Fela Read online

  FELA

  THIS BITCH OF A LIFE

  CARLOS MOORE

  Foreword by Gilberto Gil

  Introduction by Margaret Busby

  Cover design: Jonathan Hahn

  Cover photograph: © David Corio

  Spine illustration: Vincent Gordon

  Photo credits: Photographs © by individual photographers (André Bernabé, Chico, Donald Cox, Bernard Matussière, Raymond Sardaby) and Fela Kuti, Fela Kuti Collection

  Lawrence Hill Books edition © 2009 by Carlos Moore. Foreword © 2009 by Gilberto Gil. Introduction © 2009 by Margaret Busby. Original © 1982 by Carlos Moore as Fela, Fela: cette putain de vie (Paris: Khartala). Published in English in 1982 as Fela, Fela: This Bitch of a Life (London: Allison and Busby). English translation © 1982 by Allison & Busby.

  All rights reserved

  Published by Lawrence Hill Books

  An imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN: 978-1-55652-835-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Foreword by Gilberto Gil

  A Note from the Author

  Introduction by Margaret Busby

  Discography

  1 Abiku: The Twice-Born

  2 Three Thousand Strokes

  3 Funmilayo: “Give Me Happiness”

  4 Hello, Life! Goodbye, Daudu

  5 J.K. Braimah: My Man Fela

  6 A Long Way From Home

  7 Remi: The One with the Beautiful Face

  8 From Highlife Jazz to Afro-Beat: Getting My Shit Together

  9 Lost and Found in the Jungle of Skyscrapers

  10 Sandra: Woman, Lover, Friend

  11 The Birth of Kalakuta Republic

  12 J.K. Braimah: The Reunion

  13 Alagbon Close: “Expensive Shit”, “Kalakuta Show”, “Confusion”

  14 From Adewusi to Obasanjo

  15 The Sack of Kalakuta: “Sorrow, Tears and Blood”, “Unknown Soldier”, “Stalemate”

  16 Shuffering and Shmiling: “ITT”, “Authority Stealing”

  17 Why I Was Deported from Ghana: “Zombie”, “Mr Follow Follow”, “Fear Not for Man”, “V.I.P.”

  18 My Second Marriage

  19 My Queens

  20 What Woman is to Me: “Mattress”, “Lady”

  21 My Mother’s Death: “Coffin for Head of State”

  22 Men, Gods and Spirits

  23 This Motherfucking Life

  Epilogue: Rebel with a Cause

  Foreword

  Gilberto Gil

  Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 18, 2008

  Africa, with her many peoples and cultures, is where the tragicomedy of the human race first fatefully presented itself, wearing a mask at once beautiful and horrendous. The Motherland, the cradle of civilization, acknowledged as the original birthplace of us all, where the body and soul of mankind sank earliest roots into the soil—Africa is, confoundingly, also the most reviled, wounded, and disinherited of continents. Africa, treasure trove of fabulous material and symbolic riches that throughout history have succored the rest of the world, is yet the terrain that witnesses the greatest hunger ever, for bread and for justice.

  This is the scenario into which Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Africa’s most recent genius, emerged and struggled.

  I was privileged to meet Fela in 1977 in his own musical kingdom, the Shrine, a club located in one of Lagos’s lively working-class neighborhoods. It was during the Second Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture (FESTAC), and on that evening the great Stevie Wonder was also visiting.

  Fela was the brilliant incarnation of Africa’s tragic dimension. He was an authentic contemporary African hero whose genius was to make his scream heard in every corner of the globe. Through his art, his wisdom, his politics, his formidable vigor and love of life, he managed to rend the stubborn veil that marginalizes “Otherness.” Deeply torn between the imperative of rejecting a legacy of subordination and the need to affirm a new libertarian future for his land and people, Fela ended up creating a body of work that is incomparable in terms of international popular music that expresses the cosmopolitan—and “cosmopolitical”—spirit of the second half of the twentieth century.

