Togo - West Africa - page 897

West African Instruments
West Africa's traditional instruments tend to be found in its rural areas and are generally
fashioned from local materials - everything from gourds, stalks and shells to goat skin, cow
horns and horse hair. Discarded objects and nature also have multiple musical uses; in Si-
erra Leone, empty Milo tins filled with stones were the core instrument for the genre called
Milo-jazz. Hausa children in Nigeria beat rhythms on the inflated belly of a live pufferfish.
The Pygmies of Cameroon beat rhythms on river water.
There are bells made of bronze in the Islamic orchestras of northern Nigeria, and
scrapers made of iron in the south. In Cape Verde women place a rolled-up cloth between
their legs and beat it as part of their batuco music (the singer Lura does this live, with silver
lamé). Everywhere, there is men's music and women's music, men's instruments and wo-
men's instruments: in Mauritania, men play the tidinit, a four-stringed lute, and women the
ardin, a sort of back-to-front kora . Accordingly, there are men's dances and women's
dances. And most of these, like most instrumental ensembles, are fuelled by drums.
SEUN KUTI
' We've got to get up and think, not get up and fight,' declares Seun (Shayoon) Kuti, on stage in flares and body-
shirt, an alto saxophone hanging around his neck. 'We have to start using our minds.'
There's no doubting that the thirtysomething is his father's son. 'Fela created Afrobeat to fight injustice,' he says
over a trademark blend of jazz, funk and African high-life rhythms. 'What started in Nigeria is now a global move-
ment. The message is beating louder than ever.'
Seun Kuti was 14 when his father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, aka the Black President, died of AIDS in 1997. More
than one million people lined the streets of Lagos, Nigeria's capital, to watch the funeral procession, mourning a
rebel who took on the country's autocratic and corrupt leaders and was regularly beaten and incarcerated as a res-
ult.
Fela Kuti was a fearless voice of the masses, delivering politically charged songs with the self-same dance or-
chestra that backs Seun Kuti today.
'These guys are the real deal,' says Kuti, whose 2011 album From Africa With Fury: Rise was co-produced by
Brian Eno. 'Some of them went through arrests and beatings with my dad. They are all activists. They all have
strong political views.'
Seun's half-brother Femi, 20 years his senior, has been channelling the fury and passion of Afrobeat with his
own band, Positive Force, for decades.
'Afrobeat is on the rise across the world. There are at least 20 places in New York where you can see Afrobeat
live. There are Afrobeat bands in Australia.'
As a child Kuti was his father's orchestra's mascot, travelling everywhere with them as his mother sang and
danced in the chorus. It was while watching Egypt 80's legendary concert at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, New
York, at the age of eight that he decided to become a singer ('My father laughed, then said, “Why not?”'). He
joined the orchestra and often did an opening set at Fela's infamous Shrine nightclub in Lagos.
“Fela taught me that I am a member of the band,” he says, “and that the band are the most important thing ever.
When he died I knew I had to keep them going.”