“Who’s Got the Paper? I’ve Got the Match”: Osibisa and the Politics of Documentation

Posted on 29th October, 2025 (GMT 05:30 hrs)

ABSTRACT

This paper offers an interpretive and historical reading of Osibisa’s 1970s Afro-rock track Who’s Got the Paper? as a sonic meditation on the politics of documentation, identity, and resistance. Beneath its surface as a jubilant “party anthem,” the song encodes a global genealogy of documentary surveillance—from colonial pass laws and apartheid bureaucracies to postcolonial citizenship registers and digital data regimes. The refrain’s dialectical call and response—“Who’s got the paper?” / “I’ve got the match”—stage an encounter between state surveillance and insurgent agency, between the archive’s demand for verification and the people’s capacity for ignition. Combining lyrical analysis with postcolonial, Foucauldian, and musicological frameworks, the paper interprets sound as a mode of political imagination that exceeds textual control. Extending this argument to the Indian context, it situates the song’s critique within contemporary regimes of legibility exemplified by the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC), National Population Register (NPR), the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA)—each reiterating the colonial “paper logic” of inclusion through exclusion. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, James C. Scott’s notion of legibility, Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception,” and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, the essay argues that Who’s Got the Paper? performs the political imagination of music as resistance—where rhythm becomes revolt and dance becomes dissent. Through the contrapuntal readings of Edward Said, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Frantz Fanon, Osibisa’s sound emerges as a postcolonial act of re-signification: transmuting the colonizer’s documentary order into an emancipatory rhythm of decolonial speech.

Keywords: Osibisa, Afro-rock, citizenship, documentation, CAA, NRC, NPR, DPDPA, SIR, apartheid, protest music, postcoloniality, resistance, data politics

Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA) stands in solidarity with all communities and activists resisting the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), National Register of Citizens (NRC), Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and other exclusionary documentation regimes in fascist BJP-ruled India. These mechanisms, disguised as administrative exercises, institutionalize surveillance, discrimination, and dispossession—particularly targeting marginalized, migrant, and Muslim populations. As a collective committed to decolonial, ecological, and emancipatory thought, OBMA opposes the reduction of citizenship to paper and data, and the violence of verification that accompanies it. This article, while scholarly in form, is thus also an act of refusal—affirming that the right to belong cannot be legislated by the archive, but must be lived, sung, and collectively reclaimed.

1. Introduction: Joy, Fire, and the Politics of Paper

Osibisa⤡—Who’s Got the Paper (Lyrics)

Let′s go, let’s go, let′s go now
Who’s got the paper?
Who’s got the match?
Who′s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
I′ve got the match
Who’s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who’s got the match?
Who′s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
I′ve got the match
What you wanna do?
Party, man, party, man
One more time now
Who’s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who’s got the match?
Who′s got the paper?
I′ve got the match
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Who’s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who’s got the match?
Who′s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who′s got the match?
Who’s got the paper?
Who’s got the match?

Writer(s): Teddy Osei, Michael Tontoh, Solomon Amarfio, Jeannot Mandengue, Fidelis Kofi Ayivor, Kiki Gyan

Osibisa’s Who’s Got the Paper? (1974) opens with an infectious groove. Layered percussion, call-and-response vocals, and cyclical chants create a euphoric atmosphere that invites participation. Yet beneath the celebratory surface lies a question heavy with historical weight: Who’s got the paper?

Formed in London in 1969 by Ghanaian, Caribbean, and West Indian musicians, the band Osibisa pioneered Afro-rock, blending African highlife, funk, and progressive rock (Collins, 2002). Their music represented a diasporic assertion of Black presence in post-imperial Britain—a celebration of cultural fusion and political defiance (Gilroy, 1993). Though widely perceived as “party music,” Osibisa’s work carries traces of the Black Atlantic’s colonial trauma and liberation struggles. The track’s polyrhythmic percussion and syncopated horn sections recall Ghanaian highlife and Caribbean funk, making the dance floor a diasporic space of resistance.

This essay argues that Who’s Got the Paper? is not merely an invitation to dance but an encoded critique of bureaucratic control. The song allegorizes the history of “papers”—passes, identification cards, registration certificates—that mediate inclusion and exclusion. In its repetition lies a question directed at power: who defines legitimacy? who holds the right to move, to belong, to exist?
Here, one may recall Edward Said’s (1993) notion of “contrapuntal reading,” which invites us to hear in cultural texts the echo of imperial histories—how joy and rhythm themselves can carry traces of surveillance and resistance.

2. Historical Genealogy of the “Paper”

The “paper” has long been an instrument of governance. Across colonial and postcolonial histories, the state’s demand for documents has defined citizenship, mobility, and subjugation. A brief genealogy contextualizes Osibisa’s refrain within this global documentary apparatus.

2.1. Pass Laws and the Colonial State

In 1906, the Transvaal government enacted the Asiatic Registration Act, compelling Indians and other non-white residents to carry registration certificates. Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement (1906–1908) famously resisted this “Black Act,” culminating in the symbolic burning of registration papers in 1908 (Brown, 1972).

This act of burning—the literal destruction of the state’s paper—prefigures the “match” motif in Osibisa’s song. The line “I’ve got the match” recalls the revolutionary gesture of igniting the paper of subjugation, transforming compliance into defiance.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) would read this moment as the decolonization of symbolic order—the burning of the colonizer’s language of registration and its replacement by an embodied, communal act of refusal.

The song’s movement from “Who’s got the match?” to “I’ve got the match” marks a critical shift—from the language of state interrogation to the grammar of collective defiance. The question, initially posed in the idiom of surveillance, echoes the bureaucratic demand for proof, presence, and legitimacy. Yet the reply reclaims that demand as a site of insurgency: the speaker’s possession of the match transforms vulnerability into agency. This inversion—question to answer, paper to fire—enacts what Derrida (1995) might call an archive fever turned against the archive itself: the will to incinerate the logic of control. The repetition of the question throughout the song sustains tension, but the final response detonates it; sound becomes combustion, rhythm becomes revolt. In this way, Osibisa’s chorus performs an epistemic reversal—the state’s desire to document is consumed by the people’s desire to burn.

2.2. Apartheid and the Dompas System

In mid-20th-century South Africa, apartheid institutionalized the passbook—or dompas (Afrikaans for “dumb pass”)—a despised symbol of racial control that every Black South African over sixteen was forced to carry to enter or remain in “white” areas. This document recorded an individual’s right to exist within restricted zones, turning mobility into a privilege granted by the state. Failure to produce it meant arrest, fines, imprisonment, or deportation to designated “homelands.” The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, where police killed 69 protestors refusing to show their passes, exposed the lethal violence underpinning this paper regime (Posel, 1991). Against this backdrop, Osibisa’s haunting refrain—“Who’s got the paper?”—resonates as an ironic echo of the apartheid demand, “Waar is jou pas?” (“Where is your pass?”), transforming a bureaucratic question into a universal indictment of state power.

In this context, Who’s Got the Paper? also evokes both the literal danger of not having the paper and the moral courage of rejecting it. The line “Who’s got the match?” transforms into a metaphor for collective ignition—burning the symbols of bureaucratic oppression.
Fanon (1963) would recognize in this act the emergence of the “new humanism” of revolt, where the colonized subject asserts agency not through legal recognition but through embodied defiance.

As colonial control gave way to post-imperial migration, the paper’s function shifted—from passbook to passport, from containment to control.

2.3. Diasporic Britain and Immigration Papers

By the 1970s, African and Caribbean migrants in Britain faced another kind of paper politics: immigration controls, work permits, and ID checks. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) and the Immigration Act (1971) redefined belonging through documentary verification. Osibisa’s musicians, as Black expatriates in London, were deeply embedded in this milieu of post-imperial suspicion. Their “party” thus becomes both survival and satire—a musical assertion of identity in a system that demanded proof of it.
As Said (1978) would argue, the postcolonial migrant occupies a liminal zone between visibility and exclusion—a “contrapuntal” existence where music, narrative, and body become the only remaining documents of selfhood.

3. The Aesthetics of Repetition: Sonic Rhythm as Resistance

The minimal lyrics of Who’s Got the Paper?—a series of repetitive interrogatives and responses—produce a call-and-response dynamic central to African diasporic music traditions. The cyclical refrain acts as an incantation, transforming the dance floor into a participatory ritual of memory.

Who’s got the paper?
I’ve got the match.
Party, man, party, man…

The repetition performs several functions:

Interrogative Exposure: The demand for “paper” mirrors the moment of surveillance. The listener is interpellated into the bureaucratic gaze, compelled to respond.
Subversive Reply: The answer “I’ve got the match” inverts the power relation, reclaiming agency.
Joy as Defiance: The imperative “party” refuses despair, asserting joy as resistance—what Robin D. G. Kelley (1997) calls “freedom dreams,” where celebration becomes a revolutionary act. The lines “What you wanna do? Party, man, party, man, one more time now” can be read on two registers. On the surface, they represent the Afro-rock invitation to dance, joy, and festivity. Yet, if “party” is interpreted politically, the lyric becomes a veiled affirmation of collective organization—the banned ANC and PAC, the Black Consciousness Movement, or, by 1983–84, the United Democratic Front. The phrase “one more time now” echoes the cyclical nature of struggle: protest, repression, and renewed resistance.

Osibisa’s sonic exuberance thus conceals and reveals the political. The groove itself becomes insurgent—what Paul Gilroy (1993) terms “the radical politics of transfiguration.”
Ngũgĩ (1993) would describe such music as the “moving centre” of cultural freedom, where colonized peoples reclaim the performative and oral as counter-archives to written domination.

3.1. Sound as Archive: The Politics of Ephemerality

Sound, unlike paper, resists fixity. Its ephemerality is its politics—it circulates outside the archive’s grasp. Where the document seeks permanence and authority, rhythm embodies transience and plurality. As Tina Campt (2017) observes, “listening to images” allows us to perceive the quiet frequencies of resistance that official histories suppress. Similarly, to listen to Osibisa is to engage in an act of acoustic decolonization. Their groove is a living archive—an insurgent memory that cannot be stamped, filed, or confiscated. The beat preserves what bureaucracy erases, transforming sound into a counter-document of the dispossessed.

Where the written archive seeks permanence through inscription, sound operates in what Benjamin (1936) called the “aura of the transient”—a presence that resists reproduction’s authority. Osibisa’s music thus reclaims the archive’s death-drive (Derrida, 1995), transforming ephemerality itself into political endurance.

3.2. Afro-Rock, Prog-Rock, and the Politics of Experimentation

Osibisa’s Who’s Got the Paper? must also be heard within the broader aesthetic and political landscape of 1970s progressive music. The band’s emergence in post-imperial London placed them at the intersection of Afro-diasporic rhythm and Western progressive experimentation—a hybrid form that expanded both traditions. As Paul Gilroy (1993) notes, the Black Atlantic’s musical circuits often transformed modernity’s cultural forms into countercultural critique. In this sense, Osibisa’s Afro-rock reterritorialized the sonic ambition of progressive rock—its extended compositions, technical virtuosity, and experimental timbre—through an Afrocentric philosophy of rhythm and communal transcendence.

While British prog-rock groups like Pink Floyd, Yes, and King Crimson explored alienation, time, and technology through electronic and symphonic excess, Osibisa repurposed those formal freedoms toward diasporic liberation and collective joy. The complexity of their arrangements—the interplay of horn sections, talking drums, and electric guitar solos—mirrored the structural freedom of prog-rock, but rooted in polyrhythm rather than melodic hierarchy. The result was what might be called Afro-prog: a decolonial sonic form where rhythm became the vehicle of futurity.

