Nigeria 3: The Shrine

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. Despite the relaxing setting- or maybe because of it- I can’t help thinking about the sheer improbability of what we’ve put ourselves through and where we are. A little over two years ago, I met Lara, our lead singer, in San Francisco, and discovering a mutual love of African music between us hastily organized a jam session in my backyard shack. This led to us cramming into the shack with several of my musician friends, creating dense, serpentine rhythms inspired by the Fela Kuti CD’s I couldn’t stop listening to while Lara married them with chants and songs she had learned while living in Ghana years earlier. Which led, eventually, to us graduating from the shack to a real rehearsal studio, buying a bus that ran on vegetable oil and taking this music of ours out across the country and discovering that we weren’t the only ones to love the way it makes us feel and move. All of which led, somehow, to us biting the bullet and traveling to Africa, to see where this music came from and to soak up the inspiration for ourselves.
So far glimpsing the birthplace of this music called afrobeat had inspired so many questions and feelings that it was almost hard to digest. Here in Lagos, Fela, and by extension Femi, means something very different 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 how we tend to think of him 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. But the marriage of politics and music that drove Fela’s life hasn’t gone away in his son- and being here I am struck by how natural it seems that Fela and now Femi should be seen as political figures and not just rock stars.
For example, when we drive to the Shrine in the late afternoon it takes an hour to travel what can’t be more than a mile- even at midday on a Sunday the traffic here is virtually standstill. We crawl through dirt roads lined with shacks and glimpse shiny new Mercedes rolling in the traffic next to battered taxicabs and tro tros. 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. I am told by several Nigerians 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 books 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 this ‘oil bunkering’ (as I hear it described) 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 an agreed-on price for the priviledge of extracting dead dinosaur residue from the Niger Delta, notwithstanding the questionable environmental effects and the rumored siphoning of their own pipelines (the fact that the Nigerian government gets proportionally less for its oil than do the oil-producing governments of the Persian Gulf is another, equally troubling issue). 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.
It was into this same environment that Fela Kuti overlaid political rants railing against the ruling military government on top of stubbornly funky, impossibly polyrhythmic big band music that lashed the modern American funk of James Brown to the traditional drumming of the Yoruba of Nigeria and so appealed to just about everyone in the whole world. The courage this took- aside from the Kalakuta raid by government soldiers which killed Fela’s mother there were numerous arrests and beatings in the 1970’s and 80’s at the hands of a government increasingly frustrated and worried by Fela’s ever-growing influence within Nigeria- seems unimaginable, and yet being here among these people now it also seems entirely natural to me. The one thing all the Nigerians I meet here- from our driver, who loudly rails against the ‘thieves’ running Nigeria, to the local newspapers which denounce Nigerian president Obasanjo’s current anti-corruption campaign as a political sham, to the several concertgoers at the Shrine who tell me all about the aforementioned oil scandals- are not is timid and cowed. Everyone here seems outspoken, bold, and full of life, and it’s not hard now to imagine a man like Fela standing up and barking with his music straight into the face of 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- which has been stepping up attacks on oil installations and pipelines in the Delta region, financing itself with stolen oil and pushing the region and the whole country closer to the brink of full-scale civil war. And people here seem resigned to the horrible direction the country might be heading in- none of the news of kidnappings, death or sabotage seemed unusual or out of place to the Nigerians who shared the news with me.


Meanwhile you may be 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, but seeing the scale of the problem, 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, and how “in one hundred years people will be talking about this band from America who came here to the Shrine.” We then get to watch Femi perform at the Shrine, which is in itself worth the trip coming here. Before he takes the stage I am backstage as he walks out from his room, his band already playing. 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, polio cripples careening around the dancefloor on skateboards. 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. His set is the most high energy nonstop performance I have ever seen, with barely even any breaks 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 comparitively relaxed performances for 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 firehose. 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 dancefloor at breakneck speeds, threading their way in between the cracks in the crowd and occaissionally snatching beers from unwary patrons. Several times I see them get stopped and pummeled with fists by 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 congragulate 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.
Meanwhile 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 is the backstage scene, where several of us, starting with our girl singers, 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, eventually pulling 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.