Modibbo Kawu
BEING TEXT OF CONTRIBUTION BY IS’HAQ MODIBBO KAWU, Ph.D.; FNGE. TO AFROBEAT REBELLION: FELA ANIKULAPO KUTI. THE TALKS. TOPIC: FELA’S LYRICS: GO INTO THE LYRICS. AN EXPLORATION OF FELA’S LYRICAL ACTIVISM. HOLDING AT THE ECOBANK PANAFRICAN CENTRE, 270 OZUMBA MBADIWE AVENUE, VICTORIA ISLAND, LAGOS. 1700 HRS.
NOVEMBER 1ST, 2025.
For practically every member of my generation, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s music, and his very inspired commitment to a vision of society that placed the interest of the people at the heart of governance, influenced us a great deal. For me, as an individual, I have related very deeply with the various phases of artistic and political developments that characterised Fela’s oeuvre and how these different phases of artistic development transformed the music, the man, and the artist. Let me start by asserting that I have held an abiding interest in the nexus between art and the social and economic conditions in human society.
From this standpoint, it is very easy to appreciate the individual genius of the artist, while understanding that such individuality is actually shaped by the prevailing mode of production and the class relations in society. The artist who becomes conscious of these realities, then finds out, as Fela eventually did, that his artistic genius is to reflect, critique, and hopefully, assist to transform society, through the process of conscientization, that artistic ingenuity conveys. Of course, this aesthetical standpoint appreciates the fact that the power of art lies in its ability to affect and influence people at those deeper, sensory, and emotional levels. That was precisely the role that Fela’s music played at the height of its artistic, as well as political power.
In a 1931 paper titled: On Literature and Art, the Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, Anatoly Lunacharsky, wrote of what he called the three basic features of every artist:
The first of these is his unusual sensitivity to his environment, his unusually receptive nature. The second is the rich and complicated method by which he processes internally the material that he received from external sources. And finally, the third feature is his ability to reproduce in his works with the maximum effect, vividness and expressiveness, everything which has been taken from objective reality and then processed and coloured by the artist’s subjective temperament.
My own personal experiences of the Fela Phenomenon offered me an appreciation of the fecundity of the artist’s mind and how that fecundity has been shaped very much, by his encounters with the late colonial and neo-colonial realities of our country. The very interesting artistic description of a late colonial city (based on Ekwensi’s encounter with Lagos), has been conveyed in the 1954 debut novel of Cyprian Ekwensi, People of the City. It is the story of the aspirant crime reporter, Amusa Sango.
In my view, it is a very illustrative piece of writing that captured the emergence of the urban city and the urban phenomenon, with its characteristics: the aspirant urban bourgeois strata of lawyers, merchants, media entrepreneurs/editors, and doctors, who provided the leadership for the anti-colonial nationalism of the epoch. The urban working class of the railways, ports authority, electricity, marines, and other proletarian elements, that constituted the mass base of the trade union movement, who also provided membership and followership of the nationalist/ anti-colonial movement. And then the Amusa Sango type of aspirant reporters, artists (the Fela type), members of the vibrant highlife bands (the Bobby Bensons of that epoch) and night life habitués, and the mass of the urban lumpen of prostitutes (Ekwensi created Jagua Nana out of this group), sundry hustlers, and criminals. There were other elements, such as petty traders, thrown in for good measure.
