Many
people have, over the years, wondered why the legendary musician, Fela,
married up to 27 women in just one night. Odega Shawa, in this piece
tries to explain why.
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| Fela |
I just heard someone comment in a rather cordial conversation that
Fela is no hero to African values. He didn’t send Femi to school and he
married 27 women in one day. And to this guy, who by the way is a
musician of the new school, using the two reasons so stated, Fela is no
hero and cannot be pointed out to the young to emulate as a role model.
To everyone that did not understand the language Fela spoke with
his actions, the language of freedom and happiness, let me make it
clear. Nigeria has no socio-cultural hero more prominent than Fela
Anikulapo Kuti. What Fela addressed, bravely, with his life and family
as example, is education and morality. Fela asked his generation two
questions: What is education and what is morality? The answers he got
were unsatisfactory to him, so like every intelligent person, he went
out of the box for answers that satisfied him.
Let me start with education. Traditional African societies trained
children, after careful observation of their inclinations during
infancy, in what was referred to as occupation, a skill that is life
sustaining and takes a period of tutelage to master. The pupil had his
own space to move and grow, and the value of that traditional education
is evident in the culture that our ancestors all left behind.
Modern schools lump everybody in one box and brands them, like
slaves, as either good or bad. The bad are the F students. The good are
the A students. This classification is artificial of course and does not
represent the true life prospects of particular students. Schooling is
just a monster agent of social chaos. Reality scorns the results of
schooling, since in life most ‘successful’ people were F students in
school and most ‘unsuccessful’ people were A students at school. There
is just a small margin of equilibrium where the system gets it right,
but not because the system is any good itself. Just because things have
to balance out in any case. Fela recognised this stupidity of formal
schooling for what it is and decided to try the way of his ancestors. He
didn’t abandon Femi. He trained Femi to play music. And today, Femi, is
one of the most globally renowned musicians out of Africa, without the
contribution of the University of Lagos.
Then Fela married 27 women at once. Of course no married man today
has had sex outside his marriage 27 times. And no unmarried man has had
sex 27 times with either prostitutes or his girlfriends. Yeah, right.
Let him who has no sin cast the first stone. But what was morality, as
far as Fela was concerned? Well, for Fela morality was blunt honesty and
sympathy, not hypocrisy and cruelty. He didn’t have to marry any of
those women (he was already sleeping with them anyway) but he did. He
married them to protect them from society’s scorn, a scorn he already
understood because he has had to deal with it. For the women, Fela took
them from illegitimacy and placed them under his legitimate name. People
normally hide behind their churches and their mosques to indulge in
secret sexual affairs. But Fela is not normal that way, just the same
way he said he was not a gentleman. Fela had his affairs out in the open
– and he made it all legal too.
The problem we have with interpreting Fela’s life as a role model
is because he was an alternative thinker – and we are all idiots. At
least you are more of that if you still imagine that we cannot teach
Fela in Sunday schools.
There is a limit to the level of clarity with which an alternative
thinker would choose to do a certain thing for it to become meaningful
to everybody. In a world that now has more idiots than people that are
ready to use their own brain people like Fela will always be treated
shabbily in church and chapel conversations by people who are not even
fit to untie the laces of his shoes. But that is the way of life. The
guy I argued with told me that St Paul is in heaven and Fela is in
hellfire. St Paul told slaves never to aspire to freedom since they
would find it in heaven after they die. Fela told the slave master to go
shove his chains up his own you-know-what. I don’t know how saints get
chosen but if I am a black man with a sensitivity towards enslavement of
blacks by whites, especially in America in the 17th century, I don’t
know how St Paul is my hero and Fela is my villain. It is just a force
of opinion that the same people who accused our ancestors of worshipping
wood carvings will not allow me to accuse them back of worshipping
wooden crosses. All of a sudden the wooden crosses meant something more
than wood, but the wood carvings of the agaba masquerade, by some
reason, cannot mean anything more than wood, it cannot be a metaphor for
a hidden cosmology just like the cross. Just so some white christian
idiot can vilify my ancestors in peace.
Fela understood the world, like our ancestors did, that we are soul
spirits just having another human experience. Today we believe we are
human beings that can have spiritual experiences.
Fela was ready to live the wisdom he imbibed, out in the opinion,
something Pastors Chris Oyakhilome and Chris Okotie should do well to
learn from. We are all Christians but we have now allowed our religion
to wrap us in a mystery of hypocrisy and double life. Fela didn’t want
anything to do with any double life. That is why he married 27 women and
if we have any brains left in our heads we should know there is wisdom
here to teach our children, and to teach ourselves.
God bless you. And bless that brother that argued with me too. Heaven help us all.
***
Written by Odega Shawa
IG: @shawa_kalakutabooks
Twitter: @shawa2008
When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
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