MASTER DRUMMER OF AFROBEAT - Duke University Press

gressing, drawing nicely. Then one day, I noticed that there was an electrical
switch on the wall. It was completely broken, and it was dangerous.
You know, in my childhood I used to play around with electricity— fixing
wires and batteries and light bulbs. So I had different components at
home, and I told my teacher that I had a brand- new switch that I could
install for him, and it was only going to cost him two shillings and six
pence. In those days my tuition fee was one pound, and one pound was
equal to twenty shillings. This was before Nigeria switched to the naira
currency. So I got my switch and I fixed the problem, and I wanted him
to pay me. He kept telling me, “I’ll get it to you,” but he never paid me.
Every day he says he’ll give me the money. I said nothing.
At the end of the month, my father gave me the money to pay for the
next month, because you have to pay in advance. So what I did was take
the one- pound note and change the money, and I deducted my two shillings
and six pence and I gave my teacher the rest. And he flipped out
completely! He said, “Hey, what’s this?” I said, “I just took my money
out of the one pound.” He shouted, “No! You can never do that! You have
to give me my one pound for the month! I told you, I will give you your
money.” I said, “But it’s over one month now since I put this switch in.”
The teacher said he was not gonna accept that. So I said okay, and I gave
him his full pound. And then I took my screwdriver out and I took off
my switch and I put it in my box and that was it. He saw this and he
said, “What?!” Because this guy was running the school in his own home,
his parents and grandparents were there. He started yelling, “Mommy,
mommy, mommy—come and look at this! Come and look at what Allen
has done!” So I left the fucking switch like that, and I told him, “Now
you’re gonna buy the switch, the electrician is gonna fix it, and you’re
gonna pay for both.” I did it like that diplomatically, because I didn’t want
to fight the guy. And I took my bag and walked out. So that was the end
of drafting school.
I went back home and narrated the whole story to my father. And he
said, “Okay. What next?” He asked if I wanted to look for another drafting
school. I thought about it and told him that I wanted to go to an electronics
school. So I had to start all over again, reading a whole new type
of literature and taking notes for the exams—first for the theory and
then for the practical. I studied for about one year and a half and then
I got a job. My uncle I. K. Mettle was the chief engineer of a German
radio company called Witt & Busch, and he got me employment there.
So I worked as a radio technician for about four years. We were building
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