The reality was that an urban type had been consolidated by the end of the Second World War, and it was, therefore, not a coincidence, that urban cities like Lagos, Accra, or Freetown, in West Africa, would be at the heart of the anti-colonial movement. It was also within the setting of the urban melange of cultures that highlife music could have emerged. Tejumola Olaniyan in his: Arrest The Music! FELA & His Rebel Art & Politics made a most telling description of highlife music:
As a decidedly non-ethnic music, highlife is perhaps Nigeria’s first truly national music, and it helped to widely broadcast, in sensuous form, intimations of loyalties beyond the ethnic group. Bands travelled widely and sang in various languages. Unlike existing popular musics such as juju, apala, or sakara, highlife’s verbal and aural imagery were profoundly secular and cosmopolitan, tied to the pressures of the modern urban context- the meeting place where ethnic identities and interests are renegotiated and reshaped-that gave birth to it. There is little doubt about it: highlife was the quintessential soundtrack to Nigerian independence, the upbeat music of the arriviste bourgeoisie with a modernist ideology that by its refined cultured outlook and hard work would peel off colonial shame and transform Nigeria into a modern, developed, and respected nation. (2009:15).
Of course, what Olaniyan said about the musical forms in the Yoruba-speaking parts of Nigeria, were being replicated in other regions as well. Even the more traditional setting of Northern Nigeria, also experienced the disruptive impact of highlife music, especially in cities like Kaduna, which had Bala Miller’s highlife outfit, or Jos with the Sahara Dance Band built on a sub-soil of a cosmopolitanism fuelled by tin mining and a significant colonial enterprise, with the attraction of diverse groups of people from all over Nigeria; while cities like Kano and Ilorin regularly hosted highlife bands from all over Nigeria.
What we know is that highlife provided the backdrop for Fela’s musical journey. He endeavoured to innovate within the tradition with arguably, mixed success. But the world was also changing. Independence came in that broad wave which commenced in 1957 in Ghana, and the decade of the 1960s was to become the decade of Independence in most of Africa. A lot more was happening in the world besides. There were the mass students’ revolts of the 1960s in Europe; the mass anti-Vietnam War manifestations that the Pakistani/British writer, Tariq Ali, described as the “street fighting years”.
The continent-wide impact of the Cuban Revolution, and the emergence of its heroic representatives, like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, on Latin America. There was also the emergence of the civil rights marches in the United States, the Black Panthers Movement; the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X; as well as the stirring speeches of Martin Luther King. The armed struggles for liberation in the Portugese-speaking colonies of Africa, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, were also minting new African heroes like Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Machel, Augustinho Neto, and most notably, Amilcar Cabral. This was a most engaging historical backdrop for the deepening of artistic education and political insight.
By this time, jazz music too had evolved away from the big band and swing eras with the prominent roles of Louis Armstrong, to the more radical interpretations by Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Dizzy Gillespie. It was more intellectual and certainly very sophisticated. This background was going to impact Fela’s work; the influences shifted him decisively into the artist that would return to Nigeria after the musical sojourn in the United States. He conveyed the deepening consciousness of his encounters with Sandra Izsadore, and elements in the Black Liberation Movement. The Fela that emerged was one that was very much able to take a more critical and certainly radical look at the country he returned to, and the depredations of a neo-colonial state. Fela never weaned himself away from a fascination with jazz.
I recall that he used to partake in jazz jam sessions with his niece and husband, Frances and Tunde Kuboye at Jazz 38 in Ikoyi, and I had been privileged, not just to watch him perform on a Friday night, sometime in 1987, but also enjoyed a ride back to the Afrika Shrine with the maestro. After the performance that night, my friend, Didier Martin, then French Adviser at the Kwara State Ministry of Education and I approached Fela with a request to drive with him to the Afrika Shrine. He obliged us, and told three of the ladies that accompanied him to accompany us in our own vehicle as we followed him to drive through the Agege Motor Way, in a mind-bending speed, to watch him perform his Afro Beat songs that night.
By the mid-1970s, I had finished secondary school and was recruited to work by the defunct Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), Radio Nigeria. I started out as a Studio Manager (Trainee), before becoming an announcer and presenter. Eventually, I became a Disc Jockey (Dee Jay), who regularly presented music programmes and therefore had to select Fela’s music amongst several other artists. My own life was also evolving, in an ideological manner. By this time, I had also become increasingly politicised, just like other members of my generation. I selected and played music consciously to assist in conscientization of my listeners. Fela was therefore a very important part of the choices that I made over the years. His art was very much part of the process of our conscientisation.
