“I will one day be president of my country. Of this I have no doubt.” In 1982, a BBC documentary called Music Is the Weapon was filmed in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria, in an abnormally large shanty called the Kalakuta Republic. Its proprietor, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, sprawled on a wicker chair, surrounded by a coterie of dancers/wives, explained his political ambitions. “Right now we have two parties, two parties to represent all of Nigeria.” With no change in his tone, he says that he knows the government will not put his name on the ballot, will not allow his voice and his views to be heard, because they fear that they will lose. He learned this first-hand a few years earlier. The next year, an election was held between the same two parties, and by all appearances the incumbent, Shehu Shagari, had won; the opposition begged to differ, and charged corruption. A coup was staged. Fela was never on the ballot, and never would be.

Colonialism is rarely good to the colonized, perhaps nowhere more so than those wide swaths of mostly-sub-Saharan Africa that are now, and have been for decades, synonymous with chaos, wrenching poverty, and even mass bloodshed. But, as Fela himself said, brandishing his fire from a stage in Berlin in 1979, on the live-recorded version of “V.I.P.” (“Vagabonds in Power”), “Most—99.9%—of the information you get about Africa is wrong.” He knew that, when he was touring with his massive band, he would be, for many Europeans and Americans, the first, and probably only, firsthand taste of African culture they would ever get to sample. And when Fela talked about African culture, he was talking about an ideal, a return to what he considered ideas and traditions born when Africans ruled themselves, before Europe showed up with its slave trade and its own ideas of for whom Africans should work and by whose dictates they should live, accompanied by the brute force of wealth and weaponry to ensure they were followed. Fela recounts the tale of an anonymous Western man asking him, “’If you are African, why are you wearing European dresses?’ I say to him, ‘You cannot say it is European dresses, because it is a matter of history.’”

Fela saw himself not just as a musician or political leader—and a political leader he most certainly was, even if the entrenched power was moved to disagree—but also as a teacher, communicating a learning he received through his all-too-rare middle-class upbringing. It wasn’t all money, of course, social justice and inetllectual curiosity were taught as much in the home as abroad; his mother was an intellectual, a feminist, and an anti-colonial agitator, and his father was a respected teacher and union leader. But they did have the resources to send him to London, to the Trinity College of Music, where he first fused his beloved highlife stylings, and their easy, breeze-swaying polyrhythms, with American fusion jazz and JB’s funk and called it “highlife jazz.” The sound wouldn’t change fundamentally over the years, or even within individual songs, which can go on for as long as a trance-inducing half-hour at a clip while barely altering tempo or exploding into release. While in London, he formed a band, Koola Lobitos, whose output was largely apolitical, with other Nigerian expats, and became a regular in London’s R&B club scene. After garnering some success at home and abroad, Fela and his band headed for America, where they fell in with the burgeoning late-’60s Black Panther movement, who taught him about Socialism and Black Nationalism, and these were the ideas that would fuel his work, that powerful combination of musical joy and personal pain, for his remaining decades.

After getting chased out of the country by the INS—they didn’t have visas—Fela and his band relocated to Lagos, then considered the most dangerous city in the world. He hardened the conscience of his lyrics, and translated them into a loose pidgin English that he thought could be better understood by the under-educated masses. He donned brightly-colored funk onesies and tribal face-paint and had his band do the same. Watching him in action for the first time while watching the documentary, it becomes clear that Fela, in addition to everything else, was a highly-polished image-maker; he knew as well as any current American pop star that a easily-defined image goes a long way toward keeping attention focused on you. For me, predisposed to see such things as inherently, if marginally, negative, this makes Fela a little stickier, and perhaps even more interesting. While, generally, any obvious marketing strategy seems to make anyone that much more dubious with regards to their prime intent (self-aggrandizement? money?) it’s difficult to square that paranoia with Fela’s over-100 arrests, his burnt-down home, and his constant political and physical harassment by the rotating regimes. When his mother was killed by police in a 1977 raid on Kalakuta, he took her coffin to a local army barracks, and wrote one of his most potent screeds, “Coffin For Head of State.” The song was a huge hit all over Africa, and the incident made all the papers. It all seems like it may have been a little to close to the bone to call it strictly “performance art,” or anything like that, but there was a line being straddled here. If I have a problem with most Western life-as-art pieces, or image-marketing, or what have you, it’s with my experience of its general impotence and amoral ambiguity. But Fela’s sincerity, in the face of the world he was affronting with acts like that, cannot be denied.

He was firm in his belief that his music was indeed a weapon, and in a certain sense it was—in the sense that, when he used it, it could, and often did, provoke violent reaction toward him from the people and institutions at which it was aimed. But calling the music itself a weapon is a bit of a red herring; for all its irrefutable power, Fela never did get his freed Nigeria. The coups, the poverty, the political killings occur to this day. And while Fela escaped the ineffectual bumper-sticker-and-t-shirt fates of Che Guevara or Frida Kahlo (in the U.S. st least), it does raise another point against the idea that art can, by itself, change the world—an idea that many of us, including this hack right here at one time, have held dear. While a love for Fela’s music and respect for his life may speak for anything from cultural open-mindedness to a longing for real social justice (or just simple dance fever), listening to him, or writing about him, or reading about him, will never be a direct political act. That apparently requires a grand scale, and real action of some kind or another. And then, I suppose, you all pray for the best.

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