n 
Olusegun 
Adekoya 
SINCE his transition into the world of the dead on 2nd August 1997, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti has 
been the subject of discourse, the most engaging issue, in the Nigerian media. There is 
hardly any aspect of his life and music that has not been discussed. It is thus with fear 
and trembling that we venture to lend ours to the plethora of voices acclaiming, 
analysing, condemning and pronouncing eternal judgement on all that the man and his 
music stand for. It has to be done, if only for the sake of self-apprehension, for Fela 
speaks for us even if we superficially comprehend him or do not understand him at all. 
Part of the obfuscation of course could be traced to the language chosen by the music 
star to communicate his idea(s) and vision. A great art that is expressed in an ordinary 
language runs the risk of being undervalued. Perhaps a greater percentage of his 
audience would have taken Fela more seriously if he had not laced his music with lyrics 
that tend to detract from its significance and shift attention from the field of music where 
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on the Arts 
Vol. 2'No. 2
he succeeded to the arena of politics where he 
failed. Yet it is the lyrics that capture the imagination 
of his fans, ideological fellow-travellers, and 
political sympathisers. 
Joseph Conrad confessed that he was 'just a mere 
animal''' before his visit to the Congo, an account of which is 
provided in Heart of Darkness. Similarly Fela remarked that 
until he toured the United States he had not known himself. He 
discovered in America among African-Americans a revolution 
in artistic consciousness, an affirmation of their Blackness and 
cultural identity, a celebration of their African ancestry and 
history, and an alternative worldview predicated on the 
animist apprehension of life which sharply contrasts the White 
Western cosmology and scientific ontology. He appropriated 
the Black Power salute (upraised right fist), the political 
messages of the Pan-African Nationalists which resonated in 
the speeches of Malcolm X, the inchoate revolutionary thrusts 
of rap music which he called 'yabis', the tradition of protest 
music, and the values of individuality and originality in artistic 
creativity. 
The animist worldview is an essentialist and totalist 
conception of life. The marriage of man and matter, matter and 
spirit, male and female, it perceives the perennial pairs of 
opposites imagisticallyas paradoxes and integrates them into 
an organic whole. Founded on the principle of natural dialectics, 
it is a mythic conception of the cosmos. Among its major 
components are a fertility myth, a cyclic concept of history and 
time, and a mode of existence that is communalistic and 
ritualistic. The three elements throw light on Fela's political 
philosophy, sexual life, and idea of music. The symbol that best 
illustrates the animist world apprehension is the cipher or the 
ouroboros (the tail-chewing creation snake) which is at once 
a figure of completeness (or fullness and nothingness). To be 
full is, like the Christian God, to desire and lack nothing. The 
figure could be used to explicate the traditional African 
conception of architecture, birth, death, marriage, music, 
organisation of work, space and time. The emphasis is placed 
on the collective and the cyclic. Everything - the sacred and the 
profane, the dead, the living, the unborn, planets, stars, 
. animals, stones and vegetation - is circumscribed by the circle 
Outside of the self-containing capsule, the womb of Mother- 
Nature, lies nothing and nothingness. Animism is an allembracing 
vision of life. Hence Fela could call Berliners his 
brothers and sisters, in spite of Hitler's legacy of the racist 
ideology of Nazism. It was the non-acceptance of the Black in 
the world of the White people that led the former to embark on 
the quest for self-retrieval from the chaos of history and gave 
birth to the Harlem Renaissance, the Negritude Movement 
and the Black Arts Movement which all had a tremendous 
impact on Fela's music and informed his political thought. 
After four centuries of a futile struggle to appropriate 
white values or be white, African-Americans turned their backs 
on White America and looked to Africa for inspiration, forms, 
concepts and styles in their culinary art, mode of dressing, hairdo, 
music, painting and writing. The consumption of soul foods 
became popular. As Ralph Ellison jocosely puts it through the 
unnamed protagonist of his novel Invisible Man, 'I yam what I 
am'3, a statement that fuses cuisine and cultural identity. Many 
African-Americans changed their names. Leroi Jones became 
Imamu Amiri Baraka. Malcolm X explained that the letter 'X' 
stood for his patronymic African name which had been lost in the 
course of history. That Fela dropped the English name Ransome 
and replaced itwith Anikulapo, a Yoruba hunter's name, was in 
tune with the Black cultural revolution. It was the same cultural 
consideration that made the present writer substitute Olusegun 
for Moses his baptismal name. Marcus Garvey even conceived 
the idea of physically moving the Blacks back to Africa. The Black 
Muslims nursed the idea of the Nation of Islam, a nation that 
would be carved out of the United States of America in which 
African-Americans could live, work, and organise themselves as 
they deemed fit. The small Yoruba commune called Oyotunji in 
the United States is paradigmatic of the Black Muslims' vision. 
