. . . the latest entry in the biography series featuring van Gogh, Prem Rawat, Leo Tolstoy, William Bradford, God, Lynn Margulis, Quetzalcoatl, Bad Bunny and me.
I first got interested in Fela Kuti listening to the 12 episode Higher Ground podcast, Fela Kuti, Fear No Man. Man, that blew my mind. Check it out.
He was a Nigerian musician/activist, revolutionary really and the originator of Afrobeat - merging jazz, with James Brown funk, the polyrhythms and vocal inflections of his native Yoruba music and the pungent protest language of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
He was born in 1938 into a prominent family in Abeokuta, about 30 miles north of Lagos, the largest city. Back then Nigeria was a British colony and had been for sixty years, ever since they moved in and took over back in 1884. Colonization, as we shall see, is not a good thing.
His father was a school principal, very respected, and his mother was a political activist who became a well known women’s-rights leader. She was a big influence on little Fela. He accompanied her on some of her protests where she led the women in singing out their protests against unfair taxation, forcing the local chief to resign. His grandfather was a prominent Anglican minister and musician who wrote hymns and translated them into Yoruba. He was, in fact, the first Nigerian to release a music album.
In 1958 Fela moved to London to study music — keyboards and trumpet. After classes he hit the jazz hot spots around town, sat in with some of the musicians and formed 2 bands of his own. He spent 5 years there.
Back in Nigeria, independence had come but it had not brought peace and prosperity, instead it went through cycles of violence and corrupt military governments. That’s what happens when the culture of a country is shattered by colonialism. It becomes toxic. It rebuilds itself eventually but in the mold of it’s oppressor. At least that’s what happened in Nigeria after their independence in 1960. Power and money are the real game. That’s the lesson of colonialism.
The Yoruba culture, on the other hand, was built on a tradition of harmony and connectedness that was thousands of years old. Just look at their art.
Wood carvings, earthenware, textiles, beadwork — all famous stuff. They were highly skilled artisans, still are. Their society was based on clans and extended families. They had city-states governed by an Oba (king) and deeply held spiritual beliefs in an all powerful creator god. They gave him the name Olodumare.
The Yoruba language is something else, it’s pluricentric meaning it incorporates many dialects from the region into one vocabulary. It also supports a strong oral tradition. Story-telling and dance and music are the heart and soul of Yoruba culture and of Afrobeat music.
Yoruba culture survived for many centuries until the British came and wrecked it all, turned it into a business, taught them the white man’s ways. The whole colony of Nigeria was just a business for Britain. Power and money.
Anyways back to Fela. After a visit to the United States where he was exposed to the music of James Brown and the politics of Malcom X and the Black Panther movement he returned to Nigeria in 1970 and founded a nightclub in Lagos called the Shrine where he and his band would play all night parties. He established a compound nearby and boldly declared it be separate and independent from Nigeria: the Kalakuta Republic named after a 1974 prison stay where he was held in a "Kalakuta" cell — Swahili for "rascal". It served as a sanctuary for himself, his family and his band and it embodied his opposition to Nigeria’s military dictatorships. “It was an independent, defiant community functioning as a recording studio, home, and safe haven for revolutionaries, artists, and family. It was a state-within-a-state.” is how AI describes it. The authorities were not pleased.
Inside the Shrine people openly smoked marijuana, which was highly illegal, and danced for hours to the powerful music that Fela and his 30 piece orchestra produced. This is where Afrobeat was born.
The trance inducing, relentlessly recycling rhythms inside the Shrine created the perfect background for his protest lyrics, railing against the army, the corrupt politicians and all that was wrong with society. His music was not only popular in Nigeria but all across Africa. The authorities were definitely not pleased. He was repeatedly arrested, jailed and even beaten.
From the early 1970’s until his death, in 1997, Fela produced a massive amount of hugely popular music with his band Africa 70 and later Egypt 80, by some counts over 50 albums. The danceable beats and boldly irreverent lyrics spread like wild fire inspiring political resistance in Nigeria and beyond. The authorities were seriously not pleased but the more they beat on him and imprisoned him the more confrontational he became. Finally in 1977 things came to a head.
The following images and words are from the official YouTube version of ‘Zombie’. Warning: this is not an easy read.
Whew.
