How Stevie Wonder's music reflects global Black consciousness and decolonisation
Professor Kevin K. Gaines, Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia, examined African influences on Stevie Wonder’s experimental album ‘Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants’ at the Global Cultures Institute annual lecture on 4 March.
Left to right: Professor Kevin Gaines, Professor Daniel Orrells, Dr Henry Brefo, Dr Jarad Zimbler, Selasi Adjor, Professor Sarah Stockwell, Dr Daniel Matlin and Dr Michelle Kelly. (Image: David Tett)
Professor Gaines positioned Wonder’s 1979 album Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants as shaped by the musician’s experiences at FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos.
The album sits at the intersection of major issues at the time – civil rights movements, African liberation, and a growing interest in the environment – as well as Wonder’s own experiences as a Black, blind, international touring artist.
Wonder – like many artists of Black Power era – was concerned with embracing African heritage in a global Black consciousness and finding solutions to the alienating effects of racial exclusion in American society. He believes in music very strongly as a vehicle for consciousness raising.
Professor Kevin K. Gaines
The Global Cultures Institute was delighted to host Professor Gaines for our third Annual Lecture. In bringing together global music aesthetics, ecology, and disability studies, Professor Gaines' lecture brilliantly encapsulated the work of talking across boundaries that the institute seeks to do.
Professor Daniel Orrells, Chair-Director, Global Cultures Institute
Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants was originally conceived as the soundtrack to a documentary of the same name, which was in turn influenced by an eponymous book about experiments on plants showing their response to music and their ability to communicate with humans. Despite criticism from the scientific community, the text resonated with the alternative spirituality movements of the global 1960s.
A ‘global homecoming’
FESTAC – described as a ‘global homecoming’ – brought together artists and intellectuals from across Africa and the African diaspora. The historic gathering sought to reconnect communities separated by the histories of slavery and colonisation.
FESTAC is part of African American experience of return. It’s an important intellectual and political right of passage, and African Americans have vested that return with the fulfilment of a romantic yearning.
Professor Kevin K. Gaines
Wonder attended as part of the African American delegation. It was his first visit to Africa, and he performed at the festival’s closing ceremony. He even delayed returning to the US for the Grammys, performing at the ceremony from Lagos instead.
Alongside the official programme, a “counter FESTAC” emerged at venues such as Afrika Shrine. Founded by Fela Kuti, the venue hosted performances and discussions that criticised the Nigerian government’s handling of the festival.
Wonder visited the Shrine during his stay. While there, he announced plans to distribute gifts to blind children and expressed his happiness that his music had reached audiences on the African continent.
Wonder was interested in promoting styles of African diaspora music to American and African American audiences. His aim is a certain kind of consciousness raising. He understands very well that music – Bob Marley’s, for instance – is coming out of a specific critique of colonialism and the history of enslavement.
Professor Kevin K. Gaines
Professor Kevin K. Gaines delivered the Global Cultures Institute annual lecture 2025-26. (Image: David Tett)
Vision beyond sight
Wonder was an exception to the usual barriers of success faced by African American artists; he refused to see his blindness as a handicap and actively participated in the Black Power era political and cultural gatherings.
Professor Gaines emphasised Wonder’s desire to connect with global audiences and use music as political advocacy. His songs often contain submerged references to his life as a sightless person, as well as to racial injustice.
He often visited schools for the blind while touring overseas and performed benefit concerts to raise funds for schools and other charities, bringing attention to disability issues alongside racial inequality.
Blindness as much as blackness was central to Stevie Wonder’s creative vision and global consciousness.
Professor Kevin K. Gaines
Through composing the soundtrack for a film he was unable to see, Wonder wanted to push back on perceptions of what sightless people can do and open doors for disabled people.
Stevie Wonder performs at the 2008 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. (Image: Adam McCullough/Shutterstock)
Ecological influences
Parts of the film represented images rarely seen on screen before – such as a Venus flytrap catching an insect, or seeds sprouting from the ground – so there were no cinematic precedents for Wonder to follow.
Wonder’s lyrics summon images of the sensory experiences of the natural world.
Professor Kevin K. Gaines
The film hoped to capitalise on the burgeoning ecological consciousness sparked by the first Earth Day in April 1970. According to Professor Gaines, Wonder reflected this environmental consciousness through experimentation, drawing on traditions associated with reverence for nature – such as Indian, South Asian, Japanese and European classical and traditional musical idioms.
When the documentary was withdrawn from wider commercial release, the album had to stand on its own; sales underperformed despite promotional efforts from the record label.
However, nearly five decades on, the concerns referenced in the album remain relevant – suggesting its resonance has only increased.
The album’s operation at the intersection between struggles for racial and social justice with disability activism seems prophetic given our current times.
Professor Kevin K. Gaines
Professor Gaines' talk was titled 'Global Culture and Environmental Consciousness in Stevie Wonder's Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants'. (Image: David Tett)
Global Black cultures
During a Q&A, Professor Gaines and Dr Jarad Zimber, Director of Research at the Global Cultures Institute, discussed the limitations of large festivals such as FESTAC and whether they draw attention to people who are marginalised. For African Americans, the festival presented an opportunity to compare notes on Black experiences and gain direct knowledge, instead of through movies or propaganda – yet it came with its own challenges.
People talk about FESTAC as a moment of connection across the differences created by these historical processes such as slavery and colonisation – but looking at FESTAC, a lot of the discourse is being produced by African Americans. You get the sense that even though the intention was to imagine Blackness as something global, it was very difficult for African Americans – and perhaps Stevie Wonder – to truly accomplish that.
Professor Kevin K. Gaines
The audience posed questions on the influence of animism or counterculture hippy movements; state sponsorship or subsidies for artists in the context of civil rights movements; African Americans’ relationship to US citizenship; and whether FESTAC succeeded in its aim to raise global consciousness of African culture.
The work done by Professor Gaines in his book American Africans in Ghana has been of foundational importance to the LITAID project. It’s been a great privilege having him at King’s, and hearing him further develop some of the book's core ideas – about the movement of artists and ideas across Africa and the African diaspora, and about utopian dimensions of pan-African political and cultural projects.
Dr Jarad Zimber, Director of Research at the Global Cultures Institute
About the Global Cultures Institute
The Global Cultures Institute fosters interdisciplinary conversations to probe and articulate the limits and boundaries that divide us on the rounds of language, culture, community and identity. By building a critical understanding of their origins and development, the Institute shares its work through research, education and public engagement, finding ways to talk beyond boundaries.
About LITAID
LITAID (Decolonization, Appropriation and the Materials of Literature in Africa and its Diaspora) is a five-year research project in the Department of English that addresses fundamental questions about the materials of literature and how these are appropriated from one literary culture for another. It does this by examining literary decolonization in Africa and its diaspora from the 1940s to the 1960s. It focuses especially on cultural production and arts education in Ghana, considering their transnational dimensions from the perspective of local artists and institutions as well as a range of travellers who came seeking decolonial resources for their own communities.
About the Empires and Decolonizations Research Hub
The Empires and Decolonizations Research Hub in the Department of History aims to serve both the King’s community and the wider national and international one by initiating conversations around the history of empires.
