Fela
The late Fela Kuti, activist and Afrobeat king, helped Nigeria find its voice. His saxophonist son is a political force, too – but an icon is a hard act to follow, writes Rachel Newsome
When Femi Kuti arrived at the hospital, it was so early that the 4am Lagos sprawl seemed as still as the Aids-extinguished body of his father he’d come to collect. Had Fela Kuti been another anonymous figure making up the rising percentage of annual Aids deaths in Nigeria, the streets that August morning in 1997 would have remained so.
But, in the short time between Femi’s arrival and departure, it had become a different city. As far as he could see, crowds of mourners – five, six, sometimes seven deep – were lunging forward for a glimpse of the sore-riddled corpse in the glass coffin as it passed. At every corner the convoy jerked around, it was the same thing. By the end, it was almost as if the crowd had been reproducing itself like a grieving hermaphrodite.
Many had been intellectuals and students who admired Fela’s anti-corruption, pan-African ideology. Most were Lagos’s “area boys”. Often homeless and belonging to the 80% of Lagos’s unemployed, area boys are those you might see at junctions pushing kitchen sponges, cartons of iced milk – anything worth a few naira – or haplessly smoking joints on street corners. But in the libertarian and streetwise syntax of the man they had come to pay respect to, they had been known as Fela People.
To them, Fela, who was often to be seen in nothing but underpants and a large gold chain, smoking a joint the size of a small African state, was someone who spoke their language.
To everyone present, it was mutually understood that he was a musical genius. The progenitor of Afrobeat, a politicised hybrid of jazz, high life and traditional African rhythms, he had overseen the germination of an underground protest culture where such a thing had previously been unthinkable. And so he had delivered his manifesto in weekly performances, sometimes lasting for hours, under the corrugated roof of his club, The Shrine.
But if Fela had come to be regarded as a national superstar, then the succession of military governments he relentlessly attacked regarded him as a national threat. During his life, Fela Kuti was imprisoned four times, often on trivial or unfounded charges – his final arrest was just months before his death. Led out of his house in handcuffs on an unfounded charge of dealing, his frail figure in the last stages of serial Aids- related infections was an image just too emotive not be canonised on the calendars and posters which appeared shortly afterwards.
The police had not only failed to diminish his influence – they had provided a foil which reflected back Fela’s semi-apostolic glory.
In the end, it was his love of polygamous sex (he simultaneously married 27 women, in addition to Femi’s mother, Remi) and his hatred of condoms (another manifestation of white imperialism against black reproduction, was one line he took) which finished the authorities’ job off for them. But whether the faces of the thousands caught on the video replay of Fela’s wake were mourning the loss of Fela Kuti, or whether they were mourning something far greater, was hard tell. Either way, the search for a new hero was on.
“It was mad! Mad!” continues Femi steering his navy Pajero jeep along the same road he had driven Fela’s body 18 months before. “There were more than a million people at his funeral; you could see them from every direction. Can you imagine that?”
He beeps, and swerves past an ice-cube tray vendor standing in the middle of the road. Femi, it transpires, has never taken a driving test; he didn’t have to: 2 000 naira (R140) was enough to secure him a licence without doing so. But, he points out, at least he has a licence – which is more than he can say for most car owners.
He waves his arm across the expressway. “In Nigeria, all you need is the right money and the right connections and you can get anything you want,” he pronounces; this, for the second or maybe even third time that week.
Inheriting the Kuti family’s strong bone structure, Femi has the pensive high crown and wide forehead of his father. He is good looking, and the subtle swagger inflected in his walk shows that he knows it. He has the pan-appeal of a movie star in Nigeria’s nascent film industry. It is as if he was born to perform. But, just like his father, Femi is an Afrobeat musician.
Femi’s band, The Positive Force -which includes among its members his elder sister Yeni and his wife Funke – has been going for 13 years. And like Fela’s music, Femi’s music contains a strong political commentary on the social problems of Nigeria, in particular, and of Africa in general.
Femi slams the palm of his hand on the dashboard and swears to himself. It is after dark, and the traffic flow has seized up into a ridged metallic web of cars in various stages of disintegration. He unwinds the window and leans out to gauge how far forward the road is blocked. Nothing is moving; no one is going anywhere.
“Damn! It’s another go-slow.” Femi is indignant. “They put gates on the streets – they lock them after 11pm to stop armed robbers getting in. But it isn’t helping. All that happens is the roads get jammed and the thieves just lie in wait before the gates are locked, then rob the whole street.”
