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FOREWORD

Fela Kuti (1938–1997) and Afrobeat are here to stay. It is fair to say that no African musician has ever exerted such a powerful cultural force during his lifetime and left such an extensive and resonant international legacy after his death. Rather than fading, Fela’s stature and influence worldwide keeps growing year by year as young musicians come together to form Afrobeat bands, DJs and remixers chop and dice Fela classics, and all known art forms—dance, poetry, theater, film, photography, painting—come together in myriad annual expressions of “Felabration.” Much has been written about Fela, his life and work, and much more will be in the future. But this book assumes a unique place in the Fela literary canon because of its author, a man with the perspective, knowledge, and access to Fela’s story to render it with the style of a novelist, the precision and detail of a historian, and the musical insight of an insider to the creative process.

John Collins went to Ghana as a child when his father, Edmund Collins, brought the family there from England to help set up the University of Ghana’s philosophy department in 1952. Collins’s mother took him back to England for schooling, but he rejoined his father in Accra in 1969 and has mostly lived there ever since, becoming a naturalized Ghanaian. Collins is today a renowned archivist, producer, author, and a professor at the University of Ghana. But before he was any of these things, he was a musician, a classically trained guitarist who became swept up in jazz, blues, and rock ’n’ roll before chancing into an opportunity to tour Ghana with the Jaguar Jokers Concert Party, which combined highlife music with local theater. For Collins, becoming part of a highlife band in the early years of Ghana’s independence made him feel like an Englishman joining a sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte group with its itinerant lifestyle and improvised musical plays.

Collins absorbed everything, the intricacies of the music, the themes and messages in the concert party plays, the personalities, humor, triumphs, and scandals of the artists he came to know. Bemused and curious, he formed strong and lasting friendships with musicians he would later immortalize in recordings and writings. He came to understand that he was a privileged witness to a vanishing era of music, one created out of the tumultuous collapse of European colonialism in West Africa and the chaotic exuberance of the young nations that emerged there. All this was the prelude to his meeting Fela.

Fela was no superstar when he first came to Ghana in the 1960s. He was a young bandleader with new ideas, scrambling for work like many others. Collins and the people he interviews in these pages help us to know this Fela, a fascinating figure largely obscured from our view by the dramas that dominate his narrative. And as these dramas unfolded, once again, Collins would witness history, this time at Fela’s side, and he writes about it clearly and incisively, leveraging insight no mere researcher or ethnomusicologist can match.

The core of this book is Collins’s interviews, which provide firsthand descriptions of Fela’s early and mid career, and—especially—Collins’s own account of events leading up to two raids on Fela’s Kalakuta Republic compound, in 1974 and 1977. The fact that these accounts were written close to the actual events is crucial. The young writer understands the sounds, the trends, the key players in highlife, Afro-soul, Afro-funk, and all the various genres that feed into Fela’s Afrobeat sound. And he understands the political context, having lived through the transformation from colonial rule to independence. Writing in the 1970s, Collins cannot know where Fela’s story is going, but he senses its import, and observes precisely without emotionalizing. He is honest, neither a sycophant nor a critic. These qualities make his accounts riveting to read—the real stuff of history.

In a fundamental way, Fela’s art and story are a reaction to Nigeria’s transformation from colonial rule to independence. But Collins leaves heady analysis to others. Instead, he writes what he sees, wonderfully combining the distance of a Western observer and the familiarity of a participant in the art and history he is observing. The 1977 raid on Fela’s compound is a landmark moment in African cultural history. By pure chance, Collins was there just before it happened, dispassionately noting visual details, exchanges, and conversations, mundane events that make the larger story newly palpable and terrifying.

Collins leaves many contradictions for others to resolve. Was Fela a good trumpet player or not? Both opinions are expressed passionately. Who coined the term “Afrobeat”? Collins expresses his opinion, but almost in passing. His principle mission here is to report, not to analyze. He incorporates humor, brings characters to life, and observes very difficult events in spare, steely prose that inspires a reader’s trust and discourages any easy judgment. Collins appears to have no agenda beyond observation, an impressive achievement in such a combative milieu.

Beyond his own writings, Collins draws on his long friendships with other players in the Fela story, presenting interviews conducted at various times and places. We revisit key events from different perspectives, acquiring new detail and nuance each time. Collins’s knowledge of, and affection for, Fela’s family members adds depth and power to his account. Once again, he tells us what he sees and feels, very specifically, avoiding conclusions and generalizations. In this way, we move through Fela’s career, from his earliest days as a wannabe bandleader in Accra, to his enshrinement in a triangular granite tomb at the newly opened Kalakuta Museum in Lagos.

Once you come to know Fela, it is easy to form strong opinions about him. His brash and brilliant music bears the stamp of his headstrong personality. He was arrogant. He was politically incorrect on issues such as gender, sex, and AIDS, which ultimately felled him. He could be abusive to those around him, even those in his band. None of this fazes Collins, but neither does he hold back compromising details nor make excuses for them. This book stands as a useful antidote to Fela hagiography, whether penned by music writers entranced amid the spell cast by Fela’s best band, Africa 70, or whether played out with mystical adulation in a Broadway play. Here we find a remarkable, self-possessed, visionary, wise but also shockingly flawed man. And if, in the end, we don’t know exactly how to feel about Fela, that seems entirely appropriate.

The later portions of this book document the record of the Fela legacy, nothing short of staggering in its dimensions. Just in the five years since this book was originally published, there have been enough developments in the “Fela legacy” to pack another fact-filled chapter. From all this detail emerges the real story of Fela, a story about art, not a man. As Collins enumerates all the musical subgenres in which Fela’s music now resonates—from Afrobeat in Brooklyn or Tokyo to the latest variant of “hiplife” in Accra—we marvel at the fragmentary complexity of today’s popular music landscape. It is almost impossible to imagine any musician today making as much, or as lasting, cultural noise as Fela did. The man may be gone, but the story continues.

Banning Eyre

SENIOR EDITOR OF AFROPOP.ORG