Explaining Political Agitators: Socialization and Class in the Making of Gani Fawehinmi and Fela Anikulapo Kuti of Nigeria

Abstract

Why do certain individuals make everyone’s business their business? Why do they get so emotionally involved in public policies as if only they are affected, damning whatever unpleasant consequences their action and inaction may cause? Why do such people neither wait to be mobilized, nor themselves wait to mobilize others before taking antagonistic stands on public issues? Subjecting the lives and times of two prominent Nigerian agitators, Gani and Fela to theoretical interrogations through the life history approach, this paper argues that two basic factors: socialization and class, are major determinants of the attitudes of man towards political issues around him, and that so long as the two factors endure in social formations, individuals will always emerge as different political personalities with different political dispositions. What nations and policy makers do with views and thoughts of agitators towards public good is what needs further debate.