Fela’s Eternal Youth
by Tseliso Monaheng
I'm surfing the net. This is the fastest the connection has been since the weekend. I download a couple of torrents of mostly rap music and leave them seeding overnight. There's an album called Expensive Shit by one Fela Kuti included. The next morning, a one-track-missing Expensive Shit folder is visible on the desktop.
I'd heard about Fela for so long that he'd become legend. He'd defected from active imagination and descended into an abyss of Afro-beaten reveries. Discovering Expensive Shit was the missing link. Suddenly, the legend assumed a tangible state. The title track, inspired by Fela’s stint in prison following one Simbiat Abiola's report that his stick-up kids had jacked her red car at gunpoint, amplified Fela's legend.
What was it about this man that left Obasanjo and his goons so shook?
A non-exhaustive rummage through the gophers of our catastrophe-prone present reveals the answer. More than 40 years after its release, Water still turns party-goers into itinerant militants on the dancefloor. Nineteen years after his passing, Fela's ideas are the fodder fuelling young people's fire across multiple disciplines on the African continent and throughout the diaspora. So, in the same way systems of governance in Nigeria sought to silence Fela, they’re silencing young, militant voices in Maseru; they’re policing Universities and enacting violence on students at Fort Hare; they lie in glass chambers while #discontent is the number one trending topic in Bulawayo.
And that’s just the tip.
For Brooklyn-based Ghanaian emcee Blitz the Ambassador, Fela inspired a specific sensibility: fuck the rules and just do the damn thing. Recently-returned from two performances on the Southern African festival circuit -- one at Bushfire in Swaziland and another at Zakifo, Durban -- he shares a story about how the song Free Your Mind off of the Native Sun album came about.
"[It's] probably one of the most complicated compositions that I made from scratch," he says, referring to the twenty or so parts to the song. He mouthed every part before giving it to his band, the delightful Mighty Embassy Ensemble, to play. "When I sing a part that I think is perfect for the trumpet, I'll end up [giving] that part instead to the bassline," he says.
It’s a technique Blitz often employs, "just to break out of what people [consciously] expect." In this way, he's challenging our thinking patterns as related to music have been constructed.
Elsewhere in his catalogue, Blitz recruits like-minded spirit Nneka for a collaboration. Whenever they link up, they discuss matters pertaining to the continent.
"We're talking about how do we go back home; how do we go back properly; how do we connect with the local [people who have] been building...and be able to merge what we've done internationally with what's happening locally," he says.
His statement brings to mind what a young Fela did following his return from #Brex…sorry, London. He went back to a nascent Lagos. He devised a form of music and pushed his own agenda.
Nneka took a leaf from Fela and has been making socially-conscious yet funky-as-fuck music for over a decade. Her ode V.I.P (Vagabonds In Power) is a Tony Allen-inspired drumline and a Spanish guitar sample -- music provided by longtime collaborator DJ Farhot. She delivers a new-age chant to the corrupt officials who still rule with an iron fist; whose tongues are laden with lies; who charm their way into the hearts of a leaderless continent with the empty rhetoric of 'a brighter future.'
Listening to Nneka is like witnessing a Fela Ransome-Kuti whose mind has been unshackled from the bonds of toxic masculinity.
"Dey rip my pride and dignity away," she sings on V.I.P, and then adds the refrain "dey make me dey suffer."
It’s a roll-call of violent empires instituted through oppressive means. It's a big up to ‘our’ women in Chibok; a dap to the 147 in Garissa; an air punch to the workers and students operating under the watchful eye of Big Brother at University campuses in Jozi.
Jozi offers fertile ground for the pan-Africanist ideals enshrined in Afro-beat. Kwelagobe Sekele is drawn by these and continues to apply them, to great effect, long after Kwani ceased being an Experience. "The music of Fela gets me. I resonate with the zero-fucks attitude and the coming together of different styles and sounds that make up Afrobeat. And it's big and bold and it's Black Consciousness," says Sekele.
Sekele's new project - Yeoville Radio - came about from imagining how a unifying voice in the boho suburb-turned-unofficial township that is Yeoville would sound. “That ship that it is carries all these African [nations],” he says.
Fela's deep. He's spiritual. He's also eternal youth, in the same way that mam'Sibongile Khumalo and bab'Sipho Mabuse are; in how Papa Ramps’ poetry fires on...
Fela's also inspired Nduduzo Makhathini, who took a page off of the originator's script to pen an homage called "King Fela" on his SAMA-nominated album Listening to the Ground. The music and the song comprise some of the most tripped-out Afro-Cubano lock-step harmonies this side of the KZN Midlands, from where the pianist, composer and producer originates. If Lagos were to take a boda-boda across these imaginary lines we term borders, passengers would hear this song playing at full volume on some border official's phone on the Mzansi side of Beit Bridge ,(assuming you have the dollars to bribe said officials at all the borders you would’ve had to cross).
TIA, and that’s just the way it goes.
Fela's deep. He's spiritual. He's also eternal youth, in the same way that mam'Sibongile Khumalo and bab'Sipho Mabuse are; in how Papa Ramps’ (Lesego Rampolokeng) poetry fires on despite an 18-25-obsessed marketing machine designed to put pressure on you to get your shit together before 30, because before you know it the half-a-century thing is happening and you don’t have kids and ermagerrrd it’s time to press the panic button!
Chill with these ideas of an expiring youth. Where there's Fela, there's no 18-25.