i
\ 
I 
significance. 
Should Fela's dramatic story be read as comedy? As tragedy? 
As heroic odyssey? Was he, as some would claim, one who 
achieved greatness and then destroyed it? Or did his adversaries try 
to destroy him because they were threatened by his greatness? Was 
he simply another elite rebel obsessed with fighting the power? 
HE passing of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti after three decades 
of innovative political music-making affords us an 
opportunity to try and understand the unique and 
unprecedented way he used his popular art as a vehicle 
for both cultural awareness and revolutionary consciousness, 
and the dramatic contours of his story allow 
us to draw a variety of conclusions about its ultimate 
"<_•> Stf i 
Fela's mixture of abuse, profanity, and social deviance was already 
Micheal 
I
a hard package for many Nigerians to swallow even during the 
height of his popularity in the mid-1 970s and it might be argued that 
after 1 977, when he largely abandoned his socio-comic critiques for 
explicit political diatribes, he effectively consigned his music to an 
enforced sub-cultural location, ultimately conforming to the social 
marginality accorded most sub-Saharan African musicians who 
either assumed, or are charged with, the ambivalently-accepted 
responsibility of social criticism. Overall, however, one point is clear 
- in the midst of recent political turmoil in Africa (Nigeria, Rwanda, 
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Zaire), as well as a new cycle of neo- 
African culturalism throughout the African diaspora, Fela's music 
holds a renewed relevance for Nigeria and the entire continent, and 
his journey is a potent metaphor for the history of post-colonial Africa and of pan-Africanism. 
As a post-colonial African creative artist, Fela's work conforms closely to 
Frederic Jameson's interpretation of the 'third-world artwork' as metaphor for the 
emergent nation-state.' Criticised as oversimplistic, reductive, and ultimately ethnocentric 
in its inability to engage the aesthetic dimensions of non-Western literature,2 
Jameson's idea is applicable to Fela's work for the simple reason that the latter has 
consciously and explicitly used his art to address the condition of post-colonial Africa. 
The successive stages of Fela's work also conform remarkably 
closely to Frantz Fanon's 'three stages of the native intellectual' idea 
advanced in The Wretched of the Earth, a conformity which 
African Quar 
on the Arts 
Vol 2'No. 2
demonstrates Fela's roots in the struggles and symbols of the 
nationalist period.3 In Fanon's evolutionary scheme, the 
work of the native intellectual is marked in its first phase by 
a strong identification with the worldview of the colonial 
master, usually following a period of education in the 
colonial centre. The work of the second phase is marked by 
a reactionary tone in which the intellectual uncritically 
celebrates his native society, reflexively rejecting anything 
associated with the colonising culture. Finally, in the third 
phase, the native intellectual outgrows the romanticisation 
of the previous phase, sharpening his critical apparatus and 
s time has passed, in fact, Fela was increasingly 
loathe to identify himself as a 'Nigerian', preferring to be 
known as an African, and in this he was clearly contesting the 
idea of the nation-state - reflecting at once his embrace of the 
pan-African ideal and the subversive dimensions of his 
'Alrotopian' vision. 
directing it towards his native society. 
Making allowances for minor discrepancies 
and periods of overlap, Fela's work broadly conforms 
to this scheme. The first is typified by his early career, 
in which he attempted to make a name for himself 
working self-consciously in the high-modernist modes 
of African-American jazz music, with which he became 
familiar during his student years in Britain. The 
second phase followed his politicisation in America, 
and is marked by his full embrace of popular music as 
a valid medium, and songs, such as Buy Africa or 
Black Man's Cry, which celebrate the African nation 
and the black aesthetic. The third phase began after 
his 1974 imprisonment and especially following the 
1977 Kalakuta attack, and is reflected in works such 
as Alagbon Close, International Thief Thief, and 
Overtake Don Overtake Overtake, which take a 
harshly critical look at the problems confronting contemporary 
Africa. 
