Interview: Nigerian Musician and Activist Adé Bantu

Earlier this year, journalist Matt Sonzala visited Lagos. As he was there, he conducted numerous interviews, getting a unique look into the city’s varied music scene. Along the way, he spoke with Adé Bantu. As head of Afropolitan Vibes, Bantu stands as one of the city’s most successful independent music promoters.

That promotion doesn’t just end with a simple event. Bantu is a historian and activist, working on a documentary about one of the most important music events in Lagos, Festac ’77, a month-long festival that saw more than 16,000 artists converge on the city to celebrate African arts and culture. In this revealing chat, Sonzala talks to Bantu about the unique challenges of making a life in music in Nigeria.

You are one of the people really trying to keep the music of the legends alive, along with promoting new artists. I also understand that you grew up a bit in Germany and you were a key player in the development of the German hip-hop scene as well.

Yeah, it’s been quite a journey. I’m German/Nigerian so that’s where my German connection comes from. I spent my formative years here in Nigeria and then I went to Germany to further my education. Along the way people thought, “Well, you’re black, you must be able to do some music.” And I ended up in the college band and from there I think we recorded the second or third hip-hop album in Germany ever with a group called Exponential Enjoyment. So we helped shape the German hip-hop scene.

Were you doing music here before you went to Germany?

No, no formal music training. I am one of the victims of the ’80s educational system. With free education, which was a good thing, we didn’t really have dedicated music lessons or music teachers, there just wasn’t any funding for that. With the economic decline in the ’80s, that wasn’t a priority. But thanks to hip-hop, it was just do it yourself.

I saw your Afropolitan Vibes show for the first time this past Friday at Freedom Park. I loved how you combined some of the old school singers and musicians with the new school rappers.

When I moved back to Nigeria about seven years ago, I was extremely disappointed because there wasn’t much of a live music scene anymore, due to the years of dictatorships, insecurities and what have you. The nightlife seemed to have gone into a serious nosedive. Most of the musicians started doing church music or going completely into retirement. So with that said, I felt like reviving or adding my own bit to the revival of the live music scene. So we started Afropolitan Vibes. We didn’t want a jam session. It was important to us to do a flawless performance. And I thought people might get bored only listening to Adebantu, so I invited artists that I appreciated and that I am a fan of, and how about combining the old and the new and the future as well?

So we just set about to create a platform for alternative music, for singer songwriters to perform original material because a lot of bands do covers here. At weddings, hotel lobbies, very few have the platform to perform their own material. Aside from the Kuti’s, Femi and Seun, there is hardly anyone who has a place to perform on a weekly basis.

We started three years ago with about 100 people in attendance, now we are close to 5,000. And we are able to add our little bits to give artists confidence to try out their new material. We have also been able to re-educate the audience as well, the music lovers, in regards to live music because a lot of people in Nigeria were turned off from this whole DJ and MC set up when it came to live music. It’s interesting when you are starting a career, but you can’t sustain a career like that. So we’ve kind of got a way around all of that.

With Afropolitan Vibes we make sure we document every show. We film it, we have a podcast, we also have a magazine we have been issuing for three years as well. More like a fanzine where we have interviews with the artists, ways to contact them, etc. The shows so far have been self-funded. We haven’t been able to secure sponsorship, which is very difficult over here. But we have had a lot of support from our fans. The energy is very unique. In a country like Nigeria where we are very class conscious, there is no class divide so you have hipsters next to street kids, students, ex-pats, all of them together in one space converging to enjoy good music.

I did not expect to see such a diverse crowd in that audience. I saw Americans, British, Asians, Nigerians obviously and all classes of people were having an incredible time.

That’s why we call it Afropolitan Vibes. What’s also important to mention is that we took the word Afropolitan which is quite hip in the States and in Europe, and we brought it back home. It’s not about creating some kind of agenda that has no connectivity with the realities on the ground. We are engaging this word with the realities, with the people. And that has kind of helped expand the scope of what it means to be Afropolitan.

It’s not just about being a hip African that can travel all over the world and speaks eight or ten languages, it’s also about the fact that we Lagosians for example, we the people of Lagos, we’ve been at the forefront of globalization for the past 200 years, at least! So it’s not unusual to have someone in Lagos speak seven or eight languages. It’s also not unusual for someone in Lagos to be big fans of Dolly Parton or to listen to Drake, and to be big fans of Ebeneezer Obey and Hugh Masekela all in one. People are very eclectic here, very complex. And that’s what we try to represent on that stage and with the vibes of Afropolitan.

We do a three hour performance and we are the only show in Nigeria that starts dead on time. We say 8 o’clock and we start right at 8 o’clock.

What I like best is... I live in Texas and a lot of our music has gone undocumented, or underrepresented. A lot of our legends didn’t get the credit they were due. I love to see you bringing the legends back and putting them right next to the young artists. It’s important to educate these youths as to where all this came from.

