Fela Anikulapo-Kuti

Afrobeat, Rebellion, and Philosophy

Adeshina Afolayan, Toyin Falola

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501374722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Fela Anikulapo Kuti was the Afrobeat music maestro whose life and time provide the lens through which we can outline the postcolonial trajectory of the Nigerian state as well as the dynamics of most other African states. Through the Afrobeat music, Fela did not only challenge consecutive governments in Nigeria, but his rebellious Afrobeat lyrics facilitate a philosophical subtext that enriches the more intellectual Afrocentric discourses. Afrobeat and the philosophy of blackism that Fela enunciated place him right beside Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, and all the others who champion a black and African mode of being in the world. This book traces the emergence of Fela on the music scene, the cultural and political backgrounds that made Afrobeat possible, and the philosophical elements that not only contributed to the formation of Fela's blackism, but what constitutes Fela's philosophical sensibility too.

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Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and Fela Studies

Introduction

This chapter contains a critical review of scholarly engagements in different disciplines and from academic backgrounds with the music and ideas of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, a global figure whose musical productions and lyrics generated tremendous attention and reflections during and after his lifetime. Fela was a force whose commitment to the course of freedom and political emancipation cost him personal freedom and shredded him beyond imagination as he became a constant target of political victimization, a victim of authoritarian politics, a prisoner of societal acrimony, and in consolation, a dignified activist who was celebrated in his time and also posthumously. There is no doubt that the annexation of music for the sole purpose of antagonizing an oppressive government with its regimental system was a revolutionary action by Fela. In some aspects of African life and politics, there was no recorded precedence of such musical genre in relation to social relevance and political utility. Fela was not a public official or politician, yet he was engaged critically in political thinking. The public accepted him as its voice.

The most appropriate way to describe this historical figure is to establish the connections between his ideology and his irreversible commitment to it for social advancement, as this would enable us to generate a coherent cognitive picture. Apparently, Fela’s ideology, readily espoused in his music, is an assortment of protest and resistance to predatory political and social behavior and actions that seek to deny the people their fundamental rights and freedom to the advantage of some elite and power structures that are chiefly interested in exploiting their innocence and helplessness. An entrenched political elite would consider any act of resistance or any engagement, that seeks to undermine the enthroned lopsided structure that profits only the few, as potential impediment and would therefore throw their weight against it since they would naturally challenge anything that threatens the status quo and their class identity and interest. In this sense, any radical or revolutionary act that challenges the status quo is considered anti-society by the powerful individuals. Fela, however, was unapologetic in claiming the identity of a political rebel.

Attacks on him, therefore, led to the unending abuse of his human rights and the denigration of his identity. Successively, he was harassed and embarrassed for choosing to identify with the masses against the brutal actions of the (military) governments, who appeared to be uninterested in how their actions affect the common people. Without doubt, Fela’s rise to stardom was filled with challenges, trials, and bitter experiences that naturally almost imploded into identity struggles as those who share the messages of the enigma became impatient at a time, and would not remain silent when brutal actions are meted out against their idol for no obvious violation of the law. The aspirations of the common people are amplified in Fela’s ideologies and continuously represented even in his daily life. He attracted countless vilifications and endured innumerable traumas, but the fact that his opponent was the government gave him the necessary encouragement to continue to press his anti-establishment critique, knowing that his success or otherwise would not be put under the carpet, for the society remembers its heroes, even if they cannot identify with them during their trying times.

The entirety of Fela’s life, as contained in his upbringing, family history, musical trajectory, lyrical dynamics, life’s experience, ideological contestations, philosophical explorations, and social eccentricities, has become the source of critical and celebratory intellectual and scholarly engagements and explorations. Different books and essays have been written on different and interrelated dimensions of his life—his mother, his wives, Afrobeat, his sojourns abroad, his “Felasophy,” contributions to postcolonial critique and decolonization, his relationship with pan-Africanism and Afrocentric scholars, his love for Africa and her traditions, his countercultural effluence, and many more. This objective of this volume is to tie all these dimensions of Fela’s life together into a philosophical dynamic defined around a pursuit of freedom. It is this thread that determines this volume’s relationship with other critical material already in existence about Fela and his significance. In other words, while other significant studies of Fela’s life, music, and philosophical sensibility have been done in piecemeal fashion—as this review of the significant literature will demonstrate—this volume brings all the issues of Fela’s philosophical maturation and ideological dynamics together in stark relief.

