Tag: Fela Kuti

Perhaps Nigeria will never again know a figure so singularly iconic as the marijuana chain-smoking, government-yabbing, harem-maintaining, revolutionary musical virtuoso Fela Anikulapo Kuti – he who made a portable accessory of Death. In addition to his infamous twenty-seven wives, he managed to marry aesthetics and politics in a typically uncanny fashion.

In his eponymous essay on semiotic theory, if I might simplify it at the risk of misrepresentation, the French critic Roland Barthes defined ‘myth today’ as different from the ancient stories of gods and monsters, but still relevant to modern culture as the narrative structures on which society is underpinned.  Per Barthes, everything signifies something greater or hidden. Popular culture is annexed by the status quo (the ruling ideology) and reproduced to mean something quite different from the original; depoliticised and decontextualised.

What then does Fela Kuti signify? To conjecture, I take it for granted that Fela means something slightly different to everyone who has ever been stirred by his raspy crooning and barking amongst the horns and drums of his acolytic band. And indeed, he was akin to a prophet seized by some divine force, prancing bare-chested around the stage; otherwise contemplative with that sage-like, perennially occupied stare in his bloodshot eyes from inhaling the hemp or grieving over the African condition. To me, Fela the prophet, the gadfly, the swashbuckling iconoclast; to others, perhaps an errant musician ignorant of his place, an obstruction, a hypocritical decadent. And to the modern Nigerian music industry, it would seem, a fashionable bourgeois symbol of (faux) consciousness – not unlike the posters that commonly decorate dormitory walls.

One has to discover Fela. The first time I heard him – I daresay everyone who has heard him and had a meaningful experience of it will have repeated similar sentiments – I was street-walking and the resonant strains of ‘Water No Get Enemy’ caught hold of me through the rolled-down windows of a danfo bus. I’ll admit that I am being slightly untruthful. Of course, I had overheard his music before that. His songs always struck me as odd. They seemed overlong and overly reliant on the instruments. This was the first time I had really heard him, and I was arrested. Hitherto, I had only ever glimpsed the nuanced undertones of Nigerian Pidgin’s common-sense quality. It was a political and linguistic epiphany. I was introduced to a radical who possessed an unwavering sense of justice, and had a penchant for incisive satire. It was as if every action and speech-act was part of a sophisticated maintenance of image; every utterance a subversive political statement.

A few months later, I came across Wizkid’s sampling of ‘Lady’ in his song, ‘Jaiye Jaiye’ (which incidentally featured Fela’s son, Femi, who has remained politically engaged). ‘Lady’ has the distinction of being one of Fela’s most misogynistic songs, mocking the ways of a ‘civilised’ woman i.e. a ‘lady’, as opposed to the better, more submissive African woman. Fela was a champion of women’s rights in his own way, and both songs are light-hearted and even catchy, but sexism remains inexcusable. Furthermore, it speaks of a fundamental misunderstanding of Fela’s message and ideological stance to choose that song from his oeuvre and then promote it as a reincarnation of his style (and frankly, ‘Lady’ has little to do with the subject matter of Wizkid’s song). It is a dilution, a watering-down. Fela was much more than the spectacle and the Afro-beat. The politics must not be obscured.

This misrepresentation, if at a stretch, seems to sum up the general attitude: freeloaders are all in for the pomp and circumstance, but not the strife of revolutionary politics. I am generalising terribly, and possibly being didactic.  Nevertheless, examine a few other popular reworkings of Fela’s music (and his image) and the issue at hand will be evident. This manner of appropriation has happened with a host of populist icons from Bob Marley to Che Guevara (who is the poster boy for this sort of thing) to Thomas Sankara. Indeed, for the sake of directness, this article might be better titled ‘The Appropriation of Fela Kuti’.

In 2013, after the release of that song, Wizkid tweeted that he was the ‘Young Fela’ in an ostensible (and ostentatious) bid to draw comparisons between himself and Kuti. The tweet resurfaced recently as Nigerians, no strangers to lip service, now wondered where the young Fela was amid the ongoing economic recession. In the background to this, Tuface Idibia, another popular musician, had planned a rally to call the government to action and later bathetically bailed out after acquiescing to a cautionary instruction by the police. Thus, there was no popular figure to spearhead the protests.

The run of events was surreal, to minimise the description. Tuface appeared on television in suit and designer sunglasses flanked by wife, Annie, and spoke of how the onus was on him to lend his voice to the masses. There were the various galvanising messages and infographics. Then on Sunday, February 5, 2017, a day before the scheduled protests, Tuface opted out in a strange video posted to Instagram in which he appeared to be crying (sans sunglasses), fuelling speculation of coercion. He cited security worries, following ‘advice’ from the police. In his words: ‘it was not worth the life of any Nigerian’. The general response was sardonic and weary. I do not wish to impugn Tuface -the initiative is commendable, and the demonstrations held after all– but one could never imagine Fela, mauled and incarcerated so many times under military rule for dissidence, ‘falling the [collective] hands’ of Nigerians in such sublime manner.

To compare oneself with myth, it seems, is folly. Granted, artists have no obligation to be political. But it is surely not untoward to hold them to the standards that they profess themselves to exemplify. If, as Marx suggests, ‘history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce’, then the appropriation of Fela’s mythical mantle is the sad, inferior joke. Perhaps this should be considered a requiem.