Black President: the Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by Sarah Adams

Black President The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, New York July 11-September 28, 2003

This Is Lagos Yabis Night, Music and Fela Skoto Gallery New York, New York July 17-September 13, 2003

Taxi drivers in Lagos have their fingers on the pulse of Nigeria. Crawling through Lagos traffic at the height of this past rainy season, I chatted with my driver as I fiddled with the cab's radio dial. I let the needle rest when a song by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti suddenly blasted through the scratchy speakers. After being away from Nigeria for a while, it was one of those moments when everything just jelled--car horns blaring around us, black exhaust spewing from passing buses, traders shouting as they passed by with their wares, Fela's music filling the taxi and pouring out onto the road. Frantic perfection. I asked the driver what it was like to be in Lagos when Fela passed away in 1997. He shouted over the noise, "It was when Fela died that we knew he was a prophet. When he was there in the Shrine, we were just dancing and enjoying. But now, all those things he said at that time, we are seeing them come true. Fela na prophet."

A prophet indeed. Fela Anikulapo Kuti's music looked to the past, present, and future. His searing musical critiques of Nigeria's leadership linked the history of colonialism to present-day problems, and warned Nigerians of the dangers of continuing on that path. The founder of Afrobeat music, Fela, through words and sound, inspired musicians and visual artists in Nigeria and well beyond its borders. Two recent exhibitions in New York, "Black President" at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and "This Is Lagos" at the Skoto Gallery, mined the musical and visual legacy of his life and work. "Black President" demonstrated important cross-pollination between music and visual culture, and in doing so made a powerful case for a media-spanning approach to the analysis of visual culture.

"Black President," guest curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, was a remarkable effort to honor Fela in a museum space--usually sanitized, orderly, and quiet, a space antithetical in nature to Fela's own. Schoonmaker wisely transformed the New Museum by filling it with sound. From the moment they opened the front door, and at all times while walking through the beautifully installed exhibition, visitors were bombarded with sound: Fela's music, ambient noise from video installations, and the voices of people talking loudly to be heard. It was a welcome and appropriate break from the standard stifling museum hush.

The exhibition also provided listening stations, one of its strongest points. Visitors could sit at computers, don headphones, and select tracks compiled by Schoonmaker and Pint Orlov that placed Fela's work in a broader context of music that inspired him and was inspired by him. I found it hard to stay seated while listening. Selections were divided into broad eras: 1950s-60s ("Say It Loud--I'm Black and I'm Proud" by James Brown, "Love in Outer Space" by Sun Ra), "70s ("Africa Unite" by Bob Marley, "Jungle Jazz" by Keel and the Gang), '80s, and '90s present. It is impossible to truly appreciate how revolutionary the Afrobeat sound was without hearing the music popular in Nigeria during Fela's early years. I hope Schoonmaker and Orlov will make this acoustic doctoral thesis available on CD.

The roster of artists included in flap exhibition was impressive--Sokari Douglas Camp, Obiora Udechukwu, Kendell Geers, Alfredo Jaar, Olu Oguibe, Ouattara, Yinka Shonibare, Fred Wilson, Kara Walker, and Klaus Burgel, to name a few. Because Fela's music is rooted in protest and social critique, it is easy to argue that any number of works that deal with these themes connect with his legacy. As a result, several pieces included in the exhibition, while strong works, seemed unrelated or too tangential. Ike Ude's Nigeria Vogue (1994) felt out of place, as did Moshekwa Langa's video, Home Movies: Where Do I Begin? Other works were heavy-handed in their approach. Odili Donald Odita's installation Heaven Can Wait (2001), incorporating a red wheelbarrow resting in a puddle of oil (a black plastic cut-out) and loaded with huge bundles of naira, was an obvious condemnatinn of the continuing devaluation of the national currency, the result of corruption related to Nigeria's oil boom. While these were recurring themes in Fela's music, Odita's installation felt like a one-note song, lacking nuance and subtlety.

Sokari Douglas Camp's Open and Close Chop and Quench (2002-3) was another unexpected disappointment. Sokari, (1) along with Satch Hoyt and Yinka Shonibare, focused on the twenty-seven women Fela married in a single ceremony in 1978. Her kinetic metal sculpture depicted one of these wives with "AIDS" scrawled in stark white letters across her forehead, her legs clapping open and closed. In contrast to the artist's other kinetic sculptures, which are carefully crafted and engage the viewer with their ecstatic motion, this piece seemed stiffly mechanical. While it is likely that Sokari was concerned with the stigmatization and possibly the infection of Fela's wives through their association with their husband, who died of AIDS, the piece felt misguided.