Upside Down- To be an African Abroad
Up until this point, we have been looking at the colonial system, as well as, the colonial mentality and the role in which it played in Fela’s early life. The colonial system and its remnants in post-colonial West Africa was something that Fela constantly spoke out against throughout his career, but he was a product of that system in his own right. Fela came from an elite Nigerian family. Just like members of other elite Nigerian families during colonial times, he was completely educated in a British style.
It is clear when listening to Fela’s music that Africaness and defining what it meant to be African in a post-colonial context was very important to him(Sithole,1). However, as a young man who was educated in British colonial grammar schools, he wasn’t equipped to think about what it meant to be African. For all intents and purposes, Fela was not raised to be a Nigerian or even an African. In the world of postcolonial Africa, elites looked abroad to have their kids educated because European styled thinking was the most respected form of thinking in the days of (post)colonial Africa. No one, including a young Fela, was really spending time thinking about what it meant to be an African, they were satisfied with adopting as much of European culture as they could.
In order for Fela to begin to think about Africaness and begin the journey of inventing Afrobeat music, he needed to first be physically separated from (post)colonial Africa. Unlike most Nigerians who traveled abroad in Fela’s day, Fela developed a strong desire to gain an understanding of being African while he was abroad. Traveling abroad allowed Fela to live outside of this world of high-class Africans and their version of (post)colonial Africa where they were the ruling class at the expense of the rest of the population. Fela’s time abroad allowed him to think more critically about race, class, and identity and helped him to develop the framework to politicize his music and call out the injustices he saw on his home continent(Labinjoh,125).
In 1958 Fela started school at Trinity College in London. He was supposed to study to pursue a career in medicine or law, but he quickly developed a passion for music and decided to make that his field of study. His formal study was in classical composition and trumpet playing, but he found much more interest in the music being played outside of his classes, jazz(Stewart,102).
Along with being the place where Fela developed his love for music, London was also the place where Fela first felt the need to understand his African identity. When he was living in Nigeria his level of privilege was not dependent on his culture or ethnicity, because it was a predominately black nation. In Nigeria, Fela was able to derive privilege because of the affluence and prestige of his family, however, this privilege did not apply to him in Europe. In London, he experienced discrimination and inequality for the first time, as a result of his African identity. This angered Fela greatly because his whole life he had been taught how to assimilate into British culture and he was realizing that as an African man he’d never fully be accepted into the culture of his colonizers. Furthermore, he realized that because he was only taught how to be British that he really didn’t have much to offer as an African to the world. This left Fela in a cultural purgatory where he could not be English, but also did not know what it meant to be an African.
Frantz Fanon talks about this notion of African people feeling isolated from both the culture of their home country and the culture of their colonizer in Black Skin, White Mask.
“Quite simply, they are the instances in which the educated Negro suddenly discovers that he is rejected by a civilization which he has none the less assimilated […] The educated Negro […] feels at a given stage that his race no longer understands him. Or that he no longer understands it. Then he congratulates himself on this, and enlarging the difference, the incomprehension, the disharmony, he finds in them the meaning of his real humanity. Or more rarely he wants to belong to his people. And it is with rage in his mouth and abandons in his heart that he buries himself in the vast black abyss.”(Fanon,7)
This quote from Fanon’s book shows that the cultural isolation that Fela was feeling was common among colonized people who were traveling abroad. Conversely, it also highlights that most Africans who felt like this did not use the feeling as a cue to actually embrace their African identity. The colonial system left them more familiar with the ways of the west and they were more interested in embracing that identity than that of their mother countries in Africa.
The lyrics from Fela Kuti’s 1976 “Upside Down” touches on this idea as well. This is one of the few songs in Fela’s whole discography where he doesn’t sing lead vocals, but you can hear the passion and sentiments of Fela Kuti in the lyrics.Overall, the song is explaining how backwards and unorganized Africa has become in comparison to the rest of the world. However, in the lyrics highlighted below Fela specifically criticizing the African man living abroad who doesn’t carry his ethnic and national heritage with pride.
English man get English name
American man get American name
German man get German name
Russian man get Russian name
Chinese man get Chinese name
For African man outside don’t see
I’m beginning to vex up for this land
I no to travel anywhere
Everything dey under my nose
For African man outside don’t see
Fillings boku road no dey
Land boku food no dey
Area boku house no dey
People no dey bear African name
People no dey think African style
People no know Africa great
For African man outside don’t seeeeeee e e
This song expresses that the international community doesn’t know how great Africa truly is because the African people who travel abroad don’t know it themselves. He juxtaposes the pride that people of other nations have in cultural identity by highlighting how people of various nationalities bear names of their culture while African don’t even have African names, let alone African thoughts.
While in London Fela could have easily ignored his African identity and tried even harder to become like a European by distancing himself from his African culture, like most of his African contemporaries did when they went abroad. However, he did what Fanon would describe as burying himself into the vast black abyss. Fela wanted to be able to contribute something to the world as an African and break out of the mentality that he had been taught as a youth in colonial Nigeria. He began to read about African traditions and listen to traditional African music. As he began to immerse himself into Africaness, it started to change the way he played music.
During this period Fela started his first band called Koola Lobitios. It was with this band that Fela first started to experiment with combining African music and rhythms (mostly Highlife music) with the American and Caribbean styles of jazz that he was already playing. He and his band gained some notoriety in London before returning to Nigeria in 1963. While in Nigeria, however, his hybrid form of music wasn’t resonating with the masses of Nigeria. Even his own mother urged him to start playing music his people and not jazz(Stewart,102).
London was just the first step for Fela to develop the political consciousness needed to develop Afrobeat. It was where he first had the thought that he should be African above all else and where he began to build and identity that was free of European colonial thought. However, he was still missing pieces needed to completely translate these ideas into his music in an appealing way for his Nigerian audiences(Labinjoh,127).
Although his music wasn't initially popular in Nigeria, it did gain traction in other West African nations. He spent some years touring and performing with his band in Ghana where his music was better received, but he still felt like his music wasn’t getting the reception he desired especially in his home country(Barrett,3). At this time American soul music was becoming hugely popular in Africa and Fela decided to leave the continent once more to go to America in hopes that the trip would be able to help him propel his band to the forefront of West African music(Stewart,103). Not only did this trip help propel his music career, but it would also serve as the most important step Fela took to completely Decolonize his mind.
