The politics of music in Africa

The artiste, who made Fadhili Williams’ Malaika a global phenomenon, died in 2008, aged 76. Makeba, the first black African woman to win a Grammy Award, explained it best when she said: “You sing about things that surround you ….

Our surrounding has always been that of suffering from the apartheid and racism that exists in our country. So our music has to be affected by all that.”

Haunting lyrics

The ignoble regime banned songs such as Eddy Grant’s 1988 anti-apartheid reggae anthem, Gimme Hope Jo’anna. Its lyrics represent not only the city of Jo’burg, but also the apartheid government of the time.

Same as Lucky Dube’s 1985 album Rastas Never Die, which was quickly banished for containing lyrics inspired by the anguish and heartache of apartheid.

Later, Dube’s harmonic vocals in songs such as Different Colours, One People were used to unite the country when apartheid was abolished in 1991.

Across in Nigeria, politics and music were like (Delta) oil and the waters of River Niger — they never mixed — as Fela Kuti, the King of the Afrobeat, bitterly learnt.

In 1969, his Koola Lobitos band embraced the political philosophy of Malcom X and addressed the trials, tribulations and contradictions of the Nigerian society in fiery tunes.

Fela’s hard hitting songs, like Zombie, Coffin for Head State and Army Arrangement (the latter which directly attacked Nigerian leadership, government programmes and police brutality), send him to the coolers severally.

As he became more outspoken, Fela declared his compound an independent state and called it The Kalakuta Republic, a commune where him and his band lived. But, in 1977, over 1,000 police officers raided it, stripping, beating and torturing the residents.

Fela was beaten senseless, sustaining a fractured skull and broken bones in the process.
His 82-year-old mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was thrown out from a second floor balcony.

The song Coffin for Head of State blamed the president for his mother’s subsequent death from the savagery.
Fela’s Afrobeat blended elements of West African high life music, traditional Yoruba rhythms with intense political lyrics in such songs as Jeun Ko’ku (Eat and Die), and delivered, in call-and-response, a vocal style that accounted for his folk hero status among Nigeria’s poor.

Amnesty International’s “prisoner of conscious” died in 1997, aged 59. Zimbabwean musicians have, too, faced the music, and fewer have sung “hotter funk” than Thomas Mapfumo, currently exiled in America for rubbing the Mugabe government the wrong way with his satirical, hard hitting songs.

Marima Nzara (You Have Reaped Poverty) is a scathing attack on the Mugabe government’s land redistribution policy, Huni is a strong warning to Mugabe that “if you continue pushing people around they will inevitably revolt against you”, while Mamvemve talks about how the country has been trashed.

Disaster is self-explanatory, and was promptly banned. And though the “Lion of Zimbabwe” has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Zimbabwe, his music is never played on radio.

Kenyan artiste Eric Wainaina’s Nchi Ya Kitu Kidogo, a song about rampant official corruption in Kenya, caused discomfort among government officials whenever it was performed live.

But, although the national broadcaster shunned it for years, it didn’t get Wainaina cooling his lyrical heels in the slammer. Funny how, after the 1998 terrorist bombing of Nairobi and the 2007 post-election madness, it was Wainaina’s Kenya Only that seemed to unite and put sanity to a confused nation.

Repression