Afrobeat

by Ntone Edgabe

Part 1 of 2

Special to G21 Africa

To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, copy and paste the complete URL ("http://www.g21.net/africa26.html") and enter it in the box after you click through.

"To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song; you must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people, the songs will come by themselves, and of themselves."

The deep voice of Sekou Toure announces my arrival behind the decks at the Curve in Observatory, Cape Town. A strange place, this Curve. A darkie vibe in a joint owned and frequented by whities who feel there should be a darkie vibe in their neighbourhood. On a weekly basis these friendly cats get to hear two of the voices most feared by their grandparents as I open my gig. Toure's baritone and an excerpt of Kwame Nkrumah welcoming African freedom fighters at the Accra Conference in June 1962.

Then comes the gong, reminiscent of the Far Eastern intonations at the end of Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise. It is followed by a Yoruba war cry coming from the depths of Abeokuta, Nigeria.

The first connection with contemporary Western music is made with the introduction of a chirping staccato line by the 'tenor' guitar, backed by the small percussion (shekere, clips and lead congas). The rhythm guitar then enters, followed by a simultaneous entrance of bass guitar, rhythm congas and drum set, completing the rhythm section foundation of the tune.

At this point, the syncopated bass drum and hi-hat patterns of Tony Allen, the man behind the set, fool the uneducated into believing they are in the familiar territory of funk a la James Brown. But a brief tenor sax improvisation brings back the confusion to its fullest. Those who began dancing are now slowing down to internalise the lines. Confusion Break Bone. Is this jazz, they seem to wonder.

While they're deciding whether to dance or listen, the horns make a dramatic entrance to introduce the song's main musical theme, then continues through a series of call-and-response structures with various soloists.

This is music to dance and listen.

The voice only comes in much later, sometimes 15 minutes into the song: "Lets get down to the Underground Spiritual Game," it goes. That's the last clue.

By now all those in the club who can point out Nigeria on the map of Africa are elevating their knees and punching the smoky atmosphere with clenched fists. The dance steps for revolutionary music. They know the steps. Not so long ago they used them routinely in front of the old SADF's buffaloes and hippos in the townships. They called them toyi-toyi back then. Today the steps are mostly used indoors on most of Bob Marley's "Uprising," Franklin Boukaka's "Le Bucheron" or anything Thomas Mapfumo put to vinyl during the seventies.

Or when COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) propagandists remember their existence. At the Curve though, this knee-up-raised-fist ballet is reduced to just a dance, a physical response to a post-colonial rhythmical assault in provenance of Lagos, Nigeria.

No chanting down of Babylon here. There is simply no other way to listen, or dance to Afrobeat.

Invariably, somewhere towards the middle of the set, in between the screaming horns of Shakara and the polyrhythmic frenzy of Roforofo Fight, a youngish looking white guy would approach the decks.

"Howzit bru?" I would hear, in that voice of white men who believe Quentin Tarantino is the human face of God.

My eyes would meet his smile. (It's the same smile many white South Africans have when they are about to learn something, anything, from a black person. The grin we gave our mother when she first caught us with the hand in the jar. Shame.) "What's this music bru?"

Once the fatal question is asked, White Boy's face transforms into a notepad and pen, a Dictaphone, a video recorder, a CD writer and every imaginable recording equipment out of Japan.

He has clearly been touched by the music. I can tell he would rush onto the Internet to find out more, if only he knew what to ask his search engine. He is even willing to learn the steps. His eyes tell me he never wants to be in this position again. So my ego enjoys the situation for a few seconds before I mercifully lean across the turntables, as if to share a secret, and mouth off the two magical syllables:

FE-LA

.

"You Africans listen to me as Africans. You non-Africans listen to me with an open mind," The Man used to say at the beginning of a yabi session. So I convey this message to White Boy.

As he nods pretentiously before returning to the dancefloor, White Boy looks empowered. He wants more. He is now trying to remember some of Sekou Toure's words at the beginning of the session.

