Irony at a Thousand Feet

Yesterday as I sat on my roof in Cambridge on a welcome day of sun and warmth, I gazed at the irony flying above me.  It was a prop plane gliding lazily over Fenway Park.  It was dragging a massive banner for the fuel efficient Honda Insight.  There was only one rationale I could imagine uttered in the meeting room of Honda marketers for this idea:  “We should spend money on airplane rental and fuel to sell a car whose selling point is minimal fuel if it will lead to sales of enough units of the car to create a wave of new hybrid owners.”

One of the engineers at PRI’s The World Mike Wilkins (a regular at Red Sox games thanks to his work with the Spanish Beisbol Network) made this fair point:  “How many newspapers (trees cut down) would you have to print (crank up the printing press for several hours) to reach the same number of people?”

Anyone care to crunch the carbon footprint cost-benefit on this one?

Thomas Sankara meets George Faisans

A few weeks ago, I posted some thoughts and photos from the New Afrika Shrine nightclub in Lagos.  One of those pictures featured a painting of Burkina Faso’s late president Capt. Thomas Sankara, which was hanging next to a rigger putting up a neon Red Bull sign on the wall.  The irony here:  Sankara loathed the notion of Africans importing stuff they admired in movies and Western pop culture (like Red Bull), and yet, here was Red Bull hanging next to Sankara.

Sankara was a 37 year-old army captain when he died.  He was killed in a coup organized by his second in command Capt. Blaise Compaore, who is president of Burkina Faso to this day.  In the four years Sankara was president, he made a long list of enemies in Ouagadougou.  Though it should be said, many of those enemies were urban elites in Burkina Faso who didn’t like Sankara’s attacks on urban middle-class affluence in one of the world’s poorest country; it wasn’t because Sankara was a brutal tyrant in the mold of Charles Taylor or Robert Mugabe.  Here’s an enthusiastic (if not subjective) account of four years of Sankara. 

His assassination was the first big story I covered in Africa.  I happened to have arrived in Ouagadougou about a month before Oct. 15, 1987.  I took the above photo of Sankara about five days before he was killed.  It was at the reception that concluded an anti-apartheid conference held in Ouagadougou.

A bit of sidebar trivia:  the man with the white beard whose hand Sankara is shaking is George Faisans.  He was at the center of a 1985 controversy in Guadeloupe.  A white schoolteacher had kicked a black student (kicking is an outrageous insult in the French West Indies, and is a bitter reminder of the colonial masters’ treatment of slaves).  Faisans intervened, attacking and injuring the schoolteacher with a machete.  He was sentenced to four years in jail (the schoolteacher was “disciplined”), where he immediately undertook a hunger strike.  Large street protests ensued in Point à Pitre calling for his liberation.  He was transferred to a prison in Paris, but the cries from the streets of Guadeloupe were too loud to ignore.  Faisans was released on July 24, 1985.  Sensing a simpatico revolutionary ambiance in Burkina Faso, Faisans moved there soon after.  I’m not sure if Faisans and Sankara had met prior to this picture in 1987.  But Sankara seemed to know who Faisans was and his significance.

I used to drink with Faisans at a bar in the center of town managed by a lovely Burkinabe rasta named Bawa Dakambary.  But that’s another story.

Still Suffering and Smiling

Every day my people dey inside bus
Every day my people dey inside bus
Forty-nine sitting, ninety-nine standing
Them go pack themselves in like sardine
Them dey faint, them dey wake like cock
Them go reach house, water no dey
Them go reach bed, power no dey
Them go reach road, go-slow go come
Them go reach road, police go slap
Them go reach road, army go whip
Them go look pocket, money no dey
Them go reach work, query ready

Every day na the same thing
Every day na the same thing
Every day na the same thing
Every day na the same thing

Suffer, suffer for world…

Suffering and Smiling, Fela, 1978

You can’t fully understand any music unless you go where it originates and understand the environment it sprang out of.  I’ve found a new thick layer of meaning for Fela here.  Prior to my coming, Fela’s words echoed a universal truth about the downtrodden around the globe and the (usually governmental) oppressive forces that make those people downtrodden.  But being here, you suddenly absorb the local context — you are dealt the full impact of the daily struggles Lagosians face – and why that tension would’ve prompted an outrageous musical response from someone like Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, knowing who he was and the background he came from.

Go to a slum like Bariga.  I spent four hours Saturday morning, prior to visiting the air conditioned Century 21 Mall, with my crew and a couple of locals showing us around the neighborhood.

Bariga sits on the Leeki lagoon on the Lagos mainland, just to the west of the Third Mainland Bridge.  It has seemingly resigned itself to being surrounded by filth.  Bariga has spread into the lagoon, first atop a thick landfill of mostly garbage and sand. 

