Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday, 23 August 2017 at 10:58
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - FELA KUTI, KAGAME AND SOYINKA
Colleagues: hope all is going well. Now that I am settling down in the “city of gold”, I thought I should revive the articles sent to a list of good friends and comrades! Also a way of keeping in touch with each other and hear about, and from, Africa! These two recent ones are a tribute to Afrobeat star Fela Anikulapo Kuti; and another on Fela’s first cousin, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, and Paul Kagame. Best, adekeye
Fela’s Enduring Legacy
Adekeye Adebajo
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the death of legendary Afro-beat superstar Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Fela was an institution in Nigeria's social and political life, creating local idioms that have become very much part of the local vernacular. He was a voice for the voiceless, the national conscience, the defender of the defenceless, an unabashed polygamist, and a perennial rebel with a cause. A musical Orpheus who made magic with his saxophone and biting lyrics, he was a political Cassandra whose prophecies often went unheeded by his cynical and sceptical compatriots. A compliant, conservative middle-class often dismissed Fela as a decadent, half-naked, marijuana-smoking madman, a promiscuous Pied Piper of Perdition leading the country's youth astray. Fela betrayed his own class in speaking out for the weak and down-trodden rather than settling into the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle to which his family background entitled him.
He developed his unique fusion of African indigenous rhythms and jazz, using his native Yoruba language and pidgin English to reach a mass audience. A man of the people, he sang about social issues and everyday life that ordinary people could relate to. He mocked the materialism of African women, ridiculed the blustering shakara (false bravery) of Nigerian men, and mercilessly lambasted Nigeria's prodigal political class as “Vagabonds in Power (VIP)” for selling out their country and mortgaging their children's future.
Fela, a thorn in the side of many corrupt regimes, spent an estimated 200 spells between detention and the recording studio. He spoke truth to power, castigating the misrule and mismanagement of Nigeria's profligate ruling elite. During the country's lavish Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, Fela refused to take part in the event so as not to legitimise the military government of General Olusegun Obasanjo.
His self-declared commune - the “sovereign” Kalakuta Republic - was burned down a week after FESTAC by what the government described as “unknown soldiers”, and his 78-year old mother was thrown from a window, leading to her death a year later.
Fela, who was very close to his mother, never recovered from her death. He felt guilt-ridden that she had died as a result of his struggle.
The Afrobeat star drew inspiration from these events to ridicule Nigeria's “lumpenmilitariat” and securocrats as “Zombies” and “Yellow Fever”. For many young Nigerians of my generation, his “shrine” in Lagos's sprawling suburb of Ikeja was a sacred place of pilgrimage.
He was the lavish high priest at this paradoxical temple of sin and salvation. Fela combined great respect for the pantheon of traditional Yoruba deities and cosmology with sinful sex and drugs. He was also a committed Pan-Africanist, who believed fiercely in the culture and heritage of blacks on the continent and in the diaspora. A 10-month trip to the United States during the civil rights struggle in 1969-1970 seemed to radicalise him. He celebrated Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Thomas Sankara. But Fela also had his critics. He was often described as an autocratic band-leader, and was accused of misogyny by feminists who regarded his stereotypical portrayal of the “real” African woman as “strong, submissive and subordinate” as antiquated.
In order to pay homage to “Abami Eda” (the Strange One), I recently visited the Kalakuta Museum on a trip to Lagos. This was the house in which Fela had lived and in which he lies buried. As one enters the building on Gbemisola street in Ikeja, Fela’s graveside is on the left hand side of the house. It is a simple tomb with a triangular design and a sign above the grave that simply reads: “Fela 1938-1997”.
The house has three floors with intimate family photos hung up all along the walls. These pictures depicted scenes from Fela’s life and times: his father, the family patriarch and famous educationist; his indomitable mother who was one of Africa’s first female activists; his two main wives and six children; Fela’s two medical doctor brothers, one a former health minister and the other a human rights activist; the family home in Abeokuta; Fela with his two fists clenched and raised in defiance; his “dancing queens” with horrific injuries following the 1977 attack by soldiers; Fela’s “wedding” to 27 of these “queens” shortly afterwards in a powerful demonstration of solidarity with women whom the establishment had sought to depict as prostitutes; life performances with the “Africa 70” and “Egypt 80” bands; and Fela lying in state in a glass coffin with a huge spliff of marijuana in his hand.