"In order to achieve real action, you must yourself be a living part of Africa and of her thought; you must be an element of that popular energy which is entirely called forth the freeing, the progress and the happiness of Africa. There is no place outside that fight for the artist or for the intellectual who is not himself concerned with and completely at one with the people in the great battle of Africa and of the suffering humanity."

Like the pro-black ideologists across the Diaspora, the Guinean leader pondered a means by which popular culture could function as a simultaneous vehicle for aesthetic pleasure, cultural awareness, and revolutionary consciousness. From both sides of the Atlantic, these thinkers imagined the endless, potentially explosive, cross-cultural combinations of music and 'blackism' on one coast and African nationalism on the other.

Suppose James Brown read Frantz Fanon? Better even, suppose Malcom X heard Ghanaian highlife pioneer E.T. Mensah, they dreamed in their seminars.

Then in 1970, a budding Yoruba jazz-highlife musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti (then Ransome-Kuti), returned from a short stay in the US. There he had been introduced to the writings of Malcom X, hung with Black Panthers, mimicked James Brown and John Coltrane, and in the process found out he could be better than both of them. Afrobeat was born.

For the 27 years and 70-plus albums to follow, Fela would put "death in his pouch" - a translation of the Yoruba "Anikulapo" ­ to spread the Pan-Africanist gospel of Saint Kwame Nkrumah. His battlefield would be home. Worldwide. His enemies,

• successive Nigerian military governments and their supporters,
• corrupt African leaders and their sponsors,
• M.K.O. Abiola and multi-national capitalism,
• PW Botha and apartheid,
• Margaret Thatcher and British imperialism,
• Ronald Reagan and American supremacy,
• the Vatican,
• Mecca,
• most of the West and most of the East.

In short, Power in all its forms.

If power corrupts, dedicating one's life to fighting it has its own kickbacks. As most of the military leaders at the receiving end of his venom, the 'Black President' set an authoritarian rule over the Kalakuta Republic, Fela's Lagos-based commune and arguably the favourite practice target for the Nigerian army. A dictatorship enforced by his own army of musicians (Afrika 70 and later, Egypt 80). And similarly to the priest he describes in Coffin For Head Of State, the 'Chief Priest' demonstrated much fervour during his nightly preaching at the Afrika Shrine, his club, and the space in which his political inclinations fused with his musical incantations to assume spiritual dimensions.

And if music was going to be his weapon, the lifestyle supporting it had to be an integral part of his defence (or is it attack?) strategy. In sub-Saharan Africa you see, the line between art and life is finer than the see-through dresses his 27 "Queens" wore on stage. Here the term "art of living" takes its full meaning.

"Dem kill my mama. Political o mama," Fela mourns inside the bass speaker at the Curve. No bullshit here. Metaphors are only brought in to enhance the truth-telling. Facts dictate and creativity is rather invested in the musical score, like writing all the parts for his 30-strong ensembles, Afrika 70 and Egypt 80. Praise poets are running for cover.

So Fela didn't only sing about his life, he also lived his music. "Dem kill (his) mama" as a result of what is now commonly known as the 'Kalakuta Massacre', the most devastating of the multiples army raids to the commune, in February 1977.

Fela lost everything during the attack, including his recording studio, musical instruments, master tapes, the free health clinic he provided for the poor of Lagos and the multimillion dollar soundtrack to his film autobiography-in-then-progress, The Black President.

Most importantly, the invasion that led to the death of his mother, ironically coinciding with the British invasion of the Benin Kingdom (today's Nigeria) 80 years before, signalled the beginning of the end for Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ramsome-Kuti.

---

The Beginning itself took place during colonial times (October 15, 1938) in the Yoruba cultural capital of Abeokuta, setting the stage for a near-perfect illustration of Franz Fanon's theory of "the three stages of the native intellectual" in The Wretched Of The Earth.

