Fela’s Pidgin English Eloquence

 

 

 

     Fela tended always toward extravagance.  His oeuvre is very large, amounting to at least sixty-four albums, many of which I have not heard.  Ignorant of Yoruba and imperfect in my understanding even of pidgin, I can here do no more than encourage others with even less acquaintance with Fela to listen to this remarkable artist who expressed the thoughts of millions in his country and elsewhere and recorded songs that speak to even a bourgeois American suburbanite.

 

 

     Slightly less than fifty years ago, Patricia and I embarked on a study of West Arican history and culture in contemplation of teaching in Nigeria.  We read about Nok terra cottas and Benin bronzes, about the Middle Passage and the Berlin Congo Conference of 1885.  We got an inkling at least of the complex and, I think, comprehensive pantheon of Yoruba orishas well as some sense of the contemporary meaning of juju and witches.  We investigated Nigerian cuisine, as well as one might when limited by the resources of a 1970s American supermarket. 

     And we listened to music popular in Nigeria: King Sunny Adé, the Juju master, Prince Nico Mbarga  (who was actually Cameroonian), and, of course, Fela.  The musician Fela Kuti was born Ransome-Kuti, and for a time used the name Anikulapo, Yoruba for “one who has death in his purse,” though he is most often called simply Fela.  He died in 1997, having established himself as the preeminent figure in Nigeria’s musical scene during the second half of the twentieth century.

     During the last century, the significance and, at times, the beauty of popular culture has been recognized.  Since the term popular implies acceptance by the masses, largely independent of the trends occurring among the elite, one might argue that it registers specific moments in social history more precisely than high art.  Once in Mumbai I watched a film at a gigantic cinema palace, grander than any movie theater I know in America, where every seat was occupied by boisterous expressive fans, cheering, laughing, singing, and gasping while balancing trays of snacks.  The experience of watching a Bollywood musical in that setting surely revealed more about India today than visiting a museum or reading a novel by Arundhati Roy.  Similarly, acquaintance with anime characters, the haunting melodies of Um Kulthum, or the comedy of George Formby can reveal the taste and received ideas of a given place and time [1].  This is emphatically true in the case of Fela who constantly engaged topical themes. 

     The musician, whose birth name was Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, grew up in an affluent and influential family.  His parents had been leaders in the struggle for independence, his mother as a leading feminist and socialist organizer and his father as head of the teachers’ union.  Nobel-winning writer Wole Soyinka is his cousin.  Though himself a relatively privileged member of his country’s small educated middle class, he was brought up to fight for progressive causes, a tendency that accelerated after his visit to the United States in 1969 when he became acquainted with Black Panther Sandra Smith who gave him a copy of Malcolm X’s Autobiography.

     His American influences were musical as well as political.  When young he had performed with trumpeter Victor Abimbola Olaiya who had in turn been influenced by James Brown, but Fela’s own musical style came to be called Afrobeat.  His distinctive arrangements include elements of highlife and Yoruba folk music, but also blues, jazz, and funk, often featuring lengthy repetitious jams with strong horn sections and frequent call and response passages.  He sang sometimes in Yoruba, but quite often used pidgin English [2] in order to seek a mass audience across tribal groups.

     Those fond of Fela’s music, even those most sympathetic to the singer’s anti-imperialist stance, might be given pause by other elements of his politics.  Though he died of complications from AIDS, he considered the condition a “white man’s disease.”  In 1978 he married twenty-seven women in a single ceremony.  His Afrocentrism considered ethnicity (rather than power or wealth) the most essential and definitive characteristic in social relations.  His cultural nationalism was evident as well in his use of Yoruba ritual.  Still Fela was a significant voice of protest against post-colonial oppression and domestic authoritarianism and his frequent use of pidgin, a dialect most used by the powerless, underlines his advocacy for the poor and working class.

     He began, however, with the group Koola Lobitos doing love songs like “My Lady Frustration” (1968): “Everybody knows how much he meant to you, baby/ But you still insist that your heart's alright.”  Other tracks are dance music and focus on the night club scene, such as “Its Highlife Time” (1968):

Jump for joy

At this freaky club

He’s brand new craze

that makes me craze

 

      From 1969 on, however, his dominant themes were regularly political and cultural.  His Nigerian and international antagonists are identified in his “yab” (ridicule) of Moshood Abiola, “I. T. T. (International Thief Thief” (1980) and his political ally Olusegun Obasanjo.  As Abiola had been appointed a vice-president of I. T. T. he might represent multinational corporations as well as oppressive forces within the country.  Identifying such exploiters as stealing the people’s money, he blames them for “oppression,” “inflation,” “confusion, and  “corruption.”  

