How Fela Landed Me in Jail
July 20, 2003
By JOHN DARNTON
It's not always easy to realize when you're in the presence
of genius - especially when it comes in the form of a
muscular 5-foot-7 Nigerian, dressed in leopard-skin bikini
underpants, his eyes blurry-red from overindulgence in
marijuana, who is ranting on and on about a toothbrush. Not
a specific toothbrush, but the very idea - the concept -of
the toothbrush, which turns out to be a vestige of
colonialism, another Western assault on the dignity of
Africans.
"Before the white man came, we Africans used sharpened
sticks to clean our teeth," said Fela, glaring out from the
stage. "I've thrown away my toothbrush. My brothers, we
must all throw away our toothbrushes."
It wasn't one of his more thoughtful diatribes. Still, the
audience of 400 or so, mostly men in their 20's and 30's,
drank it in. The time was somewhere around 3 a.m., in July
1976, at the Shrine, Fela's nightclub in the Surulere
section of Lagos. The ramshackle structure was roofed in
corrugated metal and threaded by open sewage drains, with
women in Band-Aid-strip panties gyrating on bird-cage
platforms under the red neon glow of a giant map of Africa.
It didn't look like the center of a political-musical
revolution.
I liked going to the Shrine: the sweltering heat, the
pounding music, the palpable anger in the air, the weapons
search at the door, where it was hard to say if more
weapons were going or coming. It was my education. The
teacher was Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the originator of
Afrobeat, a synthesis of Nigerian high life and American
jazz and rock. Thoughts of Fela, who died of an
AIDS-related illness in 1997, came flooding back recently
as I went to an exhibition in his honor at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art, at 583 Broadway in SoHo. The show,
"Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela
Anikulapo-Kuti," explores his influence through the work of
34 artists. It says he "was arguably Africa's most
influential musician of the last 50 years."
Who am I to argue? Simply put, Fela was the best performer
I've ever seen. And not incidentally, he was Nigeria's most
notorious political dissident. He had been arrested a
half-dozen times. His songs were not allowed on government
radio but blared out of thousands of shanties in the slums,
which is to say everywhere. Little did I know that my
contact with him would help land me in a Lagos dungeon,
also stripped to my underwear, and then earn me a one-way
ticket out of the country, together with my wife and our
two daughters, ages 4 and 6. But I get ahead of myself.
Late one night in February 1976, I arrived in Lagos to take
up residence as the West Africa correspondent for The New
York Times. The next morning I awakened to military music
on the radio. A coup was under way, and the head of state,
Murtala Muhammed, had been gunned down in his Mercedes in a
traffic jam. The coup failed. But because it was said to
involve a former ruler who lived in London, it ignited a
week of anti-Western demonstrations, and during one of
these I noticed a bizarre caravan of young people led by a
Ken Kesey-type Day-Glo bus.
"What's that?" I asked.
"That is Fela," said an Agence France-Presse man, the only
other Western reporter in town, "and to the government,
he's nothing but trouble." Over the ensuing weeks, I heard
more and more about him, so I resolved to meet this
38-year-old legend.
His house, painted yellow and encircled by barbed wire, was
called the Kalakuta Republic, because, I was to discover,
he took the position that he and his followers could no
longer get along with Nigeria, and so had decided to
secede. When my wife, Nina, and I were ushered in, we found
him an imperial presence. He was seated on a thronelike
chair (as always, in his bikini briefs), smoking a
cigar-sized joint that was held for him between tokes by
one of three or four female attendants. The interview was
awkward at first, but he soon warmed up; he was grateful to
America, which he had visited in 1969, for teaching him
about black power, he said. It was odd, he added, but it
took photos of African-Americans wearing dashikis on 125th
Street for Nigerians to feel proud in their own national
dress. What he most disparaged about the United States was
the size of the joints: "Do you believe," he told his
circle of wide-eyed followers, "over there, they light up
one little one, and they have to pass it around!"
Later that night - much later - we accompanied Fela to the
Shrine, a walk of about four blocks. In a ritual that I was
to see repeated time and again, he stopped traffic for
blocks around, strolling down the center of the street like
a bantam toreador while a multitude of worshipers pressed
in from all sides, throwing clenched-fist power salutes and
chanting his name in a quasi-religious fervor: "Fay-leh!"
"Fay-leh!" "Fay-leh!"
Once we were inside, the music took some getting used to.
The songs by his band, Afrika 70, lasted 40 minutes or
more, and after a while, the beat behind the jazz riffs
caught momentum. But from the first moment, his performance
was electrifying: imagine the sauciness of Mick Jagger, the
rebellious snarl of Bob Dylan and the cool authority of
John Coltrane. He strutted and strolled, danced and pranced
and played the saxophone like a madman. From time to time,
he would break into pidgin English to drive home a
political point about the backwardness of Africa or the
corruption of its leaders. He derided the "colonized"
African: "African man no de bare African name. African man
no de think African style." And in a song called "Zombie o
Zombie," he taunted the military, marching around the stage
with his sax tucked under his arm like a rifle. The
audience loved it. It was the military, of course, that
eventually did him in.
