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In the Belly of the Beast: Fela in New
York City
By
Akin Adesokan
P
Photo: Caroline Austin
The last album Fela Anikulapo-Kuti released was Underground System, a raucous,
emotionally charged tribute to Thomas Sankara, the assassinated president of Burkina Faso,
which came out in 1992. Between this release and his death from AIDS-induced heart failure in
August 1997, the musician merely played tens of unrecorded songs at his Afrika Shrine nightclub
in Lagos, or at his various concerts mainly in the city. In 1995, after a performance at the Shrine,
Fela sat down to an interview with a colleague, Waziri Adio, and me. We wanted him to speak to
this strange hiatus. A few months before the interview, Femi, his son, had released the hit song,
Wonder, result of a recording deal with Motown Records. Executives from Motown had gone to
Lagos in 1993 specifically with a contract for Fela, but he had turned down the overture, and the
opportunity went to Femi.
Why did Fela snub Motown?
Hedged by band-boys, dancers and acolytes at the Shrine, his gaunt, lesion-lined face still
marked by chalk, camwood and kohl from the night’s worship of African gods (the intermission in
his weekly performances), Fela launched into one of his fond exercises. He had always been an
adept at analyzing words according to Yoruba mysticism and popular astrology, and every
excursion came down on the side of opposition politics, and often in Yoruba. Motown, he
declared, meant Mo ta’hun. I sell voices. No, he was no longer going to let some capitalist
sorcerer vend his voice all over the world. This was both strange and familiar; anyone who
encountered Fela at this time and who wished to seriously engage him was treated to some of
this fancy. While I languished in Ikoyi Prisons two years before this Shrine encounter, I was one
of four journalists who interviewed Fela in captivity—he and I were both detainees —and his
game with words had struck us then as outrageously beautiful. ‘Imagine’ meant nothing more
than Imo jinni--the knowledge of djinns, the gift of all artists. Television he explained as Tee le fi
soni. That which you could make into a crocodile; the crocodile was a symbol of spiritual control
in Fela’s world. Video stood for Fi de o; a form of shackle. (On October 15, 1996 when he turned
58, I went to his house hoping to get another interview while joining the annual birthday throng.
The house was busy as usual, with hangers-on hawking ‘weed’, and girls loitering about the living
room. Synthesized sounds of Fela’s voice darted out of the dark like benign vampires, warning of
Palaver, exhorting Lady, but there were no signs of the man. I sat alone, watching people come
and go, keeping the surge of ganja-smoke at bay. Finally, an assistant emerged with an oracular
message. Fela had no wish to mark this particular birthday because 58, as five and eight, added
up to thirteen, a powerful number in astrology. And to celebrate would be to ‘berate the celestial
bodies’.)
But back to the Motown story. A musician determined to stop the vending of his voice might be
protesting unfair treatment at the hands of a recording company. Fela’s riposte to Motown
sounded very much like Ma Rainey’s famous complaint. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, August
Wilson’s play about the early blues, ‘the queen of blues’ memorably accuses the studio
executives in Chicago of trying to trap her voice in ‘them buttons and dials’. Like Fela, Ma Rainey
was a hardnosed artist, but nonetheless a link in the studio chains; in her time, as a singer, there
was very little she could do to break free of the studios. Her temper made up for the rest. With
the exception of his politically-motivated maltreatment at the hands of Decca executives in the
late 1970s, Fela had always exerted a strong voice in the marketing of his music. Up till the time
of his death, he maintained that Decca Records wronged him, and continued to blame the
chairman of Decca (West Africa), Moshood Abiola, later to die in jail as undeclared President-
elect of Nigeria, for his woes. This musician had always been known to be prolific, too; apart from
a two-year lull resulting partly from his imprisonment in 1984, Fela had at least a new record
almost every year since 1969. In the Seventies, a single release in a year was the exception.
Given this history, the deliberate silence after the heady noise of Underground System seemed
all the more intriguing. We pressed him; interviewing Fela was like reading a William Faulkner
novel: you had to keep going in circles.
‘Instructions from the Shrine’, he ventured laconically, as though dictating to a stenographer.
A recent article in a British publication had explained so-called crisis in Afrobeat as the result of
Fela’s inability to innovate. The world of music was always responding to new technologies and
talents, the writer opined, and the Afrobeat maestro was simply unable to adjust to these
changes. We seriously disagreed with this interpretation, for the precise reason that some of his
unreleased songs were innovative in form, if not in content or structure. And in art, content and
structure are all too often shaped by form. Besides, there was nothing particularly frosty in the
global reception of Afrobeat at that time. Determined to get Fela to speak in detail, Adio referred
to this piece. Fela sucked his teeth. We waited. Then he relayed a vision he had recently, in
which John Major, then British Prime Minister, was so stunned by Afrobeat that he sent people all
over the world in search of its creator. John Major, the most Torious of Tories, defender of free-
market, whose last name fueled a neologism in the British press—majorality—for political
equivocation, as promoter of Afrobeat! That was the future of his music, and nothing would stop
it. We followed this captivating fantasia with interest, made other observations about the state of
his health, and discovered that to be a touchy subject. When Fela resorted to the cliché of his
name--He who has death in his pouch--one of us replied, ‘But everyone would die someday.’
‘Ha!’ Fela bellowed, and embarked on a Yoruba-Pidgin-English diatribe. ‘Se’wo fee ku? E maa wo
eleyi ke?! He said everyone would die someday! You, do you want to die? Just look at him! If
someone tells you that you’re going to die now, you will start running up and down, doing gbe-
gbe-gbe, looking for babalawo, crying, begging. Running after pastor. Imam. You, you want to
die? Nonsense!’ Two years after our interview, Fela was pronounced dead in Lagos, and his
brother, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti (deceased in 2003) admitted that the death was related to AIDS.
A profound irony sits at the heart of Fela’s self-proclaimed immortality and the cause of his
demise. The global popularity of Afrobeat, most recently broadcast in the exhibition, Black
President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in
New York City, makes the irony all the more poignant. Reviews and media reports of this show
extolled the genius behind Afrobeat, ‘a new musical genre…that merged Nigerian highlife music,
Yoruba percussion and American funk and jazz into an infectious groove’. But this was usually as
an appendix to the fact of Fela’s marriage to 27 women at a single ceremony, and his death from
AIDS, although Fela’s intensely political life and work--his life-long battles with Nigerian
governments, the anti-imperialist core around which his lyrics gathered--were never totally
ignored in the exhibition that lasted from July 11 through September 28 2003 and is expected to
travel the world.
Featuring the works of 34 artists, film-makers and photographers the show came in different
media, including sound installation, cartoons and photomontages. Trevor Schoonmaker,
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