Afrobeat group, BANTU, on Friday released its third studio album titled Agberos International.
The worldwide digital release comes 13 years after the group’s second album, Bantu.
Comprising 10 tracks, Agberos International took “six years in the making from the first chord to the final mix and mastering process,” the group said in a message posted on its official Facebook page.
The album’s title expresses the band’s intentions.
Agbero is Yoruba slang for public vehicle conductor, a man hailing passers-by to board his taxi or bus.
The agbero implicated in the title is a crowd-puller of international reach, an apt metaphor for a band like BANTU, which deploys the estimable services of producer/sound engineer Aman Junaid who has worked with such artistes and groups like TLC, George Clinton, Joi and Organized Noize.
On the Afrobeat song from Agberos International, ‘Niger Delta Blues,’ there is as much a call to international authorities to look at the plight of the people of the Niger Delta as there is to the people to dance as there is to master drummer Tony Allen, whose universally African spirit one might say governs the proceedings on Agberos International.
On ‘Niger Delta Blues’, the album’s longest song, bandleader Ade Bantu, who is fluent in both English and German, offers a spoken word piece, parts of it in the pidgin peculiar to the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.
The song is introduced by a Yoruba folk song in what can be read as the band focusing its pan-African, pan-Nigerian focus on a single song.
“The blues of the Niger Delta has now become the blues of Nigeria – yours and mine,” says Ade Bantu over a heavy Afrobeat sound.
Not that the music of BANTU is exclusively political. Along with stinging criticism of the Nigerian ruling class and harmful western policies, the music of BANTU is never less than danceable -as if even in acknowledging the difficulty of Lagos, Nigeria and African living, there is an imperative to be happy, to see the bright side, to remember that though music is a tool of protest, it also one that inspires dance.
On Agberos International, the band offers a satire of the Lagos Barbie archetype, a local human version of the popular doll; there is ‘Ma Ko Ba Mi’, a playful interpretation of a common Yoruba folk song; and ‘Oni T’emi’, a love song delivered in spoken word verses featuring the poet Wana Wana aka Wana Udobang, who plays a female who is serenading and is being serenaded by Ade Bantu’s male lover with “pitch-perfect oriki poetry”.
The album concludes with ‘Ile (Africa)’, a part eulogistic, part elegiac tribute from a returnee narrator to the continent that inspires the band. It is both love song and activist music; as always it lends itself to dancing.
Months before the release of Agberos International, BANTU travelled by road, more than 5000 kilometres across the continent, to attend a festival at the banks of the River Niger.
“We were determined to show solidarity with our fellow brothers and sisters in Mali who have been battling with Islamist insurgency for years,” said Ade Bantu about the trip.
