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The Shrine was the only place in Lagos – in Nigeria – where ganja was openly sold and
smoked because the authorities had tired of closing it down. As with Bob Marley, it was part
of Fela’s cobbled-together religion although it hadn’t always been like that. The very first
time I ever saw Fela was when he came to play at our school hop in the late sixties. In those
days he used to answer Ransome-Kuti and his band, the Koola Lobitos, played songs with
refrains like ‘cherry kokos, we are cherry kokos’. He didn’t smoke ganja in those days and
used to berate his musicians who did but even then he was a hip guy with fantastic stage
presence, what with his way of turning up the collar of his tight-fitting shirt and raising one
shoulder while he sang into the microphone, his saxophone at the ready in his left hand. His
conversion came soon afterwards when he traveled to America for eighteen months and got
turned onto the Black Panther movement. When he returned home he dropped Ransome
because it was colonial, changed the band’s name to Afrika 70 and hit his musical stride with
what came to be called Afrobeat, which John Collins unravels in the ‘Diary’ already quoted
from earlier. I include it here for the benefit of the discerning musicologists among you:
Fela’s Afrobeat is a unique combination of styles. The dance band highlife influence of
Victor Olaiya, E. T. Mensah and Ambrose Campbell are there especially in some of the
dance movements, the use of punctuating horn sections and Tony Allen’s brilliant web of off
beats… Jazz is there of course, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and also Ghana’s Guy
Warren (now Kofi Ghanaba) who was playing with Afro-Jazz ten years before Fela’s Koola
Lobitos. In fact, I’ve been told that Zeal Onyia, when he was with Nigerian Broadcasting
[Corporation], complained about Fela borrowing Ghanaba’s Afro-Jazz records from the
gramophone library and not returning them. Then there’s the Brazilian influence. Just listen
to ‘Water No Get Enemy’ or the clips beat of any typical Afrobeat. Not surprising really when
one remembers that a large number of Brazilian ex-slaves settled in Lagos in the last
century and brought samba with them. Traditional African features of Afrobeat are found in
the pentatonic scales that Fela usually sings and solos in, the call-and-response between
voice and horns and the use of the modal harmonic structure of Afrobeat that is based on
the movement between two chords usually a tone apart. Most certainly the soul music of
James Brown has been an influence, first brought here live in the late sixties from Sierra
Leone by Geraldo Pino’s Heartbeats. But I think it was James Brown’s radical ‘Black and
Proud’ lyrics that influenced Fela more than his music. Because soul uses African-derived
call-and-response, modal chords and pentatonic (i.e. blues) scales, some people say that
Fela copied soul. I think it would be true to say that these musical features of soul rather
reinforced Afrobeat’s utilization of traditional resources.
Not being a musicologist I heard it rather than understood it and since Fela had long since
stopped releasing records because of piracy the Shrine was the only place you could hear
his more recent compositions, which were now longer and more fully incorporated into the
show. The Shrine itself was simply a rectangular block building with a raised zinc roof to
allow for ventilation and a view of the night sky. The stage was at one end and the bar at the
other and for the rest you were on your own. Hawkers plied their wares as people stood
about in groups or sat on the metal chairs ranged in front of the stage. The band usually
struck up around eleven and Fela would arrive any time before one, always in the company
of his dancers with their painted faces, skimpy clothes and haughty swagger as they
fluttered around Fela, who always turned out to be smaller than one had remembered. Later
one of the dancers I befriended called him ‘small and fine’ which I thought accurate. Fela
himself would be decked in the costume he had himself designed in a variety of bright colors
– pink, yellow, blue, green – depending on his mood. The style was quintessentially early
seventies from my university days: tight-fitting shirt with a wide collar, and tight-fitting
trousers that flared out at the bottom. The effect was completed by a sneaker-type shoe in
the same color, also designed by him.
Fela would hang by the side of the stage watching the musicians then go into a private room
to one side, where he would linger. After a few minutes he would emerge, climb the stage
and walk slowly to the microphone. He would clear his throat, take a drag on the huge spliff
he carried and say, ‘I beg, make I smoke first make my head correct’ to yells and laughter
from the crowd. One of his attendants would take the spliff from him and at a signal the band
really sprang into life. It was difficult to keep still when Fela was playing, just as it was difficult
keeping your eyes off the dancers, especially the ones in the cages – three altogether – in
front of the stage and elevated so that you got to see as much as the particular dancer
wanted you to see. Some were naturally more popular than others but all were energetic
and hard-working. Fela fined them for slacking.
The show was in two parts, with a half-hour interval for Fela to do his worship, after which he
played on till daybreak when it was safe to go into the streets. The worship itself, which was
largely ignored by his audience, involved muttering incantations as he poured libation to the
ancestors and did or didn’t sprinkle his face with the blood of a sacrificial chicken. The
shrine itself was an odd assortment of traditional objects collected together in a flimsy wire
mesh cage below a photograph of his famous mother who died shortly after being thrown
from the first-floor balcony of Kalakuta Republic when it was invaded by one thousand
soldiers from the nearby barracks. And now those same soldiers had recently burned down
the police station I was wandering about in following an altercation between a soldier and a
policeman at nearby Ojuelegba, no doubt to Fela’s amusement as he sits up there in ganga
heaven watching the absurdities that he sang about still playing themselves out with ever
more tragic consequences.
(This extract is taken from Legacies, the author’s forthcoming memoir and follow-up to his
earlier In My Father’s Country.)
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