Substituting a differenflens of analysis offered 
by Edward Said (in Orientalism), the period from 
1958 (when he entered music school in England) 
through 1974 (the year of the first police raid on his 
home) might be thought of as Fela's nationalist period, 
during which his work tended to be concerned with 
issues of nation-building, modernist ideas of the art 
work as assisting the nation-state project, and repairing 
the psychological damage of the colonial encounter. 
Fela's work since 1974 is best thought of as 
liberationist in tone: it is ultimately concerned not with 
issues of national independence and solidarity, but 
Class and Education as 
Catalysts for Political Art 
understand the ideological underpinning of Fela's 
social mission, his symbolic deconstruction of his elite 
status, his deviation from the traditional social function 
of the African creative artist, and the varying reception 
of his message by different sectors of Nigerian society. 
Much of this can be directly traced to two sources: 
his family heritage, which exposed him to his father's 
staunch anti-colonial stance and'his mother's African 
articulation of socialist ideals, his childhood in colonial 
Abeokuta, in which Western education and 
native cultural consciousness fused to create a hotbed 
of regional, sub-ethnic political activism; and the 
cosmopolitan perspective Fela developed during his 
formative periods abroad, in Europe and the United 
States. It was his proximity to these experiences which 
set him apart from other African musicians, most of 
whom have tended to be less radical in their social 
vision for two reasons: their artistic visions tend to be 
deeply rooted in traditional culture, and their creations 
continue to be heavily patronised by national 
elites. 
Music has thus generally not been a vehicle for social criticism, 
and politically-active African artists tend to have had some advanced 
education or significant experience abroad, often working in mediums 
considered to have had their genesis during the colonial era 
such as film or literature.5 As such, Fela was more similar in many 
ways to writers such as Ngugi Wa Thiong' O and Wole Soyinka, or 
Issues of class must be considered in order to 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No 2 GLEN DORA 
with using a timeless vision of African 
Utopia (simultaneously pre-modern and 
post-revolutionary) to critique the problems 
of the post-colonial nation-state and 
function as a voice for its dispossessed. 
As time has passed, in fact, Fela was 
increasingly loathe to identify himself as 
a 'Nigerian', preferring to be known as 
an African, and in this he was clearly 
contesting the idea of the nation-state - 
reflecting at once his embrace of the pan- 
African ideal and the subversive dimensions 
of his 'Afrotopian' vision, while 
demonstrating what Gayatri Chakrovorty 
Spivak has called the failure of the nation-
state model to speak to or change 
the condition of the underclass [subaltern].'
filmmakers likeOusmaneSembene, in his self-conscious use of art as 
a tool for social criticism, education, and political empowerment. In 
fact, Fela shared much with Sembene in his loose application of 
Marxist ideas of class struggle, his liberationift approach, and his 
'neo-griot' goal of using his art to account for the history of the 
masses. I am thinking especially of Sembene's critique 
of the Senegalese elite in his 1 974 film Xala, and it is 
no coincidence that it was produced during the same 
period that Fela offered Colonial Mentality, Mr 
Grammartology-lisation-alism Is the Boss, and Johnny 
Just Drop, covering an identical range of topics. The 
work of both men critiqued African post-coloniality 
during a period in which the condition had become 
relatively well-defined, and their experiences abroad 
enabled them to view their cultures against the backdrop 
of planetary culture. 
t is important to note that the African elements 
in afrobeat have been fashioned within an ongoing 
dynamic of cross-cultural interaction between Africa and 
its diaspora which influenced the articulation of their 
"Africanity." 
when Fela chanted the names of mythical African figures such 
as 'Oranyan,' 'Orompoto,' or 'Orunmila' in his songs, he drew 
not on the symbols of the entire continent, but those of his native 
Yoruba culture. And it is somehow difficult to image Fela 
fashioning his own parallel universe in Nigerian cities such as 
Kano, Abuja or Onitsha as completely as he did in Yorubadominated 
Lagos. 