The human sprawl then spills into the water, where descendants of the Tofinu people from Benin (the ethnic group that settled the famous village-on-stilts of Ganvie in Benin not far to the west of Lagos along the Gulf of Guinea) have built their own village on stilts, in this mega-urban setting.  At first glance, it seems that fishing families, squeezed by necessity and the outward push from the neighborhood, have gotten the short end of the stick, and are now hanging on for dear life between the lagoon and the traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge.  But compared to the part of Bariga that’s developed on top of festering trash, the fishing community feels calm, even quaint, even though people there wash and cook with lagoon water in which you see frequent evidence of human waste.

A listen to “Suffering and Smiling”  doesn’t explain though why a lot of these people in Bariga don’t explode in anger at their government.  Maybe the levels of dysfunction in Nigerian society have simply become so entrenched, so much a part of life, that to not accept them would be to handicap one’s own chance of getting ahead.  And that makes “Suffering and Smiling” more relevant than ever.

 

 

 

Have a Safe, Lagos

Lagos has a couple of malls of the kind pioneered by the US.  One of them is the Century 21 Mall on Victoria Island, the posh part of the city.  On a typical Saturday at the entrance to the mall, chauffered SUVs and luxury sedans sealed off from the heat and chaos with air con set on high drop their charges for an hour or two of shopping and socializing.

 

Mega Plaza is the main attraction here.  It’s a version of Best Buy, featuring a throbbing  televison display attended to by shopkeepers who were mostly watching the Arsenal v Man City and the Chelsea v Newcastle matches when I went in.  Outside the store, there is a prominent display of safes for sale. 

Lots of varieties and sizes.  Then as you climb the stairs and enter the crisp air of Mega Plaza, two other items have been given high floor visibility (once the seductive walls of HD-LCD TVs stop zombifying you):  an astonishing array of diesel generators and paper shredders, large ones.  Safes, generators and paper shredders.

 I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

Millions of Little Kalakuta Republics

It was when I was in a police cell at the C.I.D. (Central Intelligence Division) in Lagos; the cell I was in was named “the Kalakuta Republic” by the prisoners.  I found out when I went to East Africa that “kalakuta” is a Swahili word that means “rascal.”  So, if rascality is going to get us what we want, we will use it; because we are dealing with corrupt people, we have to be “rascally” with them.

Fela Anikulapo Kuti speaking with music producer John Collins, 1985

Fela also renamed his communal compound “Kalakuta Republic,” proclaiming it an autonomous zone free from the laws and jurisdiction of Nigeria and open to people African descent worldwide — especially to all persecuted Africans…The newly fortified Kalakuta Republic was fairly self-sufficient, with farm animals, a free health clinic, and facilities for rehearsing and recording.

Fela:  the Life and Times of an African Musical Icon, Michael Veal, 2000

Here are four ways in which Lagosians have come to create, in a way, their own little Kalakuta Republics.

Generators

The power in Lagos, as everyone here knows too well, is inconsistent at best.  The power company still makes you hook up to their power, and you have to pay pretty much whatever the utility tells you to pay (many homes don’t have meters, and those that do often don’t work). 

So if you want electricity guaranteed, you must have a generator.

Gates

This is Neighborhood Watch goes DIY-gangsta.  Fight crime by putting up gates and sealing off the neighborhood.  This gate goes into the pocket of Ikeja where the Kuti’s Kalakuta Republic is found on Gbemisola Street.  These neighborhood-sealoffs were banned by the government several months ago I’m told, but the order has yet to be really enforced.  So right now, some of the gates have guards.  Some are more loosely observed by the nearby neighbors, a focal point of people coming and going.

Preemptive 419 Warnings

Nigerians don’t even joke about 419 anymore.  The pre-payment scams are so seriously embedded into the culture here that it’s practically passe.  One of the more recent variations on the usual email 419 we get in the US, and which Nigerian con-artists perpetrate on other Nigerians, involves a stranger who scopes out your property, and then attempts to sell it to a third party.  That’s where this warning comes from.  You see them on houses everywhere.

Telecom

As far as I can tell, there are no private individuals who have attempted to create their own personal telcom systems.  But there’s a heavy reliance on mobile phones in Lagos because the landlines were unreliable.  The sight of “masts,” as Nigerians call them, is something you can’t escape.  They also represent the every-person-for-themselves mentality, just higher up the food-chain.

The government has been aggressively nurturing a rapid growth of cell phone companies.  Some of the country’s billionaires continue to make their fortunes on mobile networks.  They’ve performed an odd kind of acupuncture on the Lagos skyline.  ”No one here understands these things give you cancer,” said Seun Kuti on his roof, as we looked at the horizon.

Seun for President

Yesterday, Seun Kuti told me in our proper sit-down interview that though his father couldn’t run for president (Fela had planned to run twice for the head of the Nigerian government, but was blocked), he would like to at some point.  As he sat on the bed in a tank-top, having just suspended a Play Station soccer match, it was a bit hard to imagine the young Mr. Kuti focusing someday on the presidency.  But he is very smart, and in the interview referenced the Nuremburg trials and genetically modified food and Monsanto as casually as he talked about the Roots.  And he seems to be reading up on how to run a country.  Here are five books he downloaded from iTunes to his iPhone that I would not have expected to find.