Over the course of a year, we saw quite a bit of Fela.
Once, in an attempt to deepen the friendship by removing
him from his entourage, we invited him to dinner at our
place on the island of Ikoyi, the enclave for rich
Nigerians and foreigners, that he sometimes lambasted in
his songs. My wife negotiated the numbers. He wanted to
bring 38. She insisted on 3. They struck a compromise: it
would be 5. The evening of the dinner, he turned up almost
on time - in the Day-Glo bus, with 18 others. We ate small.
He sat in the tallest chair and put his own records on the
hi-fi, just like home. The next day he sent us a thank-you
gift: a jar of the substance he called N.N.G. - Nigerian
natural grass.
Fela was born in Abeokuta, the center of Yoruba culture, to
a family that grew to prominence under British colonialism.
(His father was an Anglican preacher, and his mother a
fighter for independence.) In 1959 he studied classical
music in London, where he fell under the spell of Charlie
Parker, Miles Davis and other Americans. It took years for
his jazz-infused music to catch on at home.
His politics were not deep. His three heroes were Kwame
Nkrumah of Ghana, which was fine, but also Sékou Touré, the
leftist tyrant of Guinea; and Idi Amin, the deranged
buffoon leading Uganda into bloody ruination. I could never
shake his idolatry for Amin, whom he admired as "a big
man." Inside his own republic, he himself was a dictator.
He meted out punishments: lashings with a cane for the men
and confinement in a tin-shed "jail" for women. Once, in a
hotel room in Accra, Ghana, we walked in while he was
administering "justice" to one of his 27 wives, and we
turned and left in disgust.
My own time in the slammer can be traced to the evening of
Feb. 18, 1977. Our dinner was interrupted with a frantic
knock at the door. It was a runner from Fela, delivering a
two-word message: "Come - urgent." I made my way to the
Kalakuta Republic, and from blocks away, I saw flames
leaping high into the night air. Soldiers were beating
passers-by, who were fleeing with their arms raised in a
gesture of surrender. It was a riot by the military. It
lasted five hours. When it was over, Fela was wounded,
along with 60 others, including his mother (who was to die
much later from her injuries). I high-tailed it home, wrote
an article and sent it off to New York. The next morning, I
picked up the Nigerian newspapers and saw how seriously the
government viewed the incident: not a single word anywhere
on the attack.
The riot caused such public distress that the military
authorities held a public inquiry in the new national
theater. I accompanied a friend, a drummer named Bayo
Martins, who had had a falling out with Fela but still
respected him. As the only white face in the crowd, I was
not hard to spot; police summoned me, confiscated my notes
and told me to leave. A small item appeared in a Nigerian
paper the next day.
One week later, after I returned from Ethiopia, I found
four plainclothes security policemen in my office, rifling
the files. One was pretending to read letters - and holding
them upside down. Luckily, about three hours later, my
driver appeared. I took him aside and gave a message to be
delivered to my wife: for God's sake, get rid of Fela's
gift. I used a term he had never heard, and in carrying out
my injunction, he breathlessly mangled it (the malalaba?
maraluba? Maryjanal?), but she caught on and flushed it
down the toilet moments before the police arrived.
I was taken to a prison and handed over to a 7-foot-tall
warden who was stripped to the waist, with a raised scar
curving around his shoulder and across his belly. He
demanded my clothes, piece by piece. When I removed my
shirt, he was shocked at the juju charm around my neck and
asked, politely, where I had obtained it.
"Zaire," I replied. Even then, Zaire was collapsing as a
country, but its magic was the envy of the continent. In
exchange for an elephant-hair bracelet, the warden let me
keep my underpants. He escorted me to an underground cell
with a straw mat and a tiny window that was out of reach.
After about eight hours, I was summoned for interrogation
by a young man in reflecting sunglasses. I had been told by
the American ambassador weeks before that the military
authorities were displeased with various articles I had
written: one on infant mortality, one on pirates in Lagos
harbor and one on a campaign to unsnarl Lagos's notorious
traffic jams by whipping motorists. But among the questions
put to me by the young man was: "And what kind of music do
you like?" I was definitely a lover of Brahms and
Beethoven.
Some 16 hours later, after my wife and daughters also put
in time in jail, we were expelled from the country. The man
who locked us into a holding cell at Murtala Muhammed
Airport shook his head sadly and said, "I am so ashamed for
my country." The plane we were put on landed in Kenya, and
there we remained for another three years.
From time to time, I would hear about Fela. Many years
later, in 1986, he came to New York and called me. He said
I should quit the newspaper and go to work for him as his
"minister of information."
I was taken aback. "Minister?" I said. "What are you - some
kind of country?"
He laughed and said: "Yes. And I'm bigger than all
Nigeria."
John Darnton, an associate editor of The New York Times,
was its West Africa correspondent from 1976 to 1979.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/ar...d5c65a1fcc6c31
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. I just read that the remastered CD version has the longer, unmixed version of the jams; I'd like to hear that. 
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