Fela: This Bitch of a Life

That’s why I said to myself, “I have to be very original and clear myself from shit.” I was still hustling. Hustling to make bread. “I must clear myself from this mess. I must identify myself with Africa. Then I will have an identity.” That’s what I was thinking to myself.

I wanted to be like Malcolm X! Fuck it! Shit! I wanted to be Malcolm X, you know. I was so unhappy that this man was killed. Everything about Africa started coming back to me.

Then one day I sat down at the piano in Sandra’s house. I said to Sandra: “Do you know what? I’ve just been fooling around. I haven’t been playing AFRICAN music. So now I want to write African music … for the first time. I want to try.” Then I started to write and write. In my mind I put a bass here … a piano there. … Then I started humming, then singing. I said to myself, “How do Africans sing songs? They sing with chants. Now let me chant into this song: la-la-la-laaa. …

Poems by Nikki Giovanni, The Last Poets (you know, “Niggers Are Afraid of Revolution”), Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Stokeley Carmichael, Jesse Jackson, Nina Simone’s “Four Women” , Miles Davis. … It was something that happened over a period of time. It was constant talking every night, every day, over a period of six months. Politics. Love. Love and politics.

A place open to everybody. A real compound, you know. I’d think to myself: “Ah-ah! What is this city shit-o? One man, one wife, one house isolated from everybody else in the neighbourhood? Is an African not even to know his neighbours?” Man, even the Bible says, “Know thy neighbour!” So why all this individualism shit? This “mine”. That “yours”. That “theirs”. What’s that shit? Is it African?

Sometimes it all comes back to me and I ask myself: “Why all this shit? Why do all these horrors happen to me? … All the shit I’ve been through in this motherfuckin’ world ever since I was born. … What kind of world is this? A world where you get your ass kicked if you do good … but given a medal if you kill some guy in the name of patriotism! What shit is that?” My first clash with “law and order” people was on 30 April 1974. I can’t forget that, man! Oh, what bastards! There I was in my house in Surulere. At that time, you know, there wasn’t any barbed-wire fence around my place. I had nothing to fear. I wasn’t even thinking they could have something against me. I was just preaching revolution for Africa, you know.

It was the first time I ever see prison in my life-o! I use to think prisoners were criminals until that day. Inside there I found guys who were also looking for a better life.

What’s the importance of a name? A lot, man. Malcolm X knew that. That’s why he chose “X”. Slavery had taken away his African name. So he preferred an “X” rather than the slave-master’s name. But so many people, man, are just brainwashed! They’d come and ask him: “Why X?” That reminds me of that French journalist who just the other day, there in Paris, asked me: “Why did you change your name from Ransome to Anikulapo?” I looked at him surprised. ‘Cause he’d asked just the opposite of what he should have asked. That i-d-i-o-t! He should’ve asked why my name had been Ransome in the first place. Me, do I look like Englishman?

Jobless. Homeless. Still in a cast, my body all bandaged. So I told everybody, “OK, motherfuckers, we must all get back to work!” We had to try to get the Shrine moving again ‘cause we didn’t have shit. All of my equipment, my belongings, they’d all gone up in flames with the house. Not a fuckin’ thing was left. Me, my girls, and the rest of my people slept in my brother Beko’s garage for a while. We still kept our dignity, though, man. We started the Shrine back. I began playing again, with one arm and a leg in a cast. That’s when I composed “Sorrow, Tears and Blood”. We were penniless, man. Then I thought to myself: “Don’t I have money coming to me from Decca or EMI?” We’re now in June-July…

Who are these “world leaders”? Destroyers, man. Not builders. Not creators. But destroyers. You see, I can’t accept that my fate be in the hands of such fucked-up people. Does that seem normal to you? Do you accept the idea that your fate, your last hour on this earth, might depend on some motherfucker sitting up in the White House in Washington or up in the Kremlin in Moscow? Should the fate of the whole world depend on whether or not one of those bastards’ pricks couldn’t get hard one night? Is that normal? Not to me, man! You see what I’m getting at? A handful of unnatural, unbalanced people are ruling this world. That’s why when I hear that the non-aligned bloc is trying to be a third solution, I can only shake my head. ‘Cause those people who call themselves non-aligned are unbalanced. Do you know what something which is non-aligned means? It means something which ain’t straight, man. Something crooked, unbalanced, an out-of-line people, you know!

I also told them that Africans have to start by feeling that we belong to any part of the continent. We should not limit our area of belonging to that small enclave cut out for us at the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Africa has to open her doors to every Black man in the world. Until Africa sees it that way, she won’t have made it yet, man.