of Nigerian society to fashion a contemporary tragic vision 
Elements of a Pan-African 
Vision 
A loose distinction can be made between what 
is African and what is black in Fela's work. The 
afrobeat style is fundamentally African in its oppositional 
political alignment, privileging the interests of 
dispossessed African masses over those of neo-colonial 
Western governments, multinational corporations, 
or indigenous elites. It is fundamentally African in the 
traditional rhetorical modes by which most of Fela's 
song lyrics are structured, as well as in the communal 
social setting in which it operated. It is also fundamentally 
African in its musical construction, as Fela drew 
extensively upon traditional African musical styles as a 
source of compositional and conceptual inspiration 
although it has not always been clear exactly which 
African musical traditions he has drawn upon. But the 
potent, pro-African combination of these political, 
cultural, and musical elements may explain the reason 
Fela was consistently awarded top annual honours in 
the Nigerian Musician Union's (PMAN) incredibly 
vague 'African Music' category, even though all the 
categories are ostensibly concerned with music produced 
in Africa by African musicians; the honour 
acknowledges the musical sound, political commitment, 
and cultural resonance of Fela's afrobeat. 
It is important to note that the African elements 
in afrobeat have been fashioned within an ongoing 
dynamic of cross-cultural interaction between Africa 
and its diaspora which influenced the articulation of 
their'Africanity' Instrumentally, Fela's extensive use of 
techniques like modalism, ensemble stratification, and 
hocketing all clearly had their roots in traditional West 
Ajrican Quarterly 
on the Arts 
GLENDORA..»;.» Vol. 2/No. 2 
African music, while their presence owed equally to 
their articulations in the music of African-American 
musicians such as John Coltrane and James Brown. 
Ultimately, these influences were refashioned in a way 
which accented their fundamental African character 
and Fela's compositional rigour enabled him to consciously 
arrange a number of pan-African musical 
devices to evoke a mood which was thoroughly African. 
In terms of the rhetoric infusing his music, Fela's 
style reflected the influence of what Gilroy has described 
as a 'metaphysics of 'blackness' largely developed 
in the African diaspora (especially Afro-America), 
and characterised by a foreground of contentious 
gender dynamics, radical excavations/reformations 
of black history, a confrontational approach to political 
activism, an emphasis on 'blackness' as a signifier 
for (pan) African identity, and an existential proximity 
to, and ritualised re-enactment of historical terror (both 
personal and collective). His style of derisive criticism 
was based as much in the political rhetoric and 
vernacular traditions of Afro-America as in indigenous 
West African traditions of derisive humour. Thus, his 
work was fundamentally black in its elegant fusion of 
pan-African modes of identity, expression, protest, and 
musical style. 
Finally, we should identify that strain of Fela's 
work which might be called particularly Yoruba in 
nature. First in the fact that, despite his insistence on 
pan-African culture, most of the cultural symbols which 
enliven his work are specifically Yoruba in origin. 