Born as the fourth of five children in a upper middle-class family, Fela was cut for leadership from the onset. His paternal grandfather, the Reverend Canon Josiah Ransome-Kuti, was an Anglican pastor and a pioneer of the Christian church in Yorubaland. Most significantly, as a composer of religious hymns, he's considered the first West African to have his music commercially recorded ­ he recorded a series of 78-rpm religious discs for EMI Zonophone during a trip to London in 1925.

Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, Fela's father, also an Anglican pastor, was a prominent educator and the first president of the Nigerian Teachers Union. A member of the pre-independence Elliot Commission for the Institutionalisation of University Education in Nigeria, he is recognised as one of the founders of the country's higher education.

But it is likely Fela's political education started long before he could walk, on the back of Funmilayo Thomas Ransome-Kuti, his mother. Beere, as she was known to Nigerians, was an internationally recognised woman's rights activist, a staunch socialist and a confidante of Kwame Nkrumah, then president of Ghana. As the founder of the Nigerian Women's Union, she was the first African woman to cross the 'Iron Curtain' during the cold war -- she repeatedly visited China (where she met Chairman Mao Tse-Tsung), the USSR, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and East-Germany between 1953 and 1961, until her passport was confiscated by the Nigerian government.

The Ransome-Kuti's tradition of leadership and achievement was also extended to Fela's siblings. His older brother, Olikoye, first a professor of paediatrics, served as the country's Minister of Health from 1985 to 1993. He now works with the World Health Organisation. The family's youngest, Bekolari, also a physician, is a former leader of the Nigerian Medical Association. He also chaired the Campaign for Democracy (CD), a coalition of trade unions and civil rights organisations, and has duly spent much time in Nigerian jails since 1993 for his political activism.

Even members of the extended family contributed to the pot of glory. Fela's first cousin, novelist, poet, playwright and 1985 Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, spent his school holidays at the Ransome-Kuti home, and later shared an apartment with the musician during their college days in London.

And it is there, in the colonial cultural centre, argues Fanon in The Wretched, that the "native intellectual" first realises his/her unoriginality as a Westernised element in a Western society. Then, "in order to insure his salvation and to escape from the supremacy of the white man's culture the native feels the need to turn backwards towards his own roots," he writes. This complete rejection of the colonising culture is, according to Fanon, a reaction to the first phase, in which the work of the native intellectual is marked by a strong identification with the worldview of the colonial master, in which Things [begin to] Fall Apart.

The third phase, which Fanon calls "the fighting phase," is best described by Sekou Toure in the speech I use at the beginning of my set, the same Fanon used to open the chapter "On National Culture". Here the native intellectual outgrows the earlier romantic period, sharpening his/her critical eye and directing it towards his/her own native society.

Fela's introduction into the colonial world is obvious through his family background and his stint at Trinity College of Music in London in the late 50s, where the theoretical curriculum consisted in composition, harmony, counterpoint, and Western music history. On the practical side, he studied the trumpet. He continued to uphold these Western standards during the early part of his professional career, working self-consciously in the high-modernist modes of African-American jazz after his return to Nigeria in 1963.

The shift that had began to take place in the cultural melting pot of London was fermented by his politicisation in the US, and later flavoured by the mood of reconciliation that prevailed in post-Biafra Nigeria after his return. During this second phase Fela recognised local popular music, and in particular highlife, as a valid medium and began to integrate some of its elements into his own music [CONTINUED NEXT WEEK -- Ed.]

---

NTONE EDJABE is a Cameroon-born writer and DJ based in Cape Town, South Africa. He has published in various South African newspapers including the Cape Times and the Sunday Independent. He also regularly contributes for magazines such as Jazz Heritageand Big Issue.

Ntone hosts 'Soul Makossa' on Bush Radio, the most in-depth African music programme on South African radio. He also co-owns the Pan African Market aka Kalakuta Republic in Cape Town, the country's biggest African art and crafts market and a cultural centre dedicated to the promotion of Africa's cultures. He edits an All-Africa sports magazine for young adults called Hoops Africa. This is his first article for The World's Magazine.