Insanity: Rastafarian, Majek Fashek's dilemma....read full details

The dreadlocked and rastafarian artiste surely needs help. But for how long will this go on since help had come his way many times in the past and he seemed to have fluffed it. 

Majek Fashek has been trending all day after a blogger and investment banker, Joseph Edgar, chanced upon him at Fadeyi, in Lagos this morning and wrote a moving tale about the experience. The story though looked as if it happened years ago. 

Those who should know are saying Majek’s problem seemed hydra-headed though the rainmaker himself said he was facing a spiritual attack.

Movie maker, Charles Novia who managed Majek for some years had expressed his views on the reggae artiste’s dilemma. Monica Omorodion Swaida, Majek’s former back-up singer, according to a report, has even started a campaign to raise funds for Fashek whose health has deteriorated because of his long battle with drug addiction. 

“Our fight right now is to raise money so that we can send him to a home that can help him. Apart from his alcoholism, he has spiritual and mental issues to go with it,” Swaida quipped.

The US-based lady has created a GoFundMe page for the former star and her aim is to raise twenty thousand dollars.

Back to Charles Novia, he narrated, “I managed Majek Fashek for 5 years, 2005 to 2010, re-engineering his career on my label, November Records and tried as much as possible to bring him back to the limelight all through those years. It was a passionate and selfless adventure. My life, my business, everything stood still all those years for Majek. I wanted him to be healed. I wanted him well. He was too much of a talent to be allowed to waste. I fought for him, struggled for him and with him. I sacrificed everything for him. It was a mission and a vision for me.

“Thank God for a wonderful wife who understood and supported me in my quest to help the legend and never for one day complained. What didn’t I do for my brother? And I don’t say this to elicit any sympathy but just out of pure love and angst; a mix of emotions I feel right now. It’s as if it was all wasted or that I wasted my years within those 5 years. But I regret not one day. It was my destiny. It was a burden bigger than I could bear but which I had to carry.”

“Majek is like a masquerade, an extremely bohemian act with frustrating demands but a lovable childlike disposition when he’s in the flip mode. He’s medically schizophrenic. He was an artistic Jekyll and Hyde. Gosh! He was trouble! But we all took it all in our stride. We all understood. We understood that he had his devils to chase out. That he had sunk into a deep hole which he himself had struggled to crawl out of but needed our helping hands as well. We understood that deep spiritism mixed with helpless alcoholism had made him an opposite being; a guy who lived in his past and sees his present as his future.

“But we had to do what we had to do. I am writing a book on my experiences with Majek. I don’t know when it will finish. I was going to shoot a movie on him and had started some measure of pre-production in America, when he got a bit jittery and asked me to stop, even after giving me the rights to tell that story. ‘Shoot it when I’m dead’ he said.

This narration from someone close to him gives a factual insight to how a star can press his self-destruct button and destroy the fame he managed to build for decades. Majek had confessed or concurred that his problem was the backlash of having broken a vow in mysticism he indulged in while in United States of America. In spiritual or metaphysical things, the onus lies on the victim to open up and allow the evil spirit to leave him or remain in the same shape and get worse till death. Majek Fashek’s destiny lies in his hand but let us his fans intensify prayer for the African pride because he needs it more now.