There were exceptions to this in his work of the 1 970s, 
into which he integrated Ashanti aphorisms ('Fefe Na 
Efe') or pan-anglophone West African slang 
('Shenshema') into his songs. But for the most part, 
On a more philosophical level, Fela plumbed the depths
within a musical mood of pervasive pathos, in the 
process conforming deeply to mythopoetic tendencies 
in traditional Yoruba oral literature. Wole Soyinka, 
in his essay The Fourth Stage, defined tragedy in 
traditional Yoruba myths as'.. .the anguish of (cosmic) 
severance, the fragmentation of essence from self,' 
and Fela's project of cultured revitalisation certainly 
aspired to a reintegration of the African psyche with 
its cultural and cosmic essences. Karin Barber, discussing 
Ghanaian highlife songs, has noted a prevalent 
mood of pathos in highlife lyrics, seeing them as 
ultimately reflecting '...all the ills characteristic of a 
society undergoing rapid urbanisation.' Even if 
Barber's observation does not directly concern Yoruba 
culture, the most intractable worldly problems are 
often articulated in terms of the cosmic, and Fela's 
articulation of worldly problems - even when not 
metaphorised in mystical terms - was often deeply 
infused with the mood of traditional Yoruba oral 
literature. With what Gabriel Gbadamosi has called 
'the ghoulish dynamism of Nigeria,' he explored his 
country's 'traumatic self-image forming out of the 
collision of disparate influences' with his sarcastic, 
trenchant imagery of political infighting [Noise For 
Vendor Mouth'), civil confusion ['Confusion1], aimlessness 
['Perambulator'), deprivation ['Original 
Sufferheaa") indignity ['Power Show'), culture alienation 
['Gentleman'), military domination ('Overtake 
Don Overtake Overtake1) and decay ('Confusion 
Break Bone) - immeasurably reinforced by the 
mocking and heavily-traditional tone of his chorus 
singers. Fela's embrace of tragedy was not resigned 
or hopeless; rather, it reflected a characteristically 
Yoruba philosophy of tragedy (often conceived of as 
a traditional state essential to cosmic and social 
realignment) as well as a more worldly sense of 
ultimate revolutionary triumph.12 
Fela's Musical Legacy 
It is the potent combination of these elements 
which qualified Fela as an authentic, organic folk 
hero, and over thirty years he established a body of 
work that was simultaneously progressive, innovative, 
and subversive. In light of recent events, it is clear 
that Fela continued to be a highly-charged cultural/ 
political symbol in Nigeria until his death. Over three 
decades, he refined his musical language and his 
music also cleared - if only temporarily - a space for 
not only popular political dissent and mobilisation, 
but also a type of counter-cultural expression extremely 
rare in West African societies. At the same 
time, his pan-African odyssey points to future possibilities 
of both political engagement for musicians and 
innovative formulation of neo-African identity. 
One of the most overlooked aspects of Fela's 
ouevre is the contribution it has made, the work of other 
African composers notwithstanding, to the development 
of a uniquely-(pan) African tradition of 'serious' 
composition. Although his music operates strictly within 
the sphere of popular music and he has been fairly 
dismissive of more consciously-Western African composers, 
his work contains deep structural insights into 
the fusion of African and Western musical traditions 
and materials. The distinction between Fela and these 
composers is on what Samuel Floyd has called the level 
of music's 'mythical' content. Despite the Western 
training he shared with many of them, Fela substituted 
the myths of African art - the myth of art as communal 
enterprise, the myth of art as maintenance for socialequilibrium-
in place of the Western myth of the concert 
hall, or of the artistic as separate, other-worldly sphere. 
But ultimately, selective aspects of his work will likely 
facilitate the continued development of African art 
music.
It remains to be seen whether younger practitioners 
will emerge and adapt the afrobeat style to 
subsequent generations, or whether it was a brief 
historical episode fuelled by a charismatic individual 
and a particular set of economic, social, and political 
circumstances. Based as much in African-American as 
African culture, Fela's work will probably receive a full 
revisionist reappraisal at a time when political and 
cultural developments stimulate a resurgence of pan- 
African cultural sentiments 
similar to the period in which 
he originally developed his 
style. On the musical front, the 
music of the 1 970s has for the 
past several years experienced 
a major comeback as 
digital fodder for sampling, 
studio-based musicians on 
both sides of the Atlantic (i.e 
those practising in hip-hop, 
jungle, house, acid-jazz, or 
similar styles), as well as 
through retro tastes which seek 
the music out in its original 
form. The acid-jazz style, in 
particular, has stimulated a 
revival of the brand of 1 960s/ 
ejecting his 
father's image as a 
social rebel while 
continuing the 
legacy of political 
music, Femi has 
cultivated an 
image as a cleanliving, 
responsible 
musician, while 
like Ziggy Marley, 
working largely 
within the musical 
and rhetorical 
models established 
by his 
father. 