There are three poignant episodes which tell me about the artistic genius of Fela and which speak to his incredible ability to reflect the objective reality of the society that he lived in. A couple of years ago, I was driving to Lagos in the company of three other friends. It was a very rainy afternoon, and on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, we had an accident which, luckily, was not as serious as another accident on the other side of the road. There was a bus conveying people for a burial. The casket had been on the roof of the bus, but the impact from the accident, flung the casket into the bush, while six of the people conveying the dead body died on the spot!
We joined others in the rain to assist people who were injured, while some of the passengers from the bus, went into the dense bush, to search for, and eventually lift out the casket and the dead body. By this time, there was a traffic build up which made movement impossible; and it was still raining! The very eerie scenario immediately brought to my mind Fela’s lyrics from the song, CCB (Confusion Break Bone): “Deadi Bodi Get Accident Yepa; Confusion Breaki Bone Yepa; Na double Wahala for Deadi Bodi and the Owner of Deadi Body”. In that short period of being caught up in that accident, Fela’s song was enacted and the confusion of existence in our country was played before us.
A few weeks after the creepy experience on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, I had to go to a police station in Ilorin. There were so many people as often happens in Nigerian police stations. Each person had a reason to see the DPO. What struck me was that almost everyone was handing some amount of money to the policemen, for onward delivery to the DPO, one way or the other. Again, my mind went to Fela. He once sang that police stations have now become banks and the DPO was a bank manager! It took the ingenuity of the artist to put that together. It was only an artist at the height of his power and a most penetrating glance into the entrails of society that could see the metamorphosis of a police station into a “bank” and the DPO’s new role as a “bank manager”.
There is something about the way that the mind of the artist works. The outstanding artist seems to live in a rarefied height of creativity that allowed him/her to look at or relate with social existence and then draw in the vital lessons that our “ordinary eyes” see but cannot see, at the same time. In 2007, I was part of a delegation of The African Editors’ Forum (TAEF) attending the African Union’s Summit in Accra, Ghana. It was hosted by Ghana to commemorate its 50th Independence Anniversary. We spent the whole week in the company of one of Africa’s greatest musicians, Hugh Masekela.
I did a very long interview with Hugh Masekela that we ran inside Daily Trust. One of the most interesting accounts was the month that he said he lived with Fela in Lagos. Hugh Masekela told me that they were having breakfast at a weekend; and by that time, Fela owned a rather scroungy donkey for a pet, in his compound. But the story was not just the fact that Fela had a donkey, according to Hugh, but the fact that he named the donkey after one of the Nigerian military heads of state of that period. As the story goes, Fela called the donkey by the name of that military ruler, and he then turned to Hugh: “Can you see that, Hugh? Did you notice that he is as dull as his namesake?”! It was only the fecundity of the artist’s mind that could have created such a scenario.
I want to illustrate my story of the powers of the lyrics of Fela’s songs with four of his successful songs. These are Yellow Fever (1976); Ikoyi Blindness (1976); Upside Down (1976) and Zombie (1976). I think that was one of the most productive periods in the Fela story. He was reaching the heights of artistic power, as well as a much deeper understanding of, and dissection of the problems of our neo-colonial society. It was also a neo-colonial society that was caught in the bear-hug of a neo-colonial military dictatorship. That was the phase of physical power, that he would play the tenor saxophone, the alto saxophone, the baritone saxophone and the piano, as well as sing the songs.
Yellow Fever was a song that reflected Fela’s deeply-felt worry about the self-deprecating practice of skin bleaching and the fundamental crisis of loss of self-esteem in an effort to escape being black or African. Being light-skinned is closer to “whiteness”, and it is therefore an aspiration which underlines the continuing impact of the worst excesses inherited from slavery and colonialism that continued to cloud the consciousness of the African or the Nigerian. The song from 1976 was a powerful repudiation of that mindset and a reinforcement of the African, his black skin colour, and the humanity these convey.
