DESCRIPTION

In an essay titled "Roforofo Fight," oppositional politics expert Yomi Durotoye describes legendary musician and activist Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's life as an "epic, contra-diction-riven roforofo fight against postcolonial domination." The quote references Fela's 1972 song, "Roforofo Fight", in which the Afrobeat King describes a battle from which no participant emerges unsullied; a mud-slinging contest. For Fela, roforofo was a potent metaphor that captured the urgent need to construct radical counter strategies to resist colonialism's ongoing domination. As Fela explained, "Because we are dealing with corrupt people we have to be rascally with them."

Throughout his life, Fela's rascality was acted out at different sites and with different weapons: stage, home, street, studio. One of his typically "rascally" moves was to turn the tools of corporate capitalism and colonialism against their masters. Bypassing editorial censorship in Nigeria's predominantly state controlled press, Fela thus began buying advertising space in daily and weekly newspapers such as The Daily Times and The Punch in order to run outspoken political columns. Published throughout the 1970s and early 1980s under the title, Chief Priest Say, these columns were essentially extensions of Fela's famous "Yabi Sessions", consciousness-raising word-sound rituals, with himself as "chief priest", conducted at his Lagos nightclub, the African Shrine. Organised around a militarily Afrocentric rendering of history and the essence of black beauty, Chief Priest Say focused on the role of cultural hegemony in the continuing subjugation of Africans. Employing genre malleability, a trickster's penchant for play and language games, withering social satire, incantations and invocations, Fela's writing constituted a literary symphony of dissent and resistance. From explosive denunciations of the Nigerian Government's "criminal behaviour", Islam and Christianity's "exploitive" nature and the and "evil" multinationals, to witty deconstructions of Western medicine, Black Muslims, sex, pollution and poverty - nothing was safe from Fela's phallacious pen.

Chief Priest Say was finally cancelled, first by Daily Times, then by Punch, ostensibly due to non-payment, but as many commentators speculated more likely because the paper's respective editors were placed under increasingly violent pressure by the government who were determined to silence Fela.

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RE/SOURCES

• Durotoye, Yomi. "Roforofo Fight", Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway, Schoonmaker, Trevor (ed.), Jacana Media, 2003
• Veal, Michael E. Fela: The Life & Times of an African Musical Icon, Temple University Press, 2000.
• Olaniyan, Tejumola. Arrest the Music!: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics, Indiana University Press, 2004
• Kuti, Fela. Roforofo Fight, Jofabro / Editions Makossa / Pathe Marconi, 1972.
• Chimurenga Volume 8: We're all Nigerian!, Dec 2005.
• Idowu, Mabinuori Kayode. Fela: Why Blackman Carry Shit, Opinion Media, 1986.
• Olorunyomi, Sola. Afrobeat!: Fela and the Imagined Continent
• Edjabe, Ntone. "Why Blackman dey carry shit", Chimurenga Vol 1: Music is the Weapon, April 2002