In Lagos, the pervasive feeling, even on the busiest market day, is of stasis hedged by simmering desperation. It’s as if a kind of mental paralysis has been brought on by the confusion of too many unbalanced equations.
Every night, on Femi’s television, political broadcasts by President Olusegun Obasanjo’s People’s Democratic Party flash promises of crime fighting, of improved education and of a streamlined economy. Every morning, however, the newspaper headlines anticipate Nigeria’s plunge towards a national blackout. Despite the fact that Nigeria is the world’s fifth-biggest oil-producing country, Femi’s family must cope with the low petrol supply by queuing up at a Mobil station before dawn.
The way Femi sees it, it is not simply his duty, but his fate to question his country’s uneasy infrastructure. This is what the Movement against Second Slavery (Mass), the coalition he has set up with the National Association of Nigerian Students, is all about. Second slavery, he explains, is the continued oppression of Africans by a coercion of corrupt governments and Western multinationals.
“No one wants to listen; they just keep on listening to the same people who have spoilt Nigeria.” Femi is in mid-flow. “Every single person who is standing for election has been a minister or a senator before. So who says they are going to rectify the country’s problems? They all come back with the same story that they are going to give us free education, but obviously they are lying. Obasanjo is claiming that his government is good for national stability. But his government killed students and ruined the economy. The last time he was in power, he emptied the treasury. How did he expect the country to function with no money? Now, when I think this, I am sorry for this country.”
Femi sees Mass as an awareness-raising, non- political campaign “to free the African mind” and to promote traditions which were lost in the process of colonisation. “Even most of the boys around Kalakuta [an independent state set up by Fela] think America is the ultimate way of life,” he laments. The main vehicle of communication will be a series of free concerts at colleges and universities; eventually, Femi hopes to spread his message to every higher education institution in the country. Because, to Femi, it is acutely apparent that the only people who are outside the system, who have the energy, intelligence and enthusiasm to make a change in attitudes, are the country’s students.
“I want to channel all that energy,” he enthuses. “If they learn to understand what a government should be like, they will not allow it to take so many liberties with our lives. We are nonchalant about this country. We don’t care whether someone lies. We don’t care whether someone dies of Aids. We don’t love ourselves or this country any more.”
But Femi is not the first revolutionary Kuti; radicalism is all but written in the family’s genealogy. Femi’s paternal grandmother was the first African woman to visit Russia and China; while in-between her travels, she managed to secure the female vote. His uncle Beko, Fela’s elder brother, has only recently been released from a three-and-a-half-year incarceration under ex- president Sani Abacha, after setting up his own democratic movement. His uncle Koye rose to become deputy president of the World Health Organisation, while Fela’s cousin is Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winning writer. Yeni – perceptive and astute – is just as politically vocal as her brother. And then there is the presence of Fela.
Unshackled by a physical presence, Fela’s grip on the collective consciousness has transubstantiated into an iconic status. “Whether anybody liked to say it or not, he was a special human being,” Femi explains. “He did believe he was some kind of god. And yes, I would say that he is a god. He is a god of music.”
But though Femi used to play his father’s records until they scratched, his admiration was tempered by a fear that must gnaw at all celebrity offspring. Even now, sitting on the groovy Seventies-esque floral sofa at Kalakuta, polishing his saxophone, Femi fears that everything he had worked for might be forever eclipsed by his father’s myth.
“When I was younger, I used to go with my father to the university lectures he was giving at that time,” Femi remembers. “I used to think, `Would I ever be able to hold an audience down like this? Would I ever be able to hold a band down like he does?’ That was my greatest fear. But I also used to think that, if I could, would I want all these people around me?”
By this, he means the sycophancy which had curdled the atmosphere at Kalakuta and turned Fela against his family. It had soon become clear that one side-effect of Fela’s stand against the despotic nepotism of Nigeria’s leaders was that he would insist on treating everyone the same – including his children, to whom he paid only slight attention.
“He was so busy trying to impress people in the house that he wasn’t paying any attention to his children. I do not know why he had to do this,” Femi says. “Because, whether he liked it or not, we were his children and he was our father, and nobody else will ever be our father.”
By the time Femi was eight, Fela had left his family to consolidate his revolutionary status at his new home, which he declared the “independent” state of Kalakuta. Kalakuta Republic was a large building near the expressway, which had enough rooms to house the itinerant population of musicians, homeless people and women of a certain virtue who had begun to spin an impenetrable web around him. But it was Fela’s announcement that he would be marrying 27 of the women who lived at Kalakuta that irreversibly underscored Femi’s disenfranchisement. He could not quite understand why Fela had done this.