     Asking “Why Black Man Dey Suffer” (1986) his answer is clear.

 

Our riches them take away to their land

In return them give us their colony

Them take our culture away from us

Them give us them culture we no understand

Black people we no know ourselves

We no know our ancestral heritage

We dey fight each other everyday

We are never together, we are never together at all

 

     Just as the British colonialists had practiced “indirect rule,” selecting local traditional leaders who would collaborate with the European program, today’s ruling class rewards a few Nigerians to ensure their support.  These Africans then reinforce outside domination by building their own support by passing some monies down the line.

 

Them get one style wey them dey use

Them go pick one African man

A man with low mentality

Them go give am million naira breads

To become of high position here

Him go bribe some thousand naira bread

 

     Similarly, in  “Colonial Mentality” (1977) he notes that some Africans have adopted the European view as superior, leading them to look down on their own people.

 

De ting wey black no good

Na foreign things them dey like

 

E be so them dey do, them dey think

Dey say dem better pass them brothers

 

In “Underground System” (1992) he praises Nkrumah but attacks Obasanjo. 

 

When one good man want rise for Africa

Today Bad leaders dey go wan finish am o

When one good man want rise for Africa

Today Useless people dey go wan finish am o

 

     Fela’s attitude toward the Nigerian government, always critical, was brought to a head with his creation of the Kalakuta Republic, a commune of his family and entourage in Lagos which he declared to be an independent nation [3].  He complained of the military and police authority’s frequent raids in “Zombie” (1976): "Zombie no go walk unless you tell am to walk."  The following year the compound was destroyed by the military in an attack during which the singer’s mother was thrown from  a second story window ultimately dying from  her injuries.  It is unsurprising, then, that for Fela the security forces bring only “Sorrow, Tears and Blood” (1977). 

     Fela had meanwhile changed his group’s name from Nigeria 70 first to Africa 70 and then to Africa 80 reflecting his Nkrumahism, pan- Africanism, and socialism.  In 1979 he founded a political party, the Movement of the People supporting the artist himself as a presidential candidate, but the organization soon folded under heavy political repression [4].

     Fela’s Afrocentrism is consistent.  Rejecting European culture, he declares in “I no be gentleman at all o/ I be Africa man original” (“Gentlemen,” 1973).  During the Biafran War in 1970, Fela released “Viva Nigeria” which pleads “Lets join hands Africa, we have nothing to lose but a lot to gain.”  In “Expensive Shit” (1975) he declares “Me I be Fela, I be Black Power man”  “I no go agree make my brother hungry.”  In “Mr. Grammarticalogylisatitionalism Is the Boss” (1976) he criticizes the emphasis on English language proficiency in the educational system.  Even in the matter of toilet etiquette he prefers the traditional practice. 

 

Don't worry about my nyash ooh

I dey use water to clean my nyash when I shit finish

Yes, I dey use water because anytime way I use

Toilet paper, my nyash still dey smell, ahhhhh

My fore Father's teach me for Africa the correct way

                           “Don’t Worry About my Mouth-o” (1977)

 

     He is equally hostile to all organized religion [5], denouncing priests and imams alike as exploiters tied to the ruling class. 

 

Na the best friend to Bishop na him be director

 

Pastor's house na him dey fine pass

My people them dey stay for poor surroundings

 

           “Coffin for Head of State”

 

My people them go dey follow Bishop

Them go follow Pope

Them go follow Imam

Them go go for London

Them go go for Rome

Them go go for Mecca

Them go carry all the money

 

put your minds into any goddamn church

Any goddamn mosque

Any goddamn Celestical

Including Seraphoom and Cheruboom

 

We now have to carry our minds

Out of those goddamn places

               

                                “Shuffering and Shmiling”

 

      Apart from resisting authoritarian action by the state, Fela protests class stratification.  In “Alagbon Close” (1974) he speaks for the poor, including those called agbepo, who, in a country where most areas (even in Lagos and Abuja) lack sewage systems, carry human waste away from residential areas.   

