Things Fall Deep

The Los Angeles Times runs obituaries for Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, car designer Roy Brown, actor Harry Reems, and author Chinua Achebe.

"A Rare Phenomenon"

"In other words, if you’re looking for an orderly assemblage of the facts, this isn’t it. But 'Fela!' offers something that only the theater can provide—an immersion in Fela’s music, an encounter with his charismatically frenetic concert presence and a confrontation with his political style. The trade-off, trust me, is worth it. But be prepared to get out of your seat and shake your derriere. Passive spectatorship would be an insult."

Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times reviews Fela! at the Ahmanson Theatre.

"A Kind of 'Shock of the New'"

"'The Benue River, the largest tributary of the Niger, is 650 miles long,' Berns says. 'Central Nigeria is one of the heartlands of early occupation of the African continent. It's a historically important area, but it has always been a sort of in-between zone.' The artistic legacy of the Benue Valley—too far south to have been well known to Sudanic Arabs and too far north to have been accessible to Europeans before the mid-19th century—has received far less attention than the arts of Nigeria's southwestern coast, particularly metal, ivory and bead work of the Yoruba, a huge cultural group."

Suzanne Muchnic in the Los Angeles Times visits the Fowler Museum's current main exhibit, Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley.

Looking for the Perfect Afrobeat

"Opening with a spacey duet between Fela on keyboards and powerhouse drummer Tony Allen that sounds like an outtake from Miles Davis' electric period, the title track is a mercilessly funky, 25-minute journey. Yet even as Fela decries Nigeria's post-colonial plight in a mix of pidgin English and West African Yoruba, the song never loses track of its central mission to move bodies as well as minds."

Chris Barton in the Los Angeles Times claims that "2010 might be the year of Fela" Kuti.

African or American?

"What the Maryland professor unearthed among public British documents -- including a 1759 parish baptismal record and a 1773 ship's muster, both of which list Equiano's place of birth as South Carolina -- came as a shock. 'I was surprised. I was resistant, in fact,' Mr. Carretta says. 'The naval record was the real problem to me, because at that point he's free, he's an adult. The pursers went and simply asked, "What's your name? Where are you from?"'"

Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher Education explains the dispute over Olaudah Equiano's birthplace.