Amador led a major slave revolt in 1595 on the island of São Tomé that came close to overthrowing Portuguese colonial authority. Amador’s date of birth is unknown, but he was born on São Tomé.
São Tomé was uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived on the island around 1471. Beginning in 1493, Portuguese colonists established sugarcane plantations on the island. To work on these plantations, the Portuguese brought slaves from nearby parts of Africa. Over the course of the sixteenth century, sugar became dominant throughout São Tomé. However, slaves on the island did not passively accept their fate. They frequently ran away, establishing maroon communities in nearby mountainous forests. From these communities, they attacked plantations and the town of São Tomé. In response, Portuguese authorities created a militia to fight these runaway slave communities and protect the European settlers. During the late sixteenth century, the sugar industry in São Tomé became less important with the rise of sugar production in Brazil. Divisions between the governor, the bishop, and the town council created political instability.
Amador took advantage of political tension to lead his revolt. On July 9, 1595, Amador and two other slaves, Lazaro and Domingo, led a group of slaves into the parish church in the town of Trindade and killed Portuguese men attending Catholic Mass. In the following days, an increasing number of slaves attacked plantations and burned sugar mills and plantation houses. On July 11, the militia and rebels fought again, resulting in the death of three Portuguese. Another battle followed on July 14, and the slaves fled. Amador proclaimed himself the king of São Tomé, and organized his runaway slave army into four units. Each unit attacked a key area of the town of São Tomér, but the Portuguese militia pushed the slaves back.
Amador’s army continued to attack the town for the next two weeks. With an army reportedly containing five thousand slaves, Amador waged one last assault on the town on July 28. Over two hundred soldiers died during this assault, including Lazaro, one of Amador’s commanders. The Portuguese governor offered clemency to any slave who surrendered, and more than four thousand accepted his offer on July 29.
Eventually, one of Amador’s confidantes betrayed him and Amador was arrested. On August 14, 1595, the Portuguese hung and quartered Amador and placed his heart on a pillow. Amador’s slave revolt was one of the greatest slave uprisings in Atlantic history. His army had destroyed most of the island’s sugar mills, and accelerated the movement of plantations away from São Tomé to Brazil before its eventual overthrow.
After São Tomé and the neighboring island of Príncipe gained independence in 1975, the government proclaimed Amador a national hero of the anti-colonial struggle. In 1976, the São Tomé and Príncipe government replaced the Portuguese escudo with a new currency, the dobra, and incorporated Amador’s portrait in the country’s currency. No images of Amador exist so a local artist created a portrait of him. In 2004, the National Assembly of São Tomé declared January 4 a national holiday in honor of Amador, and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan inaugurated a statue of Amador in São Tomé.
La mulatresse Solitude: the first black woman’s honoured with a statue erected in Paris
Commonly remembered in Guadeloupe as “la mulâtresse Solitude” (“Solitude the Mulatto Woman”), Solitude has become a legendary figure in the antislavery struggles of Caribbean blacks in the early nineteenth century. Her extreme courage made her legendary and prompted whites to caricature her as mad.
While details about Solitude’s life are few, her existence has been authenticated in historical accounts of the abolition and re-establishment of slavery in the French Empire during the 1790s and 1800s. Speculation places Solitude’s birth around 1772, possibly the product of the rape of her African mother by a white sailor on a ship bound for Guadeloupe.
At the time of her birth, Guadeloupe was a French colony reliant on enslaved African labor. Solitude is thought to have escaped slavery with her mother (who died when she was eight) and lived as a Maroon during her adolescence.
The news of the 1794 proclamation of the abolition of slavery in the French empire soon reached the colonies, and slaves left plantations in droves. In the early months of 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte answered planter complaints by sending a large military expedition to restore order and reimpose slavery. A number of officers of color in the French Republican Army, including Louis Delgrès and Joseph Ignace, rejected the official French decision and led a vigorous resistance against the re-imposition of slavery in Guadeloupe.
Solitude played an active role in the armed resistance, bearing arms in the battle of May 8, 1802. Women participated as combatants and also inspired the men to greater feats of resistance and valor. Though pregnant, Solitude participated in all the battles in the Dolé post. She was particularly prone to expressing her rage against prisoners taken by the resistance fighters. Solitude kept rabbits and once caught one that escaped, speared it with a skewer, and showed it to the prisoners, saying “Look, this is how I’m going to treat you when the time comes.”