 

I dey do my part

I be human being like you like you

 

     Using similar imagery in “Expensive Shit” (1975) he combines his own arrest for possession of cannabis when he swallowed his joint and was detained and his excrement regularly searched (though he managed to substitute another prisoner’s) with a general image of citizens who prefer to walk away from the shit, i. e. the corruption and repression of the rulers.

 

Him go bend the yash, him go shit

Him go comot away from him shit

Him shit go be the last thing wey him go like to see

Because why, oh? (Because the shit dey smell)

 

     He comments on issues other than repression from the point of view of the general population, the availability of safe water, for instance, in “Water No Get Enemy” (1976).  In “Opposite People” (1977) he complains about those who act contrary to the people’s interests. 

 

Everyone dey dance, him go push

Everyone dey talk, him go shout

Everyone dey hear, him go sleep

Everyone dey think, him go drink

 

In “Go Slow” (1972) the traffic jams of Lagos, then the capital, become an image for the country’s stagnation under selfish and tyrannical leadership.  He insists that the country should belong to the common people, saying “Man must be man for him land o.”

     Fela became the leading entertainer of his country while maintaining a vigorously adversarial attitude toward its rulers.  The listener to his recordings is overwhelmed by the full orchestrations and spellbound by his hypnotic repetitions.  His music remained primarily dance music (as the stage show emphasizes).  Fela is always hosting a party, however serious the theme of his lyrics.  Like the blues, his oeuvre indicates that art can transmute suffering, redeeming human experience by recasting it in aesthetically pleasing, even celebrative, forms without denying the pains it may describe.  His unstoppable plucky defiance, his art, renders his opponents fatuous and often ludicrous in spite of their holding the stronger hand.  Whereas the fans of artists like Victor Jara from Chile, José Afonso in Portugal, or Woody Guthrie in America were likely to be engagé even before encountering the music, many of Fela’s listeners were drawn first by his sound even before discovering that the man strutting on stage was not simply a romantic but remote show business idol, but rather was speaking their language and representing their interests, creating a body of work that found admirers far beyond West Africa.

 

 

 

 

1.  Some works are sufficiently admired by critics to be considered simultaneously popular and “high” art.  Among them are Homer, Dickens, Mark Twain, George Herriman, Walt Kelly, Louis Armstrong, and Bob Dylan. 

2.  The low prestige associated with pidgin is implied by the common term “broken English.”  Of course, blues, jazz, reggae, rebetiko, and fado all developed not in concert halls but in the low dives of the lumpenproletariat.

3.  When I arrived in Lagos in 1979 with my wife and five-year-old daughter, I wanted to attend a show at his compound, but in the end did not venture there, having been told that the music would not begin until after midnight and that audience members had to strip to their underwear.  As I did not go there, I cannot confirm if these conditions were real. 

4.  It was revived by Kuti’s youngest son Seun Kuti in 2020. 

5.  Fela makes no distinction, for instance, between the British and thus colonial Anglican church and the indigenous Christian cult of the Cherubim and Seraphim. 

