With my music I create a change. I see it. So really I am using my music as a weapon. I play music as a weapon. The music is not coming from me as a subconscious thing. It’s conscious. I’m consciously doing what I am doing. What I mean is that whatever I want to do is in my mind. Man can have complete control of his mind. That’s what knowledge is about. To be able to control one’s mind.

Fela’s hit tunes of the late 1970s, “I.T.T.” (International Thief, Thief), “V.I.P.” (Vagabonds in Power), and “Authority Stealing,” already betrayed a perceptive recognition of the local implications of an emergent transnational capitalism. In that new scheme, the ruling elites in Africa appeared as amoral and soulless comprador classes, devoid of any national interests or cultural moorings, people without any specific allegiance to nation, country, or continent. African despots, too, were beasts who belonged to no nation.

I grew up in a black world filled with soul and reggae music, a world where Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder were kings. But Ace grew up in middle England, where Motörhead and Black Sabbath were his heroes. He’s on beat one, I’m on beat two, and because we’re open to hearing things in different places, that sometimes creates wicked, weird, warped musical ideas. I love that. There have been days all four of us hear a riff in four different places in the groove – that’s when magic happens!

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.

In that age of optimism when the colonial shackles were newly off and the future was bright, statesponsored ensembles presented a cosmopolitan mix of Caribbean, European, American, and African music, a musical modernity with an unmistakable local inflection. Some of the bands included in their repertoire the traditional songs of various ethnic groups but the kora, balafon, and traditional drums were supplemented with modern instruments and sometimes supplanted by them. Whatever was played was played with focus and with that effortless virtuosity that is a byword for Manding musicianship—but one should never call virtuosity effortless.