Fela emphasised the primacy of the indigenous in every 
aspect of his life. Culture, to him, is not just the superficies or 
excrescences for which dilettanti mistake it. It does not end with 
dancing, singing, music, and the arts generally but includes the 
human and applied sciences, as well as the means of reproducing 
life, and the religion of a people. Till his death he upheld his 
firm belief in the grandeur, legitimacy and rootedness of the 
African culture(s): a way of life founded on the animist conception 
of the cosmos. No dread disease would make him renounce 
his faith in native medicine to seek help in Western medicine. 
That he apprenticed one of his daughters to a traditional medical 
practitioner was proof enough of his unshakeable faith in the 
efficacy of native medicine, the side effects of which he rightly 
judged to be less deleterious to the human body than those of 
Western medicine. He matched his beliefs with practice. His 
death is a sad commentary on the limitations of the colour-based 
ideology of Blackism, which is synonymous with Negritude. Had 
he accepted the fact that AIDS cuts across the colour line, he 
would have probably practised safe sex and not deluded himself 
that the syndrome is a gay or White man's affair. Many African- 
Americans and Black Jews allow the same false and negative 
thinking to influence their attitude to work in the United States. 
They perceive their refusal to work as freedom from exploitation 
by the white capitalists who monopolise the market economy and 
run the evil system. Rather than work, they depend on social 
welfare and food stamps and consequently live a low form of life 
on the fringe of society. 
The policy of economic self-reliance or separate development 
is Fela's blueprint for the rapid realisation of the dream of 
a technological breakthrough in African countries. It was indeed 
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Vol 2/No. 2 GLENDORA
the strongest plank in the manifesto of his unregistered political 
party the Movement of the People (MOP). Economic cooperation 
with the West, the party thought, would only lead to the 
coopting of Africa into the evil world capitalist system and 
make the continent a perpetually unequal participant in world 
politics and world trade. Despite decades of economic cooperation 
with either the east or the West, there is not one African 
country that has achieved the miraculous feat of technological 
development. The policy of transfer of technology has been a 
barren and ineffectual one in Africa. It appears that selfreliance, 
as articulated by Fela, is the only strategy that can 
bring quick and meaningful development to African countries 
without loss of racial pride. The song 'Buy Africa' expresses the 
idea in very clear terms. The same economic consideration 
often led African-Americans to boycott White and Asian shops 
and support Black businesses by buying from Black Stores. If, 
as the song 'Black Man's Cry' puts it, colonialism is responsible 
for the poverty and suffering of the Black man today then it is 
reasonable to expect Africa's disengagement from all cultural 
relations that reproduce a colonial or neo-colonial arrangement 
on the continent as the solution to its problem of underdevelopment. 
The Black Diaspora gave expression to the concept of the 
African Continuum and affirmed the concept of Negritude 
which Leopold Sedar Senghor defined as the sum total of all 
values that are Black and African. According to him, image 
and rhythm are the two fundamental features of African Style 
and Black aesthetics. Based on the rhythm of nature, the 
Negritude philosophy questions the linear concept of history 
and time and challenges the claims of White mythology to 
infallibility, superiority and universality. It affirms the principle 
of undecidabilityand punches holes in irrational knowledge on 
which Western metaphysics prides itself. Science, like every 
other human invention, it argues, is incomplete and paradoxical, 
for it is both creative and destructive to man and nature. It 
(science) fragments reality, disengages matter from spirit and 
breeds unbridled materialism, the bane of the contemporary 
capitalist world. No wonder then that Fela abhorred the 
acquisitive drive of the Nigerian political leadership and in 
symbolic gestures wrecked the image of opulence created by 
the group. By negating reason with emotion, Soyinka argues, 
Negritude itself falls into the trap of Western Manicheanism 
which recognises a contradiction in all things but fails to work 
out a possible order of integration. Animism, like Negritude, 
leaves room .for the element of chance and the unknowable. It 
deconstructs the materialistic vision by interrogating it with the 
spiritualist. Its conclusion neither foregrounds one nor displaces 
the other but affirms the truth of paradox as the essence 
of being. Hence it envisions social lifeasgiving-and-receiving. 
Would the world ever be reconstructed on the animist-syncretist 
principle of give-and-take?
