Ghanaian dancer Tawia Brown (second from right) and friends at the Africa Shrine. For the Bunzus and Basa-Basa shows at the Africa Shrine and Papingo nightclub, Tawia Brown would do a floor show in between sets.
At roughly the same time that Afro-rock was emerging, different Africanized versions of soul, or “Afro-soul,” were appearing in many African countries. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo the guitarist Dr. Nico Kassandra released his popular soul number “Suki Shy Man” in 1969, the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango released his “Soul Makossa” in 1972, and by 1974 Moses Ngenya’s and his Soul Brothers of South Africa were blending soul with local township mbaqanga music.
In Ghana there was the Afro-soul of the Magic Aliens, El Pollos, and Tommy Darling’s Wantu Wazuri, followed by the Afro-funk and funky highlifes of Ebo Taylor, Bob Pinodo, and Gyedu-Blay Amboley. Nigerian experimentations with Afro-soul music likewise began in the late 1960s and included those of the highlife guitarist Victor Uwaifo (his mutaba style), the highlife saxophonist Orlando Julius, the pop and soul musician Segun Bucknor—and of course the highlife musician Fela Kuti, who coined the term “Afrobeat” in 1968.
As will be discussed in this book, Fela actually combined a number of musical styles into his Afrobeat that, besides highlife and soul music, also include three other important ingredients. First there was jazz music, with Fela employing the modal jazz approach of artists such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane, who created melodies based on improvising around and moving between two modes or tone centers rather than following a single scale and strict chord changes. Incidentally, this use of modal melodies that move between two tones rather than following a Western-type chord progression (e.g., I–IV–V) away from and back to a single tone center, makes modal jazz rather similar to African traditional music. As such, Afrobeat created a convergence between modal jazz and African music. Another jazz feature found in Afrobeat is that its rhythmic basis was created by the half Ghanaian–half Nigerian trap drummer Tony Allen, who played in a modern-jazz style—moving away from simply providing regular dance rhythms to also including improvisations, polyrhythmic high-hat pulses, and offbeat accents that supplied rhythmic space and ventilation for the dance groove. Allen also developed the double bass-drum technique so distinctive of his Afrobeat style in which he does a double kick on the bass pedal a sixteenth note apart, which usually falls right at the beginning of the four-bar measure and propels the rhythm emphatically forward.
Besides highlife, soul, and jazz, another source that Fela drew on for his Afrobeat was traditional Yoruba music making, which included the modal melodic movements already mentioned as well as other traditional features such as call-and-response between chorus and singer/soloist and the use of a pentatonic singing style that Fela blended in with the minor blues scale. These traditional elements were enhanced by Fela’s adding two hand drums to his ensemble around 1970–71.
The last ingredient of Afrobeat was that Fela often gave his compositions a Latin touch. This was partly a result of the long-term impact from the 1930s of Afro-Cuban (later called salsa) music on West African dance-band musicians. But also important was the presence from the late nineteenth century of many thousands of freed Brazilian slaves (Aguda people) who brought their samba music and masquerades with them—and which became part of the Lagos musical landscape. Indeed, current Felabrations in Lagos that commemorate Fela’s birthday include a carnival parade that draws on this Brazilian heritage.
Fela began experimenting with his new Afrobeat style in the late 1960s with his Koola Lobitos band, but really put the sound together when he was in the United States in 1969–70. It was also there he changed the name of his group to Nigeria 70, and on returning to Nigeria changed it yet again to Africa 70. His Afrobeat spread far and wide and influenced many African artists and bands. There was the Poly-Rhythmic Orchestra of Cotonu in the Benin Republic, the music of the South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and the Big Beats, Sawaaba Sounds, and Nana Ampadu’s African Brothers (with his “Afrohili” style of guitar-band music) in Ghana. In Nigeria there were the Lijadu Sisters and the Hausa Afrobeat of Bala Miller’s Northern Pyramids.
In Nigeria a number of Yoruba juju-music guitar-band artists were also influenced in the early to mid-1970s by Fela’s Afrobeat—and these included Pick Peters, Prince Adekunle, and Sunny Adé with his “synchro system” style.
Emmanuel Odunesu of the EMI Studio in Lagos.
Fela’s Political Background: Nkrumah and the Early Independence Era of Ghana and Nigeria
Fela was born one year before the outbreak of the Second World War during which Africa supplied raw materials and about 300,000 soldiers to the Allied war effort. The war weakened the British and French, and as a result their colonies were granted independence, beginning with British India in 1948, followed by Caribbean and African countries during the late fifties and sixties.
The first African country to gain independence was Ghana in 1957, and the preceding nationalist upsurge was triggered by a peaceful demonstration in 1948 of Ghanaian ex-servicemen who had fought in the British army in Burma and the Far East against the Japanese9 and were demanding back pay. Several were shot, and this resulted in widespread rioting and the looting of European shops. The British lost their colonial nerve and allowed elections to be held in 1952. Despite the fact that the British had jailed the radical Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah who wanted independence “now,” he won the election—and the country was given internal self-rule in 1952 and full independence in 1957. Ghanaian independence was followed by the independence of Guinea from France in 1958, and Nkrumah helped its new president Sékou Touré after the French had wrecked the country in a fit of pique when it had dared to say non to General de Gaulle’s referendum on retaining close ties with France.10
Like Ghana, Nigeria supplied raw materials and soldiers for the British war effort; in fact over, half of the 100,000 Anglophone West African soldiers who fought in Burma were Nigerian—where they became known as “boma boys.”11 Also like Ghana, Nigeria had a tradition of anticolonial activists, for instance, the previously mentioned Nnamdi “Zik” Azikiwe who, like Nkrumah, attended university in the United States. Following his studies (in 1934), Azikiwe became the editor for the African Morning Post of Accra, Ghana. But when he was imprisoned for publishing what the British thought to be a seditious article, he returned to Nigeria in 1937 where he founded the West African Pilot newspaper that fostered Nigerian nationalism.
Also like Ghana, Nigeria had been radicalized by the war, and this growing militancy was evidenced in 1945 by two developments. That year Zik and Herbert Macaulay founded the independence party called the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) that Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti supported. Second, there were a number of big strikes that year by Nigerian workers. There was a general strike led by the Nigerian Trade Union Congress (led by Michael Imoudu) that involved tens of thousands of railway, transport, dock, and civil service workers. Nigerian popular artists of the times even became involved in this dispute, such as the leader of the Nigerian popular theater movement, Hubert Ogunde, who produced the sensational play, Strike and Hunger. Ogunde would eventually be arrested on charges of sedition for his play Bread and Bullets about the 1950 Enugu coal strike.12
By the 1950s there were three main political parties operating in Nigeria that were demanding independence: Azikiwe’s (NCNC) had control of the Eastern Region government; the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) centered on the Northern Region; and the Action Group (AG) was based in the Yoruba Western Region. Internal self-rule was granted in the late 1950s, and in October 1960 the country obtained full independence as the Federation of Nigeria. The first government was an alliance of the eastern-based NCNC and the northern NPC, with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as Nigeria’s first prime minister and Azikiwe as the governor-general. When Nigeria declared itself a Republic in 1963, Azikiwe would become the country’s first president, serving until 1966 when the first of many military coups took place in Nigeria.
During these years, when Fela and the Koola Lobitos were playing in Lagos, the city was the highlife hub for both eastern and western Nigerian highlife musicians. After