Relive Fela at Glastonbury 1984

Joy on YouTube. Over an hour of vintage Fela at Glastonbury in 1984. Lots of hypnotic Afrobeat classics to nod and sing along religiously to as though no greater truth was ever told in the lines of a song. No greater truth, period. 'Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense' 'Confusion'... I have a strong feeling I saw this film on Betamax in the 80s (only it wasn't titled 'Fela at Glastonbury' then), and when Fela and the Egypt 80 started to sing 'Deadi bodi geeti aksident, yeepa!' this time round, I was already anticipating his tight-trousered body wiggle across the Glastonbury stage - eat your heart out, Mick Jagger!

Fela at the peak of his powers, and you can catch a still apprenticed Femi Kuti playing the sax on film too. I remember the Fela, Black President exhibition at the Barbican in London, 2004; there was a piece of video art titled, 'Guidelines in Advanced Nyanshology' - on how to shake it like a Fela dancer - and there's plenty of nyanshology in this video. Excellently filmed.

The man is extravagantly introduced, on behalf of 'The Organisation of African Sovereignty', onto the stage by none other than his bandleader, Baba Ani a.k.a Lekan Animashaun.

It's Felabration time (annual posthumous celebration of the Chief Priest's birthday) and this Glastonbury film will be shown on Thursday (13 October, 7pm) - along with 2 other Fela films including the documentary 'Music is the Weapon' - as part of the weeklong programme, Shakara: Felabration at The Life House (33 Sinari Daranijo, Off Ajose Adeogun, Victoria Island, Lagos).

Featuring a variety of performers and speakers including Fatai Rolling Dollar, Ayetoro, Wana and Salvador Sango, as well as a reading of Carlos Moore's book, 'This Bitch of a Life', Felabration opens at The Life House tomorrow and is on till Sunday 16 October.

Fela! crew arrives Lagos

What a difference Broadband makes. Wordsbody's enabled and back in the groove - apologies for the long absence. Here are images of the 50-strong crew of Fela The Musical! arriving at Murtala Muhammed Airport. Fela! in Lagos is at Eko Hotel Expo Hall next week, from April 20 to 25.

Photos: Inspiro Productions

Fela! in Lagos at last

Fela! The Musical is finally coming home. The hit Broadway musical about the life of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was a critical and commercial success in New York and later London, where it was sold-out for three months and got nominated for three Olivier Awards (having won 3 Tonys in the US).

Many have asked whether the world conquering show about one of Africa’s most potent icons should not have been staged where it matters most, in his country, Nigeria. Now the heavens are aligning to bring the show to the scene of Fela’s exploits, Lagos.

Fela! The Musical will be staged at the New Expo Hall of the Eko Hotel in Lagos from April 20 to 25.

This from the organisers: “The aim of FELA! in Lagos is to unite and connect Africans in spirit and unity, to serve as a catalyst for cultural revival in Nigeria, and to celebrate Fela Kuti, for the contribution he has made to Nigeria and the world. FELA! depicts the true story of the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, whose soulful Afro beat rhythms ignited the spirit of empowerment and cultural awareness in a generation. It is a tale of courage, passion and love featuring Kuti’s captivating music and the visionary direction and choreography of Tony Award winner, Bill T. Jones. FELA! in Lagos is being produced by a Nigerian production company, Broken Shackles in conjunction with Lagos State Government.”

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  More info about Fela! In Lagos
  Images: Broken Shackles
  

Abami Eda, 10 Years On

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti died in the same year as Diana, Princess of Wales. A million people people turned out for the Afrobeat legend's funeral in Lagos in 1997. 10 years on, and the irreplaceable Fela is much missed, by ordinary Nigerians and an ever growing legion of Afrobeat fans all over the world.

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To mark the 2nd August anniversary of Fela's death, the UK Guardian published this piece. Each of Fela's 3 famous offspring gets a mention (usually with pieces written by European journalists, Femi Kuti hogs the whole space; but here, Alex Hannaford had clearly done her research). Seun Anikulapo is interviewed at the original site of Fela's Shrine, then it's off to Femi's base at the New Afrika Shrine.