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Vol. 2/Vo 2 
Nuclear physics confirms in our day the verity of the 
animist worldview. Having broken down matter to the limit 
beyond which it is impossible to proceed without being subjective, 
the nuclear physicist loses af) certitudes and accepts the 
principle of unpredictability. A purely objective knowledge of 
matter becomes impossible because the very attempt to observe, 
or experiment on, matter disturbs it and makes it unstable. 
Thus matter behaves as if it had a will of its own and was a spirit 
being. Fela was no doubt sceptical of science and technology. 
He would rather Africans avoided the mistakes made in Europe 
and America as tragic consequences of the Industrial Revolution. 
He would want Africans to mediate technological creativity 
with humility, morality and spirituality, so that it would not lead 
to destruction and pollution of nature, bastardisation of culture, 
and degeneration of humanity. His conception of music as ritual 
and his bold attempt to spiritualise it are instructive in this 
respect. The ritualising of music and spiritualising of science are 
geared towards bridging the gulf of transition between one 
human face and another, between one temporal phase and 
another, between divinity and humanity, and between man and 
nature and towards ensuring continuity of life. Continuity for the 
Yoruba,' Wole Soyinka wrote, operates both through the cyclic 
concept of time and the animist interfusion of all matter and 
consciousness.'4 'The principle of the African continuum', according 
to Richard A. Long in his essay 'Black Studies: 
International Dimensions', is that historically radiating from the 
black Core, the Black peoples of the world have carried with 
them modes of dealing with and symbolising experience, 
modes discovered and refined through milennia in Africa itself, 
and that these tactical and symbolic modes constitute a viable 
nexus of Black culture, one of the major traditions of humanity.'5 
Black revolutionaries adopted as a liberation strategy the 
mechanism of image-inversion. All the Black images that had 
hitherto been given negative connotations by the White race in 
order to control the Black people were refurbished, turned 
inside outand made positive. In contrast, all White images were 
deemed evil and condemned as metaphors for a life-denying 
life, a soulless mode of existence. James Brown the godfather of 
soul music encapsulated the Blacks' expression of self-esteem 
and self-identity in the song 'Say it Loud, I'm Black and Proud' 
which became the slogan for the Black revolution. He is reputed 
to be the first African-American to graft his music on the 
indigenous African rhythm. To have 'soul' is to brim over with 
energy and vitality, to be genial, natural and spontaneous, to 
have faith in human possibility and live life fully. Fela had soul 
and exuded sex. 
The search by the New World Blacks went on in all areas 
of human life, including sex. Fela's sexual life had a historical 
and mythical basis. He lived and loved as if to force the fertility 
myth, an affirmation of the principle of continuity, growth and 
human reproduction, and the myth of Black hypersexuality, to
assume the status of a historical fact. He not only had an active 
and robust sexual life but married twenty-seven wives on the 
same day! His denunciation of marriage as a hindering human 
contrivance was an afterthought. The truth of the matter is that 
Fela felt betrayed by his wives' acts of infidelity while he was 
in prison and so despaired of the institution. In any case, he 
agonised over the fact that a couple of years after the epic 
marriage none of the twenty-seven wives gave birth and 
promised to see a herbalist. In the animist African world the 
main purpose of marriage is biological reproduction and 
perpetuation of the race. In contrast, the White people put 
emphasis on love. The concept of love had no central place in 
pre-marital relationships in pre-colonial Africa. Neither did it 
become a strong social force in Europe until the emergence of 
the troubadour tradition about the eleventh century. Fela's 
honest declaration that he did not believe in love should be 
taken as a commentary on the practice of polygamy in 
traditional African society. The concept of love has meaning 
only in monogamy, for it is humanly impossible for a man with 
many wives to share his love equally among them, and love is 
a balancing principle, the law or lore of equity. 
