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Invited to work as a senior publicity officer with organisers of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ‘77) in 1974, Carlos Moore heard Fela’s music in a Lagos market and fell in love with it. Though familiar with Highlife and Juju, Moore had never heard the ‘beautiful’ music until then. He became interested in the music and its maker. Journalist and writer, Lindsay Barrett, later arranged for filmmaker, Ola Balogun to take him to Fela. Thus began a friendship that even Fela’s death has not diminished. Moore, Fela’s official biographer, speaks on the relationship and Fela’s aspirations.

Tell us about your book, ‘Fela: This Bitch of a Life’.

It is about him, about his whole life. It was written in the first person because Fela himself asked me to write it. It was published for the first time 28 years ago, in 1982. It was published in French, I wrote it in French. It took six months to translate it. It was published six months afterwards in English in England. It was a bestseller in French and a best seller in English and then it went out of print about six years afterwards. A long period went by. It was the period when they contained Fela, Fela’s music was contained. They had him in jail, so people forgot about Fela.

That book went out of print, and I tried to get it back into print but the publishers were not interested. They wanted to forget Fela. The military government wanted everybody to forget this man. So I waited. It was in the contract that if the publishers did not bring it back out after five years, that I could go to court and get back the book. And that is what I did.

I bought back the book from the French and then the English version which was another contract. I got back all the rights to the book on Fela in the 1990s.

It appeared for the first time in English in America in 2009. This is the first time that Africans are going to be able to buy the book, and Nigerians. I published with Cassava Republic Press because I respect them.

How come a non-Nigerian had so much to write about Fela?

If Nigerians wanted to write about Fela, they should have written at that time. Nigerians were scared to write about Fela at that time. They weren’t approaching him, perhaps, and Fela wasn’t even trusting anybody at that time. There were two things: none of those big writers was approaching Fela at that time, and they didn’t have a relationship with him. But it so happened that I had a very strong relationship with Fela.

I don’t think in terms of Nigerians and non-Nigerians, Fela didn’t think like that. That wasn’t Fela’s mentality. Fela thought about who agreed with the Pan-African philosophy. Fela and I had a total agreement. We were fighting together. I come from Cuba, I don’t care about that. I care about Africa and Fela was about Africa.

30 years ago, nobody was interested in doing this, everybody was fleeing Fela. I came to work with FESTAC and the FESTAC authorities told me that I cannot be associating with that man. He is subversive, he is against the government, he is a hooligan. They wrote me and I still have the documents. They told me if I continue the association, I would have to choose between that association and the FESTAC. My answer was: the choice is already made.

My politics are exactly the politics that Fela was fighting for, and I said that to the highest authorities. The Inspector General of Police then, M.D. Yusufu called me, and I sat down with him and I explained to him my relationship with Fela and he understood me. Yusufu said to me: I respect you, I respect your choice. And when the heads of the festival brought it down to a real confrontation, I left FESTAC and continued my relationship with Fela.

When I started relating with Fela in 1974, 1975, I said to him what you are saying should be in a book because this is important. He said no, he didn’t want anything about a book. We were discussing with each other about how we could bring the whole continent together, how we could eliminate the borders, how we could have a federation. How we could break up these artificial countries. Because this thing called Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Cameroun, it means nothing. It was done by the French, the Portugese, the Spanish and the other colonial powers.

It doesn’t work. It has never worked and it can’t work. It is dysfunctional. That is what we agreed on. That is why when Biafra tried to break away, I supported Biafra. Fela supported Biafra. A number of us supported Biafra, against the people who were talking about keeping Nigeria one. I never wanted to keep Nigeria one because Nigeria is an invention of the British. That’s what Fela knew and we agreed on this. What we wanted to do was to break up all of these countries, these so called states. They are not nations.

Nigeria is not a nation. Nigeria is a conglomerate of nations pieced together by the British and forced to live in this arrangement. We knew that this was not a nation; that what we needed was regional federation. Like Nkrumah had said, we must have regional federation. That was the Pan-African dream. That is what Nkrumah, Lulumba, Biko, Sankara, all of these people fought for. That is why when Sankara took power, he called Fela. He is the only head of state who called Fela and sat and discussed with him because he understood what Fela wanted was exactly that, a Pan-African union. I am not interested in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroun and Senegal. Those are colonial arrangements which are dysfunctional. That is what brought people like me and Fela together. We were more than political allies. We trusted each other so much that we were brothers.

Ten years after our relationship, I was in Europe working. I got a phone call in the early morning. I had woken up around two or three in the morning and the phone call was from Lagos. And all of a sudden, I was told that Fela was telling me to get on the plane, come quickly, that he needed the book written. I said which book? He said the book on him. I got on the plane, came here. By that time, the brutalities committed on him were just unspeakable. It was impossible for a human being to have been through that much.