Fela’s second-floor bedroom has been preserved with his wardrobe of multi-coloured outfits, a saxophone, a deep freezer, and the mattress on the floor on which he slept. In a side-room next to the bedroom are his multi-coloured shoes, two mannequins in underwear, and his fur-coats, used for travelling to colder climes. In another room are newspaper cuttings from The Daily Times with headlines of important events in Fela’s life such as some of his detentions by the police, and legal battles with several governments. In the same room is a type-writer and the manifesto of Fela’s Movement of the People (MOP) party set up in 1979 to contest presidential elections. Yet another room had wood carvings and paintings of Fela by an artist, while outside was a colourful mural.
The recent event that posthumously cemented Fela’s reputation as a global musical icon was the Broadway show “Fela!” which debuted in New York in 2009 before travelling to Europe and Lagos. A 2014 documentary “Finding Fela” captured highlights of this musical, interspersed with live performances by Fela and interviews with him, his children, his managers, his former band members, and two biographers: Carlos Moore and Michael Veal. Paul Mccartney also describes a memorable visit to “The Shrine”.The musical, “Fela!”, was choreographed by Bill T. Jones, who is extensively interviewed in the documentary.
“Fela!” was set in “the Shrine” in Lagos. The musical tells the story of the life and times of its subject: his priestly, musical grandfather and father; Fela being sent to London to study medicine and turning instead to music before experiencing racism for the first time; his political education in America during its civil rights struggle; and his innovative creation of Afrobeat. “Finding Fela” is a journey of discovery, showing how the Afrobeat star grew up in a musical household playing the piano and singing in the school choir. Fela’s incredible courage and commitment to social justice are enduring characteristics that come through clearly in the documentary.
“Finding Fela” travels to the bustling megapolis of Lagos, the social life of which Fela had contributed massively to shaping. It visits the sites of Fela’s “shrines” where he would have “yabbis night” and “ladies night”, the high priest effortlessly educating and entertaining the flock. Fela’s son, Seun, talks about his father’s incredible creative genius in which he would let songs gestate, and then, as if poured forth by his ancestral muse, produce the perfect song in one single session. We also see how Fela would take different parts of his musical band as if a master chef mixing diverse ingredients into an odoriferous stew.
The insights of Fela’s children – Femi, Yeni, and Seun – are particularly interesting as they note that their father treated them like other members of his commune, insisting that they call him “Fela” rather than “daddy.” This was a difficult childhood in which Femi, in particular, feared that Fela’s constant confrontations with Nigeria’s securocrats would get them killed. His children were often the last to receive his attention and affection, and the chaos of the “Kalakuta Republic” – with an estimated 250 people mulling around - is well captured in the documentary, with even a time-table of which wives would spend the night with the Afrobeat star. Yeni cries in the documentary as she recalls the terrible events of the military attack on Fela’s home in 1977 in which both her father and grandmother suffered broken legs.
The documentary then goes through Fela’s repertoire: “Jeun ko ku” (chop till you quench) which was his first big hit, and “Alagbon Close” when he first directly confronted military misrule. “Zombie”, “Sorrow, Tears, and Blood”, and “Coffin For Head of State” represent anti-securocrat anthems of this rebellious period. During a raid on his home in 1981 – under the supposedly democratic government of Shehu Shagari – Fela was so badly beaten that he was bleeding from the head. These frequent confrontations with authority seemed to fuel his fearless creativity.