Fela used the medium of music to preach or struggle for 
the liberation of the Blacks wherever they might be found on the 
surface of the earth. He tried to realise as best as he could his 
dream of the ideal republic in his home the'Kalakuta Republic,' 
a refuge of the waifs and strays, over which he presided and 
in which he practised the communal mode of existence advocated 
in his public lectures. Examining his political philosophy 
from the orthodox Marxist class perspective could be useful but 
inevitably lead to a cul-de-sac. The reason is simply that Fela 
saw every White person as a direct or indirect beneficiary of 
the colonial exploitation of the human and material resources 
of Africa. As Conrad puts it in Heart of Darkness, 'All Europe 
contributed to the making of Kurtz',4 the supreme exemplification 
of the White imperialist and conquistador. The fact that 
White racism is on the rise in the world, especially in Britain, 
France, Germany and the United States, justifies his stand on 
the race question. FrantzFanon admonished us in The Wretched 
of the Earth that 'Marxist analysis should be slightly stretched 
every time we have to do with the colonial problem' to 
incorporate the colour dimension.7 Despite the delusion of selfgovernance, 
most African countries are still largely colonial in 
their politico-economic relations with the West. The collapse of 
socialism would not allow us to add the East. W.E.B. DuBois 
rightly asserted in The Souls of Black Folk -that 'the problem of 
the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line.'8 
Songs like 'Black Man's Cry', 'ITT' (International Thief 
Thief), 'Beast of No Nation,' 'No Agreement,' 'Shuffering and 
Shmiling' which are frontal attacks on Western imperialism in 
all its diverse manifestations, on its local agents in Africa, the 
so-called comprador class, and on Europe-American politicoeconomic 
hegemony over the rest of the world and which 
appear to look at problems confronting the wretched of the earth 
from the Marxist class perspective would be better understood 
if inscribed within the global struggle of the Black people 
against White domination. It is important to stress that Fela does 
not speak for the oppressed White worker who, by the mere 
virtue of being White, partakes of the fruits of centuries of 
oppression of the Black World and enjoys privileges that are 
denied the Black worker. It is such privileges that put a wedge 
between the Black worker and the White worker in the United 
States and make cooperation and unity between them impossible, 
long before the fall of socialism and the end of the Cold 
War prominent African-American members of the Black Panthers 
Party like Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael and a 
dyed-in-the-wool Marxist like Richard Wright had shifted 
emphasis away from the concept of racial integration to selfdetermination 
and Black nationalism in the United States. A 
class analysis would distort the musician's message. We refused 
to accept Bassey Ita's judgement in Jazz in Nigeria that 
the Fela of the Koola Labito's days is 'a singer of trash.'' 
'Ololufe', 'Lai Se', 'Mi o Mo', and 'Ajo' ('lya mi o se o!') which 
explore eternal themes of filial and sexual love, betrayal, crime 
and punishment generated by the eternal love triangle, treachery 
and motherhood will definitely outlast 'ITT', 'Coffin for Head 
of State' and 'Go Slow' which treat period themes. 
Fela considered the day his house (Kalakuta Republic) 
was burnt down by Nigerian soldiers as his saddest. The event 
no doubt put a question mark on his racial ideology and 
sharpened his understanding of the nature of evil - it wears no 
colour. The soldiers who committed the atrocity were merely 
unthinking tools in the hands of the then ruling military junta. 
Abusive and educative, the song 'Zombie' is in Fela's large 
political design an attempt to raise the consciousness of the 
culprits. It is unfortunate that Fela passed on without resolving 
the class-colour dilemma. His untimely death denies us the 
privilege of knowing how he would have resolved the crisis of 
consciousness that confronted him some seven years before his 
death. Would he, like Leopold Sedar Senghor, for example, 
have gone beyond ancestor worship and resolved the race 
problem in favour of the Christian precept of love, or would he 
have persisted in perceiving the world from the narrow perspective 
of racial politics? The paramountcy of his political preoccupation 
had definitely become a 'given' in his art towards the end 
of his life and, as expected, had adversely affected the quality 
of his music. The message was increasingly privileged over the 
music that made him world famous. Would he have reversed the 
situation and once again repeated the feat achieved with his 
African 7 0 band? So many ifs, but one thing is certain, his 
increasing spirituality is a clear evidence of his dissatisfaction 
with the nightmare that is history and the deceit that is politics. 
He returned to Nigeria after his eye-opening tour of the 
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Vol. 2/No. 2
United States to begin the quest for the substructure of African 
music upon which to construct his architectonics. The search led 
him to discover the ritual character of African music, its 
gntiphonal style, and the centrality of a polyvalent syncopated 
rhythm. Thathecalled himselfachief priestand worshipped his 
ancestors at the African Shrine before every performance 
would convince the most hardened sceptic that he conceived 
of music as a ritual. Ancestor worship derives from the African 
animist worldview. As a religious concept, ritual is any sacred 
ceremony performed or) a regular basis to guarantee the 
continuity of life. Performed by the living, it provokes the 
resources of munificent nature and causes the dead to return 
and bless the living. The dead, like sown seeds, are reborn as 
new babies. As an element of style, ritual connotes the use of 
repetition and variation to build up a rich rhythm. 