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And as for Yeni, here's what she has to say about her late dad

"My father was a very charismatic person," she says. "For someone like me, it was easy to follow his ideology because, as a black person, he made me proud. Fela's father - my grandfather - was a pastor, but he was still a radical; he was very outspoken. And my great-grandfather was responsible for taking Christianity to Abeokuta [a city north of Lagos]. He used music to get people to believe, so in his way he was a radical as well. And my grandmother was an activist. So we come from a long line of revolutionaries.

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"I would love my father to be remembered for his words and his music. He was a brilliant man. If only the government at that time had listened, I doubt that Nigeria would be where it is today. We would be ahead of all the other African countries. The things he used to sing about are 100 times worse now, and religion in Nigeria is an epidemic - it is 7km from here to my house and I have counted 58 churches. Who are the congregation? Poor people. But the vicar's suits cost $5,000 to $10,000.

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"Fela would have been disillusioned with Nigeria today," she adds, "but not surprised."

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Yeni's eyes stray towards the tiny TV on her dressing-room table. It shows Obasanjo handing over the presidency to Umaru Yar'Adua, and various senators and governors being sworn into office. Obasanjo's daughter, Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello, is being sworn in as a senator in Ogun State. "How did she become a senator?" Yeni asks rhetorically, incredulous. "It's like Chelsea Clinton taking office because of her father. We Nigerians are gluttons for punishment."

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Nice to know Fela's offspring are still telling it straight. But we always knew that...

• Fela Anikulapo-Kuti may still be relatively unknown in the West as the Guardian article says, but the Fela-thon held at the Barbican, London in 2004 certainly did its best to change that. Reproduced here are some of the programmes that accompanied the 2004 Felafest in London.
• And the BBC has been remembering the Fela years too.

Iberi on Fela

Fela

The Man, The Music, The Message

By Patrick Iberi

February 2nd 1988 was like any other day, and my uncle Tony’s hasty pace consciously told me to keep up with him as we walked towards Ikeja bus stop in the tropical Nigerian heat. For a minute I didn’t realise I had stopped in my tracks to listen to the sound booming from a music retail shop. I looked around the frenzied crowd scurrying past me in the typical Lagos craze and felt their pulse in the beat. 2:14pm and my first encounter with his music betrayed what was to come. Nine and a half years later I joined nearly a million people who thronged to the Tafawa Balewa Square for his funeral.

Fela Kuti as a music artist embodied different things to different people. For the vast majority of Nigerians, he stood tall as a social crusader who championed the fight against oppression, government excess and corruption. To the authorities, he was just a dissenter, a cannabis-smoking saxophonist who was to be vilified, hounded and imprisoned. To the rest of the world, he was more like the eccentric performer whose unyielding lyrics gave jazz a rebel face. Indeed, Fela’s life as a maverick resonated in the genius of his art - Afrobeat music so subliminal, so dissident and yet so persuasive.

Music publications across the globe have traded expansive reviews on his music and biographies have been authored; the message in his music remains stuff for engaging contemporary critics to interpret, while independent projects have been set up to archive the man’s extraordinary life and art. But so much more has been left unexplored in appreciating the essence of his music.

Born in October 15th 1938 in Abeokuta, South West Nigeria, Fela became a cult figure in Nigeria for challenging everything that was devoid of humanity, from successive military dictatorship of that dark era to championing the affirmation of traditional African culture. And he paid the price time and time again, severe beatings from soldiers (who also torched his house), several court appearances, frequent harassment and incarceration by the authorities became his lot. But the message in his music was not lost to all.

Influenced by trumpeters Miles Davies, Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown and saxophonists Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Harold Land, he chose music as a weapon to instigate change in his society. Upon arriving back home from Trinity College of Music in England where he had finished his studies in 1963, Fela began to experiment with Highlife music, which was the craze in West Africa in the fifties and sixties, but highlife enthusiasts were at odds on what to do with his fusion of jazz into it.