Fela: This Bitch of a Life by Carlos Moore

Carlos Moore examines the life of the Afrobeat star using scholarly frameworks that assist in the interpretation of Fela’s works and the evaluation of the sociopolitical atmosphere that propelled them. As a political scientist, Moore was able to interrogate the political rascality generated by the African postcolonial environment in the music of Fela, and therefore understood the imperative of his protest. As an ethnologist, however, he considered the African cultural scaffoldings that strongly influenced the perception of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Moore’s intellectual compilation was foreworded by Gilberto Gil, a composer, and a bandleader, who was able to easily relate to the artistic brilliance of the music genius. This Bitch of a Life is also introduced by a sound critic, Margaret Busby. Collectively, they all celebrate the fecundity of Fela’s messages and art, not leaving behind the revolutionary spirit of a man who refuses to be silenced. The fact that Carlos Moore spent a considerable amount of time with Fela to retrieve personal classified information for his biographical account adds to the credibility that the book has in public intellectualism.

Apart from the book taking us through a terrific journey into the heart of Fela, his life, and works, it competently reveals how the man became an assortment of techniques and ideas with which to combat the overindulging elite, who, according to him, refused to see beyond their noses in relation to a future that would throw Africa behind others (if they fail to rescue the situation by taking bold steps that would instigate African development). The book, no doubt, accentuates the contributions of Fela, with the burden of protest animating his entire being. Fela roared against injustices so much that his voice travels the world around. His commitment to African struggles and true freedom is succinctly summarized by Margaret Busby: “Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was a fearless maverick for whom music was a righteous and invincible weapon. His self-given second name, Anikulapo—which translates as ‘the one who carries death in his pouch’—spoke of indestructibility and resilience.”¹ It is fair to conclude that in no place did Fela’s music fail to win the heart of anyone with the taste for good music, style, and artistic content during his lifetime. And this is still a posthumous fact.

One does not need to travel far into the work of Moore, Fela: This Bitch of a Life, before one gets to be educated about the prescience, directness, and ideologically controversial nature of the man in question. Just a few words from him and one gets to know about the African cultural nuances especially as related to the belief in the supernatural. He gladly talks about himself as an abiku—a socio-ethnological phenomenon among the Yoruba people that explains children with unknown power for reincarnation. This signals why he was eventually referred to as Abami Eda (an enigma). Within the same breath, Fela already reveals his aversion to Eurocentric imposition and identity politics which seek to erase the African identity in place of their own. Fela categorically recollects that “So to make some white man happy, my father asked this German missionary to … name me. Can you imagine that, man? A white man naming an African child! In Africa, man, where names are taken so seriously.”²

Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon by Michael E. Veal

This book, apart from Carlos Moore’s Fela: This Bitch of a Life, is about the most popular of all Fela’s intellectual biographies. Published in 2000, three years after Fela’s death, Veal’s volume contained a detailed trajectory of the emergence of Fela as a musical force. In eight chapters, Veal painstakingly outlined Fela’s historical trajectory from Abeokuta, where he grew up between 1938 and 1957 to the height of his musical maturation before his death in 1997. The book also contained a critical appendix of the personnel of Fela’s bands, from the Koola Lobitos to the Egypt 80, as well as a detailed discography.

As an accomplished ethnomusicologist, Veal came to the writing of the Fela book with a certain depth of understanding of Fela’s musical competence. And this was further accentuated by his historical methodology, fieldwork, and participant observation assisted by Fela’s willing collaboration. Veal’s interest in Fela’s Afrobeat came from his realization that Fela’s music “seemed to recontextualize and extend musical ideas” with which he was familiar.³ Afrobeat contains

unmistakable echoes of diasporic African musical innovators and styles: James Brown, John Coltrane, modal jazz, big-band jazz, funk, rhythm-and-blues, and salsa. At the same time, I recognized an overall spirit and use of many musical devices I associated with West African music: tightly woven rhythm patterns, vocal chants, call-and-response choruses, and an overall percussive approach to articulation, among others. Compositionally, I admire Fela’s ability to compose a seemingly endless series of complex, catchy groove patterns, chorus lines, and horn riffs. Compositions rarely clocked in at less than fifteen minutes, with sections allotted for scored ensemble passages, jazz-styled solo improvisations, choral singing, and the vocal song proper, which itself comprised a number of movements.⁴

Veal calls Afrobeat “a long-form highlife-funk-jazz fusion” that undermined and even refashioned all the known conventions underlying the musical styles, especially of the Afro-American music context.