To the charge of the repetitious nature of the rhythmic 
quality of his music, Fela responded that the criticism was a 
homage to African music, the recognition of its defining 
element. The single distinction made by Malcolm X between 
African-American jazz and White American jazz is that the 
former has got the swing, which is traceable to its polyvalent 
rhythm. Duke Ellington says it all in his song entitled 'It Don't 
Pay If the Swing Ai n't There.'The animist concept of rhythm was 
originally derived from the observation of nature. Natural 
phenomena and processes like sunrise and sunset, phases of 
the moon, the ebb and flo.w of the tides, the cycle of birth-deathand-
rebirth, the seasons, the menstrual cycle have a circular 
design and infuse into the animist an acute sense of the cyclic 
rhythm upon which a fertility or vegetation myth,' a world 
ontology and a moral order, are constructed. 'Black music', as 
characterised by Ben Sidran in Black Talk, 'is a kind of 
'ritualisation', or imitation of nature, which can channel black 
aggression toward constructive and creative ends.'10 
The polyrhythmic nature of Black music is equally traceable 
to the constituent elements of the oral culture like spontaneity 
and improvisation. Black music is not played according 
to laid down rules and rigid conventions (the scores). Asked to 
blow a single note of tenor 'paan' by Mrs. Cunningham-Wilson 
his music teacher at Trinity College, Fela added a little flourish 
to the note and blew'paan... paan... paan.' Chume responded 
exactly in the same creative way to his White music teachers 
instruction in Wole Soyinka's Jero's Metamorphosis. • Black 
musicians make their instruments sing or swing. Both the horn 
and rhythm sections swing their instruments in Fela's music. His 
music technique is undoubtedly eclectic. According >o Bassey 
Ita, 'Fela Ransome-Kuti's is a hybrid of African rhythm, European 
harmony and Afro-American jazz.'-' Fela blended vari- 
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Vol. 2'hlo. 2 
ous modes like Blues, highlife, Jazz and Soul which all have 
African roots to create an authentic form that he initially labelled 
Afrobeat' and later identified simply as classical African music. 
It is not uncommon to hear echoes of Agidigbo, Apala, Juju, and 
Sakara chords and rhythms in his music. A few members of his 
band had at one time or the other played the Yoruba musical 
forms mentioned above. The animist of course is a syncretist who 
normally would not like to exclude any cultural production from 
his world order as long as the give-and-take principle is not 
thereby violated. 
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's legacy lies in his successful attempt 
to use his knowledge of classical European music to fashion a 
new brand of music from several indigenous African forms. If 
music-wise he lives forever, as we all wish, it is because he built 
his music on the primal rhythms. Wherever it is played, it would 
quicken in the auditors a profound feeling of natural piety and 
sympathy and make them move their limbs, for it speaks the 
language of the earth in an idiom that is essentially animist. Erotic 
songs like 'Na Poi', 'Open and Close', 'E Gbe Mi o' and 
'Beautiful Dancer' which are condemned by some politically 
inclined commentators as pornographic junk are best interpreted 
as part of the ritual scheme to wake the seeds of life in us and 
induce nature to release to us its hoarded gifts. They celebrate 
life in poetic terms and in the best pop tradition, especially the 
first two which are heavily onomatopoetic; and animism is a lifeaffirming 
worldview. As he prophetically puts it in 'Eko He', the 
quester has wandered in' foreign lands, specifically in Europe 
and America, and returned home to attain his bourne. GR 
Notes 
1. The essay is imaged as a homage to Fela. a patron of the Watu Wazun Movement ot which 
I was a member at the University of He (now Obafemi Awolowo University), lle-lfe. Nigeria. 
2. Cited by Gerald Jean-Aubry. The Sea Dreamer A Definitive Biography of Joseph Conrad. 
Trans. Helen Sebba, London: George Allen and Unwm Ltd.. 1957. p.175. 
3. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. 1965. p.215. 
4 Wole Soyinka. The Fourth Stage, Myth. Literature and the African World. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1976. p.145. 
5. Richard A Long. Black Studies: International Dimensons. New Black voices. Ed. Abraham 
Chapman. New York and Toronto: Mentor, 1972, p.424. 
6. Joseph Conrad. Heart ot Darkness. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973. p.71. 
7. Franlz Fanon. The Wretched ot the Earth. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1967. p.30. 
8. W E.B. DuBois. The Forethought. The Souls ol Black Folk. London: Longman, 1965. P.vi. 
9 Bassey Ita Jazz in Nigeria. Calabar: Atiaya Communications, 1984, p.62. 
10 Ben Sidran. Black Talk. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. p.61. 
11. See'..a musical deviant, says teacher.' Guardian on Saturday. Lagos Vol. 14. No. 6,846 
(Saturday, August 9,1997)18. 
12 Wole Soyinka. Jero's Metamorphosis. The Jero Plays. London: Eyre Methuen, 1973. pp. 
62-67. 
13 Ita, p.60.