Arrest the Music!: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics

7 Pedagogue, Pedagogy, and the Pedagogic Form

7 Pedagogue, Pedagogy, and the Pedagogic Form “I.T.T.”: The ABC of How Euro-American Multinational Corporations Underdeveloped Africa Fela designed the sprawling composition “I.T.T.” (International Thief Thief) as a detailed expose of the insidious manner in which Africa is cheated of its immense wealth by Euro-American multinational corporations. Against a background chorus of “International Thief Thief!” and a chaotic din of complaints of lack of social services by the people, Fela’s voice, beefy and authoritative , rises to address the crowd. “Make I yab dem?” (Should I roast them?), he asks, in the manner of a union leader holding a rally with fellow workers against the management. “Yab dem! Yab dem!!” (Yes! Roast them!) the crowd roars its assent, which sounds very much like an excited appeal by eager students for gems of wisdom from a revered sage-professor. While the precise meaning of “yab” in urban southwest Nigerian pidgin English is to roast, criticize, or abuse, its connotations are much wider—to expose one’s wrongdoing in public, to discom ¤t, humiliate, deconstruct. Indeed, one of the most beloved features of a Fela concert was “yabis time” during which, to intermittent interventions from the audience, he would range widely round the world critically picking apart and ironizing news items and events: the minister of culture in an African country who always dresses in three-piece suits imported from West End London; the escape, for the umpteenth time, of yet another group of armed robbers from police custody while, as usual, police “investigation continues”; the sick African vice president who had to be jetted to a hospital in Europe because of the dilapidated state of the hospitals in his own country; the latest ploy by Thatcher and Reagan to prolong the reign of apartheid in South Africa; the UN and its announcement of one more program to save Africa while African presidents cheer like a pack of beggars; and more. Yabis time was a consummate scene of educational instruction in which, led by Fela, the audience came to know a lot about itself and its place in the contexts of the nation, the continent, and the world and the dominant relations, historical and contemporary, among those entities. A chief cynic himself, Fela never expected to convince the audience without a struggle. So he kept in stock an array of rhetorical strategies to aid his task. He resorted to an extreme one early in “I.T.T.,” apparently to demonstrate the gravity of the matter at stake. “Na true I wan talk again o” (I want to tell the truth again), he cleverly announces both the immediate occasion and, more important , the fact that the occasion is just another one of his usual—“again o”— truth-telling sessions. But this one is graver, so its truthfulness needs unusual underscoring. “If I dey lie o, make Osiri punish me o” (If I am lying, may Osiri punish me), he commences an extended swearing which invokes the wrath of African deities and mythological ¤gures on himself if what he is about to say is not the truth. The swearing works well musically; he heavily accents the enchanting repetitive phrase, “punish me o” to the thrashing chorus of “well well!” Beyond musical rhetoric, however, the oath has a substantive content. In a cultural context where people generally steer clear of this kind of self-directed oath-taking and not simply out of civility, the musician here puts something more than his reputation on the line to guarantee the truth of what he is about to tell. The much-expected truth,when Fela ¤nally tells it,appears to be lightweight. At ¤rst, that is. He has, he says, researched the culture of shit-carrying that is rampant in many poor neighborhoods in 1970s Lagos1 and has discovered that it is not African at all. A “long, long time ago,” Africans “no dey carry shit” (didn’t carry shit). They shit in big holes dug in the ground. To prove it, he ri®es through several African cultures to give the various indigenous names of the shit hole.For a large part of his audience: students,dropouts,clerks,messengers, the unemployed and underemployed, the lumpen proletariat, he provides a handy cultural nationalist education. “Na European man dey carry shit / Na for dem culture to carry shit” (It is Europeans who carry shit / It is their culture to carry shit), he declares authoritatively, adding that it is Europeans who forced Africans to...