Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

Contrasting takes on a culture controversy

Thursday, February 4, 2010

I WAS LONG AGO INITIATED into membership of my tribe, a band that's ragged and leaderless, but often gung-ho. That would be the clan of Western journalists who were captured early in our careers by Africa - and our fascination with the continent remains enthusiastic, even obsessive. That much is often very clear in these columns of mine.

This loose affinity-group may now be expanding. For Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria (and its third richest) is enjoying, if that’s the word, a whole new stretch of attention from American mainstream journalism.

Regrettable or otherwise, what’s clearly prompted this extra attention is the case of the world’s currently most famous Nigerian citizen - Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the disaffected 23-year old son of privilege, whose family originates in the country’s largely Muslim north, but whose banking-based wealth derives in large part from the oil riches of the south. And his arrest on charges of trying to blow up an American airliner over Detroit has also led Nigerian media commentators – not least in the Daily Sun and This Day newspapers - to muse much on the fecklessness of their nation’s wealthy elite.

It’s intriguing that FBI media-managers, synchronizing their effort this week with their Director Robert Mueller’s appearance on Capitol Hill to defend his agency’s performance, got themselves called - disingenuously, even laughably - “sources familiar with the investigation” after they intensively briefed reporters about, among other things, Abdulmutallab’s family.

They leaked in self-serving detail how the Bureau got relatives from Nigeria to fly in and visit the alleged bomber at Milan federal prison in Michigan, thus persuading him to resume cooperation with his interrogators - something he’d reportedly abandoned after being read his MIRANDA rights. This account offers more grist, Director Mueller obviously feels, for opposing the Dick Cheney-esque argument that a military response to the failed attack, with CIA interrogators at the beginning, and a military tribunal ultimately deciding the matter, would have been more effective than a crime-fighters’ approach.

Nigeria’s oil wealth, of which the Mutallab family have been fairly or unfairly seen as emblematic, is without doubt iniquitously ill-shared across the country’s population as a whole - a simple fact that largely defines the nature of modern Nigeria. My own introduction to this vibrant society, albeit often fractured and feverishly roiling, came in the early 1970s when oil exploitation was gathering pace - and my memories have been greatly stirred again by Bill T Jones’ musical Fela! now playing on Broadway (pictured above, with Sahr Ngaujah in the lead role).

 

Controversy has been stirred, too, over how such a thoroughly African milieu is being re-envisioned through a theatrical prism that’s conventionally controlled by white owners and producers, and still caters largely to whites. (At the performance I attended, with an African-American companion, Rudy Lucas, the overwhelming majority of the audience was indeed white).

 

And the controversy? Well, a few days ago the show was decried as being “tilted … a little too closely toward minstrelsy”. The startling slap was delivered by The New York Times’ second-string theater critic Charles Isherwood, who chose his words with a self-conscious alertness to their outrage potential.

   

 

You can follow this column on TWITTER – by clicking HERE

** EVERY WEEK THE CONNECTICUT NPR STATION, WHDD, AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN, with program host MARSHALL MILES **

 

- Broadcast on Fridays at 7.35am, Saturdays at 4.45pm and Sundays at 6.45pm.

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE

 

I FIRMLY BEG TO DIFFER. For me and indeed for my friend Lucas, who also knew Nigeria's major city, Lagos, in the 1970s - in particular The Shrine nightclub, which is the setting for this all-singing, all-dancing musical biography of the contentious Afrobeat performer Fela Anikulapo-Kuti - the piece wins out completely by sourcing itself authentically in both the music of the time … and the political and economic distortions of a nation simultaneously exploding and being repressed.

Isherwood complained that “the exotic was being over-emphasized (even fetishized)”, and wished that “more about the sociopolitical situation” had been provided to counteract this impression. I’m surprised he couldn’t synthesize into his experience, as we did, not merely the endlessly changing contemporary headlines and photographs (projected all around us in the audience, as part of Marina Draghici’s aptly eclectic stage-design) but also the jaw-dropping factual summaries of authoritarian brutality that were presented, along with - above all - the powerful songs, powerfully performed here, that are Fela’s lasting hallmark.

It’s hard to shake off numbers like Zombie (possibly his most internationally known), attacking slavish obedience to his country's ruling army generals; the lyrical Water No Get Enemy celebrating the preciousness, and power, of that vital resource; and, most persistent of all, a song with the furiously bitter title Look and Laugh, which records how police caused the death of his political activist mother. Its disarmingly, deceptively, agonizingly simple lyrics go like this:

“Dem come, burn my house,
Burn my house, all my property.
Burn burn.
Dem beat, beat me, kill my mama”.

If this is minstrelsy, then King Lear was a vaudeville hoofer.

I WONDER SOMETIMES, as now, if the Times’ culture staff talk to each other much. Isherwood was contributing what the trade calls a “think-piece” just this week. It had previously fallen to Chief Theater Critic Ben Brantley to formally review Fela! when it opened on Broadway late last year (transferring from a small downtown venue, with the financial backing of rapper Jay-Z and actors Will and Jada Pinkett Smith).

Brantley’s take was very different. He exalted that audiences would be both be “swaying, vibrating, in thrall to the force field” and be infused with “the spirit of rebellion - against repression, inhibition and conformity”, in a way that is “more visceral and more far-reaching” than anything else in conventional American musicals. It wasn’t just, according to Brantley, “what Fela said about a country broken by corruption and oppression. It was how his music said it”. He concluded in short: “There has never been anything on Broadway like this production”.

For his part, Isherwood at least had the canniness to admit he had nervously delayed voicing his negative reflections, and he cautiously prefaced his piece with a quote from playwright David Mamet’s currently running legal-drama Race (which Rudy Lucas and I had also happened to see together): “I know there is nothing a white person can say to a black person about race which is not both incorrect and offensive”.

All I can say is that Lucas and I, our heads echoing afresh with the radical rhythms of Lagos streets and clubs, are with Brantley in his unbridled enthusiasm.

 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -