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| French Flag |
We were
still adolescents in our mindsets. Hence, the issue of music came in. My friend
proposed to come along with a mobile cassette tape player. We would play Fela’s
classical Afro Beat while in the field. Fela is the inventor of Afro Beat,
which fuses Jazz and southwestern Nigerian music rhythms.
When the
French man heard it, he welcomed the idea, pointing out that Fela was very
popular in Europe (he must have noticed Fela was not all that popular in
Nigeria.)
While
reading Time Magazine, an article referred to the highly social character of
France. It was the statement that kept resonating in my mind, the picture still
not getting clear to me, nevertheless.
I am an avid
fan of international news. Radio France International is one news source I
embraced. I noticed that each time there was an interlude, there was a good
chance Afro Beat would be played.
I once
watched a video of Ara performing somewhere in France. She is a Nigerian female
music artist who carved a niche as a woman that plays the talking drum. As a
Nigerian, playing to the French music fans a genre one would have considered
exotic and obscure, the fans danced vigorously as if it was their invention.
Finally,
when Emmanuel Macron became French President, he visited Nigeria. In his
itinerary, there was going to be a visit to Fela’s shrine in Nigeria. He lived
up to his travel plans. That was when, at last, the total picture of France’s
profound social character became clear to me.
While in
secondary school, we had a skewed understating of the word, “social.” To us, one who was social was him with a profound love for western music. Imagine the
depth and enormity of our ignorance. We were to understand that one who is
social is he who can tolerate and live with exotic cultures, no matter how
remote they must have come from. Along this line, it is not America, as our
ignorance had made us believe. It is France.
