Free Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French Page B

or under another name the next.
    When we left Kudirat, we set out to look for a different sort of opposition leader, Nigeria’s most famous musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The first thing I had noticed when I arrived in Lagos was how the city had been plastered with posters announcing that Fela would be performing that night at his own club, the famous Shrine. I had never seen Jimi Hendrix perform, nor had I seen Miles Davis—two other musical heroes of my youth—and having been a fan of Fela’s since college, I was determined not to miss his show.
    Fela came from Abeokuta, a remarkable city in the country’s southwest that is located a couple of hours’ drive from Lagos. The city was founded in the 1830s by refugees from the Yoruba civil wars, and since most of its 500,000 residents come from the same clan, the Egba, many claim that this makes Abeokuta the world’s largest village. In a badly divided country, though, the city’s main source of renown was the extraordinary gallery of national leaders it had produced. The famous sons and daughters included the once and future president Olusegun Obasanjo; the rightfully elected and now imprisoned president, Abiola; and Ernest Shonekan, an interim president installed as a puppet by the military in 1993, before Abacha seized power outright. Abeokuta had also produced Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize–winning author and political exile, and his aunt and Fela’s mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, a matriarch of a clan as impressive as any in Africa and a political firebrand who successfully led a two-year demonstration to repeal a “women’s tax” in 1948, twelve years before independence.
    In Nigeria, easily the most famous person from Abeokuta, though, was her son Fela, the dissident musician-bard who had been arrested by the army and police as many as two hundred times because of his unrelenting criticism of military misrule. In one bid to silence him, Fela’s mother was thrown off the balcony of his home in 1977, killing her.
    Fela’s music, Afro Beat, had its roots in Highlife, a creolized dance-band music that first blossomed in Ghana in the 1920s, catering to a semi-Westernized elite. Fela’s songs usually eschewed the feel-good themes of Highlife, though, and swiftly evolved into a bitter and incisive oral history of Nigeria and, by extension, of the African continent. “I no be gentleman at all. I be Africa man. Original,” Fela declared in one vintage song from the 1970s that bristled with African pride at a time when many Africans were soaking up Western influences as fast as they could. With time, his songs became even more trenchant and political, with titles like “Zombie,” “Army Arrangement” (about the country’s rigged politics), “ITT” (“International Thief, Thief,” about Abiola), “Colonial Mentality” and “Coffin for Head of State” (about the murder of his mother) that denounced the soldiers and dictators laying Africa low.
    Our driver, David, took us to Fela’s famous home, which was known as the Kalakuta Republic. It was a sprawling urban commune with a large open courtyard where people smoked pot, washed clothes, cooked and dozed by day. Fela didn’t have Abiola’s excuse of being a Muslim, but he had married twenty-eight women simultaneously in the late 1970s nonetheless. Many of that original number had long since left him, but new women, for the most part the statuesque dancers who enlivened his shows, were constantly joining his lair.
    We were scarcely noticed when we walked in, so utterly preoccupied were the people with either getting high or sleeping off the effects from previous highs. I spotted a gorgeous woman, nearly six feet tall, who was grilling fragrantly spiced chicken over charcoal by the building’s concrete outer stairway, and approached her to ask if we could see Fela. With a low-key nod, she directed me upstairs, where I advanced feeling a touch of trepidation.
    People were smoking dope everywhere on the