LAGOS, THE SHRINE continued....
The following day is spent mostly lounging
around Femi's swimming pool in his compound, a bizarre
Miami-ish respite from the chaos that surrounds us. We
journey to the Shrine in the late afternoon, and a drive
that can't be more than a mile takes us an hour- even at
midday on a Sunday the traffic here is virtually standstill.
We crawl through dirt roads lined with shacks, and as we do
I can't help but think about the fact that we are at this
moment in the heart of the economic engine that drives the
entire world. Nigeria's oil wealth is immense- more, much
more, than any of us know. I am told by three different
people here that what the Nigerian government reports as its
official export total is about one third of the actual
total, making Nigeria the largest oil source in the entire
world, larger than Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Venezuela. In
addition, Nigerian crude is much easier to process than oil
from other parts of the world, making it more valuable.
Panji, our Ghanaian sound engineer who has travelled with us
to record a "Live At the Shrine" album, tells us at one
point of an ongoing scheme that involves people driving fuel
trucks around the Niger Delta and siphoning off oil. These
trucks are then driven to a waiting barge, which, when
sufficiently full with oil, steams out to sea five miles
into international waters, where a supertanker, usually
provided by Royal Dutch Shell or another giant oil company,
awaits. This tanker then pays for the crude oil- less than
market rate but still a huge sum, and completely off the
books- and steams off to refineries in Europe, North
America, or wherever, where no one cares where the oil came
from or how it got there. The Nigerian government usually
owns the barge and sometimes the fuel trucks and is
complicit in every step- meaning the Nigerian government is
stealing from itself to sell oil off the book on the world
market. Shell gets rich, the supertanker captain gets rich,
the Nigerian Junta gets richer, and the fuel truck drivers,
well, at least they have something to do besides watch the
burning oil wells that litter the delta like trash heaps.
There is no way to confirm any of this, of course (getting
in a car and driving the couple hours to the Delta-
Nigeria's oil country- does not exactly sound like a fun day
trip), and following this logic gets you to a paranoid and
conspiratorial place: Iraq is a smokescreen, Saudi Arabia a
diversion, Venezuela and its loudmouthed strongman Hugo
Chavez a mere distraction from the real issue at hand: the
importance of Nigeria’s crude oil and the country’s growing
instability. But at the same time there is no way to
disprove it exactly either, and as a scientific hypothesis
the basic premise fits several of the undeniable facts that
have confronted us since we crossed the border. Evidence of
Nigeria's
wealth is everywhere, even here amid the shacks packed
together like supermarket shelves and the dusty alleyways
with filthy open sewers. Shiny, spotless Hummers roll down
alleyways lined with people selling phone calls as their
only means of survival. The occupants of new model Mercedes
stop to buy bags of water off the heads of women who will
make less than a dollar all day. To be fair, this disparity
exists in Accra too, and to a lesser extent (the economies
of the French African countries seemingly better off) in
Togo and Benin. But in Nigeria it slaps you in the face and
brings home some unpleasant truths. Shell, for example, is
not stealing oil from Nigeria. They are paying what is
likely a fair market price for the privilege of extracting
dead dinosaur residue from the Niger Delta, notwithstanding
the questionable environmental effects and the rumored
siphoning of their own pipelines. The issue, as several
ordinary Nigerians alluded to or blurted right out, is the
Nigerian ruling elite who keep this immense paycheck for
themselves, their mansions and cars, their foreign bank
accounts and their trips overseas while letting the city of
Lagos fester in its own dysfunction and the country slide
ever deeper into chaos. This chaos is not imagined or
overstated either- in just the two days we are here we hear
of 3 dead at a Muslim/Christian clash in Lagos, 10 oil
workers abducted in the Delta, more religious strife in the
north of the country, and guerrilla activity in the Delta
from a group called MEND- the Movement to Emancipate the
Niger Delta- a group that has been stepping up attacks on
oil installations and pipelines in the Delta region,
financing itself with stolen oil, and which is pushing the
region and the whole country closer to the brink of
full-scale civil war. None of this news of kidnappings,
death or sabotage seemed unusual or out of place to the
Nigerians who shared the news with me.
Meanwhile you are reading this on a computer
made of plastic and circuitry, powered by electricity; at
some point you will get in your car and drive to work or
school or home or the race track or wherever. Meaning it's a
very safe bet that every day, at least some of what you do
is powered by Nigeria in one way or another, and the effects
of this massive drain on the country's resources- the
Western World's electrical socket as it were- coupled with a
government run by criminals, are chilling when you see it
from the inside. It is hard not to feel hopeless about this
situation also. I am, of course, writing this on a computer
and rode in a tro tro powered by diesel fuel to get here to
the Internet Cafe. When I get home to San Francisco I will
continue to drive where I need to go. Our band will continue
to drive on biodiesel and promote it as an alternative
(although we have not exactly made a big deal of this while
we are here in Nigeria....!). But seeing the scale of the
problem, and the fact that within Nigeria the system is so
rotted and dissent so suppressed (the people of the Niger
Delta, for instance, periodically rise up in revolt against
the oil companies and Nigerian government- in response
soldiers routinely burn entire villages to the ground or
hang dissidents like Ken Saro-Wiwa publicly), it is hard for
even the most starry-eyed idealist to do anything but throw
his hands up in disgust.
That night we open for Femi and play a much better, tighter,
more focused set. Femi doesn't sit in, but tells us
afterwards how great it was. We then get to watch Femi
perform at the Shrine, which is in itself worth the trip
coming here. In the States he performs with a sizeable band,
but here it is immense, with ten dancers (about the most
beautiful women any of us have ever seen), two drummers, two
bass players, guitar players, percussionists, you name it.
