By Austin C. Okigbo,
The late Fela Kuti (1938-1997) who crafted the Afrobeat musical style remains by far the most famous musician that Nigeria has produced. His fame has earned him large following internationally, including in academic circles where his music and philosophy have become the subject of study among scholars more than any other musician from the continent of Africa. In the words of Tejumola Olaniyan, professor of African History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Fela was noted for his sensational, rhetorically ostentatious, and politically inflaming lyrics. His extra-musical lifestyle and reputation as nativist ideologue also accounts for his prominence. For those familiar with Nigeria’s history, every word heard in Fela’s music nearly twenty years after his death still sounds so relevant in relation to the current situation of the country, so much so that one cannot but marvel at the “prophetic” nature of his songs many of which addressed the social, cultural, economic, political, and religious problems that plague Nigeria. Hence I suggest that Fela’s music still has a message for us in the light of the increasing wave of radical and violent forms of religious extremism that are threatening the sociocultural fabric of the Nigerian state and its economic and political stability.
Fela may be rightly described as a cultural nationalist whose “nativism” hinges on his privileging of African institutions and cultural ideals as a means to salvage the nation and the continent at large from the current structures of neocolonialism. In my own study of his music and political thought, I describe Fela’s idea about neocolonialism as illustratable in the figure of a tripod stool, the top of which is an oppressive superstructure that rests on three legs, namely local repressive regimes, “foreign religions”, and multinational corporations. In Fela’s thought, each of these legs relies upon, and feeds one another. Fela’s critique of Christianity and Islam as foreign religions, succinctly articulated in his song “Suffering and Smiling” (1977) is particularly because of the anomalous ways in which they are practiced in Nigeria. In this song, Fela used a two-section compositional structure with his stylistic signature long, funky, instrumental intro, delivered in rudimentary African call and response style and withy lyricism to paint a pervert picture of Nigerians’ embrace of these religions. For him, Nigerians’ perverted embrace of Christianity and Islam account for the utter abandonment of the project of our national unity and development, the loss of the quintessential African sense of community and mutual interdependence, mental and spiritual enslavement, and reckless transfer of our national wealth overseas in obeisance to the “God” of the “foreign religions.” As a Catholic Christian, I differ with Fela in his characterization of Christianity and Islam as foreign agents of neocolonialism. I agree with him however in the fact that the nature of Africans’ embrace of these religions has resulted in our cultural dislocation, culminating in what I describe as (borrowing a leaf from Kwame Nkrumah) the crisis of the African cultural and national conscience.
Though cosmopolitan in outlook, Fela’s criticism of Nigeria’s political elite and the citizenry in general in “Suffering and Smiling” echo of which is also heard in other songs- “Colonial Mentality” (1977) and “Mr. Follow Follow” (1977), is their uncritical embrace of Christianity and Islam. These religions were delivered to Africans with the vestiges of European and Arabic cultures and their attendant ethnocentric worldviews through which Africa and African ways of being in the world are looked down upon. This is to the extent that the worship of God and Allah in ways other than in the modes of European and Arabic cultural paradigms is considered evil or syncretic at best. While the trend is gradually being reversed in the church especially following Vatican II and the emergence of African and inculturation theologies, some pockets of newfound Christian groups in their radical, conservative, and sometimes near-violent fundamentalist approach to the gospel have managed to earn themselves the new nomenclature “Christian Boko Harams.” Meanwhile in some West African countries including Nigeria, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Mali, emergent fundamentalist Salafists, a radical Sunni version of Islam closely associated with the Saudi wahhabism and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, has been reversing the centuries-long cohabitation of Islamic Sufism and indigenous cultures. In Nigeria though, the hardline conservative interpretation of the Quran, which paved the way for the kind of violent extremism associated with current global terrorism has been in the making since Sheik Usman Dan Fodio acquired his education from the Sunni School of Cairo in early 19th century, sequel to which he unleashed one of the bloodiest jihadist campaigns in the history of Islam in Africa. Since then, Nigeria has been experiencing the rise of violent jihadists often propped up by the political class who use religion to claim legitimacy in the face of rising poverty, which they helped to create. The most recent and most lethal of the jihadist groups include the Maitatsine (1980s) and Boko Haram (2002 to the present). These groups’ puritanist agendas include the complete elimination of indigenous practices and institutions, replacing them with Arab-derived ones, and the complete rejection of all elements of “modern civilization” which they perceived to be antithetical to the “pure spirit” of the Quran. The result of this interpretation of Islam in Nigeria is the constant slaughtering and kidnaping of students such as the case of the high school girls from Chibok in Borno State; the destruction of infrastructure especially in the North; needless wastage of thousands of human lives; all of these exerting adverse impacts on the national economy.
It seems then that Boko Haram, and indeed all those who subscribe to fundamentalist interpretations of the Holy Scripts do in fact place their interest in the “foreign religions” over and above the sustainable development and stability of their country, an issue that Rev. T.B. Joshua tried to address in one of his recent sermons in response to the threat on Lagos. This is clearly exemplified in the fact that basically every slightest literary or performative criticism of Islam or the founding prophet from anywhere in the world (e.g the release of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Danish cartoon of the prophet, and the YouTube video that depicted the prophet as pedophile) often triggers violent reactions from extremists in Nigeria who resort to burning places of worship, destroying businesses, and killing their fellow citizens who know nothing about the novels, cartoons, and videos; exactly what Fela feared for Nigeria more than three decades ago.
I must observe though that there is a point on which Fela would have agreed with Boko Haram, namely his notion about undue western cultural influence on Africans, and the continuation of the so called western colonial mis-education even in post-colonial contexts, an issue that some prominent African scholars such as Chinweizu and Ngugi wa Thiong’o have also addressed in their writings. Fela however more fundamentally differs from Boko Haram in his nativist embrace of African culture, traditional values and institutions as antidote to the current problems plaguing Nigeria and Africa. For Fela Kuti, Nigeria’s and indeed Africa’s development must be home grown, albeit rooted in local cultures and traditions as articulated in his song “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense” (1986).
In conclusion, while the reader and I may have issues with this musical legend, thanks to his extra-musical reputations, we must allow Fela to remind us that Nigeria’s national unity and development cannot come from religious extremism, nor from what Professor Kenneth Amaeshi of Edinburgh University has dubbed act of “doing God” (i.e. hypocritical hyper religiosity in private and public spaces) in Nigeria. Rather it must come from an inward rediscovery of the best of what defines us as Nigerians and Africans, upon which we can lay a solid foundation for sustainable development by forging national consciousness and national unity.
Austin C. Okigbo teaches Ethnomusicology and Africana Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
E-mail: austin.okigbo@colorado.edu
Twitter: @aokigbo