  Fela was possessed by an apocalyptic vision, wherein he saw how tall were the walls that had to be broken down. Thus, he engaged in a messianic rebellion. He was enthralled by the haunting lamentations that emerged from the diaspora of uprooted black slaves, reminding him of his own outraged sense of deracination in his native Africa—a land increasingly usurped by neocolonial self-interest. He was divided between the awareness that a universal future for all mankind was inevitable and the awareness that there was danger in denying Africa its own place in that future. Therefore he determined to rescue, both for his own people and for the world, the wise traditions of tribal Africa, having in mind that we might one day constitute a global tribe.

  Arming himself with a Saxon horn—a saxophone—Fela made music that harked back to days of yore, when his forebears were warriors and cattle herders. Yet putting into the balance his virtuoso improvisation, his poetic outbursts, he made everyone swing: in the Shrine, in the whole of Lagos, in every reservation, in every shantytown, in every township of the black planet.

  Today, some time after his passing, we are at a juncture at which we recognize and acknowledge Fela’s work. But we must confer another form of acknowledgment, one that goes beyond the careful, reverential attention that, increasingly, is afforded his music—an acknowledgment in a wider intellectual sense: one rooted in a careful analytical interpretation of what Fela and his work stood for.

  This book is among those that are aiming to fulfill that mandate.

  At a time when, all over the world, we are engaged in the huge and (who knows?) perhaps final effort to establish a viable humanist legacy for the generations still to come—in an era that I may call posthuman—it is indispensable to be able to rely on books that bestow on those efforts a true dimension of legacy.

  We need books that will tell us, now and here, and that later on will also tell the builders of posthumankind, about those notable men and women of our recent past, such as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.

  We need to know who they were and what they were about and how they have enriched us.

  Translated from the Portuguese by Tereza Burmeister

  A Note from the Author

  Originally published in France in 1982 as Cette putain de vie (This Bitch of a Life), this book was born of a deep friendship with Fela and could not have been written in the first person without his unreserved trust. He never intruded in the work and allowed me full access to his personal files and domestic intimacy. I thank him; his senior wife, the late Remi Taylor; his cowives; and those members of his organization who assisted me in gathering the material for the book: J. K. Braimah, Mabinuori Kayode Idowu (aka ID), Durotimi Ikujenyo (aka Duro), and bandleader Lekan Animashaun. I am also grateful to Sandra Izsadore, Fela’s longtime friend, for her generous assistance.

  Writing the life story of someone else in the first person, then translating it into another language, are tricky and perilous tasks. I succeeded only thanks to Shawna Davis, who transcribed and edited the more than fifteen hours of tape-recorded interviews that served as the building blocks for the original version, then translated the manuscript into English. Her involvement was particularly important in the two opening chapters, “Abiku” and “Three Thousand Strokes,” and she contributed the descriptive biographical presentations of all those interviewed, as well as the general introduction to chapter 19, “My Queens” (where for the first time Fela’s wives expressed themselves). Without Shawna’s rewriting and translation skil
ls, and keen eye for the artistic, Fela: This Bitch of a Life would have been a much different and certainly less attractive book. My debt to her is immense.

  Gratitude is also due to Nayede Thompson, who assisted Shawna with the transcription and early drafts. I am beholden to the late Ellen Wright—former literary agent and widow of Richard Wright—for having read the original manuscript and made pertinent suggestions, as did Marcia Lord, whose feedback was greatly valued.

  In addition, I acknowledge the generous assistance of André Bernabé, Heriberto Cuadrado Cogollo, and Donald Cox, whose photos, drawings, and newspaper collages helped create the proper mood for Fela’s story.

  This book owes a lot to Margaret Busby, who published the first English edition of the book in 1982. Befittingly, twenty-seven years later she has written the introduction to this new edition. I thank her dearly.

  I am especially grateful to Gilberto Gil for undertaking to write the foreword and to Stevie Wonder, Hugh Masekela, Randy Weston, and Femi Kuti for their commentaries.

  My literary agent, Janell Agyeman, and Lawrence Hill Books senior editor Susan Bradanini Betz worked hard toward the agreement that has finally made Fela’s life story, told in his own words, available to the public once more, and for the first time in the United States.

