Journalist Selwyn Seyfu Hinds Examines The Mashup, part 1

Journalist Selwyn Seyfu Hinds Examines The Mashup, part 1
Monday, June 14, 2010

The entire city of Lagos, Nigeria breathes like one giant organism. Inhale. Frenzied motion does not so much cease as pull back. Like the innumerable vehicular antibodies that speed along Lagos's asphalt arteries, only to slam to unpredictable halts driven by nary a stop sign or traffic light. Exhale. Hucksters of all types—young, old, armless, legless—swarm the stuck vehicles, creating an instant market. Goods are swiftly offered: phone cards, sexual favors, foodstuff. The bargaining comes fast, at least until the city draws its next breath; sucking hucksters away, then propelling vehicles off along its arteries again. Inhale. Exhale. Stop. Go—at hyperventilating pace. Such is the exhausting, inexorable rhythm of this living city. Save, perhaps, for one place in an area called Ikeja. Here, the sun blinks through Lagos’s near-permanent grey sky to gaze upon a sand-colored building with a portentous name—The New Afrika Shrine. It is not the same Shrine made famous by afrobeat king Fela Ransmoe Kuti. That place is long gone, destroyed in 1977 by the soldiers of Fela’s nemesis, the Nigerian government, the longtime target of his musical broadsides against the forces of oppression and structural iniquities. This new Shrine is its spiritual and musical inheritor. Within these walls, one finds respite from the frenzied stop/go pace of the city. On any given night, especially when Fela’s son Femi Kuti is home from tour, the new Shrine comes alive with the sounds of afrobeat, and Lagos's hectic stop/go drowns in a steady pool of rhythm, melody, and spirit. All around the building, images of Great Ones look down with still approval—in stark contrast to the living, dynamic bodies in motion. On one wall sits Fela himself, of course. Nearby one finds MLK, Malcolm X and sundry others. All of them great. All passed on. All champions of resistance. All powerful advocates for the human and political rights of African and African-descended peoples.