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Approximately 40 years ago, two French cinema directors Jean-Jacques Flori and Stéphane Tchalgadjieff arrived in Lagos where they spent several weeks interviewing and shadowing Africa’s biggest musical export of that time.
It is unclear exactly when the phrase “Music is the Weapon” found its way into FelaAnikulapo Kuti’s musical lexicon, but by the time the French duo were done producing their documentary in 1982, they had no doubt what to name it.
Four decades later, many of the people whom Fela famously lampooned as Animals in Human Skin shortly thereafter, are still very much in and around power in Nigeria and around the continent. Despite his being widely lionised as a symbol of revolutionary Nigerian and African post-independence struggles, the story of Nigeria’s post-military era suggests that the core of the message that was encoded in Fela’s music is no longer influencing behaviour as it once did.
These days, the “weapon” in Fela’s music has been almost entirely de-fanged, with everyone from Emmanuel Macron to upcoming Nigerian musicians now seeing his music either as nothing more than a charming historical tale or an exciting urban counterculture. What is different now, and what does that mean for anyone who desires to spark some sort of societal change in the version of Nigeria we now live in?
The soul of Fela was anger
Back when Fela was getting the political establishment very hot and bothered with the content of his music, many of his contemporaries looked down on his method of social engagement. In their view, it was unduly combative, rude, uncouth and counterproductive. If an educated man like him wanted to give voice to a concern about the society around him, he was supposed to write a politely-worded letter to a newspaper editor and have it published for other members of the polite intelligentsia to read. Releasing a song recorded in pidgin, where he called Muhammadu Buhari a “craze man” was seen as foolish, incendiary, unnecessary and unacceptable.
In Nigeria today, like back then, to accept that one is angry about something and to express that anger in clear, consistent and unequivocal terms is like declaring some kind of weakness. There is an idea across all Nigerian societal strata that keeping a stiff upper lip and only expressing dissatisfaction in bland, inoffensive and polite ways, is the gold standard for civil behaviour. Admitting that something eats you up on the inside, and to give a clear and honest voice to that discomfort, apparently devalues whatever it is you have to say.
Some recurring accusations leveled at my work are that it is rude, it betrays anger, and that I consistently write from a place of rage or angst. I will not bother denying these accusations because they are absolutely correct. I do in fact draw from a deep well of rage when writing, and I am in fact someone with a large reserve of anger that I regularly channel into my work. While that does not necessarily mean that I lack a personal emotional handle, as those who meet me in person are often surprised to find out, it does mean that I have a vast reservoir of one of the most potent creative fuels known to man. Anger is an accelerant that is matchless at inspiring action and cutting through genteel verbage to pass important messages across with maximum impact.
When I was studying for my creative writing degree a decade ago, Ray French, one of my instructors, used to say that the best kind of writing is that which communicates the most possible message in the fewest possible words. Anger has no match when deployed as a fuel that selectively burns through drafts, removing the unnecessary “Sirs,” “Honourables,” “Chiefs,” “Your Excellencies” and other assorted bootlicking terms, phrases and messages, which are unfortunately ubiquitous in most forms of Nigerian communication.
It is that fuel and the ability to channel it constructively that differentiates my writing from the average Ciroma ChukwumaAdekunle’s bog-standard Facebook rant. The power of the emotion behind any communication and the quality with which that emotion is communicated make all the difference. It is precisely why someone with no knowledge of Fela could listen to his music alongside that of one of his would-be copycats, and immediately tell that one of them is greatness and the other is a poor simulacrum of it.
Fela had anger, and he was not afraid to show it. He would spend 16 minutes of a 24-minute song tearing into the real issues he saw around him, calling out powerful people by name and sometimes even excoriating his own audience to their faces. Without than anger, he would have been no more potent than any of his many successor-wannabes who also use two fist salutes, cultivate bad-boy images and occasionally throw in vague ‘socially conscious’ references (that no one can pin them down to), in between verses about billionaires who still dey find money – all form, zero substance.
