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Reminiscing on Fela
By Adewale Maja-Pearce
I got up and stood by the door. The male cell was to my immediate right. The prisoners, stripped to the
waist, were fanning themselves with their shirts. Some in the front stretched out their hands for money but I
ignored them. I had enough police wahala as it was. I strolled towards the entrance and paused. Nobody
came after me. I looked up and saw the Area Commander sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. I had
the impression that he was looking out for me. I wandered to the front yard. To one side were the police
barracks, six altogether. Each was five stories high with the solidity of the colonial buildings but they were
completely dilapidated, without even running water judging by the number of women and children carrying
buckets to and fro. Plywood had turned balconies into yet more rooms and plywood had also been used to
cover the broken windows, which was most of them. Paint clearly hadn’t touched anywhere from the time
they were built and no structural maintenance had been carried out since then either judging by the crack
that ran from the top to the bottom of one of them, falling buildings not being uncommon in Lagos,
although mostly of the post-colonial variety. In front of each building makeshift plywood canteens screened
by net curtains advertised ‘Food is Ready’, the greatest line in Nigerian poetry, according to my poet
friend. It was tempting to head for the main road and catch an okada home. I hadn’t taken my bath and my
skin was crawling with the heat. Just then a lorry passed by with a colorful painting of a smiling Fela holding
a huge spliff. Fela had been a frequent visitor at this very station when he had lived nearby in the original
Kalakuta Republic before it was burned down by one thousand soldiers because he called them zombies in
one of his songs.
I returned to the charge room. It was similarly dispiriting, with broken-down chairs and desks and, against
one wall, a row of crude wooden lockers of the type we had used in boarding school. I remember reading
about how Fela had once berated the authorities of his old school for not bothering to hang a picture
straight; according to John Collins, an Anglo-Ghanaian musician who hung out with him in the early
Kalakuta days, ‘he went into a long diatribe about Africans not doing anything one hundred percent, but
always half-baked, and this was hindering the development of the continent’. I couldn’t have agreed more
but then I agreed with a lot of things Fela said, most of which are still unraveling almost a decade after his
death. One of his songs pilloried General Obasanjo for rigging the 1979 elections when he stepped down
for the civilian administration that was subsequently overthrown in another coup. More than two decades
later, the same Obasanjo shed khaki for agbada in order to rig another election to extend his tenure. This
was Fela’s ‘Army Arrangeement’, an evil pact that is still working itself out as Obasanjo dithers over
whether he wants to carry on or hand over to another retired soldier on the grounds that the country can’t
be trusted to ‘bloody civilians’ who might proceed to probe them.
Fela was a prophet who managed the singular feat of making beautiful music carry a profound political
message: ‘Beasts of No Nation’ describes the venality of rulers who have stashed away more than two-
thirds of the $300bn earned from crude oil in forty years of exploration; ‘Sorrow, Tears and Blood’
describes the aftermath of soldiers invading university campuses to silence the students and lecturers
protesting the decimation of education while the Generals send their own children to Swiss boarding
schools; ‘Shuffering and Shmiling’ describes the plight of the common person – seventy per cent of the
population and climbing – as they go about trying to put food on the table and clothes on their back; ‘Open
and Close’ describes the continuing mentality of Africans eager to bend their ynash to the white man
because they consider their compatriots too bush, hence ‘Yellow Fever’, which castigates the legion of
women – and not a few men – who bleach their skin because they despise the color God made them. And
so on.
His achievement was remarkable although many continue to harp on his bohemian lifestyle, for instance
his habit of appearing in public in his underpants, in itself a statement in a country where people in
authority hide their oversized bellies in the billowing gowns that foreigners pretend to admire because it
reminds them of the Medieval courts they dispensed with centuries ago but are here lovingly preserved as
a cover for theft. Besides, he was revered by the common people because he spoke the truth and damned
the consequences and the common people, who are unable to do much on their own account because
they are too poor and the society is too fractured, know the truth when they hear it. I remember traveling
by coach from Port Harcourt to Lagos on that day more than a decade ago now when Ken Saro-Wiwa was
executed by a kangaroo court and it seemed as if every passenger knew the words of ‘Beasts of No
Nation’ by heart as the driver played it over and over for the length of the journey. When the revolution
comes, as it must, it will be to this song.