Most definitely. And in a society like Nigeria, which unfortunately doesn’t have proper archive culture. Archiving your story is so important, if you don’t want someone else to take your story and make it their story. It is very important to protect where you come from and to elaborate on it.

For us, we have a 360 approach. When I moved back I discovered that a lot of these old cats were not being interviewed and were not being properly documented. So a friend and I began doing a documentary called Elders Corner: The History of Nigeria Told Through the Lives and Works of Its Musical Icons. We have been working on this project for about six years. It is a cinema documentary and we hope to have it in a couple of festivals by the end of this year.

When we went out to the old folks, they said, “How come nobody ever came to us to ask these questions before?” We are talking about Nigeria’s independence, the Biafra War, a lot of the old folks never spoke about their war experiences. Then Festac ’77, which was one of the biggest festivals ever on the continent, back in 1977, where the Nigerian government spent billions of dollars and even created a new village so to speak, a new community for artists here.

Everyone was here, Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra, they all came here to perform in 1977. It was a one month festival. Miriam Makeba even stayed over for about six months. That’s how much money they spent. So we talk about that as well. And obviously the ’80s, ’90s, the decline of the economy and also the ways Nigerian music and industry kind of went completely obsolete. So it is very interesting and there are some moving stories. A couple have since passed away, so it was important that we told their stories.

How can a place with such incredible musical talent for its entire history, how could its music industry go by the wayside at all? There is so much here.

In order to understand the decline of the Nigerian music industry one should not forget the politics around Nigeria. So with a dictatorship comes censorship and the first people you censor are the free spirits, the artists. It became more and more frustrating for artists that were vocal. People like Fela Kuti, he was constantly being arrested, molested. You just can’t go about being creative when you are under permanent observation and have permanent tension.

Also, we had our golden era in the ’70s when people were financially buoyant and they could buy records en masse. You had a lot of superstars, a lot of patronage, but with the decline of the economy people weren’t able to patronize the way they used to, and artists suffered as well. With the insecurities that came with the financial decline, there were a lot of armed robberies, a lot of curfews set by the military, a lot of people were wary of going out at night. You never knew what could happen.

With that, nightclubs started closing left and right. And the artists had no vocation other than music, so there weren’t a lot of alternatives. A lot of them turned away from secular music and went on to become church musicians. A few went into music education and some went on with their lives and became lawyers, farmers, traders, etc.

Beyond Fela, who were some of the other revolutionary voices from that time?

You had people like Fatai Rolling Dollar, you had Mary Afi Usuah, who was a classically trained vocalist who went on to tour with Led Zeppelin in Italy for example. You had the Lijadu Sisters, they just got reissued by Knitting Factory in the States, one of the few female voices that you had. MonoMono they are now based in California but they were a rock/psychedelic band in Nigeria in the ’70s. You had a lot of experimentation going on. You had mainstream music and obviously those that were a bit more leftfield and were more progressive.

Well, there have been a few compilations that have come out of West African psychedelic rock and the like, but most people have no idea of the diversity in sound that is happening not only right now but historically. The music runs deep!

The thing you have to understand is Lagos in particular has always been a meeting point of various cultures and sounds. And people have always been very, very open. Nigerians in general are inquisitive people. It’s part of our culture. And we are very open. So when the sailors came back with all kinds of sounds in the ’20s and the ’30s, Nigerians were open to it and they were incorporating that into traditional music.

Now fast forward to the ’60s and ’70s, especially with TV and radio, people got tuned into all kinds of sounds. So for somebody like a Ginger Baker to come back here and to set up shop and to set up a studio, it’s a big deal. Even Paul McCartney recorded here with The Eagles. So you always had people coming here looking for inspiration.

When we had the economic boom of the ’70s with oil prices at an all-time high and people not knowing what to do with the money, Nigerian television started importing American shows. So you have a generation that grew up on Good Times, on The Jeffersons, on Sesame Street and that is what also informed popular culture as well. That is why a lot of Nigerians can relate to a lot of African-American culture, because they basically had direct access to it.

And a lot of the stars also came to Nigeria. Everyone was here, James Brown, Stevie Wonder was in the Shrine, he jammed with Fela Kuti. Bootsy Collins was here. So when you have all of that going on, and not like on the internet, you experience it live, it leaves something inside of you. It’s beautiful. Lagos has always been that signal post for Africa.

It’s interesting, though, you take these compilations for example. You can easily access these compilations in the United States or in Europe. But you can’t access a Nigerian rock compilation from the ’70s that has been reissued here in Nigeria. No one is releasing them over here. So a kid that is inquisitive that wants to hear this sort of music from Nigeria, they can’t access it. You can argue that they can go on the internet, but let’s be honest, it is the privileged few that can access the internet in a way that they can fully research what they are looking for. Very few people here have that option. Everyone is bandwidth-conscious because it costs a lot of money to be on the internet. So when you go out to look for something or you go out of your way to download something, it better be something that you are extremely sure of.