As a fully registered member of Fela Kuti’s implausible commune, Kalakuta Republic (or Kalakuta for short, the only home worth knowing for most of its clamorous citizenry), you weren’t, in theory, expected to do much of anything. After all, you were a victim, a despondent deviant confronting the implacable face of an oppressive and ultra-conservative social order.
So, it was tacitly agreed by all that you had been admitted into its far from secure confines to relax and lick your wounds, all the while under the somewhat distant, albeit razor-sharp beams emanating from the steely yet benevolent gaze of the Philosopher King, Consultant Psychologist-in-Chief, and champion and defender of his volatile and beleaguered enclave: Fela Anikulapo Kuti, or simply Fela, if you didn’t want to incur his ire.
There were two large adjoining living rooms on the first floor, lined all around with low-slung cushion chairs that could be converted, at a moment’s notice, into bed-like contraptions. One room housed the boys, the other, the girls. And for some ineffable, impossible-to-pinpoint reason, both were in a state of constant, undeclared but remorseless warfare.
It was a state of total war, except, of course, when everyone was required to come together as one for the greater good of the Republic and engage in that most humdrum and unpalatable of chores: fetching Fela’s bathwater at the crack of dawn. And since the water pipe was broken all the way at the junction where the street ended, that in effect meant a six-minute trudge, back and forth, up the sloping hill where the house was perched at its tip.
Which wouldn’t have been that bad, except for a troubling riddle. The bucket reserved for the Chief Priest’s morning ablutions apparently had developed a small leak, completely invisible to the naked eye. Or what else could explain how Fela’s big plastic bucket stubbornly refused to get full, morning after succeeding morning, no matter how much water we lugged up the street to fill it for hours on end?
It took a while, for some of us more than others, but daylight finally dawned on even the most innocent and trusting of minds. Fela didn’t have an overwhelming urge to swim in his bathwater every morning, he wasn’t perversely tipping it all away the moment he took delivery of it to give us even more, morning legwork. Not at all.
This was, in fact, a hand-of-Esau-but-the-voice-of-Jacob situation of the most outrageous degree.
This unrelentingly gluttonous bucket was finally revealed to be not for the sole use of Fela at all. It was, in reality, a multi-use bucket with a deceitful “for Fela’s exclusive use” reputation, bestowed upon it by the household high command. While it actually served all his wives, all his concubines, all his residential band members, the entire “Fela friends contingent,” all the in-and-out-of-residence hangers-on, all his household staff, and all and every wise guy, wise woman, street boy, and street girl visitor who happened to be in lodgings at the relevant time.
The only people it didn’t serve, of course, were us, the small battalion of downtrodden mugs who marched right down to the bottom of the hill and marched right back up again. All in the firm grip of a most stubborn and unfortunate delusion: that just because this was Kalakuta Republic, it somehow wasn’t Lagos anymore, and therefore that famous and most helpful of streetwise admonitions, “never to be a Lagos Looker”, couldn’t and didn’t apply.
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Glossary
Lagos Looker: A credulous person
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Image: Donald Giannatti Unsplash remixed