A tribute to Fela

The news came on my portable radio and it sounded so strange, a floating

contradiction that was at once detached from, yet, infused with the world from which
I had myself just earned a lover’s rebuff. My young cousin, the abàmi èdà that the
world knew as Fela, was dead. He had not yet attained his sixtieth year.

A naked torso over spangled pants, over which a saxophone or microphone would
oscillate on stage, receiving guests or journalists in underpants while running down a
tune from his head, in the open courtyard at rehearsals or in any space where he held
court – all constituted the trademark of his unyielding non-conformism. (…)

Fela loved to buck the system. His music, to many, was both salvation and echo of
their anguish, frustrations and suppressed aggression. The black race was the
beginning and end of knowledge and wisdom, his life mission, to effect a mental and
physical liberation of the race.

[In 1984] I had travelled to Paris in order to campaign for Fela’s freedom at a
mammoth music concert under yet another dictatorship, that of General Buhari’s
government had flung him in prison on spurious charges of currency offence. Under
the general anti-racism and human rights slogan – Touche pas à mon pote (Don’t
touch my mate!) - the organisers of the concert planned to devote a special spot to
publicise Fela’s unjust imprisonment and mobilise world opinion on his behalf.

On the day of Fela’s funeral, the whole of Lagos stood still, all businesses were
suspended and any governmental presence banished. The mammoth crowd at the
funeral of this most vocal and unrelenting dissident being was, firstly, a tribute to his
person. Following this however, it was also a statement of defiance to the regime of
Sani Abacha. (…) Fela’s funeral was thus an occasion that the people exploited to the
full, pouring out in a way that defied the regime’s ban on public gatherings, making
the Black President the mouthpiece of their repressed feelings, even in his lifeless
form. Neither the police nor the military dared show its face on that day, and the
uniformed exceptions only came to pay tribute.

Wole Soyinka, You Must Set Forth At Dawn (2007)