Fathers of the Funk!

There is a certain ether between African- American and original African sensibilities. And because one could easily feel it in the soul, music becomes the expressive platform. Moreso nothing has really been lost ever since African-Americans finally got delivered by the sacrificing of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. These were felled in the sixties, when the likes of James Brown, The godfather of Soul and Fela Anikulapokuti, Nigeria's King of Afro-Beat founded their pervasive music idioms.

African music especially when perceived consciously, carries a certain inner feel with an outward expression. This feel, which is not uncommon to the human race, becomes more meaningful to the African, because of the vicissitudes of survival in a harsh world. This is usualand common to the Irish, but to the Arabs it may be subjected to the dicta of Islam. Yet before Negroid Africans were enslaved on American plantations, some earthy originality was perceived by the first White man that landed on the continent. That is the origin of the brotherhood of the African rhythm, beat and harmony between Fela and James, Fathers of the Funk!

So there is certainly that ether, which remains pervasive; therefore, on reading a recent story on James Brown, there was not missing the contemporariness of the two. Born into a well to do family, Fela was privileged to be exposed to the racial injustice of the sixties in America. But James Brown was part and parcel of the demeaning crust of the American excitement. This, Fela would later find uncomforting through indoctrination from the peers of James. There remains the soul connexion, undoubtedly. A privileged African witnessing the incapacitation of his kinsman - a soul brother. That is why Fela abandoned all that stuff about classical music, which he studied in the Royal College of Arts in the United Kingdom.

Fela needed to come home to Nigeria, because he wanted to be home, lest he miss the sixties evolution of his country. It might have been a replication of the American society, where the ruling class were emulating the Whiteman, and, of course, seeking riches to support lifestyles through corruption. And it was not as if Fela's radicalism, the contending opposite, was born solely out of his African-American brother's prejudice, but being the son of the first woman to have driven a car in Nigeria, he was born perhaps with that derring-do. So that guy was naturally equipped with the pains of black and Americans and that of his mother, who finally got thrown down from a one-story building, dying afterwards because of the impact.
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But you must differentiate James and Fela somehow. After all, the usurpers of human rights on both sides of the Atlantic were different. And James fought racial discrimination with a certain demure, while Fela came out to confront military regimes, who locked him up, but knew the truth in his songs. While James felt like a sex machine, Fela married 27 wives and operated the machine. The former slid and glided though the sixties and seventies, while Fela simply pranced like a leopard in his tight fitting costume. James thinks that his hair and teeth are the things that make the soul, but Fela would dance with only his pants, not his trousers. Both were simply connected by one thing: soul brotherhood.

But the funk remains their haunting specter! It is not the kind you could experience in African superstition, but the fear of the insecure inner personalities. James might be explicatively showing that, by being violent with women, but Fela was not ashamed to brandish his penis and demonstrate with his women on stage. As a modern person you might think that it all boils down to the legendary black man sexual prowess, but show me a dog and I will show you that any dissatisfied human simply hits back with his nature-sex! Sex and music are not an African originality, but have some African implication; especially when it lives under injustice.

In the long run as the radio waves of the seventies and eighties oozed the reality of James and Fela's Soul and Afro-Beat respectively, America and Nigeria were also evolving in their own ways. Nigeria among other African countries was cropping an exclusive society, and the U.S.A., if I am not wrong, was promoting inclusiveness. That is because James even found soul brothers in the racist whites too. For Fela, he found people who simply enjoyed his music in the drunken stupor of crude oil boom, never minding the message that was real. That which was we all had the funk and needed to groove out of the pervading social injustice by the re-curing corruption! So it did turn out that few Nigerians were ready to face danger in the assassins' bullets.

So while James Brown had become representative of the African-American nation in the USA, Fela Anikulapokuti was not taken seriously. Therefore by the time Fela got tired of speaking to the blind and deaf, Abacha the maximum leader of Nigeria's nineties, only needed to be swept away by the grand design of the Most High. "God bless ya!"

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