See appendix section on Call and Response Procedures in Fela Ransome-Kuti’s Shuffering and Shmili (.)ĥHis call and response technique is particularly involving, as Willie Anku’s examination of Shuffering and Shmiling has shown by his identification of three features of the form: alternating-“where the chorus picks up from the end of the call” overlapping-“where the call section starts while the chorus passage is not yet ended” and interlocking-“where repeated chorus passages and the call sections integrate.” The technique itself further reinforces the art-society dialectic in the sense that it defines the communal ethos of many African societies where, according to Anku, the entire community-the chorus-provides a response to, and anticipates the music leadership-the call. To buttress this past in a single performance like Clear Road for Jaga-Jaga, for instance, he fuses the Peul Gerewol rhythm with the Hausa Gumbe (both, initiation motions), and the latter known as such through Sierra Leone and the Caribbean islands, with other traditional formulae as call and response, wordplay game of abuse and its sense of irony He was particularly animated about the past due to what he perceived as the absence of an elite-driven indigenous mode of knowledge production in the aftermath of colonialism, which contrasted with other such examples he could confidently cite in relation to selective aspects of pre-colonial Africa. The nature of sameness in the earlier ‘dem’ is equally testimonial to this tradition, though at the phonological level with the standard English ’them.’ ‘Griotique’ĤExpressing authenticity in cultural terms, as he had often done in his political rhetoric, meant tapping into an African folkloric past and taking from these diverse sources aesthetic forms that he transposed into contemporary and an urban context. By retaining a structural similarity albeit partially with standard English as the ‘head’ in ’jefa-head’, he dilutes meaning in a manner that can still afford recognition. When Fela sings of “we we” as against “dem dem”, or “suffer-head” as against the subversive “jefa-head” (ITT), he is simply investing a youthful pidgin language with registers that delineate class-laden values and power relations. also describe as ‘abrogation and appropriation.’ The validity invested in the form by Fela, as an other’s legitimate medium of communication, in itself constitutes a step at abrogation, while its deviant form of reconstituting standard usage of English language, and reinvesting them with new meanings, amounts to no less than appropriation, a unique way of “de-colonizing the language.” 5 Presumably, for example, the English language could not have anticipated the noun ‘gentleman,’ either as a referent of an idiot or an impostor but this precisely is its lyrical rendition in the track, Gentleman.
( The Empire Writes Back.)ģMoreover, Fela’s choice of pidgin English as a medium of lyrical composition and general use, even if primarily motivated by the desire to reach out, must be seen as a tacit attempt to achieve what Ashcroft et.
Even with its relative timidity at expressing difference, the earlier West African Highlife had signaled the possibility of a plural practice of music. The term, for me, is akin to the sense of ’post-contact’ that is, predating the independence of the colonies, as used by Francoise Lionet (1995), as a “condition that exists within, and thus contests and resists, the colonial moment itself with its ideology of domination.” 4 While not denying the fact that conditions of marginality do induce their own circumstances for the outburst of creative energy it needs to be added that the cultural ingredients from which this impact was made, in the case of Fela’s Afrobeat, was not always ‘post-contact’ but hewn largely from an ebullient tradition prior to the colonial encounter.
al., and somewhat implicated by its currency in contemporary academic discourse, I use the term ‘post-colonial’ in certain sections of this chapter and book, but my usage is by no means suggestive of an aftermath of colonialism that denies the reality of neo-colonialism, dependence, and imperialism, no matter the subtleties of international finance capital in the post World War II era.
(Ithaca and Lo (.)ĢAs a distant echo of The Empire Writes Back (1989), by Bill Ashcroft et. See Françoise Lionet’s Post Colonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity.