Africa Is a Country

Representing Fela

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Representing Fela

By
Sean Jacobs

The New York Times' chief theater critic, surprise, misses the point about the musical, "Fela!"

Promo still from "Fela: The Musical."

Last week The New York Times published an odd piece of writing by one its theater “critics”, Charles Isherwood about the Broadway show “Fela!” about the life of the Afrobeat king.  Isherwood had a strange collection of problems with the show: He accused the show and its creators of “tilting” towards minstrelsy aimed at white audiences (basically, is Isherwood implying that Bill T Jones promotes blackface?), that the dancers were to sexy (they showed too much flesh and danced to suggestively) and, worse, interacted with the audience. He also had problems with the fact that it was all about Fela all the time and that no one else had a speaking role–except Fela and “an American.”

The charge of minstrelsy is so spurious as to not deserve comment (to lead up to that charge, he quoted David Mamet of all people on the etiquette for white people to talk about race).

The problem with Isherwood’s review was that it is based on little knowledge of Fela or is politics. Does Isherwood know anything about Fela’s personality and his music or politics? Fela Kuti was a genius, but he was definitely a narcissist. It was all about him all the time. It didn’t matter if it was his band members (ask Pax Nicholas who Fela fired from his band after he got more applause from fans; the other band members knew better) or his 29 “wives,” they were all subject to his temper, ego and moods.

Fela Kuti and his band Koola Lobitos in 1965.

In fact, Bill T Jones and his team’s decision to focus on Fela sounds closer to the real Fela than Isherwood’s nonsense.

That said, if Isherwood was serious about criticizing “Fela!” he could have done what more level-headed critics have done and written about things like Fela’s abusive relationship with his wives (see Carlos Moore’s new book) or Fela’s AIDS denialism.  Now those are things the play does not want to dwell on.

As the Village Voice’s Rob Harvilla wrote about the show last year:

… Finally, there’s the issue of how to handle Fela himself—the man and the myth. The Queens issue, perhaps wisely, is mostly played for laughs in a goofy mass-wedding-photo scene, though that arrangement had, of course, far more serious and transgressive overtones. Other issues were too thorny to tackle. An onscreen title card notes that Fela died in 1997, but omits the cause: complications caused by AIDS, a disease he denied existed …

Further Reading

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.