THIS ARTICLE FROM NEW YORK TIMES WAS FOREWARDED TO ME BY A FRIEND.I
THOUGHT IT WAS AN INTRESTING READ,.
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Subject: NYTimes.com Article: How Fela Landed Me in Jail
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> 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/arts/music/20DARN.html?ex=1059762781&ei=1&en=dee037741ed6945a
>
>
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