Industrialization? We don’t need it unless it’s industrialization the African way. That’s what I told them. Technology, industrialization, the machine, they’ve all brought about a progressive loss of respect for life, for nature, for the environment we live in, man. And Africans worship nature and life. Technology’s killing the spiritual things. Now, how can that be called modernization? No, man. That’s regression. The white man is leading us astray. The right way is the one of our ancestors: traditional technology, or naturalology. That’s the only viable way. Yeah, that’s what I believe. You know what viable means? It means life, man. Life!

Power is knowledge. Somebody who has knowledge cannot misuse power. Knowledge is not technology. Knowledge is power in the cosmic sense; it’s rhythm, you know. Once you start to have rhythm you start having knowledge.

Science is making the world get more and more expensive. When science brings out a new gadget it costs more than the others. People have to earn more to buy it. So science is making the world more difficult, more complex. It makes people run more. What we need is to rest more, talk more, walk more, fuck more and enjoy things in life more. There’s a limit to what Europeans call technological and industrial development. When that limit is achieved society just crumbles. That’s why I see the day Europe, America and Russia will come to a standstill.

A lutta continua… A lutta continua… A lutta continua... Those words kept turning over and over in my mind during the flight. At first I didn’t understand because it was Portuguese language. One of the boys finally translated it as “the struggle continues!” I said to myself: “How can a responsible leader ever want the struggle to continue?” Who can want a war to continue? War is massacring … and killing. How can anybody want that to go on indefinitely? Those were the things I kept turning round in my head on the flight back from Berlin to Nigeria. That’s when I said to myself: “No! It must not continue. The struggle must STOP!” Since then, that’s been my slogan.

The leaders of the African freedom struggle will always want the struggle to continue. For them, it means travelling around on first-class tickets and being given VIP treatment wherever they go. So when people talk to me about South Africa, I say:

“Our Heads of State, how do they dare talk about South Africa? South Africa? What? What about South Africa?”

We all agree that South Africa is a fascist, anti-Black, white supremacist régime. We all know that. But analyse the question well. Ask youself this: are the so-called independent states of Africa any better than the apartheid régime in South Africa?

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.

So when people say America, Russia, China are great powers, I say: “No!” They’re not. They are destructive, not great powers. The man they called “Alexander the Great” was not great, he was a destroyer. Oppressors, destroyers, massacrists can never be great people. Oh, people are so brainwashed, man! Creativity, not destruction, should be the yardstick of greatness. If you cannot create anything that will make your own life, or that of your fellow human, happier, then get out of the way. Split! Disappear! And give others a chance. That’s my advice to these so-called great people and great powers!

Do I want to leave an imprint on the world? No. Not at all. You know what I want? I want the world to change. I don’t want to be remembered. I just want to do my part and leave. If remembering is part of the world’s thing, that’s their problem. I’ll do my part. I have to do my part. And everybody has to do his. Not for what they’re going to remember you for, but for what you believe in as a man. That’s what everybody should be about. If you want to do things because you want to be remembered, you are doing it for personal reasons only. Just do things ‘cause you believe in them. A human being should be like that.

What is power? Control of your mind, man! Control your mind, don’t let your mind control you. Then you have power. Power is not government, you see. It’s a question of mind.

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.

As I said, everybody has a purpose in life. You have to know your purpose. And if you don’t know it, then you have to find it out by yourself.

Education today doesn’t allow people to know their purpose. It is meant to stifle that purpose. That’s why I am against the education the white man has brought to Africa. In Africa they make the child want to be doctor, lawyer, or engineer by force, you know. People are just not allowed to choose and go their own way. The white man’s way stifles creativity, man. See what I mean?

Dreams are uncontrolled travels of the soul. We go to places. We can see the future in our dreams. We can go backwards and forwards. For instance, I dream many dreams. I found out that many dreams I dream are opposites of the future. If I dream about something successful, it’s a failure; and if I dream about failure, I’m always successful. Any time I remember a dream, it always comes to pass. I always forget my dreams, but any dream I remember always comes to pass. Dream is an experience the body cannot feel, only the soul. The body cannot pass through a wall. In a dream it can. In a dream you are given the opportunity to see, to feel the future. What you will be.

In the late 1980s he released “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,” an unforgiving satirical assault on the colonial education that was fostering cultural alienation among the surging generations of Africans. He fired two still more powerful shots: “Beasts of No Nation” and “Overtake Don Overtake Overtake.” These devastating commentaries delineated the emergent face of a new world order that a decade later would bear the name “globalization.

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.

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.