On May 22, 1802, a furious attack forced the black resistance troops in Fort Saint-Charles to retreat. Solitude was wounded in the ensuing conflict and eventually captured and condemned to death along with a band of insurgents. However, because of her pregnancy, Solitude’s execution was delayed until she gave birth. On November 29, 1802, the day after she delivered her child, Solitude was hanged. Solitude’s key role in the fight against slavery has been commemorated in Guadeloupean memory through fiction and the construction of two statues.
Poet, considered a founder of African American literature, was born around 1753, probably among the Fulani peoples living near the Gambia River in West Africa. Her poetry and prose indicate familiarity with animistic ancestor worship, solar worship, Islam, and an African consciousness she brought to North America after she was captured aged 7 or 8, enslaved, and forced aboard the Phillis, a brigantine owned by Timothy Fitch of Medford, Massachusetts and captained by Peter Gwinn of Boston. According to the Slave Voyages Database, she embarked from the Windward Coast of Africa with 95 fellow Africans and was one of 76 who survived the deprivations of the ship’s cramped and squalid conditions and arrived in Boston 245 days later, wearing only a scrap of carpet. On 11 July 1761, she was sold on the block “for a trifle” to John and Susanna Wheatley, prominent Bostonians who named her after the slave ship that brought her to America. Her name was thus a constant reminder of her enslavement and suffering during the Middle Passage.
Seeing Phillis attempt to write, the Wheatleys encouraged her to read and write, first in English, then Latin. At age 12 she published her first poem in a local newspaper, but many Bostonians doubted that a young African woman could craft such reasoned and elegant poetry. She successfully defended her intelligence and literary skills before an inquisition by New England’s finest minds, but still failed to find a local publisher for a collection of her poetry. Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first book written by a sub-Saharan African in English, was therefore published by the Countess of Huntingdon in London in 1773. An overnight sensation in Europe, Wheatley was feted as a prodigy by London’s literati. Returning to Boston, she was granted her freedom, and continued to write poetry, including one honoring George Washington. But her fame was fleeting. A proposed second poetry collection was sold off by her husband, John Peters, a pintlesmith who was perhaps born free, and who abandoned her. Wheatley suffered from asthma (a legacy of the Middle Passage) and the death of three children, before dying in poverty and obscurity, aged 31, in 1784.
Phillis Wheatley was an inspiring example to nineteenth-century African American writers such as Ann Plato, Frances E.W. Harper, Jarena Lee, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. In the view of scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., she is the mother of African American letters. She was a polyglot who knew English, Fulani, possibly some Arabic (she was observed soon after her purchase to be making strange, though indecipherable markings on a wall), and Latin. From West Africa to New England to England, she negotiated with considerable success the mixture of white cultures and languages which encircled the Atlantic. She was thus a fine example of what historians such as Ira Berlin, Linda Heywood, and John Thornton have classified as Atlantic Creoles.
An African woman illegally enslaved twice, first in Africa and then in Uruguay. Although it cannot be known precisely, it is likely that Rufina was born between 1820 and 1825, and that she gave birth to a daughter, Francisca, when she was between 15 and 20 years of age. After being kidnapped in northern Uruguay and brought to the Brazilian Empire, she succeeded in bringing her case to the provincial president of Rio Grande do Sul, who ruled for her release and her return to Uruguay.
In March 1854, Rufina, a free African Mina woman residing in Passo de Peira (near the Río Negro in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, on the border with Brazil) was kidnapped along with her partner, Matheus, also a free African Mina, and four of their children: Francisca (14 years old), Maria do Pilar and Pantaleão (ages unknown), and a newborn, Brum. Her other two children, Ignácio and Catharina (ages unknown), were with a neighbor at the time of her abduction. Rufina and the others were taken by a group of four men led by Fermiano José de Mello. After walking for a whole night, one of the kidnappers separated from the group, taking Matheus, while the others continued with Rufina and her children.
After three weeks of walking during the night and hiding in the brush during the day, Rufina and her children arrived in Canguçu, where they were delivered to Joaquim da Silva Soares. Two months later, Rufina, Francisca, and Brum were sold to José Laurindo da Costa, while Maria do Pilar and Pantaleão were sold to the city of Piratini.