  Introduction

  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. It was an apt choice for the creator of an amazingly timeless body of work that for decades has transcended barriers of class and nationality, gathering ever more strength and devotees with the passing decades. Fela was indeed a man who seems always to have been destined for the almost-mythical status he has now claimed among music fans around the world.

  When his life was cut short in 1997, after fifty-eight years lived to the extreme and beyond all predictable convention, countless individuals felt the loss. On the day of his funeral, the streets of Lagos were brought to a standstill, with more than a million people defying the Nigerian government ban on public gatherings that had been imposed by the military dictator General Sani Abacha. One hundred and fifty thousand mourners are reputed to have queued in Tafawa Balewa Square, in the heart of Lagos, to pay their last respects as they filed past the glass coffin, which was then carried by hearse through the extraordinary throng, the cavalcade taking seven hours to cover a mere twenty kilometers to reach the neighborhood of Ikeja, where Fela was to be laid to rest.

  In the words of Fela’s illustrious cousin, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka, “Neither the police nor the military dared show its face on that day, and the uniformed exceptions only came to pay tribute. Quite openly, with no attempt whatsoever at disguising their identities, they stopped by his bier, saluted the stilled scourge of corrupt power, mimic culture and militarism. It was a much needed act of solidarity for us.”1

  More than a decade has passed since then, and recognition of Fela and of his significance is at an all-time high. The multinational entertainment group HMV ranked him as number 46 in a list of the 100 most influential musicians of the twentieth century. His ongoing legacy has been confirmed not only in the rising individual musical careers of his two sons, Femi (who served a teenage apprenticeship with his father’s band Egypt 80 before founding his own, the Positive Force) and Seun (inheritor of Egypt 80), but also in the plethora of commemorative events to honor him that have been mounted in major cities around the world and that continue to be planned. There have been birthday concerts played and tribute CDs produced, involving musicians as varied as Jorge Ben, Macy Gray, Manu Dibango, MeShell Ndegecello, Baaba Maal, Archie Shepp, and Taj Mahal, among others. From London to San Francisco there have been major exhibitions, including the 2003–2004 multimedia “Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Kuti” exhibition, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, which celebrated Fela through the response of an impressive variety of visual and other artists. The year 2008 brought exciting news of Fela! A New Musical bursting onto the Off-Broadway stage. Ethnomusicologist Michael Veal’s scholarly work Fela: Life and Times of an African brought Fela to the attention of the academic community, and a groundbreaking film is in preparation by acclaimed director John Akomfrah. The momentum is indeed gathering for a whole new generation to be brought the message of Fela Kuti.

  However, anyone who seeks the essence of the man himself can still do no better than reading the only book that can lay claim to being autobiographical, distilled from hours of conversation and close interaction between Fela and Carlos Moore. Fela, Fela: This Bitch of a Life, first published by Allison & Busby in London over a quarter century ago, has long been out of print, with rare secondhand copies changing ownership sometimes at hundreds of dollars, so it is gratifying that it is at last to enjoy currency again. Here can be found Fela’s uncensored and uncompromising words and thoughts.

  Twenty-five-plus years ago, when this book originally appeared, becoming the first biography ever (to my knowledge) of an African musician, Fela could accurately be described as controversy personified—African superstar, popular composer, singer-musician who had swept to international celebrity on a wave of scandal and flamboyance. He was “a living legend … Africa’s most popular entertainer,” said the New Musical Express. His volcanic performances and notoriously unconventional lifestyle brought him into constant conflict with the Nigerian authorities, while millions of ordinary people connected emotionally and physically with his songs. Newspaper headlines played up his public image, his marriage to twenty-seven women, the brutal raid on his household, his arrest and acquittal on numerous charges.

