Adrienne Anderson

When Bob Marley sang, “When music hits you, you feel no pain,” he probably didn’t know the back story of musician and Afro beat originator Fela Kuti. Born to Nigerian middle-class, educated parents, Fela shocked much of the world during the late-60′s and early-70′s with his in-your-face sexuality, driving traditional African beats, and funk laden spirit.

If you were around and coherent anytime during the 1970′s, you knew political climate of the United States, and the world. The stale smell of embers from the Vietnam War, urban rioting, protests and anti-war movement were still lingering, and people were worn out and tired. The civil rights and anti-war movements were limping along still trying to recover from calculated attacks on their ideals and themselves.

Fela Kuti was a touchstone for the Black Power movement. His music bridged the chasm between African Americans and the African continent. Opening up the globe to African Americans was pioneered by such musicians as Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba. Fela’s music lured African Americans in with funky extended tracks and by singing in English. He “de-exoticized” African music by using traditional Nigerian syncopation that funked and thumped with James Brown infused beats. Fela was the originator of Afro beat music: Not the sunshiny, happy dance lyrics that we hear today in the “world beat” clubs, but a darker, more ominous prophetic music with danceable overtones –the most dangerous music around.

Anyone who’s listened to bubble gum Top 40 music stations have experienced how radio-friendly beats with heavy bass can fool us into dancing to lyrics that regularly call women bitches and ho’s. You can imagine what was happening with Fela’s music, except he was calling for African unity, against colonialism, against military rule, and for a fresh embrace of Africa in its true raw self, to heal itself on its own terms.

Fela was a maverick with a controversial edge that confused and infuriated many, especially in his home country of Nigeria in West Africa. In 1977, Fela and his music group Africa ’70 composed and performed his most famous song “Zombie,” a scathing indictment against the military-led Nigerian government. Like the title of the song, “Zombie” exhibited how those in power are only followers, waiting from instructions. If you go deeper into the song, you begin to ask yourself, “Who’s giving the orders?” For Fela, the government at the time didn’t want too many people asking that question. For a growing country fresh from colonial rule, it was a question best left unasked.

As the song –and the album– grew in popularity, the government responded by raiding his music compound Kalakuta Republic, and beat him mercilessly as they threw his 78-year old activist, feminist mother Funmilayo out of a second story window, eventually leading to her death shortly thereafter.Fela didn’t stop recording controversial songs with political overtones. He followed up with such albums as Expensive Shit, which he documented how the government frequently raided his home and compound looking for marijuana, even in his feces.He was a prophet, musician, revolutionary and, most importantly, he described himself in African pidgin, “I be great obeah black powah man!” Unfortunately, he regularly demonstrated his moniker, and at the time of his death, had 27 wives, one of which could have easily transmitted HIV to him which result in his death August 2, 1997. Personally, I grew up with Fela’s music, political ideology and expressions of post-colonial Africanism. My friends and I frequently listened to his music, and every great thinker in my group had a least one original Fela album in their collection, whether inherited from their parent, picked up at a recycled record store, and trading their Rob Bass album for someone else’s Fela album. As an African American woman, I had many concerns about his reputation as a polygamist and supposed chauvinist, stating such quotes as “…women are mattresses.” Now whether he meant this as alongside such statements as Kwame Ture’s quote that the only position of women in the revolution is “prone,” or as a remark on women as deliverers of comfort is arguable. In either circumstance, it’s an underlying problem within the African American political community, i.e., relegating women to peripheral objects without context or purpose outside of providing sexual satisfaction to a man, or any man, for that matter, without consideration to her goals, intelligence or purpose. It’s short-sighted, harmful and laughable –especially in the 21st century.

While I grappled with his views on women, it took an amazing article written by Nigerian writer Gbemi Olujobi who described Fela’s views from a non-Western perspective, and wrote:

“Fela lived in a patriarchal society that glorifies maleness and worships manhood; where a woman is nothing without a man; where a woman must be married to be considered a real woman. Such a society actively encourages women to give up everything for the ‘fulfillment’ of male affection, defines a woman by her marital status and questions, in the most cruel way, her essence as a woman if she is not married… He sought to give them the respectability only marriage could confer upon them, in this society that insists that marriage is the ultimate, by marrying all 27 of them. He married all of them on the same day so that they would all be equal. In that way, there would be no senior or first wife to lord it over everyone else.” (“Far from home, a Nigerian journalist finds Fela’s legacy alive and well in art,” SFGATE, May 4, 2004, Gbemi Olujobi)

With all things great and small considered, Fela’s legacy is that of an orisha: Live a life, and serve as an example of what not to do and what to do. Your character decides which is greatest.

Links:

+ “Far from home, a Nigerian journalist finds Fela’s legacy alive and well in art,” SFGATE.com, May 4, 2004, Gbemi Olujobi

+ The Fela Kuti Project

+ The Shrine

The fela kuti. by Adrienne Anderson, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Tagged in: African musicians, Afro funk, Fela Kuti, politics and music, writing samples