It is not clear how Rufina managed to reach the police, but somehow while passing through Porto Alegre she caught the attention of the authorities, and she was imprisoned with her two children and her captor, Laurindo José da Costa. The latter was released soon thereafter on the false promise that he would return with his papers of ownership of Rufina. Once Laurindo was gone, Rufina and Francisca told the story of their capture. Rufina explained that she had been a slave of Colonel José Cabral and his wife Francisca, and that she had been freed with the abolition of slavery in Uruguay in 1846.
This would have been the second illegal enslavement of the African Rufina. As Rufina later told the judge, she remembered arriving in Uruguay at a time when slavery was still legal, and it is probable that her arrival in the Americas took place sometime in the early 1830s. As Rufina called herself a Mina, we can believe that she was shipped somewhere off the coast of West Africa, most likely in Lagos (present-day Nigeria), the main exporting port of the region after 1825. This is north of the equator, where the trafficking of slaves had been prohibited since 1815, due to British pressure on Portugal and Spain during the Congress of Vienna.
After 1850, with the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil, bush captains and slave raiders tried to capture and then sell free blacks, including those who resided outside of Brazilian territory. The British were informed by the Uruguayans of a new form of enslavement and human trafficking on the southern border of the Brazilian Empire. Once seized by the police in the province of Rio Grande do Sul, then, Rufina became the subject of intense correspondence between authorities in Uruguay, Brazil, and England.
To prove to the British that the abolition of slavery was being enforced in an exemplary fashion, Brazilian foreign minister Paulino José Soares de Souza (1807–1866) and João Luis Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu (1810–1906), president of Rio Grande do Sul Province, made every effort to locate Rufina’s two sons and to return them to Uruguay. In 1855 the entire family—with the exception of Matheus, who was never found—was returned home.
The story of Rufina is one of dozens of criminal cases of kidnapping and enslavement of free people that occurred on the Brazilian border with Uruguay in the second half of the nineteenth century, mostly in the 1850s and 1860s. But while Rufina was eventually able to return to her home, her case was an exception. Most captured blacks remained slaves in Brazil. Almost all cases ended with the acquittal of the kidnappers by popular jury, which demonstrates the deep roots of slavery in nineteenth-century Brazilian society.
In this day 1960, Togo the former German colony that gained independence from France.
It’s been 60 years since Togo gained its independence from France.
The country, which was severely hit by the slave trade in the 16th century, was once a protectorate of Germany until the Germans were defeated by the French and British military forces after World War I in 1914.
In 1922, the western part of the country was handed to Britain while France was given the eastern area by a mandate from the League of Nations.
The country was primarily divided into the British administrative region and the French administrative region.
Togo at the time had a major problem. Its major tribe, the Ewes were divided by the boundaries of British and French Togoland. Before 1918
Then emerged Sylvanus Olympio, a Lome citizen whose main concern was to unite the Ewe people.
The resident of the French area of the country was the leader of the Committee of Togolese Unity after World War II and was elected president of the first territorial assembly in 1946.
A year after, Olympio, who had Togolese and British education, began having issues with the Togoland’s French colonial administration.
With this and his wish to unite Ewes, Olympio joined the Comité de l’Unité (CUT), an association dedicated to Ewe reunification. The association also opposed closer links between Togo and the French Empire.
As president of the Togo Assembly after 1946, and later a deputy to the French Assembly, he appeared a number of times before the United Nations, stressing the need for Ewe unification.
However, his wish to unite the Ewes did not materialize when in 1956, the British Togoland voted by plebiscite to join the Gold Coast which later became independent Ghana.
In 1956 French Togo received limited autonomy. It subsequently held elections which were won by the Parti Togolaise du Progrès, and Olympio’s rival, Nicholas Grunitzky became prime minister.
But Olympio and the CUT protested the election to the United Nations till another election, this time supervised by the UN, was organized in 1958.
Olympio and his CUT won that election and he became prime minister.
Togo was granted independence on April 27, 1960. A year later, it became a republic with Olympio as its president.
Due to dissatisfaction with some of his policies and pro-French attitude, Olympio was assassinated in a coup on January 13, 1963.
Sources: face2faceafrica.com
One of the more fascinating ways to look at the small country of Togo is that if Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah had his way, Togo would have been part of the territory formerly known as the Gold Coast.
As Face2FaceAfrica once explained, Nkrumah had always wanted more of Togo, perhaps all of it, to be part of Ghana. This was in line with his dreams of a united Africa.
Indeed, part of what became Ghana was won over through a referendum in 1956 when the people of Western Togoland voted to be part of the British colony. Togoland was the French colony next door to the Gold Coast.