From time to time I used to go to Fela’s house although I didn’t make a habit of it because of the legion of
hangers-on on the look-out for free beer from visitors. The first time was soon after he was released by
General Babangida following a trumped-up charge over foreign exchange regulations - itself the basis of
another song. The first time I visited was shortly after he was released and had just returned from a tour of
Europe. I was still with the London-based Index on Censorship magazine. We had taken the opportunity of
interviewing him when he stopped over in London. (I hadn’t been able to do it myself because I was
traveling elsewhere in Africa at the time but I remember he took several swipes at Babangida for being
pleased that the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said she could do business with him: ‘Can you
imagine how stupid he is?’) I took some spare copies of the issue to Lagos with me to present to him
personally. I was particularly pleased with the full page photograph although he was naturally photogenic
with small, delicate features and a mouth that specialized in an insolent sneer. We carried the interview
verbatim under the title, ‘Animal can’t dash me human rights’, after a refrain in ‘Beasts of No Nation’. I went
in the early afternoon, which was when I was told he usually came down. He lived in a big house in a quiet
residential street. The downstairs was a huge dormitory where his musicians, dancers and assorted
handymen slept. To get to the reception room on the first floor you had to go up a concrete ramp by the
side of the building which opened out into a hall which led into another spacious room that was bare save
for a number of easy chairs ranged against the walls and two photographs: one of Fela himself, the other
of Thomas Sankara, the charismatic army captain from neighboring Burkina Faso who was shortly to be
overthrown by his deputy. Sankara admired Fela and had visited him in that very room where the
photograph was taken.
I waited about an hour. For the most part I was alone but from time to time a member of the household
would wander in to say that Fela would soon be down and would I like them to help me buy a drink or a
smoke. The atmosphere was low-key. It was obvious that nothing much happened until Fela was up and
about. At one point I went for a stroll. When I returned I was told that he had come down but had then met
another woman and had gone back upstairs for yet another ‘bend-down exercise’. He didn’t emerge again
until dusk by which time half-a-dozen other people had gathered for an audience. Presently there was a
commotion and then Fela appeared in his signature underpants with his boys on either side. ‘Yes, who
wants to see me,’ he said as he sat down. One of the men in a white shirt and white trousers beckoned me
forward. I introduced myself and opened the magazine at the relevant page. You could see at once how
much he liked the photo. He asked me if I would be coming to the Afrika Shrine that weekend. I said that I
would but in the event I didn’t. It was only after I returned to the country to start possessing my possession
that I began to go in earnest and hardly missed any Saturday he was playing.
More...
By Adewale Maja-Pearce
I got up and stood by the door. The male cell was to my immediate right. The prisoners, stripped to the
waist, were fanning themselves with their shirts. Some in the front stretched out their hands for money but I
ignored them. I had enough police wahala as it was. I strolled towards the entrance and paused. Nobody
came after me. I looked up and saw the Area Commander sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. I had
the impression that he was looking out for me. I wandered to the front yard. To one side were the police
barracks, six altogether. Each was five stories high with the solidity of the colonial buildings but they were
completely dilapidated, without even running water judging by the number of women and children carrying
buckets to and fro. Plywood had turned balconies into yet more rooms and plywood had also been used to
cover the broken windows, which was most of them. Paint clearly hadn’t touched anywhere from the time
they were built and no structural maintenance had been carried out since then either judging by the crack
that ran from the top to the bottom of one of them, falling buildings not being uncommon in Lagos,
although mostly of the post-colonial variety. In front of each building makeshift plywood canteens screened
by net curtains advertised ‘Food is Ready’, the greatest line in Nigerian poetry, according to my poet
friend. It was tempting to head for the main road and catch an okada home. I hadn’t taken my bath and my
skin was crawling with the heat. Just then a lorry passed by with a colorful painting of a smiling Fela holding
a huge spliff. Fela had been a frequent visitor at this very station when he had lived nearby in the original
Kalakuta Republic before it was burned down by one thousand soldiers because he called them zombies in
one of his songs.
I returned to the charge room. It was similarly dispiriting, with broken-down chairs and desks and, against
one wall, a row of crude wooden lockers of the type we had used in boarding school. I remember reading
about how Fela had once berated the authorities of his old school for not bothering to hang a picture
straight; according to John Collins, an Anglo-Ghanaian musician who hung out with him in the early
Kalakuta days, ‘he went into a long diatribe about Africans not doing anything one hundred percent, but
always half-baked, and this was hindering the development of the continent’. I couldn’t have agreed more
but then I agreed with a lot of things Fela said, most of which are still unraveling almost a decade after his
death. One of his songs pilloried General Obasanjo for rigging the 1979 elections when he stepped down
for the civilian administration that was subsequently overthrown in another coup. More than two decades
later, the same Obasanjo shed khaki for agbada in order to rig another election to extend his tenure. This
was Fela’s ‘Army Arrangeement’, an evil pact that is still working itself out as Obasanjo dithers over
whether he wants to carry on or hand over to another retired soldier on the grounds that the country can’t
be trusted to ‘bloody civilians’ who might proceed to probe them.