The documentary then goes on to show the extravagant, well-choreographed set of “Fela!”, involving his skimpily clad “dancing queens” with braids and braces and painted faces. The stage is exuberant, with a picture of Kuti's mother, Funmilayo, permanently on display. She helped shape Fela’s radical pan-African political views and the show is centred on this relationship. The musical sees a melancholy Fela constantly hallucinating like a black Hamlet in a haze of smoke, while using African masquerades as intermediaries to visit his mother in the land of the ancestors in the spectacular “Dance of the Orisas”. Other figures from the Yoruba pantheon such as Ogun, Sango, and Esu – guardian of the crossroads - also feature in this performance. The documentary and musical further highlight the role of another woman who greatly influenced Fela's political awakening: former Black Panther, Sandra Izsadore, who introduced the Afro-jazz star to the work of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. The musical captures well Fela’s insatiable musical and sexual appetites that seemed to fuel his genius.
After Fela was sentenced to five years in jail by General Muhammadu Buhari’s regime in 1984 for currency trafficking, he came out of jail 18 months later (after the judge famously went to jail to apologise to him), a seemingly broken man. There was a certain sadness in Fela’s eyes as he stared coldly ahead as if in a trance, his eyes glazed, morose and disillusioned that two decades of defiant struggle had not changed the Nigerian situation. This led to the final creative phase of his life in which such hits as “Army Arrangement,” “Beasts of No Nation,” and “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense” were released. Fela saw himself as playing classical African music in the mode of Bach and Beethoven, and felt the need to express himself through these more spiritual, highly-percussioned songs.
When Fela died of AIDS in August 1997 at the age of 58, a million Nigerians lined the streets of Lagos to bid him farewell: a scene well captured in “Finding Fela”. In an event that symbolised the passing of a legend, rain poured down even as the sun shone, as a great son of Africa joined the ranks of the ancestors. Today, Fela's legacy is carried forward by his sons, Femi and Seun Kuti, who play music inspired by their father's Afrobeat. But the struggles against which Fela fought – corruption, state abuse, African disunity – still continue to blight our contemporary landscape. Even many who dismissed Fela during his lifetime now regard him as a visionary prophet who was ahead of his time. As the Afrobeat star memorably noted: “To be spiritual is not by praying and going to church. Spiritualism is the understanding of the universe so that it can be a better place to live in.”
Professor Adekeye Adebajo is Director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
The Guardian (Nigeria), 23 August 2017.
The President and the Playwright
Adekeye Adebajo
One of the most curious mutual admiration clubs of recent times has been that between recently re-elected president of the small land-locked Central African state of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, and Nigerian Nobel literature laureate, Wole Soyinka. In his rich 2006 memoirs, You Must Set Forth At Dawn, Soyinka described Kagame as “seven foot plus, every inch exuding intelligence and discipline…a formidable force to encounter….one of the continent’s rare breed of leaders.” The Nobel laureate went on to note that “Kagame belongs to that uncommon leadership order beside whom one would willingly march into battle.” In 2012, Soyinka was a guest of honour at the celebrations of Rwanda’s “golden jubilee” as an independent nation, during which he praised the country as “a model of reconstruction [which] must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people”, before going on to note that “Rwanda has indicated that however thin the hope of a community can be, a hero always emerges.” A year later, Soyinka described Rwanda as a “paradigm for the continent” in a talk at Howard University in Washington D.C. Kagame returned the favour by delivering the keynote address at a launch of a book of essays honouring Soyinka’s 80th birthday in Accra in 2014, describing the Nobel laureate as “an unapologetic exponent of the universality of African values.”
Wole Soyinka has been one of the most consistently eloquent campaigners for human rights across Africa over the last six decades: he was detained for 27 months by General Yakubu Gowon’s administration during Nigeria’s civil war, an episode captured in his 1972 prison notes, The Man Died; he wrote a stinging rebuke of autocrats that alluded to Kwame Nkrumah’s repressive rule – Kongi’s Harvest - in 1965; and lampooned Uganda’s Idi Amin, Central African Republic’s “Emperor” Jean-Bédel Bokassa, and Equatorial Guinea’s Macias Nguema in the 1984 A Play Of Giants. Soyinka was also the most eloquent critic and a formidable activist who was forced to flee General Sani Abacha’s repressive military junta to go into exile in the United States (US) in 1994. He was subsequently sentenced to death in absentia three years later, and returned to Nigeria only after Abacha’s death in 1998. In his satirical 2002 play, King Baabu, the Nobel laureate portrayed Abacha as a bumbling, brainless, brutish buffoon and a semi-literate, greedily corrupt military general who exchanges his military attire for a monarchical robe and a gown. With this stellar fictional and activist background, it is hard to understand the mutual admiration between Soyinka and Kagame: one of Africa’s most repressive rulers.
