Berlin

Incredible! How easily Femi Kuti whips his audience into a trance-like kind of frenzy! Give it to the scion of the late Afro-beat maestro Fela Anikulapo-Kuti: he’s a first-rate entertainer. And he knows it.

It’s a full house tonight at one of Berlin’s many revellers’ haven Kulturbrauerei! Funny how quickly the hall filled up. There was no way – and I knew it – the show could have started exactly by 9 pm as advertised. So much for the German punctuality, I mused. They’d do it the Lagos style tonight. And did the D-J really assault our eardrums! The loudspeakers – wherever they are – belched out fast-paced African rhythms … And – amazing! – not a few of the revellers moved their bodies to the beat.

Like a thief in the night, the concert creeps upon us. No lengthy preamble was necessary. Haven’t enough time been wasted? Yeah, we can now talk of the legendary German punctuality.

First the band members make their spectacular entrance onto the stage. The band is called the Positive Force, in case you don’t already know. In Nigeria, the big masquerade is always the last to appear on the scene. So does Femi. Of course, I expected the crowd to go agog on his account. But I didn’t expect such a stunning entrée.

Meanwhile, his pied-piper retinue of dewy-eyed devotees tend to increase by the day. Who among them cares that his glittering career was burnished with incessant his lampooning the inanities of Nigeria’s as well as Africa’s leaders? Really, why should a predominantly German audience care about how Nigeria failed to manage its resources? Fela, his late icon father, had his famous ‘yabis’ sessions for skewering the Nigerian leaders. Femi’s version is no less caustic. Nigeria’s ambassador to Germany should have been here to hear him! Only that I wonder if anyone could controvert any of the facts, unpleasant though they may be.

Talk about the power of music! Virtually everyone is dancing, anyway. We don’t really have to agree with him to enjoy his music, do we? Nor does anyone expect him to be some kind of modern-day Socrates. If he says ‘Jump’, we jump. If he demands that we repeat some meaningless mumbo-jumbo, we’d oblige him. Femi’s energy pulsates through his entire band, from his erotically hip-swinging scantily-clad female dancers to his band members. And Femi keeps conjuring new tricks much like the conjurer with the white handkerchief, black hat and white rabbit. His Positive Energy doesn’t mean that he doesn’t easily get tired, does it? True he acknowledges that he is in his 46th year. But he never showed it. Nor the throng of revellers….