The Communist Manifesto, Engels/Marx

The Art of War, Sun Tsu

Common Sense, Thomas Paine

The Federalist Papers, Hamilton/Madison/Jay

Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

Think Lagos

“…our leaders not think of us

dey only think of themselves

they want us to kill ourselves

different different war…

kill themselves over money…”

Think Africa, by Seun Kuti performed by Seun Kuti and the Egypt 80

I was asking Seun Kuti to talk about the words to his song “Think Africa” when a gunshot rang out. At first we all thought it was a car backfiring, and in retrospect I remember hearing a small collision and some gasps from the side of the street Seun lives on in Ikeja. And suddenly, three more rapid fire shots, and we all rose from the interview, ran to the window, and looked one floor down into the street.

A man in matching white tunic and trousers was grabbing his bloody leg, but standing, and rapidly firing a large handgun up the street. Then he collapsed on the ground like a rag doll.  A few bystanders helped the man up, one of them got his motorcycle revving again, and the victim got on the back and was taken away, his right leg dangling.  The story that the quickly-gathered crowd in the street shouted up to us was the man in white was a cop who was carrying a bag of money. The attacker apparently knew he had it, and pulled his motorcycle drive-by, shooting the cop in the leg right in front of the Kalakuta Republic.

Much excitement and hooplah ensued.  The blood was washed and covered up with sand outside. And the final “Where Nigerians get C.S.I. oh?! Where Foh-rensic dawk-tah oh!?” jokes were made, and we sat back down to wrap things up.  No manner of law enforcement ever came, as the humor had signposted.

Here’s another contradiction in enforcement: two different signs, both at the New Afrika Shrine. Upon entering:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 And, inside the venue:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People smoke openly though at the Shrine. And no one gets arrested there. What to think?

Our Guest Today on “Afrologic”…

Ade Gboyega Oyedele is a Lagos music producer and deejay.  He is Afrobeat mad, like those New York deejays who can tell you all the personnel on specific Blue Note outtake sessions, he can tell you the Fela tracks Lester Bowie played on, and the years Roy Ayers was in Nigeria.  Ade has created an electro-Afrobeat act called Afrologic.  Afrologic is also the name of his two-hour weekly show on the University of Lagos radio station, “one oh-three dot one f-m” as they say.  It wasn’t exactly quid pro quo.  He agreed to speak with me about why he’s keeping Fela’s spirit alive.  And then Ade hinted I could be on his show at 3pm.

Fair enough.  So here’s a little excerpt of Ade asking me my impressions on my first visit to Lagos. The set-up:  we had been discussing how Fela was inspired by the misery and oppression that surrounded him.

This Guy Walks Into a Chinese Restaurant in Lagos

The restaurant O’Jez (pronounced like the band that sang “Backstabbers”) hosts a highlife party the last Sunday of every month.

I went this evening hoping to have a beer, maybe a small bite, and listen to some old highlife classics (highlife, one of the precursors to Afrobeat, is a jazzy, brassy style that came originally from Ghana, and which Nigerians cottoned on to very warmly) that are being dusted off by a young group of musicians who call themselves Evergreen.  Their slogan:  “Music for Matured Minds.”

O’Jez sits on the upper level of Lagos’s national stadium.  The way in is a maze of cafes and bars and numerous soccer games being played on a myriad of little pitches and parking lots.  I arrived when the band was just kicking off.

It soon evolved that the manager of the event had apparently offered the O’Jez space for a birthday party for a one Peter Igoh, a major player in Nigerian broadcasting, television, screen-writing and Nollywood, the country’s filmmaking hub as its called.  It was part celebration, part roast, lots of speeches, lots of memories, and many shout-outs to people who had come for the festivities.  The music was cool.  A good highlife band can really can make your day.

Seun Kuti Plays the New Afrika Shrine

A sublime evening of music, one of those nights in which you feel privileged just to have been part of it.  The crowd was not as big and bustling as I had expected.  Seun (pronounced shay-OOn)and the Egypt 80 band had just returned from a string of dates, most recently New Zealand and Australia, resulting in a long trip home.  They arrived only two days before I had.  There wasn’t much time to do a lot of publicity, Seun had earlier winced.  The room was definitely not packed.  It was 500 naira to get in, about $4.  Still, people knew that band would play at least three hours, and there was no drink minimum.  There was that pesky downpour that may have kept people away.  It delayed Seun’s arrival by about 90 minutes, and the show didn’t start until 1am.  By three, the crowd had thinned out and a lot of the boys there who had started the evening pedal to the metal, spliffs of “Indian hemp” a-blazing, were now parked in their plastic chairs, asleep. 

Still Seun and the Egypt 80 played on, until 4:15.  Backstage afterwards, Seun still had energy to burn, and was shadow boxing a friend of his.

So how do I poetically describe the show?  I’ll let these photos do the talking.

3:30am: the crowd at the Shrine thins, but the band plays on