In this blog post, Yusuf Serunkuma draws a compelling comparison between Bobi Wine of Uganda and Fela Kuti of Nigeria, both of whom are recognized as among Africa’s most creative artists and courageous political activists for their resistance against dictatorship. Serunkuma emphasises that despite the possibility that Bobi Wine’s music and activism may have surpassed Fela Kuti’s, he remains underappreciated by Western observers.
By Yusuf Serunkuma
I was in graduate school exactly 10 years ago when I got introduced to Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938-1997). As a country lad raised on local drums, storytelling music of the kandongokamu genre, Congolese Lingala and South African anti-apartheid music, I had never heard of the Nigerian Afro-beat maestro. Even when I learned about him, it was not much his musical talents but his unflinching activism and bravery that blew me off. It was Tejumola Olaniyan’s elegant writing and argumentation in Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics powerfully introduced me to the legend. By then, I had started honing my activist antennae and had fallen in love with what could be called “rebel literature and art.” Okot p’ Bitek’s essays in Artiste the Ruler had made a wonderful impression on my restless self, as I tried to understand the ruins, and pains of eking an existence in a quintessential World Bank colonial-extractive outpost called Uganda. As a Ugandan reading Olaniyan’s magisterial book on Fela—and having come of age in the time of the singing trio in Bobi Wine, Jose Chameleon and Bebe Cool—I could not help but see Bobi Wine written all over the pages. Of the three Ugandan entertainers, only Bobi Wine had cut a distinguishable political identity in his artistry and public intellectualism—which eerily resembled Fela.
Similarities with Fela were so unmissable. Could Bobi Wine have been copy-pasting Fela? Check, for example, Bobi Wine’s Ghetto Republic—for which he had self-declared himself president— and Fela’s Kalakuta Republic! While the copy-pasting seemed obvious, Bobi Wine’s Ghetto Republic exuded an undeniable authentic lustre: He was born and raised in the slums of Kamwokya, and his entire crew—Fire Base Entertainment—were mostly residents of these slums. His brother, Fred Nyanzi, often saluted in Bobi Wine’s lyrics as ‘Chairman Nyanzi,’ was actually a local council chief in these ghettos, and his other brother, Eddy Yawe owned One Love recording studio inside the same ghetto. Undoubtedly, for his lyrical and musical genius, Bobi Wine had made the Kamwokya slums admirable to folks from posher neighbourhoods—such as fellow artiste, Navio with whom they collaborated to do the song ‘Badman from Kamwokya.’ This would make the ‘president’ label fitting and natural for Bobi Wine especially after his career kicked off fairly early. His entire packaging against his lived reality rendered him immense authenticity.
When it came to the music itself, how could Bobi Wine craft a lyrical genius by just aping Fela?! It was not possible. I could imagine that many artists have tried to follow maestros of the past, but all they do is record a song or two before turning to something more natural to them. If Bobi Wine had really aped Fela all the while, then still, he was so good at it. But there seemed something peculiar, original, about Bobi Wine’s own craft. He had a long list of songs—so suited to the Ugandan context—that were direct commentaries and interventions on current affairs in the political-social milieu of the time, dating way back from the beginning of his career. The themes and subjects ranged from the excesses of politicians such as corruption and fakeness to matters of a sociological nature, such as gender, ageing, wasted youthfulness, hustling, and family roles and values. The list remains long and complex and spans a long period.
Sampling the most spectacular and most interventionist (from over 80 songs over a 15-year career) one cannot miss Mwekume featuring Wetherman who powerfully and skilfully tackled the scourge of HIV/AIDS in 2004 advising young people to wear condoms. This message was radical in its time. Then came Adam ne Kawa with Nubian Li done in 2005; and “Mama wa abaana, Taata wa abaana” with Juliana Kanyomozi — both done almost at the same time discussing domestic relations as the national parliament debated the controversial Domestic Relations Bill (DRB); and later doing Kiwaani in 2011, which is about fakery around Kampala, and Tugambire Ku Jenifer in 2012, which directly criticised the ways in which then newly appointed Kampala City Council Authority director, Jenifer Musisi overzealously went about “ modernising” Kampala, which terribly ruined the lives of ordinary folks who sketched an existence on the margins of city—and happened to be mostly road sidewalk vendors and owners of makeshift kiosks. Bobi Wine was challenging Kampala’s CEO, “For whom was her modernizing Kampala?” That this specific song—as happened to Kiwaani—would be temporarily banned from being played on radio and TV made his comparison to Fela Kuti even more appealing. I will not go into his later explicitly activist-political music, because this comes after my 2013 encounter and comparisons with Fela. But a recently completed Ph.D. dissertation at Makerere University by Jonathan Mugyenyi builds specifically on Bobi Wine’s music genius.