He plays for four hours straight and doesn't even seem to
break a sweat. Before he takes the stage I am backstage as
he walks out from his room, his band already on stage. Two
Shrine staff members shout at him, psyching him up, like
Muhammed Ali in the tunnel leading to the ring. "The king of
Afro Beat!! Anakelapo!! Make way for the king!!| and so on.
Meanwhile Femi is silent, doing stretches and staring into a
mirror. Finally, he wordlessly takes the stage and the place
goes nuts, young kids in the front crashing into each other,
cripples careening around the dance floor on skateboards.
His set is the most high energy nonstop performance I have
ever seen, there are barely even any breaks in between
songs. Seeing him here is entirely different than in
America, at the Fillmore in San Francisco, where I saw him
give two solid but comparatively relaxed performances for a
sold out houses of mostly white people looking for a taste
of ethnic dance music and a whiff of the legendary politics
of Femi’s dad. Here the audience is a different beast, one
that seemingly won’t rest until every last drop of manic
energy is poured on them as if from a fire hose. Again I am
reminded of British punk, because of the aggression
everywhere in the music, the manic tempo at which Femi leads
his band and the release so evident in the crowd of young
men that thrashes around the concrete dance floor up front
that translates, to me anyway, as solidarity. For example,
several cripples on skateboards shoot themselves around the
dance floor at breakneck speeds, threading their way in
between the cracks in the crowd and occasionally snatching
beers from unwary patrons. Several times I see them get beat
up by men who seem to know them, stopped and pummeled with
fists by large men who don’t seem to care about the
troubling image of punching a cripple. But each time the men
end up hugging the cripples and slapping hands, and I get
the sense that this happens all the time, it’s just like a
big brother playing rough in front of the TV during a
commercial break. All around me there is a similar vibe- a
little rough, yes, and aggressive, but not exactly menacing.
The gate fees at the Shrine are kept purposely low- less
than a US dollar- and I get the sense that this is because
Femi wants this cross section of Nigerian society to be
here, to bathe in his music and to feel some connection with
each other, as if everyone here really is in this together,
whatever this is. That feeling is palpable in the room. The
Shrine is more than just a nightclub, and even though this
is not the original Shrine that Fela lived and played in for
years- that one having been razed by the government two
years after Fela’s death in 1997- a loose and welcome kind
of family togetherness pervades the atmosphere here. Walking
around the floor I am besieged by Nigerians who slap hands
and want to know what I’m doing there- many of them
congratulate me on our show, some of them invite me to
another Lagos nightclub they’re going to later (I decline),
and almost everyone wants to know where we’re from and why
we came to the Shrine. They nod and seem very happy when I
say that we wanted to come here because we love Fela and
Femi; it’s as if the thought that Fela is an icon in the
West, though a very different one than here, is occurring to
them right now for the first time. I realize that Fela, and
by extension Femi, means something very different to people
here than he does to us in the West. In the short span we
are here, I notice two tabloid-style articles about Femi,
both about how he misses his dad and how difficult it is to
uphold his legacy. It’s a reminder that Fela was much more
than simply a musician here, which is what we tend to think
of him as in
America.
In Lagos he was a politician and perhaps the most public and
visible spokesperson for the people of Lagos and Nigeria in
the whole country. This of course drove the government mad,
and it of course must be an impossible thing for Femi to
live up to, hence the pressure alluded to in the tabloids.
My recognition of this to the people I meet in the Shrine
seems welcome- people here do not seem entranced or
awestruck by the fact that I’m American the way they
sometimes have in Ghana, but they do seem flattered and more
than a little impressed that this American standing before
them seems to have a whiff of Nigerian politics, of all
things. Which isn’t to pat myself on the back- it’s more
that Nigeria is such a complex and maddening place that no
one expects an outsider to understand or even be aware of
it.
Not that walking around the Shrine when Femi is playing is an analytical and detached experience. On the contrary there are two cages on either side of the dance floor with two of Femi’s dancers in them who make it very unlikely that I’ll ever visit a strip club again (why set yourself up for such a letdown?). And there was the backstage scene, where several of us, starting with the girls, get pulled into the dancers’ dressing room and made over like Nigerian backup singers, complete with face paint and ass-shaking dance moves.
I am pulled in and photographed by the most beautiful group of women I’ve ever been around- and probably the craziest too, as they grab all of us and spin us around in between drags of the huge joints that are passed around, and eventually pull us up on stage with them towards the end of the night. Afterwards a small crisis ensues when Liz leaves her video camera in the care of one of the women, who later has it turn up in her locker. The rest of the dancers react with fury- throwing the dancer in question out of the room for being a thief after screaming at her and shoving her for bringing shame on all of them. We have no idea if she intended to take the camera and are inclined to believe her story that she was holding on to it for safekeeping- not least because we’d just like those good, sex-soaked vibes back from just a few minutes earlier. But from then on our new Nigerian dancer friends are preoccupied and uninterested in us- they yell and argue in the dressing room well after Femi has left the stage. It’s random perhaps, but also a reminder that the gut-wrenching tension of this place, which we had largely forgotten in the euphoria of watching Femi and partying with Nigerian supermodels, is never very far away.
After the show and the drama with the dancers (which takes some hours to wind down), we all unwind in our dressing room, drinking beer and passing out on the floor one by one. Femi is around just down the hall but preoccupied tonight; I peek my head in to tell him what a great show he just put on but don’t feel quite like sticking around as if I’m one of his inner circle. As we wind down he says goodbye and heads upstairs, but before he does we manage to snap a few pictures of him with some of us to prove to our friends, and maybe ourselves, that all this really happened.
