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Evoking the image of ships and black sailors navigating the Atlantic, Paul Gilroy's heuristic stresses dynamic cultural exchange among diverse populations of the African diaspora and the mother continent itself-the "black Atlantic." Gilroy argues for the central role of black musical expression in producing a "distinctive counterculture of modernity" on a basis of shared oppression, common goals, and hybrid cultures (Gilroy, 1993, 36). While the perspective of black Americans' discovery and cultivation of African cultures and sensibilities (both historical and imagined) is more familiar to those on this side of the Atlantic, this process also figured importantly on the African continent. During the early postcolonial years, the interest of African Americans in discovering their African roots stimulated a similar impulse in some Africans. Describing the epiphany brought on by his 1969 trip to the United States, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the originator of the jazz, funk, and soul-infused genre Afrobeat, recalled:
It was incredible how my head was turned. Everything fell into place, man. . . . For the first time, I saw the essence of blackism [black nationalism]. It's crazy; in the United States people think the black-power movement drew inspiration from Africa. All these Americans come over here looking for awareness. They don't realize they're the ones who've got it over there. Why we were even ashamed to go around in na tional dress until we saw pictures of blacks wearing dashikis on 125th Street. (Darnton, 1977, 6)
In West African popular music an important shiftoccurred as many musicians looked less to Europe and, by extension, its former colonies in the Caribbean, and began to draw inspiration from African American cultures in the United States. This essay examines Fela's seemingly paradoxical adoption and assimilation of American funk grooves and musical practices in his quest to further Africanize his music, and his transformation from British-trained Nigerian jazz trumpeter to black-nationalist countercultural dissident icon.
From Palmwine and Highlife to Afrobeat and Beyond
With its proximity to maritime commerce and overland trade routes connected to North Africa and the continent's interior, West Africa has long been a cultural crossroads and nexus of musical development. As noted by Waterman, the interwar years were a particularly fertile period for "the growth of pan- West African urban musical traditions [as]...