Fate would have it that Fela's daughter, a wonderful dancer, decided to teach me how to dance Afrobeat, the music that Fela invented. Femi, Fela's son, runs a band and is constantly flanked by three dancers on the stage, as well as an alternating crew of dancers who come out into the audience and climb up into a cage, a wooden frame on stilts covered with netting to stop eager hands from wandering inside. When they move, the cage sways and jiggles from side to side. Though the girls are small, they are strong and powerful and it often feels as if a flick of the hips could bring the cage down.
The three girls on the stage are the full-time dancers. During band practise every Tuesday and Thursday they wear t-shirts and tracksuit pants but when they perform, either in Lagos or overseas, they wear fabulously-crafted outfits usually made from strings of beads and the bare minimum of underwear. Great chains of coloured glass beads hang heavy over each shoulder, crossing at the back. The hips are adorned with more strings, and when they move, the beads jangle and clatter against eachother, in a mind-boggling frenzy of colours. From the waist up, the girls sometimes appear to be standing perfectly still, waiting for a bus perhaps. From the waist down, they move their ample hips in dizzying circles, up and down and around and around. If the audience wasn't already in a state of smoke-induced transfixion, then this would do make sure they were.
It is very hard to dance Afrobeat. Clutching onto a railing, flicking my hips this way and that, I am trying my best, and I have been told I am "not a lost cause".
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