But Sylvanus Epiphanio Olympio, Togo’s first president, was an Ewe nationalist. He believed the Ewe ethnic group needed their own nation and thus, never quite overcame the pain of seeing Western Togoland join Ghana.
The Ewe nation is also a fundamentally important factor in the conception of modern Togo.
Archaeological evidence suggests that what counts as primary Ewe identity, that is language and a few other customs, was solidified prior to the 13th century.
The Ewe language itself descended from the Gbe group of languages which also includes the Fon and Aja. This family of languages is spoken largely in west African countries.
17th-century Eweland spread from modern Ghana right up to Benin. Consequently,
Ghana, Togo and Benin are the three countries on the continent that house today’s Ewe people.
European slave trade ambitions in Africa put the Ewe people in the region callously named the Slave Coast. This stretch from the Volta river in the west to bight of the Benin river.
The territory that is today Togo is thought to have been conceptualized, or better still, named around the 15th century. Togo, in the most popular Ewe dialect, comes fromto (toh) meaning “river” and godo (gohdoh) which means “on the other side”.
The country thus etymologically translates as “on the other side of the river”. The said river is thought to be Lake Togo, historically a premium water source for the ancients.
Although the country is literally named by the Ewe, Togo does not even have the
biggest population of that ethnic group. That honor falls to Ghana where the Ewe are in the country’s eastern region bordering with Togo.
Olympio’s dream of an Ewe nation may never be realized. But others like Togo’s first president may take pride in the fact that most Ewe have regarded the country as some sort of “spiritual home” since independence in 1960.
In 2020 a Memorial will be erected in Lisbon in honor of the victims of the slave trade, an initiative of
Djass – Association of Afro-descendants that was one of the winning projects of the 2017/2018 edition of the Participative Budget of Lisbon.
The Memorial will be chosen by voting in public sessions and will take place in December and January in various locations in the Lisbon region.
There are three voting proposals designed by three great contemporary artists:
– Grada Kilomba–
– Jaime Lauriano
– Kiluanji Kia Henda.
Check out the project proposed by Grada Kilomba
“The Boat” stretches across the memorial platform, like a garden, forming a simple composition of benches that closely mimics a “ship with enslaved people.”
A boat in the “Portuguese” imagination is easily associated with maritime glory and expansion; a narrative that romanticizes the colonial historical past and erases one of the longest and most horrendous chapters of humanity – Slavery.
The dark gray concrete benches contrast with the platform floor, accentuating in the distance the boat’s silhouette, as well as its contents, the bodies. The distance between the concrete benches creates “entrances” and endless paths, almost a maze, inviting the public not only to contemplate “the boat” from the outside, but also to enter it and walk inside it – as if it were a garden of contemplation and memory. The rectangular and uniform shape of the benches reveals them, not only as seats, in which the public is invited to sit to look, think, contemplate, pray, worship and respect; but it also reveals them as an allusion to metaphorical tombs, which give “habitat” to a story of dehumanization, and give a place of rest and recognition to thousands of enslaved people.
To distinguish the simple benches from metaphorical tombs, the latter will be covered with poems written on its surface, such as: “There is nothing sweeter than a deep truth.” The poems interact directly with the public, who reads them and bows before them. This choreography of contemplation is proper to a memorial, as a space of rituals and ceremonies to a history that has to be remembered and that cannot be forgotten. A story that has to be told and buried with dignity, for only in this way can memory be produced.
In 2020 a Memorial will be erected in Lisbon in honor of the victims of the slave trade, an initiative of
Djass – Association of Afro-descendants that was one of the winning projects of the 2017/2018 edition of the Participative Budget of Lisbon.
The Memorial will be chosen by voting in public sessions and will take place in December and January in various locations in the Lisbon region.
There are three voting proposals designed by three great contemporary artists:
– Grada Kilomba–
– Jaime Lauriano
– Kiluanji Kia Henda.
Check out the project proposed by Jaime Lauriano
Designed as a space to represent Slavery in a broad way, this project to build the Memorial to Tribute to Slave People aims to establish a link between past and present, inviting the public to reflect on colonial violence and its continuity in the current days. Designed as a piece of significant urban presence, the Memorial will at the same time be a place of reverence and mourning; a meeting arena; a spiritual and ritual space.
