Water No Get Enemy sits on the B-side of Expensive Shit, released in Lagos in 1975 on Fela's own label after the notorious raid on the Kalakuta Republic. The A-side takes its title from the joint the police claimed to have found on him, which he swallowed and, the story goes, later returned via a borrowed toilet whose contents were analysed with due state seriousness. The B-side is the answer. Not the pamphlet: the answer. Ten minutes and change of horns, tenor lines, electric piano, a Tony Allen groove that walks the length of the track like a man who knows every street, and a Yoruba proverb taken up as chorus.
The proverb is old and severe. Water has no enemy. If you want to eat, you need water. If you want to cook, you need water. If your child dies, you will need water to bathe the body. The song does not translate the maxim into slogan. It lays it down as fact, then returns to it, then returns again, and the return is what carries the meaning. This is not a folk homily. It is civil doctrine in the shape of a groove: a reminder that certain goods sit beneath politics and cannot be captured by any regime, however greedy, however armed.
What matters musically is the discipline. Afrobeat in Fela's hands is not a crowd-pleaser. The intro takes its time, the horns enter as if the band has all afternoon, and once the vamp is set no one rushes. Tony Allen's cymbal work alone is worth the ten minutes: quiet, exact, subtractive, closer to a great jazz drummer than to any funk stereotype. The horns pace themselves like a small state that has decided not to spend all its capital in the first year. Everything is patient, and yet the whole thing moves.
That patience is why the track belongs on HW today. The site has spent a fortnight in cultivated silence: Picard on the silence older than speech, Stifter's Bunte Steine, a Sunday table with a folded newspaper and a cup that intends to be small. All good. But a page fed only on European hush begins to mistake its own restraint for the whole moral order. Fela is the corrective. Restraint here comes from a hotter climate, a heavier state, a more dangerous room. And it is still restraint. The groove holds. The proverb repeats. Nothing is added that does not earn its bar.
There is also the geopolitical whisper, which a Taoist ear can hear plainly. Wu wei in West African clothes: do not fight the water, do not attempt to enclose it. It moves at its own pace, it finds every level, it outlasts every wall. This is not vague spirituality. It is a very precise refusal to be governed by scarcity theatre — oil, foreign currency, official permission — because underneath all of that is a good the regime cannot manufacture and would be foolish to insult.
Play it while the kettle is on, with the door open to the street if the neighbours will bear it. Do not treat it as background. Let the horns come in on their own terms. By the time the vamp has settled you will notice that Monday, which had grown a little too well-mannered, is once again a day on which a body has to walk.