Their early albums—Osibisa (1971), Woyaya (1971), and Heads (1972)—already staged this negotiation between psychedelic futurism and postcolonial recovery. The winged-elephant artwork by Roger Dean, who also designed covers for Yes and Asia, visually positioned Osibisa within the utopian imagination of prog-rock while grounding it in African mythos and migratory symbolism. As Édouard Glissant (1997) would suggest, such creolized forms enact a poetics of relation—they refuse purity and hierarchy, choosing instead the open, unpredictable encounter of sounds and cultures.

This synthesis also signals a political refusal. If prog-rock sought transcendence through complexity, Osibisa sought emancipation through collectivity. The groove—cyclical, participatory, plural—subverted the linear teleology of Western harmony, turning virtuosity into solidarity. Their rhythmic layering performs what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would call a rhizomatic resistance: a non-hierarchical music that spreads, connects, and destabilizes. In this light, Who’s Got the Paper? not only critiques the “paper logic” of the state but also sonically enacts a revolt against the “score logic” of the West.

By transforming the technical language of progressive rock into a vernacular of Afro-diasporic freedom, Osibisa converted the stage into a postcolonial commons—a place where rhythm spoke in tongues of defiance.

If Osibisa’s hybrid grooves reimagined rock through the pulse of diasporic memory, their insistence on rhythm over hierarchy inverted colonial hierarchies of genre and race. The drum became the document — a percussive archive of displacement and defiance. Yet Osibisa were not alone in this insurgent reorchestration of sound as freedom. Across the African continent, another musical form was igniting bureaucratic nerves and state anxieties — a sound that fused funk, Yoruba polyrhythm, and political fury.

The following table maps the historical and political resonances surrounding Osibisa’s “Who’s Got the Paper?”, situating its lyrical motifs of paper and match within key anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, and diasporic struggles where identity, legitimacy, and resistance were mediated through the control of documents:

Year	Event / Movement	Key Issue (Paper / Identity)	Connection to the Song
1906–1908	Gandhi’s Pass Resistance (Asiatic Registration Act, Johannesburg)	Indians forced to carry passes; Gandhi leads satyagraha and burns passes publicly.	“Who’s got the paper?” resonates with colonial pass laws; “I’ve got the match” echoes Gandhi’s symbolic burning.
1960	Sharpeville Massacre	Black South Africans protest pass laws; 69 killed by police.	The demand for “papers” meant life or death; lyric reflects the fear and violence tied to paper control.
1976	Soweto Uprising	Students resist Afrikaans as compulsory language; uprising spreads nationwide.	“Party, man, party, man” can be read as youth mobilization, turning festivity into political action.
1970s	Steve Biko & Black Consciousness	Affirmation of Black dignity against apartheid’s dehumanization.	The celebratory tone of Osibisa becomes a philosophy: joy and rhythm as resistance.
1974 (song release)	Osibisa – Who’s Got the Paper?	Afro-prog fusion questions “paper” and “match” in a diasporic context.	Song channels both party spirit and coded protest against racialized bureaucracy.
1970s–1980s (UK diaspora)	Immigration Acts & National Front Racism	African and Caribbean migrants pressured to prove citizenship with papers.	The lyric applies in Britain too: who holds legitimacy, who controls identity?
Cultural Dimension	Progressive Rock Movement	Breaking linear time, rejecting commodification, creating utopian soundscapes.	Osibisa’s prog-rock style itself embodies resistance: refusing categories, expanding freedom through music.

Going further, the following table situates Osibisa’s “Who’s Got the Paper?” within a transhistorical cartography of documentary control and resistance. Across colonial and postcolonial contexts, the bureaucratic act of naming and documenting emerges as a central technique of governance—where language itself becomes an instrument of top-down regulation. The “paper” thus signifies the intersection of discourse and power: to be named is to be contained, to be documented is to be made governable. Osibisa’s refrain transforms this politics of inscription into an auditory critique, exposing how authority resides not only in documents but in the very act of designation.

Region / Context	Term	Description / Use	Connection to Osibisa’s Song
South Africa (Apartheid)	Dompas	Afrikaans for “dumb pass”; an internal passport for Black South Africans controlling movement	Mirrors “Who’s got the paper?” — paper as instrument of oppression
South Africa (Early 20th c.)	Passbook / Registration Certificate	Required under various pass laws to monitor non-white populations	Song lyric reflects the fear and demand for such documents
India (Transvaal, 1906–1908)	Asiatic Registration Certificate	Indians and Chinese forced to carry under Asiatic Registration Act	“I’ve got the match” echoes Gandhi’s symbolic burning of these passes
United Kingdom (1970s–1980s, Caribbean/African immigrants)	Immigration Papers / ID Cards	Proof of citizenship or residence; tied to National Front surveillance	Song resonates with migrant anxiety over legitimacy and identity
United States (Jim Crow era)	Freedom Papers / Passes	Rarely formalized; African Americans sometimes required papers for work or travel in segregated regions	Conceptually aligns with Osibisa’s critique of paper as control
Colonial Africa (various)	Labor Passes / Work Permits	Required to move between areas or take employment	“Paper” represents bureaucratic domination over mobility
General / Symbolic	Paper / Permit / Document	Abstract representation of state or institutional authority	Osibisa’s repeated “Who’s got the paper?” turns literal bureaucracy into musical meta

Viewed through the prism of naming, terming, tagging, and documenting, these instances illustrate how power operates through the act of inscription itself. To name is to classify; to term is to confine; to tag is to surveil; to document is to dominate. In this sense, Osibisa’s “Who’s got the paper?” is not only about possession but about authorship—who has the right to define and be defined. The song’s rhythm unsettles the bureaucratic grammar of naming, reclaiming sound as a counter-archive against the violence of documentation.

3.3. Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat Parallels: Bureaucratic Sparks and Postcolonial Flames

If Osibisa’s grooves danced at the threshold of protest—playful, polyphonic, and laden with the irony of “paper” as both passport and proof—Fela Kuti crossed that threshold entirely, turning Afrobeat into a furnace where bureaucracy met its match. If Osibisa’s “Who’s Got the Paper?” asked playfully who holds the documents of power, Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s Afrobeat roared the reply: burn them. Born into a family of anti-colonial activists, Fela transformed highlife and jazz into a weapon of insurgency—sonic fire against the bureaucratic violence of the postcolony. In 1970s Nigeria, under the weight of military decrees and IMF diktats, he unmasked how colonial “papers” merely changed masters. His anthems—Colonial Mentality, Authority Stealing, Zombie—exposed the farce of independence, where identity, belonging, and dissent were all policed by stamps, signatures, and contracts.

Across the continent, apartheid’s dompas reduced Black South Africans to passbook phantoms, while in Fela’s Lagos, the paperwork of power—permits, bribes, state decrees—codified subjugation. In Zombie and Sorrow, Tears and Blood, his horns became sirens of defiance, mocking soldiers who saluted flags over flesh. When his Kalakuta Republic was burned, his mother killed, and he jailed for currency “offences,” the paper trail became literal flame. Yet Fela’s match endured: his stage turned courtroom, his saxophone the affidavit of revolt.

Osibisa’s diaspora groove and Fela’s Lagos fire converge on a single critique—the paperization of life itself. Whether in colonial Africa or neoliberal democracies, paper—be it ID, passport, permit, or debt note—remains the architecture of control. Fela’s ITT (International Thief Thief) (1980) eviscerated the contracts and concessions that siphoned sovereignty to multinational hands, echoing how documentation sustains economic extraction as moral order. His Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense (1986) mocked democracy’s paperwork pedagogy: ballots as illusions, freedom as a form.

If Osibisa hummed the bureaucratic blues, Fela blew it open into insurrection. His Afrobeat reminds us that rhythm itself resists registration—that the true match is not destruction, but disobedience in syncopation. Paper may bind, but the beat breaks bone.

4. Documentary Power in India: From Paper to Data

The politics of paper resurfaces dramatically in 21st-century India. Contemporary citizenship and data laws reproduce the same documentary logic that Osibisa critiqued through music. The demand for proof—whether of citizenship, identity, or consent—translates the colonial “pass law” into postcolonial bureaucracy.

4.1. CAA–NRC–NPR: The Regime of Proof

The Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and the National Population Register (NPR) constitute a triad of documentary control. The CAA provides a religiously selective/communal/religious extremist path to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan (Chatterjee, 2020). The NRC and NPR require residents to prove citizenship through documentary evidence, echoing the colonial pass system.

Those unable to produce adequate papers—migrants, marginalized minority communities, the rural poor—risk exclusion or statelessness (Menon, 2020). In Assam’s NRC process, nearly two million people were left off the register. The “paper” becomes both proof of existence and instrument of erasure.

In this context, Osibisa’s refrain becomes hauntingly prophetic: Who’s got the paper? Who decides which paper counts? The song’s question reverberates in detention camps and bureaucratic offices alike.
As Fanon (1952) observed, such demands for documentary proof re-inscribe the colonial pathology of recognition—the colonized subject exists only when validated by the master’s file.

4.2. SIR and the Continuum of Surveillance

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, currently underway across India, extends the logic of verification into the very heart of democracy. On the surface, SIR is an administrative exercise to update voter lists; in practice, it functions as a mass audit of legitimacy based on communal lines for perpetuating Islamophobia. Citizens are required to reaffirm residence, identity, and eligibility through documentary proof, Aadhaar linkage, and digital validation. This process, couched in bureaucratic neutrality, deepens what Edward Said (1993) would term the “administrative imagination” of the state—the fantasy of total legibility through enumeration.

The SIR’s repetition of verification echoes what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) identified as the colonial afterlife of bureaucracy: a structure that demands perpetual self-proving from its subjects. In this regime, citizenship becomes performative—renewed through paperwork rather than enacted through participation. The voter is not presumed to belong; they must reapply for belonging each electoral cycle.

From Fanon’s (1963) perspective, this constant documentary anxiety reproduces the inferiority complex of the colonized psyche. The demand to “show papers” becomes the quotidian ritual of subjugation—proof of being before the sovereign. Meanwhile, Agamben’s (2005) “state of exception” manifests as administrative routine: the possibility of exclusion now normalized under procedural revision.

The SIR, when read alongside the CAA–NRC–NPR and DPDPA, reveals a continuum of surveillance where democracy’s legitimacy depends on documentation rather than participation. The very act of revision, in Said’s contrapuntal sense, mirrors the colonial census’s epistemic violence—an attempt to rewrite populations into grids of visibility.

4.3. DPDPA and the Digital Turn

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023) introduces a new phase in the politics of “papers”—the virtualization of identity. While the Act promises to protect personal data, it simultaneously consolidates state and corporate power to collect, process, and classify individual information (Arora, 2024).

The “paper” is now a digital trace; the “match” becomes the algorithm that can ignite or extinguish personhood. Data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019) extends the logic of apartheid bureaucracy into digital governance. The Aadhaar biometric system, touted as inclusionary, exemplifies this paradox—empowering some while excluding those without reliable access to documentation.
Ngũgĩ’s insistence on reclaiming the tools of cultural production becomes newly relevant here: if language was once colonized, now data is. The challenge, as Fanon foresaw, is to humanize technology—to transform tools of control into instruments of liberation.

4.4. Interruption as Self-Reflexivity: Crony Paramavaiṣṇava, Osibisa, and the Paperfire

When scripting Paramavaiṣṇava The Capitalist (A Play)⤡—our deranged bhajan-blasting, Bollywood-burlesque phantasmagoria—we had stitched Osibisa’s Afrobeat-tinted rendition of “Raghupati Rāghav Rājārām” into its opening tableau: a grotesque temple where corporate gods performed dharmic disco to the rhythm of rupee rain. It was meant as satire of crony capitalism and philanthro-capitalism operating under a “religious” foreclosure, but the sound bit back. Osibisa’s “Afro” voices, drumming through Gandhi’s bhajan, turned our laughter uneasy—was it appropriation, or a transcontinental revolt against borders, profits, and pieties alike?

Then, all of a sudden, we came across the algorithmic whisper: “Who’s Got the Paper? Who’s Got the Match?” (1973). A track dismissed as novelty—suddenly pulsing in our script like a bureaucratic mantra. “Paper” ceased to mean joint-rolling or party ephemera; it became the document as weapon—the passbook, the permit, the proof of personhood. “Match” became the ember of rebellion. Within the play, as the Bard twirled his ektara beside a slot machine vomiting glitter and rubber ducks, the song transformed into allegory: Osibisa’s refrain haunting Paramavaiṣṇava’s SLAPP-slinging, bond-trading hypocrisy—echoing the very “paper trails” of the DHFL collapse, where promises printed on glossy bond certificates burned in the hands of victims.

In the world outside the stage, paper meant deposits, shares, recovery claims—the faith of the small saver turned to ash in insolvency courtrooms. When DHFL’s fraudulent empire crumbled and the “saviour” Piramal acquired its ruins, the match changed hands: the corporate bidder was crowned redeemer, while thousands of depositors were left clutching worthless documents—their “papers” reclassified as dust. From apartheid’s dompas to India’s digital dossiers, from state IDs to debt instruments, the bureaucratic fetish of “paper” remained intact: it measured life, debt, citizenship, belonging. Osibisa’s diaspora pulse—born in London amid Thatcherite visa raids—resonated with the Indian depositor’s plight under Aadhaar capitalism, where your fingerprint and PAN are the new passbooks of obedience.

But the note turns on itself. Were we, in scripting this Afrobeat-draped bhakti farce, merely mirroring the moral economy of appropriation—borrowing African fire to illuminate Indian fraud? Or had we, through Osibisa’s groove, stumbled upon a planetary parable—where DHFL victims, NRC-excluded citizens, and apartheid’s passless rebels share the same fate: denied legitimacy by the wrong kind of paper? The Bard’s cry, “Corporate bhakti, a gilded sham,” suggestively loops back into Osibisa’s chorus—“Who’s got the paper?”—and we, playwrights and witnesses alike, confess: perhaps we only ever had the match. To burn the documents of deceit, yes—but also the illusions of redemption sold in the name of rescue.

5. Theoretical Framework: Power, Visibility, and Bare Life

5.1. Foucault and Governmentality

Foucault’s concept of governmentality (1991) captures the way contemporary states govern not only through law but through the management of populations. The “paper” is an apparatus of governmentality—an inscription that renders life legible, measurable, and thus controllable.

5.2. Scott and the Politics of Legibility

James C. Scott (1998) describes how states “see” through documentation and classification. The NRC, NPR, and DPDPA function as technologies of legibility, translating complex social life into data forms intelligible to bureaucratic vision. The song’s question “Who’s got the paper?” becomes a counter-question to this gaze, exposing the violence of legibility.

5.3. Agamben and the State of Exception

Giorgio Agamben (2005) theorizes that modern states produce “bare life”—individuals stripped of rights through exceptional measures. Those lacking papers in India’s NRC or excluded by the CAA occupy this liminal zone of suspended legality. They exist, but not as citizens. In Agamben’s “bare life,” as in Butler’s “precarious life,” the undocumented subject becomes visible only through vulnerability—a life seen but not recognized.

5.4. Mbembe and Necropolitics

Achille Mbembe’s (2003) concept of necropolitics extends Foucault’s biopower to emphasize how sovereignty decides who may live and who must die. Documentary exclusion—whether through paper or data—functions as a necropolitical instrument. The absence of a document can condemn one to nonexistence.

5.5. Spivak and Subaltern Voice

Gayatri Spivak (1988) reminds us that subaltern speech is often mediated through the very systems that silence it. Who’s Got the Paper? reclaims that voice—its repetition and rhythm operate as counter-documentation, a non-textual archive of dissent.

As Said (1978) reminds us, every system of classification and description—every “paper”—is an act of narrative domination. To name and record is to own. The postcolonial struggle, then, is not only for freedom from papers but for the right to write one’s own story.

Together, these frameworks reveal how documentation converts bodies into data, citizens into subjects, and resistance into rhythm—a genealogy of control that Osibisa turns upside down through sound.

5.6. The Anarchist Refusal and the Will-to-Archive

The logic of documentation is, at its core, a logic of order—an attempt to domesticate the chaos of human multiplicity. Anarchist thought has long recognized in this compulsion to classify and record the origin of state power itself. For Mikhail Bakunin (1873), the state’s authority begins with its claim to define and register the human; every ledger and census becomes a miniature Leviathan. Errico Malatesta (1891) similarly warned that “registration is the prelude to obedience,” a bureaucratic preconditioning that transforms free subjects into governed populations.

Michel Foucault’s governmentality finds here a parallel in anarchist critiques of “administrative domination,” where governance is less about coercion than about inscription—about writing life into grids of control. The archive, in this sense, is not a neutral repository but a political technology that legitimizes the state’s authorship over existence.

Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995) pushes this further: the will-to-archive is simultaneously a will-to-power. Every act of preservation carries within it a death drive (mal d’archive)—the compulsion to capture, fix, and thereby govern memory. The bureaucratic state embodies this pathology: its endless production of papers, files, and databases seeks not only to remember but to rule. The paper and the archive are twins of sovereignty—one ensures obedience in the present, the other secures it for posterity.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) terms, the “match” is a deterritorializing spark—it disrupts the state’s coding of life, igniting a line of flight from bureaucratic capture. Fire, here, becomes not destruction but metamorphosis: a passage from inscription to improvisation, from state time to rhythmic time.

In this light, Osibisa’s “I’ve got the match” becomes an anarchic gesture—a refusal of the archive’s command. The act of ignition is not nihilism but liberation: the burning of records as the restoration of ungoverned life. It is what Bakunin might have called “the creative destruction of order,” an ethical conflagration that exposes the violence concealed within the will-to-record.

Mbembe reminds us that every archive bears a necropolitical function—it determines which lives are remembered and which are rendered disposable (the archive and the tomb). The “match,” then, is not only destructive but exhumative: it unearths forgotten lives from beneath the state’s paperwork.

Seen through Derrida and the anarchist lens, the “match” is thus a counter-archive: it consumes the paper but preserves the memory of revolt. The fire, rhythmic and communal, replaces the cold permanence of bureaucracy with the living temporality of resistance. It is a reminder that what the state calls illegibility, the oppressed call freedom.

5.7. Eco-Politics of Paper, Fire, and Sound

The politics of documentation is inseparable from the politics of ecology. Every “paper” bears an environmental cost—the trees felled for archives, the data servers consuming vast energy, the carbon footprint of bureaucratic permanence. The state’s will-to-archive, as Derrida (1995) observed, extends into the earth: the extraction of matter to sustain the abstraction of power. Paper is not innocent—it is the ecological trace of domination, the environmental afterlife of empire.

In this sense, Osibisa’s dialectic between paper and match is also an ecological allegory. The paper represents the extractive logic of empire—forest turned file, life turned ledger. The match, by contrast, signals both destruction and renewal: an elemental reclaiming of nature’s agency against its bureaucratic capture. Fire becomes not only rebellion but purification—what Gaston Bachelard (1964) called “the reverie of combustion,” where imagination returns matter to flux.

Sound, too, is ecological. It is air in motion, rhythm carried by wind, vibration shared across bodies. In contrast to the static fixity of the archive, sound dissipates, regenerates, and circulates—a renewable form of memory. Osibisa’s Afro-rock, in this light, performs a decolonial eco-politics: refusing inscription in favor of resonance, rejecting accumulation for circulation. As Donna Haraway (2016) would suggest, such sonic practices “stay with the trouble” of entanglement, reminding us that resistance must be as fluid and ephemeral as the ecosystems it seeks to defend.

In the Anthropocene—when states document extinction even as they perpetuate it—the burning of the paper is no longer mere metaphor. It is a call to dismantle the bureaucratic infrastructures that consume the planet in the name of order. Rhythm, in Osibisa’s vision, becomes not only revolt but rewilding: an invitation to breathe, move, and live beyond the grid.

5A. Paper, Power, and the Anatomo-Bio-Politics

The story of the “paper” is, in essence, the story of biopolitical inscription—the process by which power marks, measures, codifies, appropriates, approximates and manages life. Michel Foucault’s notion of anatomo-biopolitics illuminates this nexus: the paper becomes not merely a record of one’s existence but a mechanism of bodily governance. Through documents, the state transforms flesh into data, and the human being into a dossier. The passbook or dompas was not a neutral administrative instrument; it was a technology of visibility that divided the seen from the unseen, the citizen from the disposable. The very act of being asked—“Who’s got the paper?”—is an inquiry into worth, a summons to prove one’s right to exist within a given geography.

Foucault’s analysis of the docile body provides a crucial key here. In the modern state, obedience is not extracted through overt coercion alone but through the internalization of bureaucratic norms. The subject learns to monitor himself through forms, signatures, and certifications. The state, in turn, converts individuality into legibility. Enumeration, registration, and census-taking—what might appear as acts of rational governance—are in fact rituals of subjugation, disciplining populations into calculable and governable entities. “Paper” is thus both symbol and syntax of control; it translates life into number, presence into proof.

Through this apparatus of governmentality, power is exercised not by kings or generals but by clerks, registrars, and data processors. It is the quiet violence of form-filling and verification, where the denial of a stamp or the absence of a document can erase one’s civic and moral being. In apartheid South Africa, in colonial India, or in post-imperial Britain, the bureaucratic gaze achieved what the whip once did—it classified and contained. Citizenship itself became a papered condition, contingent on one’s compliance with systems of enumeration.

But the bureaucracy of identity carries a more insidious potential: the biopolitical logic of exclusion that underwrites modern forms of ethnic cleansing, as it has happened in the cases of South Africa and currently in India under the BJP regime. Not all cleansing occurs through mass graves or concentration camps (or, “detention camps” in the NRC context in India); some unfolds through administrative disappearance. To lack papers is to lack existence; to be undocumented is to be unofficially dead. The “hidden agenda” of such regimes lies in the seamless blending of legality and violence, where death can occur through omission rather than execution.

In this light, Osibisa’s refrain—“Who’s got the paper? Who’s got the match?”—echoes beyond the literal. It dramatizes the confrontation between documentation and defiance, between the state’s archival power and the subject’s incendiary refusal. The “match” becomes an act of epistemic arson: a symbolic burning of the bureaucratic archive that defines and confines the human. When heard against the histories of the dompas, Gandhi’s satyagraha, or Biko’s Black Consciousness, the lyric is no longer playful—it becomes a coded philosophy of liberation, exposing how resistance often begins with the refusal to be counted.

