It started on Broadway in New York, the dream city of legendary musicals. Then it went to London, another iconic culture city. Then it landed in Lagos, Afrobeat native city, where it all started, where Fela Anikulapo-Kuti created his iconic music that has found a new revival in a touring musical, Fela! In LagosDEDE Mabiaku, one of Felas adopted sons is wont to challenge anyone that says Fela is dead thus: Abi na you kill am! For him and countless others, Fela is not dead; he just cannot be dead; he has merely become an ancestor living on in a realm a little above physical world. Indeed, how can Fela, the one who carries death in his pouch be deadNowhere else is Felas immortality made more real than in the genius of the musical Fela! On Broadway (and a fellow added his own Naija jive: Fela! on Broad Street!). And, at Eko Hotel and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos at its first full performance last Wednesdaytwo days ago, it was what could be termed a resurrection of the life and times of the music legend to the stunning admiration of the audience.Although it started a clear two hours late, when the show started it more than made up for the time lapse. For those who did not see Fela perform at the shrine while he was alive but who had merely followed his music till date and for whom he is just another historical figure, Sahr Nguajah and the cast performance, and not leaving out the band members, ingeniously replicated Fela alive. And for a man like Fela, whose life was such a complicated affair in all dimensions, Nguajahs performance was nothing short of genius.Indeed, the entire packaging makes the Fela musical such a compelling force that even familiar Lagos shrine adherents re-enacted Fela and his audience whimsical pattern of yabis of give and take that made the shrine such a favourite place for the dispossessed of the land, who through Fela, sought a form of escape by satirising the Nigerian system that gave them and their beloved godfather no hope of redemption from a cruel system.Fela! in Lagos is the quintessential musical story that relives the life of Fela as those who knew him in persons knew it way back. For those who had merely read or heard the familiar yarns about the man, this show is the nearest re-enactment of Felas days on earth as he lived his often complicated and turbulent life.And so in graphic and cinematic reassemblement, the story of Fela unfolds on stage. There is nothing left out about the life of the one ritualistically known as Abami eda, the chief priest of the African shrine, the inventor of regenerative music of protest and change. So, we see his rebellious streak as a young man eager to make a mark in his generation in liberating the mentality of the African man from colonial shackles when he opted to study music abroad instead of medicine, and his marriage to Remmy Taylor.The journey takes the audience through his experimentation with music styles - jazz and highlife - before he hit it off with Afrobeat; his aspiration to go to America and make it big; his chance encounter with Sandra, who was to change Felas outlook in life completely as he was to discover his essential calling as man ordained for a higher calling through the instrumentality of his music; his brush with the authorities for his daring music that rejected the status quo for an egalitarian society; the brutalities he suffered, his imprisonment, his marriage to many wives, his life with hemp. All these are the neat package retold and re-enacted in Felas beloved Lagos soil.The audience is thrown back in nostalgic wonder at the rediscovery of Fela doing his own thing the way he was known to have always done it. For Nguajah and his fellow performers, re-enacting Fela is just like a piece of cake. There is a sense of déjà vu in the performance and the audience is thrown back to the days when Fela held sway at the shrine, his many travails that defined his path as the prophet, who willingly put his life on the line for the redemption of the masses from an oppressive system from which they were powerless.Fela! in Lagos is a work of supreme genius. The only little irony is that our own Fela, like all things Nigerian, has been imported back to us again from the West, which Fela so much vilified in his music, after we lost him to the ancestors. The remarkable thing though is that Felas native city, Lagos is considered important enough for that spiritual importation.So for some, Fela! in Lagos is Abami edas spiritual reunion with his famous Lagos adherents in the inevitable Spiritual Underground movement that so defined him and his career and lifestyle. Nguajahs performance has so typically redefined that undying movement for the dying embers of his shrine acolytes. Now, perhaps, a re-ignition of this dying fire will be inevitable in the years to come. It is the make up of the Fela phenomenon, and Lagosians love their folk hero
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