Even after the event, many Nigerians may have missed that a French president had spent an entire evening, on July 8 2018, in one of the most emblematic, but also one of the most contested places of Lagos:  the New Afrika Shrine—an historic cultural space associated with the iconic Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. It took giant advertising boards that read “Ecobank and TRACE invite President Macron to the Shrine,” the refurbishment of the road leading to the club, and finally an official announcement by the Lagos Authorities of the closing of the main axis around the New Afrika Shrine from noon to midnight, for everyone to realize that president Macron will spend an evening at the mythical club of Fela Kuti, surrounded by meticulously selected French, Nigerian and African personalities. The music and cultural TV channel, Trace.tv, proudly announced that the objective of this “night out” was meant to celebrate “African culture.”

Two days after the event, reactions began to emerge on social networks, first from Nigerian cultural and political personalities, but also from eminent members of African and diaspora artistic and intellectual spheres. Some artists, particularly those inspired by Fela Kuti, were as stupefied by the events that unfolded that night at the Shrine. Take Qudus Onikeku for instance, a dancer who choreographed a piece on Fela Kuti titled Africaman original, who described being “flabberwhelmed … I’ve written ten posts about last night at Afrika Shrine and I keep deleting them. Still can’t find the words,” he said. For others, such as Serge Aimé Coulibaly, also a dancer, choreographer and creator of a show on Fela Kuti, Kalakuta Republik, anger quickly replaced stupefaction: “Emmanuel Macron represents everything Fela was fighting against, so the symbol is contradictory. If it was to meet the youth, there are many other places in Lagos to do so.” On the contrary, the Kuti family, expressed a feeling of pride that the young president of a great Western power had chosen to visit an emblematic Nigerian venue in the frame of his two-day only official visit in their country.

So, for many people in Nigeria, the fact that President Macron – nicknamed in France the “President of the rich” – visited the Shrine of Fela Kuti, the self-proclaimed “Black President,” was quite exceptional. At the same time, this visit remained relatively unnoticed in French media, mentioned briefly as the president’s visit to a nightclub in the Nigerian economic capital.

In order to fully grasp the challenges at stake in this presidential visit to the Shrine in July 2018, one must revisit both the history of this mythical cultural and political place, the trajectory of its founder, Fela Kuti, and the evolution of the place since the death of its “Chief Priest” in 1997. This brief history of the Shrine allows us to understand how this place evolved from an artistic space, emblematic of forms of creativity and contestation conceived by its founder as “Pan-African” in opposition to the Western cultural, political and economic hegemony, to the emblem of a globalized “African” culture, stripped of its dissenting dimensions to support the political communication of a European president.