A Structural View of Certain Oracles

     On even the balmiest of days we are all aware that the specters of mortality, disease, want, violence, and a myriad of other causes of suffering hover nearby. Each of us has experienced the fragility of life and fortune. Tomorrow always poses a threat, vague or vivid according to circumstances. In an attempt to gain some measure of control over a fundamentally unmanageable environment, people have sought patterns in the phenomena around them. While this habit clearly leads toward the recognition of cause and effect and thus in the direction of science, magic and superstition arise from the same source. [1] One of the principal concerns of intellectuals over thousands of years of human history has been the prediction of the future, whether their findings are couched in the hypotheses of experimenters or the resounding rhetoric of Isaiah.
     The oracle in Solomon’s temple is described in detail in the book of Kings while little, unfortunately, is said of its uses. In the ancient world kings regularly consulted oracles for advice on war and statecraft, but many who consulted experts on the future were individuals with more personal priorities. For instance, among the queries that have survived inscribed on lead strips from Dodona, Greece’s oldest oracle, is one from Nikokrateia asking to which of the gods she should sacrifice in order to be better and stronger and cease from her illness. Another implies what may have been a heated issue several thousand years ago: “Lysanias asks Zeus Naios and Dione whether the child which Annula is carrying is not by him.” [2] How suggestive it is that this proposition is stated negatively!
     In antiquity the desire for prophetic knowledge resulted in the formulation of a great many oracular technologies. Some methods, like that which seems to have been practiced at Delphi for over a millennium, were spontaneous, relying wholly on the inspiration of a human intermediary who is thought to directly convey divine knowledge. Similarly, in most shamanistic procedures the prophet simply conveys to listeners what the deity has said. Clearly, from a modern point of view, the efficacy of these oracles depends on the prudence and wisdom of the one delivering the divine message, both in shrewdly analyzing the question posed and in maintaining the kind of ambiguity or obscurity that has, for instance, allowed excited enthusiasts to trumpet Nostradamus’ accuracy with different readings for every generation. Often such prognosticators (and indeed their contemporary incarnations, the reader/advisors that can be found in every American city) have been compared to psychiatrists and other counselors only some of whom hold degrees. Today we hear even of “life coaches.”
     A great many systems of divination involve the priest’s interpretation of specified signs. These vary enormously; among the well-known methods are the observation of cracks in heated shell or bone (practiced in ancient China), of birds (such as much Roman augury), or of tea leaves (called tasseography). These allow for almost unlimited latitude in decoding and thus, like the direct methods above (and such related beliefs such as explaining the meaning of dreams) reflect more than anything else the acumen of the practitioner. Parallels might be made with such varied agents as brokers who rely on the mysteries of “technical analysis.”
     People have also sought to discern the future by selecting one of an inventory of options meant to be encyclopedic. [3] Rather like an Aristotelean essay, such lists of possibilities analyze in the etymological sense, breaking down a topic into constituent parts to produce an anatomy as Burton did for melancholy and Frye for literature. Thus Freud divided the mind into id, ego, and superego and Marx saw proletarians, bourgeoisie, and aristocrats. The scala naturae assumed by Aristotle and elaborated by neo-Platonists similarly aims toward a comprehensive classification of phenomena into a framework sufficient to include all the data. Familiar examples of such symbolic systems that persist in contemporary times include astrology and Tarot. The signs of the zodiac define a comprehensive set of personality types. Just as everyone must have a birth day, everyone must fall into the categories associated with that day (or hour or minute, for the lovers of precision). Were it not used for fortune-telling astrology might claim to be a scientific treatise, resembling the psychiatrists’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual setting forth the possibilities among which to locate each individual person.
     The deck of playing cards which spread from Persia to India on the one hand and to Egypt and Europe on the other, clearly breaks down society by status, [4] but its symbolic application might apply to countless other possibilities and the ordinary deck was early used for divination. Tarot cards, which first appeared in 15th century Italy, with picture cards called trionfi (triumphs, as they served as trump cards) were used for hundreds of years to play trick-taking games before they, like ordinary playing cards, came to be used to predict the future. Yet they ultimately came to be regarded as an inclusive system for representing the innumerable and shifting shape of individual fortune.
     The very ambitious analyses of such oracular systems seek to describe the world of possibilities potential in any given moment. The delineation of the entire array has a value apart from any oracular value. In reading fiction one may come upon this or that chance turn of fortune – but these systems aim to present them all at once as they would appear to the sublime eye. They seek to embrace every possibility after the manner of the multiverses imagined by science and science fiction alike. It is though one were to see from above the entire complex of plot in Ts'ui Pên’s novel (in Borges’ story “The Garden of Forking Paths”). [5]
     The most elaborate systems of this sort of which I am aware are the Chinese I Ching and the West African Ifa which exhibit structural similarities though one existed in written form millennia ago and the other remained in oral transmission until quite recently. [6] Each features 256 options, in the former derived from the eight lines in each of the sixty-four hexagrams and in the latter generated by combinations of the 16 basic Odù. The use of either system involves the selection through a random method of a particular verse as relevant to the question posed to the oracle. The Chinese had used the cracks in heated tortoise shells in ancient times, and more recently the patterns resulting from tossed yarrow stalks. Among users of the Bollingen Wilhelm translation, coin tosses were substituted. Similarly, among the Yoruba and other users of the Ifa the priest or babalawo might use the opele or divination chain, or counters (palm nuts, kola nuts, or cowries) on a divination tray or opon ifá. This aspect of the ceremony is trivial.
     The creator of the I Ching is said to be the culture hero Fu Xi while the Ifa is attributed to Orunmila who governs knowledge in general as well as divination. Their inventories of possibility are taken by believers to be exhaustive. To Jung the I Ching represented a technology based on synchronicity. Confucius, often thought to be the anti-mystic, in spite of his fondness for music and poetry, said that if he had fifty years to spare, he would devote them to the I Ching. Claims no less grand are also made for the verses of the Ifa. A well-known contemporary enthusiast declares of Ifa that the odùs “represent EVERY SINGLE energy, situation, combination of situations that have, are or will ever be,” while some modern professors of computer science assert the validity of Ifa’s predictions and add that the oracle is a sort of computer system. [7]
     In the characteristic way or art, including the art which is called religion, the attitude implied by these oracles is profoundly ambivalent, a passionate assertion undercut by deep doubt. Whether the claims of their partisans are valid and whether any system can in fact predict the future, the I Ching and the Ifa remain as ambitious attempts to classify all experiences in existence from the human point of view and to in a way redeem, with the mandala-like symmetry of the possibilities arrayed in the imagination’s mental theater, the often distressing turns of every life. Such a symbolic pattern allows the adept to rehearse again and again the defeats and the victories even unto the final denouement. Little wonder that a sensitive and intelligent practitioner might gain a sense of mastery from repeated familiarity with such a document either written or oral, and that such a person might occupy a legitimate place in the professions of her or his day.
     Yet the oracles can also evoke pathos, their desperate and unattainable goal of anticipating reality (not to speak of the controlling it through magic) always beyond the grasp of anyone for all the salesmanship and charlatanry of the centuries. They speak the naked voice of desire, the fundamental drive to make all right through possession of one thing or another, as though we could ever find oneself masters of the wild horses of our lives. And, in the lyric beauty of their images, they eloquently testify as well to the satisfaction of play in the manipulation of symbols, the dazzle of a few rapid dance moves, of some liquid sounds (whether verbal or tonal) succeeding to touch the heart, or a tale too striking to be forgotten. Whatever their other virtues or failings, the I Ching and the Ifa resemble, as art does, the human heart, though more composed, more serene, and markedly more wise than the diviners’ agitated customers and a good many of the diviners themselves, and very likely me as well if not the reader. Not every believer in art is a fundamentalist, and all the most reputable seers have sought meaning not in the letter but in the spirit. The predictions retailed on the street in Lagos and Hong Kong may not be debased currency, but merely the form of wisdom most useful to some. The most competent prophets I have no doubt are wise indeed and provide a useful service to their customers today as their predecessors have surely done since mammoths roamed the Alps.