Suffice to emphasise that these songs are not mimicries of Fela, but were powerful for their lyrics, and unmistakeable danceable beats. You couldn’t miss Jamaican influences—not Nigerian—of legends from as Shabba Ranks, Chaka Demus and Pliers, which is discernible in their mimicry of Jamaican Patois, dance rhythms, and dance beats. But also, one quickly realises Bobi Wine also relies on Kandongokamu storytelling patterns—most famously of the didactic nature embodied by local legend, Paul Job Kafeero. In the midst of this excitement, in 2014, I published an essay in The Independent magazine turning Olaniyan’s title somewhat upside down: “Release More Music! Mr Ghetto President,” I cried out as I attempted to spell out the likeness between Fela and Bobi Wine, while cheering on Bobi Wine to stress, mostly, his political-activist potential.
People Power
Later on in life, Bobi Wine intensified and expanded his reach as an activist—and public intellectual—more powerfully with the People Power Movement. With catchy slogans such as “Get your national ID” and songs for defiance, “We were crafted to be broken, but left the pottery as one piece,” Bobi Wine remarkably conscientized and inspired millions of young Ugandans, to return to politics, which they had abandoned for a long time. (Seen to be exploiting the government call for Ugandans to process their IDs—as a way of encouraging young people into political consciousness and rebel activism—the NRM government considered putting the entire exercise on a halt, yet it had been promoting the exercise itself). When Bobi Wine fully joined politics—winning the by-election for Kyadondo North seat in Parliament—and later standing for president in the 2021 Ugandan election, for a scholar working retrospectively, Bobi Wine emerged from the shadows of Fela—if he hadn’t distinguished himself already—as an original, and independent artiste. But I could not shake off this nagging feeling that Bobi Wine may have fallen in love with Fela at the beginning of his career in the early 2000s. I sought him out for this piece and learned that although he had heard about Fela, he only fully came to appreciate his stature and started to admire him fully after a 2017 meeting with Fela’s close friend and then producer, Rikki Stein. Bobi Wine tells me:
“I had heard about Fela as that Nigerian artiste who had married many women all at once, was very stubborn, and was good at jazz. Only in 2017 did I fully come to know who Fela was. This happened when I met Rikki Stein who happened to have been a close friend of Fela. Rikki is also friends with the Kabaka and had come to Kampala to attend a Kabaka event. When I walked into the room and was welcomed with cheers and whistles, Rikki asked who I was. And when he learned I was Bob Wine, he had heard about me, he made sure we spoke on the sidelines of the event. He told me I was so like his late friend, Fela and challenged me to know more about this man. I have done so over the past years, listened to his music, read what has been written about him, and now fully understand his legendary stature. In fact, I was honoured to do his song, Sorrow, Tears and Blood, at the Freedom Concert in South Africa in 2020.”
Bobi Wine told me he didn’t like the personal profile he had heard about Fela before 2017. He had not been impressed by the man’s decision to marry so many women all at once. This detail had gone viral about Fela, and many Christian-raised folks didn’t like this bit. It is also important to note that as a young man, Bobi Wine was raised on kandongokamu music, which was still the most powerful genre on the local scene, and the commonest imports were Jamaican dance hall and Congolese Lingala music. Indeed, you cannot miss the fact that many artists emerging at this moment craved to sound like Jamaica’s stars in Chaka Demus and Pliers, Buju Bunton or Shaba Ranks among others. To this end, it is difficult to make the conclusion that Bobi Wine had picked immensely from Fela—because he actually knew little about the legend. Again, if he did, then he learned from the master and took the craft to another level. What is unmistakable is that the two legends lived in different times and responded to the call of their society in almost the same way. It would be meaningless to rank them, especially since they lived in different times, and the younger of the two must have picked inspiration from the other, but they ought to be studied closely, and independently.
The usual agonies of framing Africa
It was in the process of being commissioned by a publisher in the Western world to write a piece about Bobi Wine for a series publication, “Music and politics,” that returned me to this question—this almost unnecessary comparison—about Bobi Wine being or not being Fela. Interested in writing about six artists from across the continent (including Burkina Faso, Guinea, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Uganda) each as seen through one song, I felt the editors had, quite problematically, straight-jacketed that these artists can be summarised into one of their songs, that, as they pitched the series, “changed the situation or is very representative of a politic period of the country.” I have no idea why he thought it could be one song—and not several songs—encapsulating every single artiste of some renown on the continent. Maybe it worked for some of the project subjects.