The artist is the genius: “Different, Different Fever Na Him Dey; Different, Different Fever Na Him Dey”; Malaria Fever Nko? He Dey; Jaundice Fever Nko? He Dey; Hay Fever Nko? He Dey; Influenza Fever Nko? He Dey; Inflation Fever Nko? He Dey; Freedom Fever Nko? He Dey; Yellow Fever Nko? He Dey; Na Him Dey bring the matter, Now He Dey”! The song progresses to the point where he spoke about the original and artificial. The original can be fatal because it kills. If the afflicted survives, he would or can fully recover. However, what about the artificial? “Na you go catch am yourself; Na your money go do am for you; You go yellow pass yellow; your Nyash go black like coal; you sef go tink say you dey fine; who say you fine?Na lie you no fine at all, at all na lie”!
This was a very powerful repudiation of an African practice that debases the African skin colour, and celebrates a grovelling surrender to notions of whiteness that are also conveyed in the manner that our neo-colonial ruling classes relate to imperialism. 37 years later, in 2013, I leaned on Fela’s song, Yellow Fever, for the title of my weekly newspapers’ column’s article of June 13, 2013. The article was titled: “Who Stole My ‘Bleashing’?”. That month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had issued a report that 77% of women in Nigeria used skin-lightening products; 59% of Togolese women use these creams; and up to 27% of Senegalese women, too!
The report added that the Nigerian figure is “the world’s highest percentage”! Stripped of subterfuge, Nigerians were the greatest number of people who suffer most, the inferiority complex at the heart of skin bleaching. The WHO report found out that “most people said they used skin-lighteners because they want ‘white skin’”. The deep-seated inferiority complex conveyed added that in many parts of Africa, lighter-skinned women are considered more beautiful and even believed “to be more successful and likely to find success in marriage”. But it is not only a problem with African women. The men too are not left out. There used to be a popular Nigerian governor from the South-East and in more recent years, a governor from the North-Central, who were poster boys for skin bleaching! But Fela had already seen that trend by 1976 to have done a hit record about it.
Ikoyi Blindness was also a song that he released in 1976. It is a very strong repudiation of the Nigerian neo-colonial bourgeoisie resident in Ikoyi and the socio-economic gulf that they have cultured vis-à-vis the working-class neighbourhoods of Mushin, Shomolu, and Maroko. Ikoyi Blindness speaks to the consolidation of a class society in Nigeria society represented by this bourgeois elite that has “missed road”. “You miss road, you miss road; if you miss road, you no go reach; because that no be the road, no be the road wey you for take. One man wey a know him be lawyer, him go buy de ting for him work, Him go buy de ting dem call spanner; wetin lawyer go take spanner do? One man wey I know him be music, him go buy de ting for him work, he go buy de ting dem call hammer, wetin music go take hammer do?Dem no go reach where dem dey go, because dat no be de road o, no be de road wey you for take”.
There was an element of a partial redemption for the lawyer and “the music”. The lawyer purchased books while the “music” bought the “Goje”. “Dem use dem sense…dem miss road and found dem road again”. But that is not the case with the man “wey no see road at all, wey go stand near river. Na shallow, Shallow him go drop o”. Obviously, that man is the man who lives in Ikoyi: “From Alagbon Close to Atlantic Ocean. Wey dem dey for Ikoyi dem no see road at all. Wey dem no see us for Mushin, at all, at all; wey dem no see us for Shomolu at all, at all; wey dem no see us for Ajegunle, at all, at all; Maroko nko, dem no see at all, at all; wey dem no see us for Kalakuta at all, at all; na shallow him go drop o; Shallow, Shallow, him go drop o”. The call and response pattern went on and on, conveying the incredible message of a society that has been torn asunder by a neo-colonial class structure, which places Ikoyi in polar opposite of the working-class neighbourhoods that the increasingly radical and radicalised artist name-called in the exhilarating song. You could enjoy the artistry but cannot fail to get the message.