The memorial design is based on two forms: the triangle and the circle. Taken from iconographic research on religious symbols and struggle, the forms aim to celebrate the history of resistance of the enslaved people and to inspire the new struggles of communities of African descent around the world. Another important element of the Memorial is the speech, which will be translated by writing words – on the inner walls of the Memorial – gathered in rounds of conversation with African descent communities in Portugal.
Therefore, this project stands beside other initiatives that are rethinking the colonial past not only in the light of violence. For if in the tombs people were transported to work in enslavement, they were also transported philosophies, religions and experiences that were not restricted to the borders delineated by the European colonizers. News from Haiti has reached the Americas and examples of rebels have generated uprisings in several countries. In the 21st century, the anti-racist struggles and movements are still connected, with the Memorial could not be different.
In 2020 a Memorial will be erected in Lisbon in honor of the victims of the slave trade, an initiative of
Djass – Association of Afro-descendants that was one of the winning projects of the 2017/2018 edition of the Participative Budget of Lisbon.
The Memorial will be chosen by voting in public sessions and will take place in December and January in various locations in the Lisbon region.
There are three voting proposals designed by three great contemporary artists:
– Grada Kilomba–
– Jaime Lauriano
– Kiluanji Kia Henda.
We would like to introduce you the project of Kiluanji Kia Henda.
Project
“Plantation – Prosperity and Nightmare” is intended to address the memory of slavery as the presence of an absence, as we do not believe it is possible to directly and realistically represent such transnational trauma.
We then turn to the raw material, sugar cane, the white gold that was at the origin of the compulsory slave trade.
The project is a representation of a sugar cane plantation consisting of 540 feet of black aluminum sugar cane, each 3 meters high and 8 centimeters in diameter. Between the cane feet there are regular breaks, inviting for walking and reflection. An experience is presented between the sacred, the contemplative, and the everyday banal. As if sugarcane became the image of urban repetition itself. Until a small amphitheater appears in the middle of the plantation, as a meeting point. Maybe a quilombo of runaway slaves. Maybe just a void, a gap of intervals, where something new can come up.
This is expected to be a socializing point for the most varied cultural events, from music to small street shows, from academic dialogues to theatrical readings. The historical link between monoculture and slavery is narrated, in a monument that deals with the relationship between excess wealth and the inhuman exploitation of life. The project aims to build a place of memory, open to reflection. It is sought that in the center of the anguish the avenues of encounter are open, pointing to new creations and new possibilities for coexistence.
Over a decade after his death, vindication has come to Fela Kuti, Africa’s musical genius. AfroBeat, his gift to the world, is now an international staple on his own uncompromising terms, social content intact.
Throughout his life, Fela contended that AfroBeat was a modern form of danceable, African classical music with an urgent message for the planet’s denizens. Created out of a cross-breeding of Funk, Jazz, Salsa and Calypso with Juju, Highlife and African percussive patterns, it was to him a political weapon.
Fela refused to bow to the music industry’s preference for 3-minute tracks, nor did he buckle under entreaties to moderate his overwhelmingly political lyrics. He went down in 1997 still railing against the consumerist gimmicks that taint pop music, with the aim, he felt, of promoting and imposing homogeneous aesthetic standards worldwide, thereby inducing passivity.
The fact that AfroBeat is today globally winning hearts in its original form – lengthy, ably crafted, earthy compositions laced with explicitly political lyrics – suggests that Fela’s purgatory on earth may have served to awaken a sensibility in people to appreciate authenticity and substance.
The Message
Fela’s rise in the early 1970s paralleled the downfall of the hopes Africans pinned on their newly won Independence. As a whole, Africans were again living in incarcerated societies; Nigeria, he said, was a “prison of peoples”. Africa had fallen mostly into the hands of uncaring thieves and scoundrels who were unmindful of wrecking society in order to sustain insolent lifestyles. To reclaim Africa’s stolen dignity became Fela’s obsession.
As many of these new countries turned into terror-drenched, neo-colonial states, Fela summoned his people to return to their senses and principles of old: self-pride, self-reliance, and decency rooted in traditional cultural norms. To achieve these, he prescribed forsaking the corrupting ways of Western society, its capitalist greed, its Communist despotism, the straitjacket moral conventions of Judeo-Christianity and Islam. He saw imperialism, colonialism and racism as scourges to be universally eradicated, and the structures that sustain them dismantled, before humankind could advance.
