Afrobeat Journeys: Tracing the Musical Archive in Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference

ABSTRACT

Sefi Atta has recently claimed that she considers herself an Afrobeat author, because she started writing in 1997, a month before Fela Kuti died and his music became more widely available outside of Nigeria. I contend that in A Bit of Difference (2013) Afrobeat music embodies the cultural signifier of transnational and local influences in contemporary Lagos and other Western urban spaces. The main character of the novel, Deola Bello, was born in Lagos, grew up in London, and occasionally travels to Atlanta on business trips as an auditor for an international charity organization. The protagonist Bello’s travels across countries and cultures establishes an intercultural dialogue based on African and African diasporic music, ranging from juju to naija hip hop. The first part of this essay underscores the cultural influence of Afrobeat on Atta’s writing, and presents an overview of the critical readings of music that highlight socio-political meanings in the Anglophone black Atlantic. The second half maps the historical geography of songs in the novel and their contextual significance, which serve to interpret the afrodiasporic consciousness embedded in the text.

KEYWORDS:

• Sefi Atta
• A Bit of Difference
• intercultural dialogue
• Afrobeat
• Fela Kuti
• Black Atlantic

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the VPPI-US postdoctoral contract from the University of Seville. The research visit conducted at SOAS, University of London to develop this article was partially funded by the project FFI2017-84555-C2-2-P Bodies in Transit 2, from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Fela’s birth surname was Ransome. When he came back to Lagos from the US, he and his mother changed the Anglicised ‘Ransome’ to the Yoruba ‘Anikulapo’, which translates as ‘he who carries death in a pouch’ (Garner 2016: 138).

2 In this interview, Atta brings up the designation ‘Afrobeat writer’ in contrast with the 1950s ‘Beat generation’ in the United States, highly influenced by jazz music.

3 Tejumola Olaniyan (2004) explains that, while in London, Fela absorbed the bebop jazz style, made famous in the 1940s by African American pianist Thelonious Monk, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and saxophonist Charlie Parker.

4 See Gaines (2016) for the global impact of the Black Power Movement in music.

5 Fela’s father was Reverend Ransome-Kuti, an Anglican pastor, principal of a grammar school and the first president of the Nigerian educators’ union. His mother was Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, a famous activist against British colonial rule and the leader of the Nigerian Women’s Union. Shonekan (2009) analyses Funmilayo’s influence on Fela’s music.

6 Between 1974, when he was first arrested and incarcerated, and August 1997, when he died, Fela was arraigned in courts 356 times, and was brutally treated by the military authorities (Aderinto 2013: 327).

7 Despite Gilroy’s groundbreaking conception of the black Atlantic, he overlooked geographies, languages other than English, and the intellectual and artistic contributions of black women. See for example Evans 2009; Ledent and Cuder-Domínguez 2012; Durán-Almarza and Álvarez López 2013.

8 In his influential collection of essays Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said also alluded to Verdi’s Aida to illustrate the European’s sense of cultural superiority over colonial populations (1994: 114–116).

9 Annie Randall (2005) traces the operations of power through the medium of music and through discourses about music internationally, from 1850 to 2000. None of the authors in her edited volume make a claim for the power of music itself to persuade, coerce, or resist; rather they address the uses of music, the controls placed on it and discursive treatments of musical expression.

10 See Temitope Abisoye 2019 for more information on the cultural and religious syncretism of the musical.

11 Vincent (1996) believes that Brown’s song ‘Say It Loud’ (I’m Black and I’m Proud), 1968, initiated the discussion of racial consciousness in popular music. However, this tradition is also present in 1920s Classic Blues (See Davis 1999).

12 Ikoyi is a small island connected to inland Lagos by a canal, originally established in the 1920s under colonial British rule as a residential area for the government. After independence, it became one the most affluent and touristic areas of Lagos, together with Victoria Island (see Whiteman 2013).

13 For insightful discussions of the term Afropolitan and its theoretical implications, see the special issue of the European Journal of English Studies, edited by Emilia Durán-Almarza et al in 2017.

14 A djembe is a rope-tuned, skin-covered goblet drum originally from West Africa, usually played standing up with bare hands.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the VPPI-US postdoctoral contract from the University of Seville. The research visit conducted at SOAS, University of London to develop this article was partially funded by the project FFI2017-84555-C2-2-P Bodies in Transit 2, from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Notes on contributors

Rocio Cobo-Piñero

Rocío Cobo-Piñero is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the University of Seville, Spain. She has a PhD in English-language literatures (2014) from the University of Seville, in international co-tutorship with Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (Brazil). She is also a researcher at the Centre for Migratory Movements (University of Huelva/UNESCO Chair) and editorial board member for the book series Faro de la Memoria (Beacon of Memory). She has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR-University of Central Lancashire) and at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS-University of London).