While I would struggle to agree to a lumping of all these artists—from six different countries—into a singular project, however generous the uniting embroidery could be, my knowledge of Bobi Wine, made my objections even more immediate. It would be a relic of a piece of writing. Not in his present time. Maybe possible five years ago, but not this time. I tried to explain to my commissioners that such a narrow framing would be unfair to a man of Bobi Wine’s stature. This man recently stood for the presidency (and sections of the country believe he won the election but was cheated out by the incumbent). Presently, Bobi Wine’s political party, the National Unity Platform (NUP) is the leading opposition political party in the country. At the risk of sounding nationalistic (about Bobi Wine), I do not know of any other artiste on the African continent with such a resume—present and past—who has commanded a similar profile as this man, as a master entertainer, but also used his clout and craft of popular culture to seek to challenge the status quo—as a public intellectual and presidential candidate. I felt it would be unfair to myself as a writer, and the subject itself to be contained in such a schema at this moment in time, considering also that the man is presently still politically active. I know, something could be written, but why was it suited for this moment to write about Bobi Wine backwards (like we were in the early 2010s?) And why bundle six artists across the continent into a singular narrative schema?
Noticing that my would-be editors had heard about Bobi Wine, but didn’t know the man fairly enough for better conceptualisation, in one phone call, I referenced a more familiar artiste, Fela Kuti, so as to drive my point home. I noted, “Bobi Wine, took Fela’s craft a notch higher.” My editor on the phone threw me a line that has finally provoked this writing, “of course, Bobi Wine is not Fela, but I understand what you are saying.” We then carried on with a couple of other things and ended the call. But I could not stop wondering what my editor meant when they chose to emphasise that Bobi Wine was not Fela. Of course, he is not. These are two different men. But you could not miss the ranking of greatness in the emphasis, where my would-be editors thought to make it clear that Fela ranked alone. What did they know that I did not know either about Fela or about Bobi Wine? In the dead of the night, I returned to my love affair with Olaniyan’s lively rendering of Fela Kuti, but also my sense of Bobi Wine.
The artists and their political economies
It is my contention that when writing about the subaltern world—after all the anti-stereotyping pushbacks—western scholarship and journalistic writing, in an effort to discard its orientalist ontology (although scattered fragments of orientalism have remained), has instead decided to follow an economic “initial sensibility”: it is not less the racist stereotyping that imbues the writing—this remains a common and settled denominator with Europe sticking to its universalizing claims—but rather histories and levels of integration into the global economy, and perceptions of poverty that drive the writing. In sum, whether it is writing about peoples and cultures, literature, talents or levels of innovations, or even seemingly benign things such as kinship relations and traditions, the writers from the Western world operate on an economic scale module. Something like the more economically advanced a space (country or region) is perceived to be, the more its abilities for progress, innovation, and making culture.
The scholarship is thus influenced, seasoned and pre-conditioned by the writers’ biases and knowledge of the subject’s interactions with the global north economies. For example, scholarship about art, culture, and innovations in South Africa tends to have fairer portrayals than the same items being studied in Malawi or Burundi. This is not to say that scholars enter into their research subjects with these sensibilities, but there seems plenty of room—unconsciously created—for South African inventions over Malawian ones, for Moroccan or Nigeria over Ugandan and Kenyan. Suffice to mention that these biases are not constructed in a vacuum but are constructed over a period. This is the reminder that Edward Said makes in 2003, reintroducing Orientalism, and how these narratives are sustained. Said noted that in the United States and Europe then (and nowadays), bookstores were “filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, Arab threat and the Muslim menace.” The effect is that this forms the worldview of Arabs and Muslims. The same could be said about our views of Africans and their poverty, and how in the midst of their poverty, they cannot fancy progress and culture—and the economic scale kicks in where the supposedly wealthier, the supposedly more respected and more fancied.