“The first thing we knew about it was when he sent us to tell our mother and we were caught in-between again,” says Femi. “He said he was doing it to give them a good name because they were being called prostitutes and he wanted to protect them against the police.”
But Femi still wanted to get close to his father. When he was 16, the excitement of standing onstage in the vicarious glow of Fela’s presence made his teenage chest heave all the faster. So Femi left his mother and joined his father’s band, Afrika 70, as a musician and fellow revolutionary. He moved into Kalakuta and began to develop a strong interest in Egyptology and African spiritualism. It was not long before the ensuing discussions on religion with Fela gave Femi what he had been looking for: direct personal access to his father’s affections.
“They used to call me The Professor because I was learning about juju, voodoo, African magic,” Femi tells the distorted face reflecting back off his sax. “I still believe in it. I think there is a lot of truth in it. Because of that, we became very close, and I found out a lot of reasons to explain why Africa was the way it was.”
As for Fela, it became less clear how much he was searching for something – no matter what – particularly as his friendship grew with Professor Hindu, who seemed to appear from nowhere. Hindu had told Fela that he was able to kill people and bring them back to life. He’d said that he could shoot Fela and that he would not die. Fela believed him.
“Fela changed when Hindu came into his life, and he forgot everything we had discussed. I thought, `Here comes trouble.’ Everyone now got worried because Fela wouldn’t listen to anyone except for Hindu. My mother said I should come out of it because it was getting too diabolical and too deceitful. But I told her, `If I leave him now, it is possible he will get killed and we will lose him forever.’
`I felt this because Hindu had once told Fela that if he wore a special African bullet- proof vest, they could shoot him and he wouldn’t die. To prove it, Hindu got a gun and put the jacket on a goat and fired six shots to show it really worked. It was already dark and the goat did not die. Later, we found out he had used blanks. But my father thought this was wonderful and he wanted to put the jacket on himself. Luckily, his elder brother said, `Let’s try it out on another goat, just in case.’
“So they took this double-barrelled gun – and the goat died. And Fela cried and cried. Obviously, they were cheating him.”
In 1984, Fela was charged with the illegal “export” of money from the country. By the time Fela had served his 12-month sentence, Hindu had disappeared. But so had the semi- divine halo Femi had always associated with Fela’s authoritarian identity. Suddenly, Kalakuta’s epicurean meritocracy seemed replaced by a bruised and forlorn utopia.
“Kalakuta was like a war zone. Everyone was fighting, and I could not understand why he wanted to live in that kind of environment. We had looked on him as a god. We could not understand why this man we worshipped so much, why his organisation was so disorganised. I told Yeni that I was thinking of leaving The Shrine to get a place of my own because it was now getting out of control.”
The more Femi felt rejected by Fela, the more he had something to prove. The more he saw through Fela’s public persona, the more he understood he must reject Fela’s private lifestyle. He left Fela’s band; he left Kalakuta; he stopped smoking marijuana. And, instead, he devised a rigorous personal routine which entailed hours of saxophone practice and a strict diet. He understood all this to be a necessary process, because he wanted to be somebody in whom people believed; because he wanted his words and his music to become part of Nigeria’s national consciousness; he wanted to be greater than Fela.
Femi continues to shine his saxophone. “The day I left Fela, I decided to make sure I would become greater than him. But I knew that I had to do it my own way. I knew that, if I tried to be like him, I would be the same as him – and I wanted to be bigger than him. I’d been on tour with him several times and I knew that, whatever he was giving the audience, I could give more. I knew Fela would be annoyed, and everyone around me was disappointed for a long time because Fela was fighting them because of me.” He pauses. “But I had to do it.”
The cost of Femi’s personal epiphany was a five-year silence between father and son. Still, by the end of Fela’s life, their lines of communication would be reconnected. But, whatever his father’s mental state, Femi maintains that he always loved him. Nor does he doubt that these feelings were always reciprocated by Fela in his own way.
Part of Femi’s job description seems to include “local benefactor”. By the end of any day, he may have given away 500 naira (R35) 600 (R40), sometimes a 1 000 (R70); to his fans, to area boys, even to traffic police, thrusting out fistfuls of notes as he careers about Lagos on his way to business meetings. “Sometimes it’s difficult,” Femi observes. “They come round asking for money, when I have problems of my own. But they think I am not supposed to have any. How can I explain to them that sometimes I am no better off than they are?”
As an edifice, Kalakuta polarises the father’s ongoing omnipresence and the son’s new order. Though not Fela’s original building – that was burned down under what Fela always maintained were instructions from the CIA – the one in use today is where he spent the last 10 years of his life. Fela’s room is a freeze-frame of the day he died: bed unmade; dinner unfinished, as if it was expected he might return at any time. The walls throughout are a giddy yellow and orange, the colour of Fela’s favourite cigarette brand, Three Rings.