1970s fusion music which 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 2 GLENDORA
coupled jazz-based arrangements with funk rhythms, 
performed by groups such as Earth, Wind, & Fire and 
Kool & the Gang. 
A survey of artists directly or indirectly drawing 
on Fela's work demonstrates the influence of his music 
around the world. It has been praised and acknowledged 
by some of the most influential musicians of 
recent decades such as Stevie Wonder, David Byrn, 
Jaco Pastorius, Afrika Bambataa, Brian Eno, and Paul 
McCartney. In his 1989 autobiography, trumpeter 
Miles Davis- responsible for a number of crucial stylistic 
revolutions in modern music-suggested Fela's music as 
an important reference point for future directions in 
world music.13 
Because of the way Fela ran his band and 
organisation, centred in the main around his personal 
charisma, it has been difficult for musicians to use a 
tenure with Afrika 70 or Egypt 80 as an apprenticeship 
to a greater public profile. In this respect Fela's 
organisation differed from most other African popular 
ensembles and talented soloists such as Allen, Y.S. 
Akinibosu, and others have generally not consolidated 
the experience into viable leadership roles on their 
own. Still, a number of musicians have experimented 
with elements of the afrobeat style. Since leaving Egypt 
80 in 1 986, Fela's eldest son Femi has emerged as the 
genre's main exponent, continuing to explore his father's 
musical direction and socio-political concern on three 
albums with his own Positive Force Band. Rejecting his 
father's image as a social rebel while continuing the 
legacy of political music, Femi has cultivated an image 
as a clean-living, responsible musician, while like 
Ziggy Marley, working largely within the musical and 
rhetorical models established by his father. 
Other African artists referencing afrobeat have 
generally taken instrumental elements and divorced 
them from Fela's political content Most visibly, a 
number of juju musicians have integrated elements of 
afrobeat into their repertoire, and today it is rare that 
a well-known juju group does not include segments of 
minor-key afrobeat-derived music in their performances. 
Best known among these are musicians like Sunny Ade, 
Ebenezer Obey, Dele Abiodun and Segun Adewale. 
Along with Abiodun (whose Confrontation EP contains 
two lengthy tracks of pure afrobeat), Ade's adoption of 
afrobeat style is the most direct, while Obey's borrowings 
tend to be more compatible with traditional juju 
practice. 
Outside of Africa, musicians have referenced 
afrobeat more symbolically, and the international appeal 
of Fela's music attests to its cross-cultural pedigree 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2-No 2 GLENDORA... 
An afrobeat-derived tenor guitar 
figure propels Bob Marley's 
Could You Be Loved? composed 
after his brief passage 
through Nigeria in 1 980. The 
debated influence of afrobeat 
on James Brown's music seems 
evident in a number of compositions 
recorded after the latter's 
Nigerian trip, most notably on 
theJB's Hot Pants Road (1971). 
Its particular influence on bassist 
Bootsy Collins may be detected 
in Collins' 1980 piece 
with the group Sweat Band', 
titled Jamaica, as well as in his 
own 1 976 song Stretchin'Out 
(In A Rubber Band), which he 
claims was inspired by music 
he heard during his trip to 
Africa with Brown. Later in the 
decade, Collins' P-Funk mentor 
George Clinton would pay 
homage to Fela in his 1983 
he idea of transnational 
alliance 
in Africa, considered 
outmoded 
and unrealistic 
during the 1970s 
and 1980s, has 
regained currency 
in light of the 
European Economic 
Community, 
and could 
hold relevance for 
African nationstates 
in increasingly 
dire political 
and economic 
straits. 
