AFROBEAT RULES

Seun Kuti!! Fela Kuti’s son who is keeping his father’s afrobeat legacy alive played a wonderful fantastic awesome show where I danced harder and longer than ever before. I think the key word for Afrobeat is STAMINA. Man, these songs are like 20 minutes of the same rhythm. And some of these guys have been playing the same beat for the last three 20 minute songs and they still go strong. Every one of them is so necessary for the whole togetherness of the song-two trumpets, two saxophones, two guitars, a bass, one large drum, one wooden beat keeper, one shaking gourd, two incredible back up singers/dancers, and Seun himself in his appropriate matching white striped black suit and shoes just like his dad. You just keep in the music, one stray thought can alter the vibe, and ohhh their stamina inspired mine and when the people in the stands could hardly contain themselves anymore and their energy spilled out into the dance floor, it was all out from there. Front and center dancing hard, everyone grinning from ear to ear, or maybe it was just me…
And in the revolutionary spirit of Fela’s afrobeat, issues were addressed. People are dying in Africa, there is no money. Rich people start going broke, they give them money. If they don’t, the rest of the world will go broke. But wait man, Africa’s been broke for some time now. A speculation of course, but some raw truth nonetheless.
And at the end of the night, I was so content and Bunmi and I caught a cab right out of there for a decent price thanks to my Twi vocabulary and my STAMINA, only to be woken up a couple of hours later by my other roommate Sam who couldn’t wait till morning to tell us about how they were invited back stage to chill hard with Seun and the rest of the band. Unbelievable.

Last weekend Sam and I and three other lovely people we have met here traveled to Togo, where the main mode of transportation is by jumping on the back of a motorcycle, and everyone speaks French. We stayed at an atrociously disgusting hotel which was only fair as the amount we paid for it couldn’t have gotten us much better. We weaved through the Lome market and found ourselves at the ocean. Once the water finally came back on in the hotel and we were able to take a shower for the first time in a couple of days, we gussied up, went out, especially looking forward to the place with the description in the travel book as having multilingual prostitutes. Afterwards paying some money for a motorcycle tour around Lome just for the sheer thrill of it. It was funny really. These guys do this all day everyday and next thing you know they’ve got a couple of white kids on the back of their bikes paying them a decent amount of money just to ride in a circle, all the while they laugh their heads off.

The next day we caught a bus up north to a little mountain village called Kpalime whose winding dirt roads were centered around the looming red and white church. We took a very scenic ride indeed on the backs of motorcycles up to the mountains where we were welcomed by drumming and dancing in the rain and then were accompanied by the wonderful Coolio Ga Ga to the waterfalls. There was a very pleasant café that served couscous and café au lait, but the best au lait in the entire world, and we were all ecstatic to drink coffee, even if it was Nescafe. We met MoMo there, who invited us to a traditional African drum and dance show, where we were joined with what seemed to be peace corps volunteers. Before this, we went out to dinner with Momo and his Moroccan and Algerian friends, where I could only say so much considering the conversation was in French through and through. Je ne parle pas francais. Weird vibes were thrown all over the room, but I suppose when the electricity is out for a whole city and the only light to be seen for miles and miles is candlelight, and you are in a cold stone fortress with people you can’t communicate with, anyone can seem shady. We did make it to la spectacular! Where beats were hard to contain and dancing games were played afterwards, of which I was one of the first to be booed of the stage, until drum circles commenced and everyone danced in a circle together.

The next day Momo found us a hidden bus stop full of charcoal eyed Muslims napping on benches where we waited patiently for the bus to fill up. But that’s the thing, the bus won’t leave until it is completely full, and at the rate this station was going, it probably could have taken another 6 hours to get 7 more people to need a ride across the border. So we all threw in a couple cedi and got to stretch out in a half full tro tro. The bumpy and winding roads through the limbo of Togo and Ghana in a decrepit tro tro whose roof could only take one large bump to have a head bust straight through the rust was a bit much for my stomach to handle so I was sick all the way back from Kpalime to Accra and at every stop we made, at the Immigration offices and bus stops. That was rough. But all is well now.

People have also got to calling me Krystabell. See, the first couple of weeks here, every once in a while someone would call me Krystabell and I would think, NO WAY! only mi madre calls me that. but then I figured out it is a sort of common name around here and i've discovered that it's hard for people to understand Krysta right away, so I say Krystabell and they get it instantly. So people call me that here, and I walk down the road and kids scream Krystabell. I can't say I don't love it. It feels like home. Where else???