On Fela and his Kalakuta Queens

My optimism was misplaced. And really, I should have read that title more carefully: once again, Fela is front and central.

Kalakuta Queens was a rollicking good show. No one would have guessed this was Olaitan Adeniji’s first stab at acting—such was the distinction with which he reprised Fela. But if I thought it was going to examine the women’s origins and motivations with any distinction, I was severely mistaken.

It's ironic that the play’s treatment of Malaika, the American researcher-fan who visits Kalakuta in the play, is a precise metaphor for Kalakuta Queens. Her purpose at Kalakuta, Malaika claims, is to gauge the pulse of the women. Soon, we find out she’s really only interested in Fela.

Fela himself struggled to explain just what these women were, beyond the accoutrements of his craft and celebrity. Perhaps it is understandable then that Kalakuta Queens found it impossible to suggest any insight into these women beyond ritual declarations of “courageous”.

My interview with Rikki happened a full two months before the play’s debut, but I cannot help but conclude that on this score, Rikki’s words still carry more significance than the play manages. Fela was a horny bastard with the means to summon to life desires from the recesses of fantasy.

And what does Kalakuta Queens teach us about the queens? That their concerns are petty, and divorced, somewhat counterintuitively, from the history rumbling around them. They are, according to the play, a squabbling, conniving, capricious, hypersexual bunch, sheep without direction, whose ambitions wander no farther than joying in the deluge of stardust erupting from Fela’s celebrity.

Little wonder then, one realises, that Remi chose a life apart from this coterie. As Rikki reminds me, in the Fela biography This Bitch of a Life, a queen confesses Fela’s cock as the band that tethered her to Kalakuta, despite all the suffering that came with that decision.

The sort of collectivisation that is Kalakuta Queen’s method cannot be appropriate to examine these women’s stories. There’s more, I’ll argue, to be learnt from pursuing a more novelistic approach, pursuing the individual and if necessary, only then amassing these individual journeys into a collective.

Fela and the Kalakuta Queens shows in Abuja at the NAE Centre, Kado, from 8 to10 June. For more information, click here.