song Nubian Nut, which incorporates chorus lines 
from Mr. Follow Follow Fela's afrobeat has also often 
served as a conceptual bridge for African-Americans 
investigating the music of Africa. Alfred 'Pee Wee' 
Ellis, who arranged much of James Brown's most 
innovative music, waxed favourably on Fela's music in 
a music magazine 'blinfold test' and went on to 
contribute wind arrangements for the Malian neotraditional 
vocalist Oumou Sangare on her' Worotan' 
cd.15 Soul-jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers toured Nigeria 
and recorded with Fela in 1 980, and has made a 
number of guest appearances with Egypt 80 in the 
United States." Some of his 1980s performances 
contained derivations of Fela's music; one video shows 
him influenced by Fela's stage manner, while his band 
plays an instrumental version of International Thief 
Thief underneath.17 The Art Ensemble of Chicago, 
featuring Fela's friend and guest trumpeter Lester 
Bowie, recorded a version of Zombie on their 1987 
release Ancient to the Future, and Bowie has sat in with 
Egypt 80 in the United States as a guest soloist. In a 
similar musical vein, the eclectic fusion group Hotel X 
included an instrumental version of Black Man's Cry on 
their 1995 recording Ladders, while saxophonist 
Branford Marsalis' collaborative, hip-hop project Buckshot 
Le Fonque (1994) includes samples of Fela's 
Beasts of No Nation.
In terms of political art in Africa, a few musicians have 
occasionally offered political content in their work, and experienced 
varying degrees of reprisal. Zimbabwean singer/guitarist 
Thomas Mapfumo, whose music was a crucial political factor 
in the months leading to Zimbabwe's 1980 independence, was 
imprisoned for three months during the Rhodesian government's 
attempts to censor his popular anti-government songs. Singer 
Miriam Makeba had her South African citizenship revoked, and 
received constant death threats as a result of her expatriate 
career singing and campaigning against aparthied. In Zaire, 
bandleader Franco and his entire 40-piece band spent two 
months in prison in 1979 after releasing a series of ostensibly 
obscene songs which followed an earlier series containing 
thinly-veiled barbs at government officials and policies.18 And 
Fela's countryman Majek Fashek has chosen to sing his political 
music in exile, from a base in the United States. 
While these artists have suffered various repercussions for 
their occasional forays into political content, none have suffered 
nearly as much for their opinions as did Fela. Nor have any of 
them devoted an entire genre or career to political art, or 
attempted direct involvement in their country's political process. 
Fela's afrobeat was the only genre exclusively devoted to 
abusive humour, explicit political criticism, and critical exploration 
of the African post-colonial and neo-colonial condition. Even 
on the purely instrumental level, the inherently optimistic, cooperative 
quality which characterises much African music (especially 
many of the pleasantries offered via the 'world music' 
production aesthetic) begs the question - can this music ever be 
a vehicle for explicit political dissent?1' Post-World War II 
Western art music, free-|azz in America of the 1 960s, punk-rock 
in England of the 1 970s, rap music, and the 'noise' rock bands 
of the 1 980s, and 1 990s, all communicate an undeniable spirit 
of resistance and alienation resulting from concrete political 
circumstances. Until an African artist produces a sonic assault on 
the order of punk, Coltrane's Ascension, Jimi Hendrix's rendering 
of the Star-Spangled Banner or Penderecki's Threnody, 
Fela's music - with its blaring horns and free-jazz interludes • may 
be the closest West African mUsic gets to a pure sonic representation 
of dissent. 