Fela was at that time in a state of total depression. His mother had been dead for four years. And he told me that his mother said, call your brother, Carlos Moore. He is the one who should write the book now. Fela thought he was going to be killed, and Fela was talking about killing himselfe. It’s in the book; that is how the book ends. I was very concerned because this was serious. So, Fela is the one who called me to write the book. He was calling a man who believed in the same dream that he believed.

Kalakuta was not a place reserved. Everybody was in Kalakuta, different nationalities. I came prepared and we started recording. We recorded for many, many days. He poured out his life to me. That is when I discovered a side of Fela that I didn’t even know existed. Because up till then we had talked about politics, but he didn’t tell me about his life, that he had been beaten so much as a child by his mother. His father beat him so badly for so many years. He was traumatised by the beatings. And it made him a rebellious person. He was rebellious against authority.

What I did with all of those recordings – I went back to Europe, I transcribed them, I put them in order and selected and I wrote out the story. I wrote out the story line, and then took his words and integrated it with mine, because it was the only way I could tell the story. So, I came back and said: Fela, it doesn’t work if I say, Fela did and Fela said so and so. I can only say the story as ‘I’ from the beginning to end.

The publishers said no, we won’t touch it. They said no we want Fela’s biography but we won’t touch that, because you wrote it. So I came back and said Fela, they won’t touch it unless you authorise it. So he had to sign letters and say: ‘I authorised Carlos Moore. This is my authorised biography. I authorised him to speak as me’. That is what Fela did. He had that much confidence in me.

Why haven’t you attempted to publish it in Nigeria before now?

How can I attempt to publish it in Nigeria if Nigerians are not asking me, if the government doesn’t even allow me to come back into the country? At that time, it was a military dictatorship, Babangida and all of those fellows were in power. Do you think that book would have come out under Babangida, under Abacha? There was only one time when that book could have been published. That was when there was a coup de tat in 1976, and Muritala Mohammed came into power.

Muritala’s people called me and I came. That was when I could have published, but they killed him, they got him out of power. They were the first government who were going to try to do something. I’m not saying they were anything great, but they were saying, ok, the corruption must stop, that things must start working, that the poor people must have something. But they killed them. I can only publish if a publisher approaches me and tells me, I want to publish the book. And this happened only when two years ago, Cassava Republic approached me.

Do you think the dream of a united Africa is achievable?

If it is not achieved, Africa is finished, there is no Africa. I don’t know how it is going to be achieved because what these people have done is that they have destroyed practically all of our countries. From the North to the South, from the East to the West, they have destroyed and made life unbearable for all of us. What is the situation in Nigeria? You can repeat that by 53 times. 53 African countries show you the same profile. The elites that have been ruling our countries have just been lining their pockets, selling our resources, giving it to the outside, fronting to the outside. Do you know who these elites are?

They are the direct descendants of the slave traders, the people who sold all of us to the other side for money. They are doing the same thing, selling the resources of this country just as they sold us. That is what they are doing. It is the same elites, the same predator elites who don’t care about the ordinary people. They will sell you today, in fact they are selling you, they are selling your birth right. Every time a child cannot go to school because there is no infrastructure, they are selling him. They are condemning entire generations to being irrelevant, to being hungry and poor. These elites have been destroying the continent. They are not interested in one Africa.

I am saying if we don’t have that one Africa, one continental African government defending the interest of one Africa, Africa has no future because even the Europeans have understood that. Aren’t the Europeans bounding up in one single European government? What does that mean? Look at the Asians, aren’t they trying to get one Asian government. Look at their countries, they are enemy countries. Japan is the enemy of China, Japan is the enemy of Korea, China is the enemy of the Phillipines, the Phillipines is the enemy of Indonesia. They have these historic enmities lasting over a thousand years. You don’t have these enmities in Africa. These are enmities created since independence. You had viable states before. It was possible. You had wide empires, Ghana, Mali, kingdoms which were far and extensive and were functioning.

Why can’t we function today? Look at South Africa, less than 30 years after apartheid, it is chaos again. Look at Zimbabwe, the fight in Zimbabwe went on for 20 years and the very guy who was the most prominent guy is the worst dictator. Look at Uganda, with [Yoweri] Museveni. The fight in Uganda to get rid of the dictatorship and Idi Amin has led to another dictatorship. Look at the Congo, in eight years of fighting in Congo in the civil war, six million people have been killed.

Nothing can stop that if you don’t have one central government, with one army, one administration, which can stop the fighting. If there is fighting in the north, have an African army intervene and stop the fighting. Now if there is fighting somewhere, we have to call the United Nations to stop it. Of course it doesn’t make sense.