Fela was a prophet who managed the singular feat of making beautiful music carry a profound political
message: ‘Beasts of No Nation’ describes the venality of rulers who have stashed away more than two-
thirds of the $300bn earned from crude oil in forty years of exploration; ‘Sorrow, Tears and Blood’
describes the aftermath of soldiers invading university campuses to silence the students and lecturers
protesting the decimation of education while the Generals send their own children to Swiss boarding
schools; ‘Shuffering and Shmiling’ describes the plight of the common person – seventy per cent of the
population and climbing – as they go about trying to put food on the table and clothes on their back; ‘Open
and Close’ describes the continuing mentality of Africans eager to bend their ynash to the white man
because they consider their compatriots too bush, hence ‘Yellow Fever’, which castigates the legion of
women – and not a few men – who bleach their skin because they despise the color God made them. And
so on.
His achievement was remarkable although many continue to harp on his bohemian lifestyle, for instance
his habit of appearing in public in his underpants, in itself a statement in a country where people in
authority hide their oversized bellies in the billowing gowns that foreigners pretend to admire because it
reminds them of the Medieval courts they dispensed with centuries ago but are here lovingly preserved as
a cover for theft. Besides, he was revered by the common people because he spoke the truth and damned
the consequences and the common people, who are unable to do much on their own account because
they are too poor and the society is too fractured, know the truth when they hear it. I remember traveling
by coach from Port Harcourt to Lagos on that day more than a decade ago now when Ken Saro-Wiwa was
executed by a kangaroo court and it seemed as if every passenger knew the words of ‘Beasts of No
Nation’ by heart as the driver played it over and over for the length of the journey. When the revolution
comes, as it must, it will be to this song.
From time to time I used to go to Fela’s house although I didn’t make a habit of it because of the legion of
hangers-on on the look-out for free beer from visitors. The first time was soon after he was released by
General Babangida following a trumped-up charge over foreign exchange regulations - itself the basis of
another song. The first time I visited was shortly after he was released and had just returned from a tour of
Europe. I was still with the London-based Index on Censorship magazine. We had taken the opportunity of
interviewing him when he stopped over in London. (I hadn’t been able to do it myself because I was
traveling elsewhere in Africa at the time but I remember he took several swipes at Babangida for being
pleased that the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said she could do business with him: ‘Can you
imagine how stupid he is?’) I took some spare copies of the issue to Lagos with me to present to him
personally. I was particularly pleased with the full page photograph although he was naturally photogenic
with small, delicate features and a mouth that specialized in an insolent sneer. We carried the interview
verbatim under the title, ‘Animal can’t dash me human rights’, after a refrain in ‘Beasts of No Nation’. I went
in the early afternoon, which was when I was told he usually came down. He lived in a big house in a quiet
residential street. The downstairs was a huge dormitory where his musicians, dancers and assorted
handymen slept. To get to the reception room on the first floor you had to go up a concrete ramp by the
side of the building which opened out into a hall which led into another spacious room that was bare save
for a number of easy chairs ranged against the walls and two photographs: one of Fela himself, the other
of Thomas Sankara, the charismatic army captain from neighboring Burkina Faso who was shortly to be
overthrown by his deputy. Sankara admired Fela and had visited him in that very room where the
photograph was taken.
I waited about an hour. For the most part I was alone but from time to time a member of the household
would wander in to say that Fela would soon be down and would I like them to help me buy a drink or a
smoke. The atmosphere was low-key. It was obvious that nothing much happened until Fela was up and
about. At one point I went for a stroll. When I returned I was told that he had come down but had then met
another woman and had gone back upstairs for yet another ‘bend-down exercise’. He didn’t emerge again
until dusk by which time half-a-dozen other people had gathered for an audience. Presently there was a
commotion and then Fela appeared in his signature underpants with his boys on either side. ‘Yes, who
wants to see me,’ he said as he sat down. One of the men in a white shirt and white trousers beckoned me
forward. I introduced myself and opened the magazine at the relevant page. You could see at once how
much he liked the photo. He asked me if I would be coming to the Afrika Shrine that weekend. I said that I
would but in the event I didn’t. It was only after I returned to the country to start possessing my possession
that I began to go in earnest and hardly missed any Saturday he was playing.
More...
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