This body of work is increasingly relevant in light of 
contemporary political and cultural developments in Africa and 
the diaspora. The idea of trans-national alliance in Africa, 
considered outmoded and unrealistic during the 1 970s and 
1 980s, has regained currency in light of the European Economic 
Community, and could hold relevance for African nation-states 
in increasingly dire political and economic straits.20 At the same 
time, Africa has re-emerged in African-America as a symbol of 
cultural affirmation and distinction during a period of increasing 
•social conservatism and ethnic polarisation. In such an historical 
moment, Fela's story could offer perspective on both race and 
class, on both sides of the Atlantic. Similar to Bob Marley when 
he sang (invoking the diasporic legacy of Garveyite pan- 
Africanism) in Africa Unite that the political liberation of 
diasporic Africans is dependent on unity in Africa, Fela - as 
much as he drew on the same Egyptian-inspired cultural 
narratives which fuel afrocentrism - forces the Afrocentrists to 
understand pan-Africanism in light of the concrete struggles of 
contemporary Africa, as opposed to the imagined cultural 
utopia of ancient Nile Valley civilisations. More than anything, 
this would force them to confront the reality of black-on-black 
oppression in the 'motherland' as well as the class reality that 
any 'great' empire, whether it be Dynastic Egypt, colonial 
Europe, the United States of America, or oil-boom Nigeria, is 
invariably built upon a solid foundation of human suffering and 
exploitation. GR 
Notes 
1. See Jamesons essay Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, Social 
Text #15 (Fall 1986). 
2. See Aijaz Ahmads 1987 responsive essay Jameson s Rhetoric of Otherness and the 
"National Allegory."" 
3. See pp.222-223. 
4. See Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice' from Wedge, 
#7/8, Winter/Spring 1985. 
5. See Diawara 1992, especially 'Anglophone African Production', which surveys the roots of 
the film industry in these countries or chapter 4. The Artist As Leader of the Revolution.' 
6. I discovered one exception to this during my visit to Nigeria in 1992, when Fela 
demonstrated the traditional roots of his music by executing an apala dance step to his song 
Government Chicken Boy- a song containing a derived rhythm pattern used frequently by the 
late apala musician Haruna Isola. 
7 For most ol these ideas, see Gilroy's essay 'It's A Family Affair: Black Culture and the Trope 
of Kinship1 (1993b). For the ideas of existential terror in diasporic African culture, see his 
essay Not A Story to Pass On: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime.' (Gilroy 1993a). 
8. The point is also made in Ayu 1985:34. Yoruba legend maintains that Oranyan was the 
seventh son of Oduduwa, progenitor of the Yoruba people; Oranyan also founded and 
presided over the Oyo Yorubas (Johns 1921:8). It is said that at the end of his life, this king 
metamorphosed into a granite obelisk (Opa Oranyan) which can be found standing today in 
the city of lle-lfe. Orompoto was a historical king of the Oyo Igboho court founded during a 
period (the precise years are unclear) in which the seat of Yoruba power was exiled from the 
ancient capital of Oyo proper (Johnson, p.161-2). Orunmila is one of the deities said to 
preside over the Ifa divination system (Idowu 1962:75-80). 
9. Soyinka 1976:140-160. 
10. Barber 1987:37 
11 Both quotes taken from Gbadamosi's discussion ol Wole Soyinka in Gurnah 1993. 
12 In his essay The Fourth Stage. Wole Soyinka has discussed this use ol tragedy as it 
exists in tne traditional Yoruba dramas related to the onsa Ogun isee Soyinka 1976. as well 
as Gabriel Gbanamosi's essay on SoynKa in Gurnah 1993). 
13 Davis 1989 393 
14 See Collins comments in the notes to Collins 1994. 
15 See Ellis's remarks in Sinker 1993. 
16. The 1980 LP Music olMany Colours leatures Fela and Ayers performing together. Ayers 
also appeared as a guest soloist in Fela's 1986 and 1991 concerts in New York City 
17 See Ihe video Fela and Roy Ayers: Atnca 79 
18SeeEwens 1994:166. 
19 For a detailed examination of this question, see David Toop's article The Meaning of 
World Music in Wire. January 1997:74 
20. Okey Ndibe's article 'Movement For African Unity' {West Atnca. 28 August • 3 September 
1995) examines the various resurgent currents of pan-African political sentiment. 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol 2No 2 GLENDORA