About the same period in the late sixties, he along with his band Koola Lobitos took a music tour to the United States of America where he encountered the black revolutionary movement that had, at the time, brought activism into the arts as well. This reality was not lost on him as he began to reflect on the cultural impact his music could have on his own long suffering African people.

With a blend of music genres, Fela clearly drew upon highlife, jazz and rhythm and blues, but Africanized the foreign jazz and soul elements while deconstructing dance band highlife and grafted them all onto a traditional West African rhythmic template.*1

The result was Afrobeat: a style of composition that buttressed its busy, lengthy arrangements of interlocking polyrhythms and blazing horns with fervently nationalistic lyrics that railed against the rampant corruption in Nigeria's halls of power.*2

Choosing to sing in Pidgin, a broken down version of the English language, which is spoken by the vast West African underclass population, endeared him to more fans who had been cut off by earlier recordings in his native Yoruba tongue.

Michael E Veal in his biography of Fela highlights the impact it had on his compositions: “Pidgin enabled him to dart in and around the rhythm in a strongly jazz-inflected fashion, bending the stresses and accents of Standard English to the African syntax and tonalinflections. It also allowed him to integrate nonsense syllables which had a purely rhythmic value into his singing.”

Classics like the hypnotic Water No Get Enemy (1975), the seditious Zombie waxed in 1976, and the valiantly composed 1977 hit Sorrow, Tears and Blood are all ensconced in a discography that boasts of 77 recorded albums and several unreleased compositions.

Paul McCartney was so enthralled with Fela’s composition in one instance that he wanted to record with him on a visit to the Kalakuta, as his residence where he also performed was known. But Fela was quite suspicious of his motives and the proposition was put on ice.

However, it is so easy to take Fela for granted, and dismiss him as a hedonistic band leader who was short sighted in terms of courting a wider music audience like Bob Marley did, especially when the sound of Caribbean patois and the emerging African rhythm of roots reggae had prepared the Western public’s appreciation for African music.

The reply to the above mindset could be that at the time Africa needed a projectile from the music world and Fela shot straight to the head. His frown on Western imperialism resonated in every note from his saxophone and the theme of his music centered on castigating the authoritarianism that was prevalent in Africa following independence from colonial powers.

Fela was empowered by an awareness that sprung from traditional Africa where things were essentially ordered, he ridiculed Christianity and Islam (both very popular religions in Africa), and his idea of feminism was as unflattering as some of his best compositions. But he also wondered why his home country Nigeria was earning a fortune in foreign exchange from the exploration and sale of crude oil and yet was so underdeveloped, lacked basic infrastructure and its people desperately poor.

For him, the corrupt leaders and their western collaborators were to blame and his voice can still be heard harsh as ever in Authority Stealing, Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense, Beasts of No Nation, Army Arrangement, Why Blackman Dey Suffer, Shuffering and Shmiling.*3

His message was poignant and uncompromising; it reflected the relentlessness of the reality of his time. His impact was both whole and inspiring for Nigerian folks who endured -and still sadly endures- corrupt leadership, mismanagement and embezzlement of public funds. It is such a shame that the issues he sang about are still prevalent in Nigeria today.

Fela’s insight was spiritually rooted in traditional African mysticism and his legion of fans gave him the moniker Abami Eda which when translated roughly means “The weird one” in English. But he was comprehensible enough to himself and to the world regarding his muse for the composition and performance of song after song.

Smoking cannabis or Indian hemp as it is commonly referred to in Nigeria became a rally point of departure for his conservative fans who frowned on the negative influence it could have on impressionable minds, for them the legal implication and the social consideration of drug abuse should not be divorced from the significance of his art.

