Fela’s Wizkid

The Cambridge English dictionary defines ‘Wizkid’ as “a young person who is very clever and successful.” Collins Dictionary defines it as “a person who is outstandingly successful for his or her age.” Wisdom Library says “’Wiz’ is a shortened form of ‘wizard,’ connoting skill, talent, and expertise, while ‘kid’ implies youthfulness or being junior. When combined, ‘Wizkid’ suggests a young, talented, and skilled individual, particularly in a specific field.”

Fela and Wizkid? The space between the nose and the forehead is not as short as it appears. A noisy digital skirmish: a torrent of online exchanges; an endless war of words. All between Seun Kuti and Afrobeat super star, Wizkid, with his fans, over a reported off-hand tweet that super-rich Wizkid had surpassed Fela Anikulapo Kuti in music and social stature.

Seun Kuti is reported to have remarked that “it’s an insult to Fela to call Wizkid the new Fela.” Apparently in frustration with the back and forth over the inanity on the Internet, the living star is reported to have retorted: “Ok. I big pass your Papa!!! Wetin u wan do? Fool at 40.” That “igán” was the spark that caused the conflagration.

It is a needless quarrel. Wizkid is not Fela. He is Fela’s wizkid. The fight is stupid because the truth is self-evident. A child may own as many garments as an elder, but he cannot possess the same number of rags. Time, not tailoring, produces experience. But, there is nothing that the Internet and its warriors cannot weaponise. And, the undiscerning is easily conscripted into the raucous army. Wizkid himself understands the distance involved. So, let no one summon tension where harmony is the musical key.

The younger wizard knows the source of his tumultuous river; he has never denied where it flows from. In a May 3, 2017 interview with English DJ and author, Semtex, Wizkid traced the arc of his musical influences with disarming candour. “So I was influenced by rap, reggae, Bob Marley, Fela… like good music, some big names,” he said. Yet he admitted that Fela’s music did not immediately appeal to him. His parents played Fela and King Sunny Ade at home, but the young Wizkid, by his own account, was “not old enough to understand or enjoy the music.” He wasn’t alone with that judgment. Even Fela’s mother, at the experimental beginning of his career, told him: “Start playing music your people understand, not jazz.”

Time, however, has a way of teaching the tentative how to stand firm and take their share of what life offers. Wizkid, the young man who once declared that he did not want to be “just an African star” grew into a global figure by climbing the ladder of destiny mounted on the shoulders of global giants. He mentions them in that Semtex interview: Bob Marley of Reggae, and unmistakably, Fela Anikulapo Kuti of Afrobeat.

Another old interview is unearthed by the present noise. In it, Wizkid speaks to the Fela matter with humility and clarity: “We can’t compare, let’s not use that word because it is like disrespect when you’re mentioning Wizkid and Fela in the same sentence. You can’t compare. Fela is someone that inspires me. I have him tattooed on me. Fela’s face is all over my body. Everything he did with his music, his legacy, inspires me to be great and to want to do more.”

Wizkid is big because he is wise. Reading him, hearing him, tells that the young man enjoys the benefit of good upbringing. There is his ‘Ojuelegba’ line:

“Ti isu eni ba dele

A f’owo bo je…”

And he remembers to tell his interviewer that underneath that line is the timeless advice he got from his mother: “When I was like younger my Mama told me, you when God blesses you, you should be smart enough to know that you should be more cautious. That’s when you should get more cautious of what you say, what you do and how you move.” To be cautious is to act with care, with prudence. The synonym is wisdom. What Wizkid says his mother told him is the same as what Kahlil Gibran tells us: “Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.”

The young wizard is wise. Wizkid is lucky he has a mother who prays. He sings:

“See eh, e kira fun mummy mi o,

Ojojumo lo n s’adura…”

He is as lucky as Abraham Lincoln who said the same: “I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.”

READ ALSO: Nigerian celebrities should emulate Fela

Now, if there is a positive gain for me in the ‘childish’ fight over which is bigger and deeper between the Atlantic and the Lagos Lagoon, it is the opportunity to read and know more about the music of the youth, and the chance to throw long-owed libation at the king of waters. In celebrating Fela, therefore, we celebrate a king of songs whose insistence is that art must not be for art’s sake; that music must matter, that it must speak when politics lies, and that it must disturb the comfort of the powerful.

