from the eyes of those who knew him closely.
The documentary begins with a song, Why Black Man Dey Suffer, criticising the evil of white colonialists and stating the predicaments of African people since colonisation. Fela asks, ‘Why black man no get money today?’ And then he explains that the black man was minding his business before a group of white persons showed up. “Na since them trouble start.”
The song like many of his songs serves as a confrontational platform for social justice, but unfortunately, it causes him to become a target of Police and Army harassment, arrests and violence. His popular song, Zombie, was a song on the ruthless approach of Nigerian military government without mercy. The song results in a brutal military raid of Kalakuta that Fela had declared an independent republic.
To understand Moore’s presence in the documentary as the dynamic, informative guide that leads the audience through the intricate, stimulating and occasionally disturbing life of Fela, the documentary vividly takes us through Moore’s background as an Afro-Caribbean. He mentions his fugitive experience in his native Cuba, his own political awakening inspired by working with Malcolm X and the work of Maya Angelou.
Moore connects his interest in civil right activism to the moment when Fela in his tour of America in 1969 met Sandra Izsadore in Los Angeles, an African-American and former Black Power radical
Before then, Fela was a man who didn’t like black’s inferiority to white supremacy as witnessed during his studies in Britain.He couldn’t take a cigarette or drink alcohol. In an interview with Moore, Izsadore told Moore: “I asked him what he was singing about and he told me he was singing about his mother’s soup. And I said ‘with all the injustice happening in the world, you are singing about your mother’s soup?’ Sandra said she began to give him books to read.
Meeting Sandra and learning why he shouldn’t despise black’s complex life but embrace the fact that black’s life is as important as the white who frustrates its existence especially in America. It was then that Fela first began to think in an Afro-conscious way.
As Moore said, recalling from Fela’s interview with him, it was Sandra who gave him the education he wanted. She was the one who opened my eyes. She talked to him about politics, history and she blew his mind. It was reading her copy of Malcolm X’s autobiography that realised that he wanted to play African music.
Izsadore also comments on Fela’s regressive attitudes toward women, spreading his attention among 27 wives and countless lovers in his Kalakuta. This remains a sad irony for the son of an outspoken feminist advocate. The film suggests that his mother’s death, after being thrown from a second-storey window during a raid, robbed Fela of a coherent political model and steered him toward arcane spiritual beliefs. His detachment from reality peaked when he contracted the HIV virus, refusing to acknowledge either the illness or the benefits of Western medicine. He died in 1997.
Some of the characters who feature in My Friend Fela such as LemiGhariokwu- who designed some of Fela’s most arresting album covers- and drummer, Tony Allen. While their conversations take a different route on My Friend Fela, the recordings are also complemented by figures who contribute to the Fela discourse either intimately or professionally. These figures include Seun Kuti, Fela’s youngest son, Ray Lema, Congolese jazz musician who has paid tribute to Fela in his music, and Babatunde Banjoko, an illustrator and photographer who contributed to Fela’s album covers.
The documentary also ruminates on Fela’s powerful relationship with his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, and some of the 27 women whom he famously married in a day.
At the end of the documentary, both Moore and Izsadore agreed that Fela’s struggle and death were worth his relevance as a cultural figure, just like Bob Marley.
The history behind the story
When Carlos Moore, a Cuban intellectual, who speaks more than three international languages, relocated to Brazil with his family where he has been teaching and researching about Latin American culture, he contacted Araujo to make a documentary of his friend Fela. Moore’s decision to recreate Fela’s life, struggle and death after 12 years of his death came after seeing several of Araujo’s films; he concluded he was the best filmmaker to do the job.
Sitting with Moore and listening to fascinating stories about Fela, an African Afro beat music icon he had never met, Araujo, was charmed. Later, after reading a copy of Fela’s biography titled Fela: This Bitch of a Life, it dawned on Araujo that there was a need to document the life of a man who gave it all for an important struggle he never actualised. He said he was interested to do the film and at that moment he started to look for funds in Brazil to do the film, “But it was difficult because in Brazil they didn’t know Fela but only the new generation (of artistes),” he said.
“So, the supporters, the producers said to me, ‘this guy is important but Brazilians don’t know about him,’ and it was frustrating,”he said. After spending more than six years seeking funds from the Brazilian government, Araujo finally received the first money to do the film, but then another film about Fela from Alex Gibney’s 2014 work titled: Finding Fela, had already been released. Rather than been discouraged, Araujo said he took it without any trouble. “I said there is no problem, I will go ahead and do the film about Fela, the Fela that is important to us Brazilian people through our own eyes,” he added.
To Araujo, writing and directing the documentary about the life of Fela was to use the channel to raise the Pan African consciousness into the lives of Afro-Brazilian new generation.
To execute the job, Araujo did face some difficulties. He was refused a visa and it was the intervention of Wole Soyinka who finally got Araujo and the writer Carlos Moore into the country, but their crew members were denied visas.
For Moore and Fela, it was love at first sight. Working as a journalist in France, Moore was contacted by the then Nigerian government, which was organising an international black festival.
In Moore’s narration, ‘I came to Nigeria with my family in February 1974 and immediately I arrived the country, I heard Fela’s music and fell in love with it instantly. I asked one person to arrange for me to meet him. So, I was taken to Fela by Dr. Ola Balogun and that was how we met.’