To no one’s surprise, Paul Kagame was re-elected to a third presidential term this month with 98.6% of the vote. The election was scarcely free and fair, as genuine opposition was not allowed to compete against the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ruling party which uses not just political muscle, but control of key economic sectors, to maintain itself in power. Nine supposedly independent political parties had supported Kagame for president – reminiscent of the five parties that had backed Abacha in 1998, famously dismissed by veteran politician, Bola Ige, as “five fingers of a leprous hand”. The Green Party and an independent were the only opposition candidates in Rwanda’s recent polls, and even they complained of harassment of their members by government officials. In contrast to the vociferous Western condemnation of neighbouring Burundi’s Pierre Nkurinziza’s creatively interpreting the constitution to run for a third presidential term last year, the condoning of Kagame’s similar shenanigans by guilt-ridden Western donors resulted in a deafening silence in the Rwandan case.
Kagame had earlier been prevented from running for president again after two terms, but a “spontaneous” petition had resulted in a 2015 referendum in which an incredulous 98% of voters handed him another potential 17 years of power that could see him have five presidential terms and rule until 2034. Only 10 people voted against this constitutional amendment in a population of 11 million people! It is unlikely that Kagame – a member of the Tutsi minority - would win a genuinely free and fair election in Rwanda. After the country’s Hutu president, Pasteur Bizimungu, resigned in 2000 and subsequently formed a political party, he was arrested two years later and sentenced to 15 years in jail for “inciting ethnic violence”, thus ensuring that he could not contest the 2003 presidential election against Kagame.
In his defence, Kagame’s supporters rightly note that he and his army halted the 1994 genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people, when powerful members of the international community had spectacularly abdicated their own responsibility: the United States (US) and Britain in particular, insisted on the withdrawal of the 2,500-strong United Nations (UN) peacekeeping force in Rwanda which could have stopped the genocide if strengthened, while France trained and armed the génocidaires. Kagame’s supporters further point to high economic growth rates of 8% in the last 17 years; falling poverty and socio-economic inequality; and increased gender equality (with 56% female parliamentarians). Rwanda’s per capita income increased from $150 in 1994 to the current $700, and poverty reportedly fell from 57% in 2006 to 40% in 2014. Kagame’s fans also note that the regime has tackled corruption; attracted foreign investment; created a national air-line; kept the streets clean (even banning the use of plastic bags!); established the country as a technology hub; and built infrastructure such as roads, a conference centre, and a new airport. It is not only Wole Soyinka who has been infatuated with Kagame. Former US president, Bill Clinton – who ironically did the most to prevent any international action during the 1994 Rwandan genocide - and former British premier, Tony Blair, have also praised Kagame’s “visionary leadership”, leaving one to wonder whether they apply different standards in measuring the achievements of African leaders.
Kagame’s apparent achievements must be closely scrutinised. He has consistently won presidential polls with over 90% of the vote (95% in 2003; 93% in 2010; and 98% in 2017) as if acting like a cheating student, awarding himself marks in an exam whose results have been predetermined. Such large presidential majorities are the preserve of dictators such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. They are not how democratic leaders are elected. In response to claims that Kagame has kept the streets clean, Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, also famously made the trains run on time.
