What did that mean, an African city? Why? Because Joburg was soundtracked by the maquamba beat? There was nothing un-African about Cape Town. He felt the old sentences begin to take shape, the old argument begin to coalesce. This city and all its fucked-up divisions and casual cruelties was the way it was because of slavery and colonialism and you don’t get more African than that.

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.

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.

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.

The keening so evident in his playing sounds like an outflow of that heritage received from two black men preaching the Word of God in North Carolina in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Coltrane enfolded into his sheets of sound the eloquence of the AME Zion Church but also the weirder and weirder dissonances of Holiness practices. His choices are musically driven but in his spirit is a consistent preference for ecstasy over entertainment. Every note he plays is air from his body, every song on these albums a transcript of his breath.