Prince Justice Faloye
Initially I didn’t want to contribute to the P Square versus Seun Kuti imbroglio ‘vawulence’, which appears to be a marketing gimmick for their albums/shows. However with it resulting in increased Yoruba-Igbo abusive rivalry, you wonder whether Fela Kuti Pan Africanism legacy upon which my generation grew, is not being trashed by his own scions. I held my tongue when Femi invited to OUR African Shrine Emmanuel Macron, the French president and, leader of Africans greatest cultural killers and epistemicide, but with this it would be unfair if we elders can’t pass on the knowledge learnt from their fathers in it’s evolved state. One good turn deserves another.
First, there is nothing wrong if Seun Kuti had specified his preferred candidate, but rubbishing the three top contenders as part of a rotten political class, is just identifying problems without presenting solutions. To make matters worse, he now singled out Peter Obi for flimsy criticism. Flimsy, because all politicians are opportunistic, or how in the first place can you rationalize Tinubu support for Buhari, a known Fulani conservative. Or Atiku perennial president candidacy now threatening our national unity. Even Seun tried to take the opportunity presented by EndSars to form a party. It’s flimsy claiming Peter Obi is a capitalist in a socialist party. Terminoloy that are mere cardinal theoretical positions since USA, the leading capitalist nation has the largest welfare program for the poor masses and rich businessmen/farmers, or China, a supposedly Communist nation with the fastest and largest growing billionaire class.
I am an ardent lifetime fan of the Kutis. It was from Prof Olikoye Kuti article on AIDS that I first had the full picture of the Original African civilization, when he refered to Yoruba and Igbo as the two most populous Original African groups. This made me realize that Nigeria and Africa as a whole is split between just two civilizations – Original/Indigenous Africans that are all genetically and culturally related like Yorubas, Igbos, Zulus, Congos etc, and Afroasians/Afro-Arabic that are products of different Afroasiatic cultural imperialism like Hausa, Fulani, Swahili, Amhara etc. Prof Olikoyes definition nicely encapsulated what Fela had been singing about, with regards to an African civilization subjected by the Abrahamic imperialism of one Christian, one Muslim always leading our collective selling out to foreign interests.
As outlined in my book, The Blackworld Evolution to Revolution (2006), based on scientific evidence, Southern Nigeria is the true origin of humanity and those now called Yoruba are the oldest full sized humans dated 87,000yrs ago by Harvard Medical School study – S.Malkick (2016). I chronologically outlined with the aid of genetic data how the 2240 groups of the Niger Congo ethnolinguistic family dispersed all the way to South Africa, how we settled from picking wild yams as hunter gatherers to become advanced societies based on yams, and evolved the first world’s knowledge bank called Ifa-Afa-Iha-Fa-Efa. Ultimately that we are a bonafide civilization and not Waka alone tribes.
Though Fela Kuti was a geographic Pan Africanist, we the next generation have identified and try to evolve to cultural Pan Africanism, aka civilizationism. Fela had rightly pinpointed colonial mentality as the root cause of many of our problems. The coloniality of knowledge and power sources that corrupts our worldview and makes us act in ways detrimental to our collective good.
In summary, Felas greatest legacy was the roots of Decoloniality that he planted to reverse our colonial mentality/coloniality of knowledge, but unfortunately the personalization of corruption which inadvertently aids coloniality of power sources was his negative legacy. Western intelligence services inspired corruption propaganda has been the greatest tool used to arrest Black political and economic development, through regime change gimmicks of neocolonizing military coups in the mid Sixties and democratic jihads of 2010s in Nigeria, Ghana, Brazil and other Black nations, specifically derailing our democracy in 1966, 1983 and 2014.
Felas generation’s Pan Africanism, with recent genetic and cultural anthropological evidence, has helped in the evolution of an Original African civilizational agenda that has informed people like me and groups like Afenifere push for an Igbo presidency guided by the principle of rotational presidency based on equity and justice.
The coloniality, foreign control, of our knowledge sources started with colonial bastardization and balkanization of our African civilization, whereby Esu/Ekwensu were demonized to derail our traditional sources of knowledge. Ifa-Afa-Iha-Fa-Efa, the 16 sector knowledge bank and information Retrieval System, is the foundation of the Original Indigenous African civilization upon which all Yoruba, Igbo, Igala, Ijaw etc towns were built, but nowhere in Ifa would you find the word Yoruba, nor Igbo etc.
The colonists broke up our Original African civilization that was made up of a continuum of dialects of the same mother tongue that spread from Southern Nigeria to South Africa. Yoruba, Igbo, Igala are just dialects of each other. The colonists did this by regionally amalgamating dialects into tribes that would forever war against each other and never unite against Abrahamic imperialism of Europeans and Arabic North. To institutionalize the break up of our civilization, they interpreted Bibles into indigenous dialects chosen as standard languages of the colonially induced tribes, then broke up the genetically and culturally proven Original African heartland into three – the northernmost part called the Middlebelt added to the Afroasiatic Northern Protectorate, and the Southern Protectorate broken into East and West. With the Northern Afroasians being the only united civilizational powerbase, albeit predatory and hegemonic, meritocracy flew out while nepotism and corruption became rife.
Therefore to uplift Africans and the Black Race as whole, we must reunite all Original African groups based on the scientific fact that we share the same genetic and cultural origins, as well as the same civilizational aspirations of true freedom based on our dualism philosophy. To achieve unity, we must deal with all other groups within our civilization with equity and justice, which is why we Yorubas with enlightened group interests supported an Igbo presidency.
It is surely a new dawn when Yorubas are at the forefront of pushing for an Igbo presidency with 120 Afenifere chieftains leading Obi Presidential Campaign council. Afenifere and other groups that make up the South and Middlebelt Leadership Forum have clearly stated that not even a Messiah can effectively rule Nigeria to benefit the majority unless we undertake politically, culturally and economically restructure. How can we unite as Original Africans to achieve our collective restructuring aspirations, if we can’t be fair and support our own son when it is obviously the turn of our Igbo cousins. The immoral Westernized and Modernized Yoruba would hide behind Machiavellian catchphrases like politics is a game of numbers/ power is not given, while we forget that Yoruba traditional political heirarchy was based on rotational Obaship between families to stabilize our polities.
It is Felas dream of African unity that we set out to achieve by helping our civilizational cousins for was rightfully theirs by rotation, but the new generation Westernized Kuti talking of capitalism versus socialism in a post ideological world, appears to be stuck in colonially inspired Pan Tribalistic perspectives instead of a civilizational perspective. Yes, the three contestants might be neoclonially tainted but we can’t overcome the coloniality unless the South and Middlebelt unite on a foundation of equity and justice. If Seun and other Kutis want to lead this generations intellectual thought like their fathers, they should evolve from problem identification to solution providers of a Decoloniality movement that must first unite the two largest Original African groups and all others, not only politically but also culturally as a civilization whose philosophical and spiritual foundations are the same and the best required to uplift the entire humanity to a higher level of political consciousness based on equity and justice for all in the incoming 2000yr Age of Shango..
The Kutis sing protest conscious music while the Okoyes sing Pop(ular) music and there is no comparison as they both have their uses to the society. Seun Kuti should have stuck to unbiased activism to prevent the Pop squaring and downgrading of Fela legacy. The Kutis must unite, protect and project the Original African civilization to uplift the Black Race if they want to lay claim to Kutis legacies.