  By the accident of birth Fela (or Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, as he was originally named) could have chosen to settle for the conformist existence and trappings of Nigeria’s educated middle class, yet from the outset he instinctively rejected that option. He considered himself an abiku, a spirit child in the Yoruba tradition, who was reborn on October 15, 1938, in Abeokuta, the fourth of five children, coming into the world three years after his politically aware parents had suffered an infant bereavement. His mother Funmilayo was a pioneering feminist and campaigner in the anticolonial movement; his father, Reverend Israel Ransome-Kuti, was the first president of the Nigerian Union of Teachers.2

  At the age of nineteen Fela was sent to London to study medicine but instead enrolled at Trinity College of Music, forming his Koola Lobitos band in 1961 with his school friend J. K. Braimah. In 1969 he traveled with the group to the United States, where he connected with Black Power militants and became increasingly politicized. Specifically, his meeting with Sandra Smith (currently Sandra Izsadore), a member of the Black Panthers, was a catalyst for everything that was to follow. Turned on to books on black history and politics, particularly Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Fela began to demonstrate a new consciousness in his lyrics.

  He returned to Nigeria, renamed the band Afrika 70, offloaded his “slave name” of Ransome, and set to championing the cause of the poor underclass and exposing the hypocrisy of the ruling elites, establishing his commune, the Kalakuta Republic, and his nightclub, the Afrika Shrine. The pidgin in which he wrote his lyrics, dealing wittily and provocatively with everything from gender relations to government corruption, made him accessible and hugely popular not only in Nigeria but in the rest of Africa, in line with the Nkrumahist Pan-Africanism he espoused, as well as bringing him to the attention of top musicians from the West. The genre he created, Afrobeat, is a heady, mesmerizing concoction with traditional African rhythmic roots but which also drew on various strands of contemporary black music—jazz, calypso, funk. It was a two-way process, and when James Brown and his musicians toured Nigeria in 1970 they took notice of what the rebellious young Nigerian was doing. He was making an indelible impact on master performers such as
Gilberto Gil and Stevie Wonder, Randy Weston, and Hugh Masekela. Paul McCartney, recording in Lagos in 1972, called Fela’s group “the best band I’ve ever seen live. . . . When Fela and his band eventually began to play, after a long, crazy build-up, I just couldn’t stop weeping with joy. It was a very moving experience.”3 (Fela did not return the compliment, reportedly berating the Beatle for trying to “steal black man’s music”) Brian Eno of Roxy Music and David Byrne of Talking Heads are among those who could also testify to the fact that encountering Fela and his music had a way of changing people’s lives forever.

  The Nigerian establishment and the military regime responded with increasing violence both to Fela’s counterculture lifestyle and to his naked condemnation of the military regime, notably in his 1977 hit “Zombie.” His compound was attacked by hundreds of soldiers, who not only inflicted a fractured skull and other wounds on Fela but callously threw his octogenarian mother out of a window, leading to her death—an episode trenchantly marked in “Coffin for Head of State” and “Unknown Soldier.” He founded an organization called Movement of the People, but his ambition to run for the presidency of Nigeria was thwarted by the authorities.

  Fela adamantly disavowed conventional morals, and his unabashed, sacramental approach to sex awakened the media’s prurient interest. It is rare to find any press consideration of his music that does not interpolate voyeuristic references to his domestic arrangements, and there is no denying that he was a gift to the tabloid media in thrall to the exoticism of black sexuality. This is not the place to debate in detail what the connection may be between Fela’s polygyny and the misogyny he has been accused of (evidenced by songs such as “Mattress”), but it is worth mentioning a theory that has been advanced by DJ Rita Ray: that, far from exploiting the young women he took as wives—his “queens,” many of whom speak out for themselves for the first time in this book—Fela was taking a progressive stance by conferring on his dancers the respectability of being married. Nonetheless, for a man who was so clear-sighted on certain political issues, he was not immune from embracing often dubious attitudes, be they sexist or homophobic. Now, as much as then, Fela has the capability to disturb and shock and confuse, as well as to inspire. Insofar as he was resistant to being made to feel there was anything shameful or immoral in the pursuit of sexual pleasure, he chose to believe he was simply interpreting and expressing what comes naturally for the typical African male, unfettered by Western-imposed religious teachings. Nor, it has to be said, were his views on women necessarily far removed from those that could have been found among many other black militants of the era.