Today, Femi is holding a press conference at Kalakuta to announce the launch of Mass. Local journalists have been lured with the promise of free chicken and Fanta. Femi is fielding questions. No, he doesn’t want to be president. Yes, Mass is privately funded with the help of profits from record sales. Yes, he is happy that Nigeria has been handed over to a democratically elected president but, no, that does not detract from the fact that he believes Mass will become a strong movement. “Untouchable” is the word he uses.
As he has an acute political understanding, it is of particular importance for Femi to convince the press to accompany him to the first Mass concert for the students of Abeokuta Polytechnic later that week, so that those who had been dozing off in the noon heat can see for themselves. When the conference is over, he wipes his brow and flings himself on the nearest sofa; being a human panacea is clearly exhausting. Does he ever feel like giving up?
“Yes, like yesterday in the go-slow. I sometimes think, `How do you solve these problems, if people are not ready to listen?’ But I would say that one of the differences between me and Fela is that a good 50% of those around me really believe in change. However, I don’t have any `yes men’. Yeni, my mother, Funke – they are there to put me on the spot when I am wrong. My father was on his own, just listening to anybody: nobody dared question his authority.”
Two days later, a busload of journalists, a van of Positive Force musicians and Femi’s Pajero are making their way to the neighbouring state of Abeokuta. The journalists are probably looking forward to their next free lunch. “I don’t need to do this for popularity,” Femi is saying. “Someone will always pay me to play. So for me to say I will give a free concert will touch them, because I needn’t do it. At night, when they are talking with their friends, they will have to think about why I am doing this.”
Onstage, Femi’s grand statements are vindicated by his near-pristine presence. He wears traditionally cut yellow batik trousers and, although it is overcast, his chest is bare. Positive Force break into a synaptic series of polyrhythms, and the man who would save Nigeria spins on the balls of his feet, pours himself into his saxophone, sweats and spins round again. Arms thrust wide, eyes skyward, he sings: “With these kind of leaders/Africa get no hope/Africans will suffer/Till the suffer reach our bone.”
As all Femi’s songs are guaranteed Nigerian hits, there is no question of anyone not knowing the words. But when Femi performs the Fela number International Thief Thief, few can be seen echoing his chorus. Fela had written this song in protest at the regime of Moshood Abiola, the former Nigerian president. During Abiola’s chairmanship of Decca, Afrika 70’s record label, he had become an enemy of Fela’s, refusing to release any of his music which was political.
But to the students of Abeokuta Polytechnic, Abiola (who died just after his release from prison last year) is a magnanimous benefactor who funded the college library, which is named in his honour. To some of the students, Abiola is a hero on whose behalf they were arrested, beaten and tortured during the 1993 riots held to commemorate his brief presidency, before he was overthrown by Abacha.
It was, Yeni explains, a constant fight against misinformation and political confusion which, even for Fela, eventually proved too much. At the end of his life, he kept more and more to his room, as if it had been some kind of surrender.
“Fela became very depressed,” Yeni remembers. “He only went out to perform at The Shrine on Fridays and Saturdays. By 1993, Fela was very upset that everyone was going to vote for Abiola – Fela had been attacking him for his corruption for years. They made Abiola a hero, because he was supposedly a democratically elected civilian, and after this it seemed to Fela that everything he had worked for was now being ignored.”
As the son of the father, Femi’s assignment is to become a vessel through which the aspirations of his fans can be channelled. But if Fela’s radicalism was belied by a disintegrating inner sanctum, then Femi’s politics begin with the personal, starting with the model image he has constructed around himself. Where Fela’s genius pre- empted his deification – detached and ultimately dystopic – Femi has an air of buffed solidity, of self-determination and reliability. He has worked hard on this. It’s a modern style of heroism injected with equal degrees of pragmatism, idealism and a religious self-subjugation. What Femi wants is to be a perfect paradigm in an imperfect world. But whether such a thing is possible, he is still trying to work out.
“When Fela died,” he muses, “something told me I had to fill his space. I thought, `This has been your fear since you were young, and now your time has come.’ I knew there would be problems and that people who had been close to him would object. But I also knew this was my mission. I was sitting on the Kalakuta balcony, and I called my friends and said, `I think there is a vacuum now, and if someone doesn’t do anything about it, this country will turn out like Rwanda. I want to put my life on the line for this; I think I can succeed. That chance is one in a million – but it is there.'”