I believe that you brought Fela and his Africa 70 band to Ghana in the early 1970s?
Yes, I promoted him twice to Ghana in 1971 and 1972. The first show was at the Lebanon Club in Tudu, Accra. The minister of education, Mr. R. R. Amponsah, the minister of information, Mr. Brodie-Mends, and the Nigerian high commissioner were there. Then Fela played a number and all of them felt so embarrassed.
The song is called “Na Poi”—it’s a bit filthy, and there are portions [where] Fela sings “when men take women lock door, what thing they do? Na poi”—sex and all this sort of thing. When Fela was playing it the Nigerian high commissioner bent his head and didn’t raise it until the show had closed. So at the end of the show Mr. Amponsah called me and asked me to bring Fela to his office the following day, before the next engagement in Takoradi. So I sent Fela there, and Mr. Amponsah pleaded with him to take that song out of the program, and Fela promised he would.
Our next show at the Atlantic Hotel in Takoradi had a very full attendance. So many people were standing on the chairs and tables to see Fela’s band and his half-naked girls that they broke over one hundred of them. After the show the manager of the hotel seized Fela’s instruments and we had to pay for the damage. It was that night that the anti-Busia military coup was announced [by Colonel Acheampong], and the following day we were meant to be going to Kumasi to play at the City Hotel. So the show couldn’t come on. However, as the first two shows had very good crowds the money we made was substantial. After that I brought Fela and his group to Ghana once again.
Fela always used to travel by road then and on these two [1971 and 1972] trips he had a VW bus that carried the instruments. He also had two Opel cars, Fela drove one and his drummer, Tony Allen, drove the other. J. K. Braimah also came. He was a longtime friend of Fela’s and was the band’s road manager. He also attended primary school here in Ghana, so he knows the country well.
Fela told me a story of what happened once after playing here at one of the trips I organized. He was going back to Nigeria, and when he got to Lomé [the capital of Togo] he began driving on a one-way street. He was stopped by one man who looked scruffy and told Fela in very bad English that this is one-way and you shouldn’t go. So Fela said: “So what, are you police?” The man said yes, and that he was a gendarme. Fela said no, as he was convinced the man couldn’t be a policeman, as he wasn’t wearing a uniform. So the man said that [if] I’m not a gendarme let us go to the police station. So they went there as Fela was so sure that he was going to report that the man was impersonating a policeman.
Immediately they got there the man gave Fela a big slap and told him to go behind the counter-back, as “I be gendarme” and all the other police said, “Oh yes, you be gendarme.” You see Fela was a rebel and when he wants something he will just do it.
After that [the two 1971–72 promotions] anytime I used to go to Nigeria Fela put me in a hotel, as we were close. Just to give you an example of my relationship with Fela there was a time in the early 1970s when Remi [Fela’s wife] was sick and needed convalescence. I was at Fela’s Afro-Spot club in Yaba [originally called Kakadu], and Fela told me that “I’m sending Remi, the children, and their English grandmother [Remi’s mother] to you in Ghana to look after them.” So I housed them at the Star Hotel in Accra, although Fela paid the bills. I used to go and pick up Remi and the three children and take them to Flagstaff House, the zoo, and places. They stayed two weeks. Remi was very nice, and in a way I would say that Fela didn’t deserve that woman, as she was so patient and understanding with his womanizing.
Was it Fela who introduced the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela to Faisal Helwani and his band Hedzoleh?
Yes, I took both Uhuru and Hedzoleh to record in December 1973. Hedzoleh recorded an album [called Introducing Hedzoleh] with Hugh. You see, I was the A&R [artist and repertoire] man for EMI at the time. In fact it was Fela who introduced me to the EMI management, as he was then recording for them. Mike Wells was the managing director, and then Mr. Plumley came in. But Fela fell out with Plumley. There was a time I was passing through Nigeria and met Fela at Lagos airport. I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was coming to stop Plumley going to London, as he owed Fela. Fela said he’d been at Plumley’s house but Plumley had been dodging him. So Fela stopped Plumley from going to England that day. There was a lot of crowd there with Fela. They were all arrested and taken to the Apapa police station where Plumley gave an undertaking or check—and Fela was paid. That’s the type of man Fela is—if he wants something he will go all out, using legal or illegal means to get what he wants.
PART TWO CONFRONTATION
5
THE KALAKUTA IS BORN
On April 30, 1974, the police raided Fela’s house, opposite the old Africa Shrine at the Empire Hotel, Mushin, and he was charged with possessing Indian hemp. In fact, he did have some on him, but he quickly swallowed it. Hemp was a term, incidentally, that Fela himself hated as he claimed that cannabis was not Indian. According to him it had been around in Africa for centuries, so he called it Nigerian natural grass, or NNG.
After the raid he was imprisoned for a while at the police CID headquarters at Alagbon Close. It was because the police examined his stools for traces of marijuana that he wrote the song about his “expensive shit” that was so interesting that doctors had to examine it with microscopes. As the note on the album cover says: “The men in uniform alleged I had swallowed a quantity of Indian Hemp. My shit was sent to lab for test. Result negative—which brings us to Expensive Shit.”
In fact he was never prosecuted, as the other prisoners would keep switching their buckets of feces with his, so the police could never find any evidence.
During this time at Alagbon Close he was locked in a cell the prisoners jokingly called the “Kalakuta Republic” (kalakuta is Swahili for “rascal”) and scratched this name on the cell wall. Because of Fela’s popularity with the downtrodden Lagosian underclass, or “sufferheads,” he was elected “president” of this “republic” by his jail mates. On his release he promptly named his house the Kalakuta Republic and brought out two albums whose lyrics dealt with his brush with the law. One was the above-mentioned Expensive Shit and the other Alagbon Close.
Fela yabbing to Lagosians outside the Africa Shrine on November 26, 1974, after his court acquittal.
On November 23, the same year, Fela’s house was attacked for the second time, this time because he was harboring a young runaway truant girl called Folake Oladende, who wanted to join his band. Her father was the inspector general of police for Lagos. The police officer claimed his daughter was only fourteen, and so under age. She claimed she was seventeen. After several fruitless attempts to get her back, the exasperated inspector general sent in the riot police, complete with metal helmets, shields, and tear-gas grenades.
By coincidence I was staying at the Africa Shrine that day, having just come to Lagos with two of Faisal Helwani’s bands, Basa-Basa and Bunzus, to record at the new eight-track EMI studio in Lagos. What follows is a journalistic account I made of that memorable eleven-day trip, written on my return to Ghana.
THE 23 NOVEMBER RAID
After a sixteen-hour journey to Lagos, a session at Victor Olaiya’s Papingo nightclub at the Stadium Hotel, and finally sleep at the Empire Hotel (Africa Shrine) Mushin, we were woken up on our first morning (23 November) by the roar of an angry crowd.
From our hotel balcony we could see about sixty riot police axing down Fela’s front door, just a hundred yards away. Fela’s people fought back, so then came the tear gas, and we Ghanaian musicians were down-wind!
We discovered later that he had refused to allow the police to make a routine