Experiences such as the one related above are the source of Fela’s ‘78 hit “V.I.P.” – again a play on words, for instead of “Very Important Person”, it stands for Vagabonds in Power.

Marley effectively used the hypnotic sounds of reggae laced with poetic lyrics to protest injustices, creating an entirely novel philosophical discourse through music. Brown’s aggressive funk, which became the backbone of Fela’s Afrobeat, placed the reviled, feared black body and features on the map of the world in a positive, sensuous light. But neither Brown nor Marley tried to organize popular resentment into a political party, as Fela did. Neither went as far as Fela in identifying in unmistakably graphic terms the elites that were responsible for the oppression of African peoples all over the world.

Nevertheless, he refused exile. “No one will force me out of this country,” he warned. “If it is not fit to live in, then our job is to make it fit.” Instead, he chose a life on the margins that rejected all the material excesses of Africa’s post-independence elites. He saw the Africa that he and his parents inherited as “not the real Africa.” The Kalakuta Republic he set up in the heart of a large, sprawling ghetto was his attempt to reinvent and reimagine another Africa: a space of belonging for all, especially the dispossessed.

This seemed to be in direct conflict with the pride Ghanaians had in their own culture and precolonial history. I recall a song—my father’s favorite—by the great Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti called “Colonial Mentality.” Colonial mentality, as defined by Kuti, is the idea that people who have been colonized, marginalized, and enslaved feel themselves inferior to their colonizers based on the very fact of their colonization. He be say you be colonial man, Kuti sings in his beautifully rough voice, his Nigerian pidgin clear and defiant. You don be slave man before / Them don release you now / But you never release yourself.

To put it simply, when you don’t feel you own a country, you probably won’t feel accountable for its state of affairs. People don’t normally rob themselves. Instead, they take care of their own property and try to ensure its protection. Corruption is stealing from the people of Kenya and all Africa, and it is driven by the mentality of the outsider looking in. This was the main theme in my novel Devil on the Cross, which I wrote in Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison in 1978. In the novel, I depicted a competition organized by the devil to choose the seven cleverest robbers. But these are no ordinary robbers: to qualify for the competition, one must demonstrate that one has robbed millions or billions from the people. These are world-class thieves. They testify to their past heroic plundering, but they also articulate a vision of future theft. The winner will be crowned Chief of Robbers by the Organization for Modern Theft and Robbery, then headquartered in New York. I would recommend the book to all those who desire a resurgent Africa.