As Fela’s Afrobeat goes West

By Pelu Awofeso

DEAR Nigerians!

I think we’re going to lose Afrobeat to the West, sooner or later.

And by that, I mean the Afrobeat that Fela started and nurtured here in Lagos and has now become a global movement.

The Afrobeat Fela created and cooked on Nigerian soil.

Let me explain.

Last Saturday, after leaving Afrobeat Rebellion, I stopped over at Freedom Park, which hosts parallel concerts during Felabration.

I arrived just as a swiss group called Kalakuta Mentality (pictured) were rounding off their performance on the main stage, thrilling the audience.

This is a full band ooo, with members playing instruments — trumpet, saxophone, guitar and so on.

I watched them perform “Zombie” and a number of Fela’s popular songs.

They sang the lyrics, but of course the pidgin didn’t sound like Fela’s pidgin, Naija pidgin, and that’s understandable.

And right there, my mind flashed back to some 7 or 8 years ago, when I watched another Afrobeat band called Newen Afrobeat, perform at the New Afrika Shrine, in Ikeja. (I have their album, by the way)

They performed some of Fela’s songs, just like Afrobeat Mentality was doing this fateful Saturday evening.

Then I asked myself: aside from the Kuti clan, how many other bands in Nigeria play Afrobeat?

I mean youthful bands.

Ten to twenty years from now, how many bands in Nigeria would be playing Afrobeat?

I don’t mean Afrobeats — the kind that Davido, Whizkid, Burna Boy and the likes are playing.

To be clear, I love these guys and I enjoy their music, a lot. They have given us superb entertainment and put our dear country on the global map.

But my concern in this post is the future of Afrobeat.

A Swiss Afrobeat band pelting Fela’s tunes at Felabration in Lagos

The way I see it, in the future more bands in the West would emerge, colonise the genre and dictate how the world listens to and appreciate Afrobeat, a musical genre birthed here in Naija.

Never mind that their pidgin won’t be as authentic. They will still pull the fans, in their hundreds of thousands.

And so na Abroad people go dey propagate the gospel of Afrobeat. Then our young musicians will be singing studio-enhanced afrobeats, because they can’t be bothered to learn how to play any instruments.

The music would evolve. They will add salt, pepper and palm oil and there would be a different kind of Afrobeat, fine tuned and re-calibrated for fans in the West.

And I can bet that we would pay to watch them bring that reinvented music to us here, on African soil.

* Awofeso is a cultural curator and seasoned tour guide offering tourism services to global tourists