Fela’s seismic music infused freshness into the reality of rotten politics. In song after song, he summoned revolt, not solely against erstwhile tyrants and exploiters (“Zombie”, “Army Arrangement”, “Coffin for Head of State”) but against self-damaging prejudices and assimilationist alienation (“Yellow Fever”, “Colonial Mentality”, “Teacher, Don’t Teach Me No Nonsense”, “Gentleman”, “Lady”). He chastised the West (“International Thief
Thief”, “Underground System”) and the local elites that fronted for multinationals (“Beasts of No Nation”, “Government of Crooks”).
Ordinary Africans embraced songs such as “Shakara”, “Sorrow Tears and Blood”, “Upside Down” and “Why Black Man Dey Suffer” for accurately mirroring their frustrations. They welcomed the graphic words of “Expensive Shit” or “Who No Know Go Know” as down-to-earth explanations for their lowly condition. More importantly, Fela’s music was a clarion proclamation that it was possible to reverse their lot (“Water No Get Enemy”, “Africa Center of the World”).
Groomed and pampered in youth by a pre-independence middle class but morphed by Black Power and pan-Africanist politics into a revolutionary ghetto hero, Fela voiced relentless condemnation of the so-called New Africa, attracting to himself a deluge of repression. His personal life became a harrowing tale of police beatings, victimization by the court system, near-death encounters with the Nigerian military.
Fela’s casual, uninhibited approach to sexual relations, his affection for nudity, further alarmed the uptight elites. Because of the Judeo-Christian concept of “sin”, he believed, humans were constrained by an “Adam-and-Eve” loathing of their own bodies. Monogamous marriage, individualism and “body-phobia”, he said, were Islamic-Arab or Judeo-Christian importations.
Few aspects of his life caused more affront, and media curiosity, than his marriage to twenty-seven beautiful fellow singers and dancers, aggravated by his impenitent use of marijuana. Though no woman ever claimed to have been coerced into marrying him or remaining at his side, these young, resourceful, intelligent and highly politicized co-wives were considered an insult to “good society”.
Nigeria’s rulers regarded Fela’s “Kalakuta Republic” as a Sodom and Gomorrah to be purged with sulphur and gunfire; this elicited from Fela a response whose trademark extravagance signaled out-and-out defiance. When convenient, he provoked outrage, rode it as if surfing a wave, and used it as political capital.
A life pockmarked by scandal allowed Fela to project himself as indestructibly macho, an image he relished and cultivated. This was as much a manifestation of patriarchal narcissism as an attempt to blunt the fear the Nigerian military’s ferocity had instilled into ordinary citizens.
The Man
Fela was a Promethean spirit, in a constant face-off with Death. In the solace of intimacy, he was jovial, boisterous and loquacious, but he was mercurial – reflective and wistful at times, irascible and distant at others. His father-brother-lover relationship with his wives was overall affectionate, their love and loyalty for him undeniable. But his angry outbursts at errant household members or defaulting band personnel were intimidating.
Anyone who knew him well was aware that he was a nurturing democrat as much as a charismatic autocrat. Intensely loyal to friends and family and a profoundly generous man, he could be quite dogmatic, inconsistent and arbitrary in views and behavior, reigning unfettered as a benevolent King over his Kalakuta commune.
Much of what Fela said may be questionable, but most of what he actually did is not. Intuitive, and shot-from-the-hip, Fela’s ideology was all his own – disjointed and contradictory, but powerful and original. His sincere commitment to the world’s underdogs is indisputable, as was his passionate love for Africa.
Although his uninhibited life-style openly challenged the nuclear/monogamous marriage structure, paving the way for progressive discussions of multiple forms of partnership, Fela’s take on sexual orientation and identity echoed archaic notions. He recognized the need to renegotiate the social pact between the genders and stood up for the rights of prostitutes as “sexual workers” deserving respect and legal protection. But he exhibited much confusion about homosexuality; faced with such issues, he retreated to the safe ground of established patriarchal/heterosexual socialization. So, what is it about this quixotic rebel and libertine that fascinates us?
Transformative Insubordination
Partly it was his transgressive deviation from conformity; partly, his willingness to pay a heavy price for defending freedom.
Above all, as an artist, he has left us an imperishable music that is indeed classical. His masterly compositions are a sort of people’s dictionary, translating into accessible art the complex ills afflicting society.
AfroBeat is about social, political and cultural literacy. It confronts the geography of world complacency, greed and fear and calls for a trans-formative insubordination.
Source: Fela.net
Check out this documentary about the man: Music is the weapon
