Helwani began bringing Fela to Ghana and was promoting him through his F Promotions. Fela so loved Ghana that any time he stays in Nigeria he rushed back down to Ghana for a holiday, and then would stay with me. I could guess that he used to come five or six times a year. Even when I’m not in he will leave his trumpet at my front door, as whether he was with his group or not Fela was always with his trumpet.
I haven’t seen a musician who rehearses so much as Fela. I suspect it was because he didn’t have a very good embouchure, so if he doesn’t play his trumpet for one day he finds it very difficult to get a sound out of it. Immediately I come home and see the trumpet I know Fela is in and so I will open the door, put the trumpet inside and keep the key under the doormat. But once Fela is in I can’t stay in the house because he would bring women. He goes to see one woman off before he’s coming with another. So when he came I used to go to my parents’ or girlfriend’s place to sleep, Fela’s own [interest in women] is like a disease. There’s no day that he doesn’t have a girl, different, different girls.
Around 1967 or 1968 Fela took your Uhurus on tours of Nigeria?
Yes, we went twice, but the first time it wasn’t promoted by Fela but by Chubby Checker [the famous African American king of twist]. You see immediately after the 1966 coup here we toured Ghana with Chubby, and I remember how he regretted that Nkrumah had been overthrown because black Americans regard him highly. Anyway, a year later Chubby was meant to be going to Nigeria but at the last minute his group couldn’t come. So Chubby came down to Ghana and wanted us to back him in Nigeria. Our first night we played at Onikan Stadium in Lagos and Fela was there. I remember that he didn’t like the arrangement of one of the songs we were playing. Fela said he didn’t believe I did the arrangement.
After the Lagos show an Ibo promoter wanted us to tour the east, as he wanted to get into favor with Ojukwu’s government, as by that time [1967] the Nigerian Civil War was starting and Ojukwu [Lt. Col. Emeka Ojukwu] was preparing to break [Biafra] away from Nigeria. So on that trip we saw them preparing every night with sticks as guns, and we played in Nsukka the day before the federal government attacked the town.
It was a little later that Fela himself promoted the Uhurus in Nigeria. He was able to organize that trip because we had engagements already at the Yaba College of Technology and Nsukka University. So he took advantage of that, and we did two shows for him in Lagos, one at the Glover Memorial Hall and the other at Lisabi Hall. We stayed at a hotel near Yaba side and shared the gate with Fela.
Uhuru on tour in Uganda, 1968. Stan Plange and Faisal Helwani are standing third and fourth from the left in the back row.
At the student-organized show at Yaba College we played “Yeshe Yeshe” [one of Fela’s highlifes]. Fela was sitting behind us on the bandstand and just jumped and grabbed the microphone from our singer Eddie Entreh, as he was so much moved because we were playing as a big band.
All of a sudden I heard that Fela had gone to America and he was there for such a long time that there were rumors that he had got stranded, his boys had left, and even that Fela had been arrested and jailed for dabbling in narcotics. He was there for months. When he came back he told me he hadn’t been in prison but he had had it tough—but had the help of one American girl, Sandra. That was when he got involved in the Black Power thing and that changed his life when he came back completely.
He was smoking cigarettes and grass [Indian hemp] and I haven’t seen any experiment that that boy hasn’t done with grass. He would put it in brandy for it to ferment for some time and would then drink the brandy. He would even chew the grass and would always smoke some before he goes on stage. I remember one time I was there Fela told me: “Stan, I’ve got some cake, will you take it?” So I said yes as he also likes cakes and anytime I’m leaving Ghana for Nigeria I used to buy Ghanaian bread and cake for him from a confectionery in Osu RE [Osu Royal Engineers, a suburb] in Accra. So they cut this cake and when I took it I realized that they had used cannabis in preparing it. So I spat it out and Fela started laughing at me. Fela went deeply into smoking Indian hemp openly.
It was after his trip to America that Fela really began his Afrobeat. His first hit as single was “Jeun Koku” (“Chop and Quench”) followed by “Who Are You.” You see Fela is one of the few musicians who are credited with having invented a beat. He based it on highlife and a James Brown type of soul. I think he got the soul idea when James Brown toured Nigeria in the late 1960s.
It was immediately after a show [in Accra] that Fela invented Afrobeat. So I think it was a fusion of soul and highlife, as already Fela was playing highlife in a jazzy form. Fela was also particular in his earlier Afrobeats with his bass line, trying to get it [the bass guitar] to go like the patterns of the big African drums. He was also one of the first here to introduce piano and organ to dance music.
Personally I didn’t like the later Afrobeats he recorded when he became more political and made songs attacking the government. He wasn’t minding the music then, and I thought personally that they weren’t very good recordings. I preferred his earlier Afrobeats like “Jeun Koku,” “Who Are You,” “Lady,” “Yellow Fever,” and “Swegbe.” “Swegbe,” for instance, is about someone who pretends to know how to do something, as part of the song says that a carpenter not knowing carpentry work is “Swegbe.” It’s a word that Fela coined and means “not the real thing.” The opposite, “pa-wo,” is somebody who really knows his work and is genuine.
I believe that you brought Fela and his Africa 70 band to Ghana in the early 1970s?
Yes, I promoted him twice to Ghana in 1971 and 1972. The first show was at the Lebanon Club in Tudu, Accra. The minister of education, Mr. R. R. Amponsah, the minister of information, Mr. Brodie-Mends, and the Nigerian high commissioner were there. Then Fela played a number and all of them felt so embarrassed.
The song is called “Na Poi”—it’s a bit filthy, and there are portions [where] Fela sings “when men take women lock door, what thing they do? Na poi”—sex and all this sort of thing. When Fela was playing it the Nigerian high commissioner bent his head and didn’t raise it until the show had closed. So at the end of the show Mr. Amponsah called me and asked me to bring Fela to his office the following day, before the next engagement in Takoradi. So I sent Fela there, and Mr. Amponsah pleaded with him to take that song out of the program, and Fela promised he would.
Our next show at the Atlantic Hotel in Takoradi had a very full attendance. So many people were standing on the chairs and tables to see Fela’s band and his half-naked girls that they broke over one hundred of them. After the show the manager of the hotel seized Fela’s instruments and we had to pay for the damage. It was that night that the anti-Busia military coup was announced [by Colonel Acheampong], and the following day we were meant to be going to Kumasi to play at the City Hotel. So the show couldn’t come on. However, as the first two shows had very good crowds the money we made was substantial. After that I brought Fela and his group to Ghana once again.
Fela always used to travel by road then and on these two [1971 and 1972] trips he had a VW bus that carried the instruments. He also had two Opel cars, Fela drove one and his drummer, Tony Allen, drove the other. J. K. Braimah also came. He was a longtime friend of Fela’s and was the band’s road manager. He also attended primary school here in Ghana, so he knows the country well.
Fela told me a story of what happened once after playing here at one of the trips I organized. He was going back to Nigeria, and when he got to Lomé [the capital of Togo] he began driving on a one-way street. He was stopped by one man who looked scruffy and told Fela in very bad English that this is one-way and you shouldn’t go. So Fela said: “So what, are you police?” The man said yes, and that he was a gendarme. Fela said no, as