Once the force of the personality behind the music – the anger – passed away, the aesthetic aspects of his music and the economic impact of the genre he created eventually subsumed the message. These days, we now have the very same people whom Fela called out by name in his songs, basking in the reflected glory of his memory. The lack of genuine living anger behind the music has taken away most of the political potency it once had. Indeed, it is now possible to hear a Fela song on the radio – something that was impossible during decades of military dictatorship where it was explicitly banned from the airwaves.
Passiveness is not a virtue – It’s a dictatorship legacy
I mentioned earlier that forced equanimity is a sign of a toxic culture that penalises victims for expressing their dissatisfaction in Nigeria, and rewards people for pretending to be OK when they really are not. To understand where this wrongheaded idea comes from and why it is a terrible thing, you would have to draw the line all the way back to its origin in the exaggerated machismo of the British colonial establishment and the military it left behind. This culture prized calmness under extreme pressure and the ability to maintain a poker face despite severe danger or provocation, which were obviously desirable traits for a soldier.
In a democratic, civilian-led setting however, this idea has no place whatsoever. A soldier’s job is to carry out orders and never talk back or ask too many questions. A civilian who has constitutional rights in an electoral democracy is a completely different proposition, and must be recognised as such. I mentioned in my previous column that generations of Nigerians have been subjected to the Five Monkeys Experiment, which essentially taught them to accept certain behaviours and react to certain actions from their leaders with no resistance or objection, just a resigned sense of victimhood. Opposition to the words and actions of those in power was once a high risk activity that had to either be done in secret or couched in layers of waffling verbosity.
You could not tell a leader “I think you are bad at your job, and I put you there so you must listen to me,” because you neither put them there nor did they in fact, have any obligation to listen to you. They were effectively emperors and Nigerians were serfs. You could only disagree in the vaguest and most polite of terms – except you were a “madman” like Fela. Nigerians were taught to respond “Yes Sir!” when their leaders made a pronouncement they did not agree with, because they were not allowed to openly disagree with their unelected overlords. Like the monkeys in the experiment, they have continued practisingthese traditions to date, even though we have now been holding elections for 21 years – longer than Nigeria’s median population age of 17.9.
Over decades of lawless, murderous dictatorship by successive unelected military juntas, Nigerians learned to become passive and swallow their anger, pain and dissatisfaction in the presence of power. In fact, ever since Abdulsalam Abubakar handed over to Olusegun Obasanjo on May 29, 1999, this behaviour has been completely unnecessary and self-defeating. Of course those in power have worked hard to maintain the illusion of supreme power and opacity, so that Nigerians continue “minding their business” while the pigs on our Animal Farm learn to walk on two legs and replace the military jackboots as civilian overlords. This Jedi mind trick is only possible because Nigerians enable them with their own passiveness.
Engaging and disagreeing vehemently with elected officials is not “rude” or “uncouth,” neither is displaying unequivocal dissatisfaction a sign of weakness. Hemming and hawing through 2,000 words just to disagree politely with someone you elected instead of saying “You are a disappointment – get off that seat!” is not a sign of mature political engagement. It just means you are suffering from Post Traumatic Abacha Syndrome and you are still afraid that if you offend someone in power, they will send men with guns after you to end your life. In actual fact, the number of people in and around the government who actually have the ability to access such executive power, much less abuse it that way, is a lot less than you might think.
Those who have an interest in making Nigerians believe that nothing has changed since 1997 will keep on grandstanding and talking down on them, knowing that such behaviour triggers their learned passiveness. In reality, if just 20 million Nigerian adults were to realise what living in a democracy actually means, and what they are entitled to even under our flawed 1999 constitution, a thousand Benjamin Kalus would not be enough to maintain the status quo. That change however, can only come when Nigerians learn to snap out of their Post Traumatic Abacha Syndrome and properly feel, accept and channel their anger and pain.
After all if we insist that we have no anger, feel no pain and have no expectations, then why should life get better for us?
Clearly we are already living in utopia.
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