Veal insists that his work is situated between being “a musical study and an ethnography.”⁵ As what he calls a “semi-biographical narrative,” Veal concentrated on Fela as a musician, as a social figure, and then Fela’s work and influence across Africa and the diaspora. According to him,

First, I analyze Fela the musician, in his various roles as composer/arranger, bandleader, vocalist and instrumentalist. In so doing, I survey his various musical influences, provide a continuous stylistic analysis that charts the development of his art throughout his career, and discuss concurrent trends in related musical genres. Second, I analyze Fela the social figure and the way his role as political musician, derisive social/political critic, heir to a family protest tradition, social maverick, and creator of a distinct artistic subculture shaped his analysis and articulation of the major social, political, and cultural themes of his time in Nigeria. third, I analyze Fela’s works within two wider spheres: post=colonial Africa, and a dynamic of cross-cultural influences operating between Africa and cultures of the African diaspora.⁶

Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics by Tejumola Olaniyan

If one intends to understand the resistance undercurrents of Fela’s music, one needs to acquaint oneself with the copiously informative book of Tejumola Olaniyan, Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics, as it is filled with sufficient textual content capable of enriching one’s knowledge. One would not only get to know about the African political travails and socioeconomic challenges ahead of them, one would perhaps understand the ineluctable necessity warranting the revolutionary protest of courageous individuals like Fela. In ten rigorously argued chapters, Olaniyan attempted to situate Fela within the context of the African postcolonial state, and what he called the “postcolonial incredible”: “that which cannot be believed; that which is too improbable, astonishing, and extraordinary to be believed. The incredible is not simply a breach but an outlandish infraction of ‘normality’ and its limits” (2004: 2).⁷ Olaniyan’s objective was to map Fela’s complex and paradoxical reactions to the postcolonial incredible. Olaniyan sees it as a relationship of transcendence and sustenance: “The one is transcendentalist in aspiration—a powerful exploration of the wherewithal to surmount the incredible and its rule—while the other wallows in a sustaining relationship with it.”⁸ And Olaniyan pursues the arduous task of situating Fela within his space and time in the Nigerian postcolony.

One thing that makes the intellectual evaluation of Olaniyan on Fela’s music very captivating is his ability to produce cultural valuations and validations which are readily suggestive of Fela’s wider sense of African sociocultural values. This is perhaps possible partly because they share similar cultural and political realities that encourage a deep-seated interest in whoever pictures a better environment. Obviously, the book is calculated to expose how Fela’s music uncovered the indiscriminate political scheming of the elite and inadvertently committed cultural and economic genocide in the process. Once the political class is adequately catered for, the survival of African economy, culture, and leadership takes a rear concern in their minds. Whereas everything in the human society is connected which means that when one aspect of human life malfunctions, the effects spread to other aspects of the people’s lives. Once the Nigerian political class is indifferent to the overall safety of the people, they have therefore declared their disinterest on things that appear more important to the people. Therefore, Olaniyan interrogates the songs of Fela and his personal life and comes to the conclusion that he was an iconic activist with rebellious mindset against any trace of oppression.

Arrest the Music! is a piece that elaborates eloquently the rascality of the Nigerian leadership which was determined to censure Fela and his arts because of the obvious eruption of discontent that his songs provoked in their minds. Olaniyan captures this in his introduction: “Fela had innately more and real violent visitations from the security agents of successive Nigerian governments over the course of the three decades of his musical career.”⁹ He supplements this with the occasion of the brutal destruction of Fela’s instruments and arts to the dismay of the miffed audience who watched the totalitarian actions with utmost disdain and disbelief. The book therefore marvels at the contributions of the artist to the sociological activities and political trajectories of the country and the continent at large.

Afrobeat: Fela and the Imagined Continent by Sola Olorunyomi

It is critically impossible that Fela with his diverse and dynamic arts did not generate multiple and multidisciplinary scholarly engagements. The fact that Sola Olorunyomi complements what different authors have recorded about Fela attests to this claim. Even though there are numerous contributions in literary scholarship, historical exploration, and sociological interpretations of Fela’s works, Olorunyomi yet again offers an impressive voice to the evaluation of Fela’s arts and sees his musical productions from a riveting perspective. In Afrobeat, Olorunyomi examined Fela’s songs vis-à-vis their anticolonial activism and his commitment to the emancipation agenda of a continent. It is a critical fact that studies into Afrobeat were lacking in sufficient literature during the beginning of Olorunyomi’s scholarly intervention on the works of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, an experience that was suggestive of the rigorously critical condition of any worthwhile past academic research into his music.

Olorunyomi’s title has a contextual implication for the elaboration of African repression and then the correspondin...