I need to start this story from the beginning. As a player on the local political scene in Uganda—mostly as a loudmouthed analyst and scrawny columnist—I have become critical of Bobi Wine in the more recent past. I disapproved of his decision to join active politics (I felt he was better as the symbol of the People Power movement); I also disapproved of the decision to form the NUP political party, arguing it both instrumentalised and thereby killed People Power; and heavily faulted him for letting go of the many “revolutionary moments” that opened in the course of and immediately after the 2021 presidential election. But my criticism notwithstanding, I am fully persuaded by the man’s creative genius as an artist and entertainer, but also as a public intellectual. If he lived in a bigger economy—a more globally integrated one—he would attract incredible amounts of curiosity and study and would be winning global awards. Thus, when confronted with a framing, which I felt did not do enough justice to his artistry and political stature, I was confident in raising my objections. Unbeknownst to me this moment became one of reflection and learning, not about just how interesting but also understudied Bobi Wine’s artistic and political genius was, but appreciating and reflecting upon the reasons why some subjects are more studied, more appreciated, and elevated. This process reaffirmed the place and power of political economies in the ways in which we narrativize our world. The research/studied subject ought to be seated in a bigger economy for their genius to shine.
Hitherto persuaded that Bobi Wine—who is still musically and politically active—had already extended, if not superseded Fela’s remarkable genius, the editor’s reminder shocked me out of this arguably Ugandan-nationalist stupor. For some time, I couldn’t get my mind off the subject. Framing the puzzle differently, I asked the question: why do chroniclers, journalists, scholars, and editors from the Western world come to know more about one place than the other? My (again, arguably, nationalistic) bias was that not enough is known about Bobi Wine, especially his musically rendered activism. He has not done his craft in English, not staged shows to European audiences in the Western world; and neither does he have European production teams. Even when he became a remarkable politician, not enough has been written about him, with thorough research and in-depth study. (except that PhD cited above, and more recently, a National Geographic production, among others).
Comparatively, there is a great of scholarship and media coverage on South African and Nigerian artists, including folks with lighter talents. As I mulled over these contentions, the penny dropped: it is not the difference in the artistic and activist accomplishments of either man. It was not even necessarily that they lived in different times and inhabited different spaces. But rather the political economies in which these two men operated, which might speak to both their artistic quality and reach, but most importantly, their renown in the chronicles of history. It is about the writer, and less about the event/subject of the chronicle. To this end, it is my sobering contention that there is a close connection between the artiste, and the political economies (or their resources) of their countries, which thereby informs their renown and celebrity.
This contention operates at two levels—local and international—and encapsulates the challenges of knowledge production in a broader sense: (a) at the so-called international level, narrators/chroniclers are moved not just by the talents of their subjects, but by the economic/political interests and histories that unite the worlds of both the subject and the chronicler. In our world today, the closer in terms of resources one is to the Western world—which often constitutes the international space—the more genius and creativity will be spotlighted. And the reverse is true. It is akin to the ways the British media brands and promotes their athletes who happen to be fairly good, but within the larger pool, are comparatively of weaker talents. (b) at the local levels, chronicles and local historians are busy eking an existence, trying to find food and water, and have no time for studying and breaking down minute details about the accomplishments of their cultural producers. They are happy to harvest their cultural production but are unable to market them to the world. Perhaps it does not even matter at all. Native scholars find themselves conditioned to a position of “native informers,” (as Mahmood Mamdani ridiculed colleagues at Makerere University) when responding to questions set from outside.
Exactly because not many have the time and resources to indulge in questions about things they are gladly enjoying. To this end, these talents are buried away from the so-called international audience. Ironically, when these talents so painstakingly make the breakthrough—to the international scene—the comparisons with other more established folks are often difficult.
It is fair to say that Bobi Wine’s talents and accomplishments—whilst being inspired and enabled by his Ugandanness—have also been denied a shine for being this Ugandan. But how would the scholarship and media coverage be if he had lived and operated in an economy as big and globally integrated as Nigeria and lived the talents he continues to live: (a) a leading entertainer and public intellectual for over 15 years, (b) inspiring an entire generation with the People Power movement and (c) politician winning a parliamentary seat, starting a political party, standing for president—and almost winning. But also standing as the leader of the main opposition political party in the country. These are feats of great genius especially in a long-established autocracy. A number of his songs cannot be played on airwaves, and presently cannot stage a show in the country. He has been arrested several times, and almost got shot and killed by the state in the northern district of Arua in 2018. (The shooting instead claimed the life of his driver, Yasin Kawuma, who was seated in the co-drivers seat). He was under house arrest after the 2021 presidential election and got terribly battered through an election cycle including surviving a bomb attack. Revolutionary talents like Lucky Dube, Ken Saro Wiwa, Okot p’ Bitek, and Fela Kuti himself would be proud of this man had they met him.
Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, a scholar, and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers which was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. He teaches decolonial studies/new colonialism and writes regularly for ROAPE.
Featured Photography: Bobi Wine campaigning with Ugandan flag (Wiki commons)
