In 1998, when the eldest son of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti finally proved to the ears of the world that he wasn’t a genetic shadow of the Black President and that the planet could count on him, the country was coming out of close to 20 years of military dictatorship. The world’s sixth largest oil producer, the cultural giant of the black continent, was preparing to freely elect a new President. Sani Abache, the last Nigerian kleptocrat, had been dead for a year, a victim, according to rumours, of a Viagra-charged orgy that went wrong. Freedom was on the march.
It’s in such an uncertain context that Fight to Win appears, equipped with 12 tracks like spokesmen for a tomorrow yet to be decided, whatever the Cassandras may think. All the same, a thorough pessimist, the first to recognize the evils that still stalk his country, from the opium of religion to corruption, Femi has neither put away his protective sax nor softened his views. Not at all. As if motivated by the new freedom of expression in his country, Femi has never been as incisive and precise. In three years, the Yoruba twin has had time to find his own way, as much in terms of his weighty paternal inheritance – Afrobeat – as towards the ethnic traps that spring from his own social statute. If he’s Yoruba – like his scathing attack, Alkebu-Lu, denouncing the Western hold-up that includes even the names of the countries of the black continent –, Femi has freed himself from his statute of Lagos spokesman to become he who speaks out in the name of all Nigerians. For all Africans. And to all those, moreover, who think music can still have a meaning. The other challenge to be met was, in effect, to address directly once again the West. To all those who, from New York to Paris (where this album was produced by Sodi), have already made this man the main representative of the New Africa. Fight to Win hasn’t lost its soul in the assumed comings and goings between North and South. Born in London, educated in Lagos, nurtured by American beats,
Femi has even succeeded in bringing to his own soil the New Yorker Mos Def (on Do Your Best); his Chicago alter ego, Common (on Missing Link); as also the revelation Jag, on the astonishing single with the same name as the album, here boiling over with suppressed tension, like a day of traffic jams on the Third Mainland Bridge in Lagos. And for the first time, as a way to cut finally the umbilical cord with he "who carried death in his quiver," the man about whom he finally speaks in the most poignant track on the disc (’97), Femi releases his own political bombs. Traitors of Africa is at that level emblematic of the changes come about in three years, an eternity in the head of this 39-year-old adult. Abandoning metaphor, Femi practises for the first time the name-dropping developed by his father. With two years to go before the next presidential elections -- expected to be crucial as much for the country’s future as for the whole region --, Traitors of Africa doesn’t hesitate to aim directly at Ibrahim Babangida, alias IBB, alias the Maradona of Nigerian politics, alias the Prince of Niger, and that at the moment when this former Nigerian dictator is preparing his return to the political arena, backed by a war chest estimated by the American business magazine "Forbes" at around 21 billion dollars.
Three years since Shoki Shoki. Four years since Fela was interred in an Ikeja mausoleum. Four years, as well, since Sola and Frances, respectively a sister and a cousin of Femi’s, both also tragically disappeared. An eternity. Femi Kuti no longer plays. He simply is. With his wife Funke, his son Made, his other sister Yeni, he is henceforth a planet well placed in the constellation of messengers. We left him as an inheritor. We find him anew as a descendant. But "the son of the tiger remains a tiger," recalls a Yoruba proverb. With Femi, music asserts itself more than ever as the weapon of the future and of pan-Africanism, to taaake up the vision developed by his father. This musician of entropy, of Lagos 2001, of that controlled chaos where one moves without warning from the medieval to the mobile, has put no more in these 12 tracks than the munitions necessary for the reality of a budding twenty-first century. Less mysticism, more pragmatism. Less trance, more self-control. The beat, more taut, passes from malarial febrility to twilight calm. Among waves of brass there is henceforth electronic spray. And Money Mark, keyboards player of the Beastie Boys, parades his black and white notes. In a word, Fight to Win is an album resolutely rooted in today’s Africa. And if it’s only an echo of that new African community that despairs of exorcising its old demons, it is without doubt the most eagerly awaited testimony of the autumn. With Femi, one can definitively open one’s eyes on the aspirations of the young children of Africa’s independent states.