1. Joseph Needham in the monumental Science and Civilisation in China details the East Asian association of divination and scientific inquiry. Indeed, until quite recent times, scientists of substantial achievement often practiced such “parasciences” as alchemy, divination, and astrology. Newton, for instance, pursued alchemical experimentation and predicted the future. John Maynard Keynes commented that “Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.” (“Newton, the Man”)

2. G. H. R. Horsley, New Documents illustrating Early Christianity, vol. 4: Review of the Greek Inscriptions and Papyri Published in 1979, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1997, p. 135.

3. A practice like bibliomancy, in which one randomly selects a passage in scripture or another book is similar but not intentionally inclusive in scope and thus unconsidered here.

4. To Claude François "Pére" Menestrier, the hearts are the church, the spades (or pikes) aristocracy, the diamonds (paving tiles) merchants, and the clubs peasants. (See his Bibliotheque curieuse et instructive de divers ouvrages anciens & modernes.) To Jessie Weston, however, in Ritual and Romance (Chapter 6) they are mystic symbols which are simultaneously sexual.

5. Many of Borges’ stories include such limitless texts (surely the most extravagant fancy of a librarian) in one form or another. The most directly literary are perhaps “The Library of Babel” and “The Book of Sand.”

6. Probably the best edition is Wande Abimbola’s Ifa: An Exposition of the Ifa Literary Corpus (London: Oxford, 1976). There are now a good many version by Africans as well as one by Maulana Karenga, the inventor of Kwanzaa, who produced a partial version under the title Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings.

7. See http://www.academia.edu/5315636/A_Comparative_Study_of_Ifa_Divination_and_Computer_Science “Computer Science takes it origin from ifa divination.”