6. Comparative Resonances: From South Africa to India

Bertolt Brecht’s play The Visions of Simone Machard (1942) dramatizes the solitude of conscience under occupation. Set in wartime France, the play follows Simone, a teenage gas station worker who envisions herself as Joan of Arc and sets fire to hidden gasoline reserves to keep them from the Nazis. Her defiance—rooted in visionary conviction rather than nationalist obedience—leads to her being branded “insane”. Brecht thus exposes how systems of power pathologize moral resistance, a theme that resonates with Osibisa’s “match”: the ethical fire mistaken for madness.

The archive of control—whether in colonial South Africa or digital India—finds its most haunting echoes across geographies: Both apartheid South Africa and contemporary India deploy documents to determine belonging. The passbook and the Aadhaar card, though historically distinct, share a genealogy of bureaucratic control. In both, citizenship is not an inherent right but a status to be proven—again and again.

The act of burning papers in Gandhi’s satyagraha finds resonance in the symbolic “match” of Osibisa’s song. The rhythmic chant performs what philosopher Jacques Rancière (2004) calls “the politics of aesthetics”: making visible that which is hidden by administrative order.

The match in Osibisa’s refrain need not be read as a call to arson or annihilation. It is the metaphor of ignition—not the act of burning—that holds radical promise. Fire here signifies illumination, not destruction: the awakening of the collective conscience against bureaucratic darkness. The song’s matchstick thus performs a non-violent combustion, akin to what Gandhi called satyagraha, the force of insistence on the resilience of truth that burns without consuming. It is also reminiscent of Tolstoy’s idea that moral fire purifies both oppressor and oppressed through recognition, not revenge. Osibisa’s chorus, then, does not endorse violence; it transforms the potential for violence into ethical energy. The sound of the match becomes a sonic metaphor for the spark of dignity—fierce, luminous, and unarmed.

The “party” in Osibisa’s song thus becomes polysemic—it is celebration and political organization alike. It evokes both the festival and the movement. When protestors in India sang, danced, and read the Constitution aloud in Shaheen Bagh (2019–20), they embodied this double logic of festivity and resistance. Rhythm became the medium through which the excluded reclaimed the right to appear.

The continuity between the dompas and the Aadhaar card exemplifies what Said called “the persistence of empire in modern forms.” Ngũgĩ’s critique of the postcolonial state’s mimicry of colonial governance further illuminates how India’s bureaucratic nationalism rehearses the same logic of control once imposed by colonial masters.
For Fanon, the repetition of colonial techniques within independent nations signals the incompletion of decolonization—liberation without epistemic rupture. Osibisa’s song, then, becomes a call to complete that unfinished revolution, to ignite the “match” not only against the paper but against the epistemic order it represents.

7. Joy as Counter-Documentation

If the state documents, the people dance. The joy of Osibisa’s Afro-rock is not apolitical—it is epistemic rebellion. As José Esteban Muñoz (2009) argues, “queer utopia” is enacted in performative moments that refuse the totality of oppression. Similarly, Osibisa’s groove imagines a post-documentary world, where identity is not proven but lived.

In both Africa and India, music functions as alternative archive. Drums, chants, and community gatherings preserve histories that official records erase. The “match” ignites not only fire but memory—the collective will to remember otherwise.

In Édouard Glissant’s (1997) poetics of relation, opacity and rhythm are modes of freedom against the transparency of power. Osibisa’s groove enacts this opacity—resisting the colonial demand to be legible and instead composing solidarity through resonance.

As Said’s (1993) contrapuntal reading would suggest, Osibisa’s “party” contains within it the double rhythm of pain and liberation: the colonizer’s archive and the decolonized beat intertwined. For Ngũgĩ, this rhythm enacts the communal rediscovery of voice; for Fanon, it is the catharsis through which the colonized becomes whole.

As Sylvia Wynter (2003) argues, the colonial order’s classificatory systems did not merely record life—they produced a particular genre of the human. Osibisa’s counter-rhythm destabilizes this genre by reasserting embodied, plural modes of being.

8. Critiques and Caveats

While this interpretation situates Who’s Got the Paper? within radical genealogies, caution is warranted. Although Osibisa never declared Who’s Got the Paper? as an overtly political text, and commercial constraints often diluted overt activism in 1970s world-music circuits. Moreover, not all documentation regimes are purely repressive; they can also enable access to welfare and rights.

Nevertheless, the affective truth of Osibisa’s song transcends authorial intent. Its repetition, rhythm, and joy encode a politics of the oppressed—what Walter Benjamin (1969) termed the “tradition of the oppressed” that flashes up in moments of danger.

8.1. The Poisoned Match: War, Capital, and the Alchemy of Fire

“মানুষ যেদিন প্রথম অন্যকে হত্যা করবার অস্ত্র আবিষ্কার করেছিল, সেদিন সে নিজেরই মৃত্যুবাণ নির্মাণ করেছিল; আর আজ সারা পৃথিবী জুড়ে গোপনে গোপনে এই যে হিংসার কুটিল বিষ তৈরি হচ্ছে, এও মানুষ জাতটাকে একদিন নিঃশেষ ধ্বংস করে ফেলবে—ব্রহ্মার ধ্যান-উদ্ভূত দৈত্যের মত সে স্রষ্টাকেও রেয়াৎ করবে না।”

“The day humankind first invented a weapon to kill another, it forged the arrow of its own death; and today, as the crooked poison of violence is being secretly brewed across the world, it too shall one day annihilate the entire human race—like the demon born of Brahma’s meditation, it will spare not even its creator.” — Truth-Seeker Byomkesh Bakshi’s statement in the story “Agnibaan” (The Fire Match, 1935) by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay

Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi story Agnibaan (“The Fire Arrow,” 1935) introduces a seemingly mundane object—the matchstick—as an instrument of both death and empire. The story revolves around a chemist who invents a poisonous match, a device that kills instantly upon lighting. What appears as a detective puzzle subtly mirrors the global war economy of the 1930s: an era when industrial chemistry and colonial extraction converged to turn everyday commodities into weapons of power. The match, born of phosphorus mined in colonies, becomes a microcosm of capitalist violence—an object of utility transformed into a tool of annihilation. Byomkesh’s revelation that the invention was sought by international agents for wartime use situates the poisoned match within the machinery of global militarism, where even fire becomes a commodity of death.

