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1 Introduction “Living In The Interregnum”: Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and the Postcolonial Incredible The scene has stuck in my mind for over two decades now, but I can no longer remember whether I actually saw it or imagined it. Veteran watchers of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (1938–1997)—simply “Fela” to his fans—dismissed my “positivist ” worries and instead wagered their reputations on its plausibility. Here then, the (in)famous spectacle: a half-literate of¤cer of the Nigerian army and lorry-loads of fully armed soldiers swooped down on the venue of a performance by Fela, their AK-47s fully drawn. Amid the commotion by the startled audience, the of¤cer bellowed out to his soldiers, “Arrest the music!” A few soldiers approached the stage tentatively and stopped at the footlights, apparently not sure how to execute the strange command. Their glance back at the of¤cer was met with an even more thunderous “Arrest the music, I say!” this time with the of¤cer’s own pistol drawn. The soldiers scrambled to cart away Fela’s musical instruments. I did not wait to see or could not remember what happened next. I have often wondered why the of¤cer’s particular phrase refused to leave me, more so when the whole scenario may really be no more than the product of an imagination gone overactive for a moment. Fela had in¤nitely more and real violent visitations from the security agents of successive Nigerian governments over the course of the three decades of his musical career. One such on February 18, 1977, resulted in the invasion and sacking of his residence by nearly 1,000 soldiers. Residents—including Fela—and guests were brutally beaten and bayoneted and scores ended up with broken heads, legs, backs, shoulders, arms, and ribs; women were sexually assaulted; Fela’s ailing mother, Nigeria’s foremost anticolonial nationalist and feminist, was tossed from a second-®oor window; and the house itself was razed—all in broad daylight, with thousands of citizens in the mostly lower-class neighborhood watching in disbelief.The government’s commission of inquiry into the cruelty by its agents acquitted it of responsibility because, it said, “unknown soldiers” committed the acts. Not even the subsequent global popularity of the phrase “unknown soldier,” thanks to Fela’s musical account of the episode in the album Unknown Soldier, was able to remove the poignancy of “Arrest the music!” in my consciousness. “Arrest the music,” I now discover, can actually be a suggestive conceptual key to approaching the music of Fela and the contexts of its production, circulation , and consumption. It reveals, for example, the peculiar character of the relations between art, speci¤cally oppositional music, and a postcolonial African state. It is also an inadvertent homage to that part of Fela’s image as a musician that is most familiar to the world: the “political.” Above all, the unvarnished crudity, unhidden ill-bred megalomania, killjoy morbidity, and sheer incredibility of the unusual commandspeak volumes about the political order— and those who manage and pro¤t from it—on behalf of which it is uttered. Indeed , if there is one overarching conceptual thread running through Fela’s music , it is that the postcolonial Nigerian, and African, condition is an incredible one. The “incredible” inscribes that which cannot be believed; that which is too improbable, astonishing, and extraordinary to be believed. The incredible is not simply a breach but an outlandish infraction of “normality” and its limits. If “belief,” as faith, con¤dence, trust, and conviction, underwrites the certainty and tangibility of institutions and practices of social exchange, the incredible dissolves all such props of stability, normality, and intelligibility (and therefore of authority) and engenders social and symbolic crisis. Evident in Fela’s body of work is a gargantuan will to articulate, to name, the incredibility and thereby inscribe its vulnerability. To the extent that Fela’s expressed objective is the overthrow or at least the amelioration of the reign of the incredible, he obviously conceives its dominance at the moment as a transition, an “interregnum .” His exertions, in all their recalcitrant multidirectional sprawl, are best seen as meaningful confrontations with a presupposed interregnum that increasingly threatens to become the norm, a norm with a rapidly consolidating hierarchy of privileges feeding on and dependent on the crisis for reproduction. This crisis-as-norm is what I call the “postcolonial incredible,” signally marked by “a great variety of morbid symptoms.”1 If Fela, even in death, remains...

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