The third song from the 1976 collection is Upside Down. This song is an unusual expression of respect for the time that he had spent touring in the United States, almost a decade earlier. That was in 1969. It was the period of his intense political, and they also say, a romantic relationship, with the activist, Sandra Izsadore. This song was vocalised by Sandra in Pidgin English! It spoke to a deep concern for the African condition and all the issues that conveyed, and have been at the heart of his artistic and political concerns, from the time of Fela’s intense conscientisation in the United States.
“Open dat book dem call Dictionary; open am make we see; I say open dat book dem call dictionary, open am make we see; upside down him dey dere proper; open am make we see; dem recognise de word for sure, yes; open am make we see; because him get him meaning too; head for up nyash for down; upside down get him meaning too; head for down nyash for up…I don travel I don see, like any professor for this land; de ting wey I see I go talk about upside down up and down side down. For oversea where I have been: communication organise; pata pata; education organise, pata pata; electric organise, pata pata; dem system organise, pata pata; dem people organise, pata pata. English men get English name; American men get American name; German men get German name; Russian man get Russian name; Chinese men get Chinese name”.
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, in Sandra’s voice, then makes a sharp comparison between what has been experienced abroad and what is available at home in Africa. “For Africa my hometown I don see; like any professor for this land; I no go travel anywhere; everything dem under my nose. For Africa my hometown, I don see; village boku, road no dey; land boku food no dey; area boku, house no dey. People no dey bear African names; people no dey tink African style; people no know African grade; for Africa my hometown I don see eee; communication disorganise, pata pata; education disorganise, pata pata; electric disorganise, pata pata; everything is upside down, pata pata”.
Play this song again today, and we will still be in awe of the artistic collaboration between Fela and Sandra Izsadore. But most incredibly is the way that the “upside down and down side up” phenomenon has continued to be central to the African condition. Fela sang in 1976, but from the mid-1980s, we have been saddled with some of the most ruinous processes of African underdevelopment with the institution of neoliberal capitalist policies: the privatisation and sale of state assets; the removal of subsidised education, health care and social services; state capture by a rapacious bourgeoisie that is completely beholden to Imperialism, and the near-religious devotion to the Washington Consensus; the hollowing out of the capacity of the state as an instrument of social development and its consecration solely for the appropriation of private capital. Fela sang through Sandra’s voice and she conveyed the realities of a continent that has been locked in processes that perpetually stunts the liberation of its true potentials.
The final song from the 1976 collection that I am speaking to their lyrics is Zombie. Personally, I think this is, arguably, the most artistically complete of all of Fela’s songs. Tony Allen, without doubt, the greatest drummer in the history of popular music, provided the rhythmic wings for Fela and the entire band to fly in the song! The horns arrangements were superb and the trumpet solos of Tunde Williams; the Baritone sax of Lekan Animashaun complimented the ensemble’s very disciplined and incredibly martial force of the arrangements as well as the discipline of the song itself. The master’s own solos and the delicate weave of truly professional musicianship and an electrifying, but remarkably defiant lyrics, gave the song a very special halo. Fela surpassed himself in Zombie, and he gave us all the pause, about the realities of military dictatorship.
Fela had been having running battles with representatives of the coercive arms of the Nigerian state especially from most of the early years of the 1970s. There were clashes and arrests as well as invasions of his “Kalakuta Republic” residence. These clashes had been captured in such songs as the 1974 hit “Alagbon Close”; and the 1975 song “Kalakuta Show”. But it was with Zombie that the s**t properly and most shockingly hit the ceiling fan, as the saying goes. The military dictatorship became completely unhinged and went for the jugular. A whole army group launched an attack on Fela’s abode; burnt it down completely; assaulted the occupants, including reports of the alleged rapes of the women; Fela himself was seriously injured, and his nationalist mother, Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was thrown out of a window!
