“Who’s Got the Paper? I’ve Got the Match”: Osibisa and the Politics of Documentation
“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) AKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY ⤡ 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 exc...