Placed against this background, Osibisa’s refrain “I’ve got the match” acquires new resonance. The match is no longer merely a metaphor of defiance but a site of historical ambivalence—oscillating between the liberatory flame of revolt and the incendiary logic of empire. The poisoned match of Agnibaan exposes how capitalist modernity converts elemental forces—fire, air, sound—into instruments of domination, just as the state converts documents into weapons of exclusion. Osibisa’s reclamation of the match as a symbol of collective ignition thus reverses this colonial alchemy: transforming the poisonous fire of war into the emancipatory blaze of rhythm. Their music detoxifies the match, recharging it with revolutionary life.

8.2. Rhythmic Continuities: Osibisa’s Sonic Politics Beyond Who’s Got the Paper?

While Who’s Got the Paper? (1974) most explicitly dramatizes the politics of bureaucracy, its pulse reverberates through Osibisa’s wider discography. Across albums from Woyaya (1971) to Right Now (1981), the band’s music performs an ongoing negotiation between containment and liberation. Their sound archives the postcolonial struggle against documentation, not through inscription but through motion—turning rhythm itself into revolt.

In “Survival” (Heads, 1972), the insistent refrain “We are going to make it” enacts a politics of endurance amid oppression. Its cyclic chant transforms repetition into resilience, echoing what Gilroy (1993) describes as the diasporic “counterculture of modernity.”

Similarly, “Woyaya” (Woyaya, 1971)—from the Ga word meaning “We are going”—embodies a theology of movement, a refusal to be immobilized by colonial borders or bureaucratic demands for “papers.” The lyric’s open-ended affirmation—“Heaven knows where we are going”—transcends documentation; its epistemic humility becomes its freedom.

“Sunshine Day” (Osibisa, 1976) extends this liberation into the ecological register. Its celebration of light and vitality reclaims solar joy from industrial gloom, resonating with Wynter’s (2003) call to reimagine the human beyond colonial overrepresentation. The song’s radiant optimism—often dismissed as mere “party music”—is, in fact, a sonic form of environmental and existential resistance.

Similarly, “African Jive” (Osibisa, 1975) enacts what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) terms “cultural decolonization,” merging funk, jazz, and highlife into a sound that resists categorization. In refusing to fit within a single genre, the music performs an epistemic disobedience—what Glissant (1997) would call opacity—defying the archival demand for legibility.

The album Happy Children (1973) offers a counterpoint to Who’s Got the Paper?: it imagines freedom as play, joy, and intergenerational continuity. Where Paper encounters the state’s demand for identification, Happy Children insists on an identity prior to inscription—a politics of being before bureaucracy.

Finally, “Right Now” (Osibisa, 1981) insists on immediacy: “Right now, we got to make it happen.” This temporal urgency mirrors Who’s Got the Paper?’s defiant temporality—the beat as the refusal of delay, a sonic demand for justice in the present tense.

Taken together, Osibisa’s discography forms a decolonial continuum:

Woyaya — movement without borders
Survival — endurance amid surveillance
Happy Children — the unrecorded future
Who’s Got the Paper? — defiance through ignition
Sunshine Day — ecological renewal
Right Now — temporal resistance

In this sense, Osibisa’s work embodies what Glissant (1997) calls a poetics of Relation—a networked, diasporic imagination where rhythm replaces writing as the true medium of world-making. The archive may burn, but the beat survives.

9. Conclusion: “I’ve Got the Match” — The Future of Resistance

Osibisa’s Who’s Got the Paper? is not simply an Afro-rock curiosity; it is a transnational manifesto. Its refrain condenses centuries of documentary violence—from colonial passbooks to biometric IDs—and reimagines them through rhythm. In the global South, where new regimes of datafication replicate colonial patterns of control, the song remains prophetic.

The contemporary Indian landscape, with its intersecting citizenship and data laws, extends the politics of paper into the digital realm. The question persists: Who decides legitimacy? Who holds the match?

Through sound and celebration, Osibisa reminds us that the match—the capacity for ignition—still rests with the people. When bureaucracy demands the paper, music responds with fire.

The genealogy of sonic resistance that Osibisa inaugurated continues to reverberate in the Indian subcontinent. From the protest verses of Aamir Aziz’s Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega (2020) to the collective performances of women at Shaheen Bagh, music again became a living register of dissent—a chorus that refused bureaucratic silencing. Like Osibisa’s Afro-diasporic call-and-response, these contemporary protest sounds transform the demand for “papers” into a shared assertion of presence: we remember, we sing, therefore we exist.

Osibisa’s closing refrain thus fulfills what Fanon envisioned as the “birth of a new man”—one who no longer seeks validation through the paper but through participation in collective humanity. Said’s contrapuntal humanism, Ngũgĩ’s cultural reclamation, and Fanon’s radical emancipation converge in the song’s final gesture: the match as music, the flame as freedom.

As Mbembe (2020) reminds us in Out of the Dark Night, decolonization must move beyond critique toward the creation of a planetary humanism. Osibisa’s Afro-rock anticipates precisely this horizon—where rhythm becomes a universal grammar of freedom, and the sound of resistance echoes as the sound of renewal.

In that instant of ignition—what Benjamin (1940) called the “now-time” of revolution—the oppressed seize history’s match.

When the state demands, “Who’s got the paper?”, the people’s chorus replies—not in ink, but in fire—“We’ve got the match.”

Special Courtesy: DEBAPRASAD BANDYOPADHYAY ⤡

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