Zombie o, Zombie, Zombie o, Zombie; Zombie no go go unless you tell am to go, Zombie; Zombie no go stop unless you tell am to stop, Zombie; Zombie no go turn unless you tell am to turn, Zombie; Zombie no go tink unless you tell am to tink, Zombie; Zombie o Zombie…Tell am to go straight, Joro-jara-joro; no break, no jam, no sense, Joro-jara-joro; tell am to go kill, joro-jara-joro; no break, no jam, no sense, joro-jara-joro; tell am to go quench, joro-jara-joro; no jam, no break, no sense, joro-jara-joro. Go and kill, joro-jara-joro; go and die, joro-jara-joro; go and kwench, joro-jara-joro; put am for reverse, joro-jara-joro. Go and kill, Joro-jara-joro; go and die, joro-jara-joro; put am for reverse, joro-jara-joro…Eh-hen!
Joro-jara-joro o, Zombie wey na one way, Joro-jara-joro o; Zombie wey na one way o, Joro-jara-joro; Zombie wey na one way o, joro-jara-joro , Zombie wey na one way o, joro-jara-joro ooooo o! Attention! Quick March! Slow March! Left Turn! Right Turn! About Turn! Double Up! Salute! Open your hat! Stand at Ease! Fall In! Fall Out! Fall down! Get Ready! Attention! Quick March! Slow March! Left Turn! Right Turn! About Turn! Double Up! Salute! Open Your Hat! Stand at ease! Fall In! Fall Out! HALT! ONE MORE TIME EVERYBODY! D-I-S-M-I-S-S!!! At the end of the song, the maestro now indulged in a most pulsating, brilliant, and annoyingly satirical play, on the military “Last Post” before subverting it with a final note of defiance which brought the finale to the classic song!
Let me confess that the very first time that I ever heard Zombie on radio, I was already a member of staff of Radio Nigeria. I was also an aspiring deejay and I used to monitor the presentation of other deejays on various Nigerian radio stations. These included Alex Conde, Yanju Adegbite, Battiloi Warritey, and Deji L. Haastrup on Radio O-Y-O, Ibadan; Sesan Ekisola on Ogun Radio Abeokuta; John Chukwu; Tony Ibegbuna; Benson Idonije, Willie Egbe, and a host of others, on Radio Nigeria, etc. That first morning, it was Alex Conde, on Radio O-Y-O, Ibadan, who introduced what he termed a most remarkable new hit, from Africa’s most hard-working musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti! The song was Zombie. I knew we were in for a trailblazing new song that would have far-reaching consequences. And it did!
Fela’s music and the power of the lyrics of his songs were very much a tributary in the powerful flow of African consciousness, especially during the decades of the 1970s and the 1980s. We must also add the 1960s, in fact, as the point of embarkation for what turned out to be some of the most intellectually productive and artistically fecund moments in African history. It was part of his truly inspiring longevity and staying power, that he was re-inventing his art, including the introduction of two bass guitars and the heavy drums right up to the end of his life.
He was also reinventing his band through the decades: Fela Ransome Kuti-Kuti & The Koola Lobitos; Fela Ransome Kuti & the Africa 70s; Fela Anikulapo-Kuti & The Egypt 80s Band. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was very much a man of his times, and was therefore able to reflect these truly stirring moments in African history. But far more poignant was the fact that he was a major factor in the creation, consolidation, and dissemination of the popular culture of resistance which is the essence of all true art. It is also why the lyrics of his different songs will continue to reflect the aspirations for a truly free and people-centred society in Nigeria and Africa.
REFERENCES:
Lunarchasky, A: (1936) On Literature and Art. Marxists.org
Olaniyan, T: (2009): Arrest the Music! Fela & His Rebel Art & Politics. Ibadan, BookCraft.
