had died but what I heard was that he was a trumpeter and also a reverend minister, and as such he used to hide his trumpet in his agbada [Nigerian attire] to go and play, as church congregations frowned upon their minister playing in clubs and social gatherings. They would take it as degrading to the pulpit. If it had been Fela’s mum she would have blown the trumpet in church. That was the type of determination she had, that eventually rubbed off on Fela. I guess through Fela’s father having been a musician Fela got to know quite a bit about music.
You saw Fela again when he returned from London in 1963?
Yes, I was in Lagos with the Uhurus and luckily there was Fela at a place called the Paradise in Ibadan. He came looking for me, and when we started playing he came in on his trumpet. It was when Fela came back from music school in London that he came out with the trumpet. Maybe his father also taught him, I don’t know. But when I first saw him in Lagos I never saw him with a trumpet. And I’ve never, up to today, heard any trumpeter that great. He was just fresh from tutelage and had been taught classical music at the conservatory. And he applied that to jazz. So his jazz was classic as well as innovative. Fela had all the qualities of a great trumpet player—the embouchure, the intonation, the dexterity, the fingering. It was just after this time that he formed his Koola Lobitos highlife band and you can see from his early works that Fela was a jazz fanatic.
I believe that you met Fela when he was in the United States in 1969?
Yes, I went to New York in 1964 to study civil engineering. While there I followed up Fela’s progress and I got his Koola Lobitos recordings. Also Fela would send people to me, and some of them would stay with me, because if he’s a friend of Fela he’s my friend and guest as well.
Then I was told that Fela was coming to the US to perform, and I met him in New York with his Koola Lobitos. Animashaun was on baritone sax, Tony Allen on drums and Tunde on trumpet. They played one night at the New York Sheraton Ballroom in a show organized by the African American community and a group of Nigerians for Nigerian National Day or some significant African day.
Then Fela left for California to tour, but wound up living there for a long time. That is where he gained his extreme African consciousness, blackmanism, and Afrocentrism. And he translated all this into his Afrobeat music.
I think this happens to all of us. It happened to me. My American friends, especially African Americans, found me to be too British. I had two Christian names and they didn’t see anything African about me as my values were too British, my dressing was too British, and my music was too conservative. So you start to form and evolve your own identity. And that is what Fela might have gone through when he was in California.
Tell me what you think about Afrobeat.
Its ingredients are a unique combination of highlife, jazz instrumentation, African percussion, and typical Nigerian movements. I can say with pride and love that myself and the other Ghanaian musicians in the Downbeats might have been the first link with Ghana and highlife for Fela. The way we did things was curious to Fela. The way we would take pains to create things, how we blended and performed our music. That was the foundation of Fela’s Afrobeat—I’m talking of highlife. You see at the time in Lagos there was only the apala and juju of I. K. Dairo and Haruna Ishola, which were mainly an aggregate of percussive instruments. So Fela got easily attracted to highlife, since his interest was in horns.
Afrobeat is a very sensitive music because Fela created it at a stage of his life when he required a lot of sympathy. He was always in difficulty for being outspoken and people would not leave him alone. So he found solace in the Afrobeat, as that was the only time Fela feels free, when he’s playing on stage.
Afrobeat was unique as he made his girls sing chorus for him. Because they are a bunch of dancers and not singers their voices could not stand a very good [complicated] sequence. So because of the ordinary nature of the chorus singing, Afrobeat became the music for the average man and woman in the street. If you take away the girls who sang the choruses you would be left with Fela as an avant-garde jazz-influenced African musician.
Fela always had a message and he made sure it was clearly heard. Here you have him come with a horn segment and it would disappear, then the guitar was there as if it’s monotonous—but it’s preparing you for what Fela was going to say. And when he starts singing everything holds up behind him. Everything stands still, goes on the bed and lies below him so he can express himself.
Fela was also influenced by his own traditional music, which is always held together by the steady metronomic figures of the cowbells and clips [claves] that maintain the measure. Also, if you listen to indigenous Yoruba ensembles and you have good ears, you will hear [something like] the string bass in it. You see, the Yoruba speaking or talking drums come in different sizes. They have, for instance, a big one they call yalo, the mother of the talking drums. Others are bigger or smaller. And they always provide the tonality under the whole percussion. So it was easy for Fela to take this and transpose it onto bass [guitar]. That gave a solid rock to his music.
Afrobeat is a beautiful legacy and great gift that Fela has bestowed not on just Nigeria and Ghana, but on Africa and the whole world at large.
3
FELA IN GHANA
Fela’s early Afrobeat hits in both Nigeria and Ghana were the singles “Mister Who Are You” and “Chop and Quench” (“Jeun Koku”), and the albums Open and Close and Rofo Rofo [Rough Rough] Fight. According to Bayo Martins, the song “Mister Who Are You” is a complaint against “bigmanism” and pomposity and aimed at the then Lagos State governor. “Jeun Koko” was “directed at those sit-tight politicians and soldiers in office, refusing to let go, while squandering the purse of the nation.”
During the 1970s, Fela, now with his Africa 70 instead of the older Koola Lobitos, continued to visit Ghana. Indeed, at one point he even thought of building a house in Ghana. I first saw him in 1972 when he was touring Ghana and played for the students at the University of Ghana cafeteria at Legon, where I was a final-year student studying sociology and archaeology. By then Fela was playing electric piano and tenor saxophone instead of the trumpet he had been using with the Koola Lobitos.
A favorite song of the time was “Gentleman,” in which Fela states he would rather be a natural and original African man than one dressed in a suit and tie and affecting refined manners. Another was “Lady” (on the flip side of “Sakara Oloje”), poking fun at refined Nigerian women and sung in pidgin English.
Fela plays, circa 1972.
On that trip Fela also played at the officers’ mess at State House for Colonel Ignatious Acheampong, who had just taken over the country in a coup against the civilian government of Prime Minister Busia, who had suddenly devalued the local currency. At that time Acheampong was still seen as a progressive, and as a result Fela dedicated his new 1971 album Open and Close to him, and indeed on the inside cover of the album is a photo of Fela and Colonel Acheampong.
As Faisal Helwani explains, it was in Ghana in 1972 that Fela began his habit of lecturing or “yabbis” his audiences:
I organized lectures at the University of Ghana and the African Youth Command at Tema. At Legon he was talking about Pan-Africanism, patriotism, “blackism,” and the black land of the Nile, not about day-to-day politics. And you know the Legon university students—anyone who will come and stand and talk more than thirty minutes, they will walk out and leave you. But Fela lectured them for three hours