Rwanda is a highly militarised state in which soldiers are ubiquitous. Kagame clearly runs a police state in which dissent is brutally suppressed. Human rights organisations and civil society are stifled; opposition parties harassed; and the media muzzled. Even talking of Hutus and Tutsis is regarded as “divisionism,” as if such a complex phenomenon as ethnicity can simply be wished away with an autocrat’s magic wand. Though he often likes to portray himself as a media-savvy president, Kagame’s regime has clamped down harshly on media freedom. According to the BBC – whose Kinyarwanda service in Rwanda was blocked in 2014 - in the last two decades, an estimated eight journalists were killed or “disappeared”, 11 were convicted to lengthy jail terms, and 33 have been forced to flee the country into exile. Many journalists thus tend to self-censor (though there are some critical call-in radio programmes), and investigative journalists are frequently harassed. Last February, for example, the police seized the computers of two journalists of the East African newspaper.
Critics such as Belgian academic, Filip Reyntjens, have also questioned the fiddling of Rwandan government economic figures to make the regime look better. Part of Rwanda’s economic performance is further accounted for by the fact that this growth was from a low base, and fuelled by Western guilt at having passively watched a genocide and prevented international action to stop it. Half of Rwanda’s budget a decade ago was accounted for by foreign aid; it remains about a fifth today. Like many African countries, Rwanda has also experienced growth without transformative economic development. About 80% of its population still lives below the World Bank’s poverty line of $3.10 a day. In a fit of folie de grandeur, Rwanda is sometimes described as the “Singapore of Africa”. The comparisons between Kagame and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew are, however, pure fantasy: though Lee was autocratic, he was also a genuine Cambridge-trained intellectual who transformed his city-state into becoming one of the world’s most developed economies.
Paralleling domestic repression, Kagame’s regime has also been accused of sponsoring assassinations of its opponents abroad. His former intelligence chief, Patrick Karegeya, was killed in a plush Sandton hotel in Johannesburg in 2014. Though Kigali officially denied involvement, Kagame noted shortly after the murder: “You can’t betray Rwanda and not get punished for it. Anyone, even those still alive, will reap the consequences.” This chilling warning seemed to equate betraying the country with betraying its leader: a common trait of fellow autocrats like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni.
Aside from his repressive domestic role, Kagame has also played a destabilising regional role. Several UN reports have accused his soldiers – and those of Uganda - of looting the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) mineral resources, after Kigali and Kampala invaded the country twice from 1997, becoming embroiled in a conflict that has resulted in over 3 million deaths. An estimated 200,000 people – including, doubtless, innocent civilians – were killed when Kagame’s troops entered the eastern Congo in 1996/1997 in pursuit of former genocidal militias who were launching attacks into Rwanda. Kagame has also sought to “launder” his image by hosting the African Union (AU) summit in July 2016, and chairing a report to reform the continental body.
Wole Soyinka once described Nigeria - under the brutal regime of General Abacha - as enjoying the “peace of the graveyard”. Rwanda, under Kagame, now appears to be in a similar situation. Though one should acknowledge the progress that the country has made 23 years after a traumatic genocide, Kagame’s repressive rule could paradoxically make another genocide more and not less likely. By establishing a system that relies for its survival on a man suffering from a “messiah complex” rather than on the more solid foundations of stable institutions, the demise or elimination of that ruler could bring to the surface all the pent-up frustration, resentment, and anger of the suppressed Hutu majority. The seeds of the system’s destruction may, in fact, lie within it. Kagame once noted, that if he had not been able to groom a successor by 2017, “it means that I have not created capacity for a post-me Rwanda. I see this as a personal failure.” He is, of course, correct. The mistake that autocrats like Kagame often make is to assume their own personal immortality.
The big puzzle, however, remains why Soyinka, an activist Nobel literature laureate – who famously noted that “the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny” – and who has spent a six-decade career championing human rights across Africa, can not see through the myth of a developmental dictator, and condemn this repressive system unequivocally. What explains this curious relationship between the president and the playwright?
Professor Adekeye Adebajo is Director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
The Guardian (Nigeria). And Business Day (South Africa), both published on 21 August 2017.
Professor Adekeye Adebajo
Director, Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation
University of Johannesburg
5 Molesey Avenue Auckland Park 2092
Johannesburg, South Africa
Tel: 011 559 7232
Fax: 086 527 6448
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