And on the premise of this understanding, the authorities justified its unbridled persecution of Fela for so many years. But getting high was not just for fun or to stimulate him while on stage as a music artist; Fela built a whole lifestyle on it and attributed some form of ritualistic symbolism to it.

Michael E. Veal again describes the experience in his account on Fela: “Marijuana was clearly crucial to Fela’s musical and social vision in a number of ways. Sonically, it was reflected in the loping, insistent patterns, whose hypnotic effect was similar to the Jamaican reggae of the same period (in the creation of which marijuana also played an integral role)”.

Fela passed away from AIDS related complications in August 2nd 1997, becoming one of the most celebrated personalities to succumb to that dreadful disease in his part of the world. The shock of his death was to reveal the sum of our collective burden: the angst of daily life.

This man made no pretence of perfection, he lived his life with apologises to no one. Fela was passionate, unpretentious, self-indulgent and above all unorthodox. He refused to be confined to the norm…he defined himself. A true renaissance man who did not only influence his family and friends but also every individual in the world today whose voice is fervent enough to be raised on behalf of some one else.


Notes

1. Veal E. Michael, Fela: The Life and Times of an African Music Icon, p. 98.
2. Loftus Johnny, Fela’s Children (Metro Times Detroit).
3. Fela Discography.

• PHOTO: © LENI SINCLAIR

felaversation

FELAversation: Talking Of Fela For Idonije

TWO Nigerians who have written the most definitive andrevealing books about the status, art and politics ofthe legendary creator of afrobeat music, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, will be on duty on Wednesday, August 23 at: The Cinema hall 11 of the National Theatre, Iganmu Lagos. Time is 1pm.

Professor Tejumola Olaniyan, the Loiuse Durham Mead Professor at the University of Wisconsin, USA, andauthor of Fela: Arrest The Music and Dr Sola Olorunyomi, of the English Department, University of Ibadan and author of Fela And the Imagined Continent,will be guests at the August edition of the monthly Arthouse Forum, organised by the Friends of the Arts,Lagos, FOAL on the platform of the Committee forRelevant Art, CORA.

The event is in honour of Benson Idonije, the veteran writer on music and broadcasting, who was 70 on June 17.

Idonije, who has written an average of three articles per week in The Guardian since 1996, was the very first manager of Fela Kuti when he returned to Nigeria in the 50s. In fact, Idonije recruited all the members of the then Koola Lobitos band including the current leader of the band and Fela’s longest serving sideman, the tenor saxophonist, Lekan Animasaun aka Baba Ani.

According to the FOAL, the Fela Conversation (FELAversation) is designed to celebrate the fact that"Nigerian intellectuals have, at last, responded to the challenges posed by their counterparts from the West and Europe on the issue of articulating the epochal contribution of one of Africa’s leading cultural icon, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti to world culture."Before now, the works that have served as references on Fela Kuti were those authored by scholars who were either impatient with thoroughly understanding the complexities of Fela’s politics and arts, or were propelled by mindset about Africa and its people in terms of capability to contribute to world of ideas even through music; or were just lazy in their approach to the research and the eventual writing."With Olaniyan’s Fela: Arrest The Music and Fela:The Imagined Continent, the authentic documentation of Fela’s iconoclasm is beginning to emerge. We areindeed proud of these two works and the authors."The event will be moderated by Femi Akintunde-Johnson, former Entertainment Editor of The Punch newspaper, who later went on to co-found FAME and Encomium magazines, and now publishes Treasure magazine.

Deacon Ayo Ositelu, a fomer editor of Sunday Punch, who did one of the most important interviews with Fela Kuti in 1994, will also reflect on the relationship between Fela and idonije, emphasising on how mutual collaboration between the artiste and the journalist can yield substantial dividend for the individual career of the two as well as the cultural heritage of the society. There will be a bandstand that will play lots of Fela’s number to aid the discussion."FELAversation is a musical exploration and picnic", says Chris Ihidero, FOAL’s programme officer. The event is supported by the management of the National Theatre of Nigeria.
-Press Release