The difference between fire and light is in what is done with them. Some music is not meant to entertain alone, but to awaken. The music of Fela is fire and light combined; it is a force that moves more than bodies; it moves minds. He created Afrobeat; he made music, and with it, made life and living into sound and resistance. His everything is a fine blend, whether of assonance or of alliteration; he made sense out of nonsense. His ‘Zombie’, for instance, has not stopped teaching us that when power stops thinking, rhythm must do the thinking for it.

Fela sang the outrage of today and the rage of tomorrow yesterday. Like NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars, the Afrobeat king orbited power with defiance. He was at once coarse and smooth, abrasive and balmy in the same breath.

The Yoruba know that when you sing wahala softly, you can get an entire city dancing. Call it iboosi if you like, trouble turned into tune. Fela sang “Palaver” and made it sound sweet; even his “Yeepa” sounds so sweet that it pirouetted the sonics of chaos into pleasure. Where there is “Sorrow, Tears and Blood”, Fela trained his voice and drum not to keep quiet; and they never did; they still are not quiet. In the moral urgency of African chant, Fela’s music sings and dances; and as it dances, it indicts. When he winks his wings make meaning. His clenched fist circles the earth; his art is an eraser that continually cleans off the boundary between stage and street, between rhythm and revolt. You listen to his ‘Alagbon Close’ lyrics, you hear his sax speak the language of condemnation, while his drum sings defiance to state captors.

The Gen Z fighting on X over which star is the biggest in the cosmos should know this: Fela was one spirit who stretched tradition until it screamed. He was the potter who scooped mounds of Yoruba earth and, from it, moulded an impossible steed for the battlefield of the world. In his sax, step and sup, music became the language of war and peace. His truth is dense, his anger repetitive, his chant hypnotic. In his dance steps are disclaimers that deprecate the chaos of Nigeria’s politics. In 1975, he flung defiantly rebellious “Expensive Shit” at power and its police; the steel-hearted swooned in pain. Fela’s truth is eternally too heavy for weak stomachs.

He acted alone in his rebellion. “Solitude sometimes is best society,” says John Milton. Fela’s choice of road to tread almost obeys that Milton poetry. He was not a gentleman, and he sang it into our skulls: “A no be gentleman at all o.” His songs, like his life, wear no borrowed manners. Every Fela song is a sermon rudely delivered; every performance a trial of societal evils; every arrest a verse added to an unfinished composition on power and freedom. His eclecticism, with his synthesis, and his defiance, give his music oxygen. They are what make Fela endure.

In Fela’s biological musical children, “heirs of fame,” and in the wizard kids who sing his legacy, he lives. The Abami Eda spirit pulses through Femi and Seun Kuti; their blazing saxophones and militant energy carry forward the torch of political Afrobeat. This paragraph is a product of reading and asking. In reading and exploring, I got to know so much about this subject: Fela’s legendary drummer, Tony Allen, was right here, modifying the rhythms, making the music irresistible. Beyond his fecund loins, Fela’s immortality is heard in the sounds of contemporary stars: Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, Tiwa Savage, Yemi Alade, Rema, Joeboy, and Olamide. In these stars, Afrobeat’s pulse blends seamlessly with the aplomb of Afropop, hip-hop, and global pop. Singly or in pairs, they speak to new audiences, while across the world, fans feel Fela in the music of Benin’s Angélique Kidjo, UK-based Afro B, and even Major Lazer. And, writing and reading this paragraph again, I realize I have convinced myself that decades after death yanked Fela’s fingers from the pot of world music, his creation, Afrobeat, still walks the streets loud, stubborn, and unbowed

A thoroughly studied phenomenon; in one text, Academy Award winner, Joseph Patel, says “Fela Kuti is the truth.” In another line, American writer, Knox Robinson, describes him as “the original Afronaut.” Music scholar and historian, Peter Guralnick and Douglas Wolk, published a survey of turn-of-the-millennium music in 2002. In it, they make the bio of “irreducible” Fela read like a political chant. Now, read them and chant along:

“Fela Kuti: 77 albums, 27 wives, over 200 court appearances. Harassed, beaten, tortured, jailed. Twice-born father of Afrobeat. spiritualist, pan-Africanist. Commune King. Composer, saxophonist, keyboardist, dancer… There will never be another like him.”