The destruction of the Kalakuta Republic was a major blow for Fela. Thousands of people actually saw the fire and knew what was happening, it was in a densely populated part of Lagos, but nobody came to his aid. He was crushed by that. He had changed people’s lives with his music, lots of people. He changed people’s lives all over the world, he had inspired people and pushed the limits of what was possible but now he was starting to feel the limits.
Following the brutal attack on his compound he was banned from performing. Many of the people in his entourage drifted away. With no source of income he ended up living in a tiny apartment with his remaining bandmates and his family. He tried to kickstart his career by organizing a tour of Ghana, where he had played before and knew people but was asked to leave when the kids started yelling ‘zombie’ at the police and soldiers. That was his song.
Fela was a complicated man. He believed in peace but indulged in confrontations and clashes throughout his life. He fought corruption but he liked to get high and had his own harem. One year after the the Kalakuta Republic raid he married 27 women in a single traditional ceremony, primarily to protect his female band members but also to shove a finger in the face of the authorities. And also to keep the remaining band from falling apart — people were leaving. In 1986 he divorced all 27, saying that “marriage brings jealousy and selfishness”.
Two months later his mother died, succumbed to her injuries from being thrown out of a second story window by the ‘zombie’ soldiers. It was another major blow for Fela. She was his lode stone, his reference point. She was the one who had instilled in him the belief that you could harness spiritual power to depose a king, because that’s what she had done.
He continued to record and perform through the 1980s and 1990s (I’m condensing the story here). He was still making music but something had changed. The music was slower, more layered, less upbeat. He had entered his ‘spiritualist phase’. He was using mediums to try to contact his dead mother. In fact he was beginning to lose his grip psychologically, beginning to become paranoid.
Well it’s not like they weren’t after him. In 1984 he was arrested at the airport by the Nigerian government for currency smuggling (he was carrying $1,000 in cash) as he was preparing to fly to America for a tour. He spent 20 months in prison. He had already been jailed dozens of times and beaten too for good measure. He changed his name from Fela Ransome Kuti, his family name going back generations to Anikulakbu which means to say ‘I have death in my pouch. I can’t die. They can’t kill me.’ He believed he would live forever or at least claimed to.
But nobody lives forever.
By 1994 he was ill, exhibiting symptoms of AIDS, but he refused medication, refused to acknowledge in fact that he was sick, refused even to believe in AIDS. He thought it was a scam propagated by white people but that was actually what he had. It was the final blow.
On August 2, 1997, Fela dies at the hospital where he had asked to be taken. He was 59 years old. The family arranges for his body to lie in state in a downtown stadium, thousands of people come by to say goodbye. The funeral procession proceeds through the streets of downtown Lagos and people gather around the hearse, more and more people keep gathering at every intersection. By the time they get to the rebuilt Shrine there are a million people.
And so after all that what’s left? What happened to the Fela Kuti legacy? Well one way to describe it is by sharing a story taken from the Higher Ground podcast referenced at the beginning. This amazing 12 episode production was, by the way, the source of much of my own podcast.
It’s 23 years later, 2020, and police brutality in Lagos still exists. A young woman, loses her best friend and brother, disappeared by the police. She searches for him to no avail. She organizes her friends and they march to the police station to protest. Social media kicks in and more people start coming. Almost everyone knows someone or knows someone who knows someone who has disappeared.
The crowd doesn’t disperse. Three days pass and these young people are still there, sleeping in the street, eating in the street, playing music in the street. The DJ puts on a Fela song. They didn’t know Fela, it’s 23 years later, but in his music they can feel his voice and his presence. He is telling them that it’s not ok to just suffer and smile, that it’s not ok to just accept the injustice and smile, he’s telling them to wake up because this is not what they deserve.
By the third day the protest has ballooned to thousands and they keep coming. It spreads to other major cities in the country, kinda like the Occupy Movement several years ago. The kids are dancing and singing in the streets and Fela’s music is everywhere. Get it? This is a whole new generation and they are hearing the message that Fela was talking about 23 years ago and they are responding.
So what’s going to happen? These kids aren’t going home, they’re pissed. They’ve had enough. And they’re inspired. They have a reference point and that reference point is Fela’s music. Zombie. Beasts of No Nation. All his protest stuff.
By the 13th day the protestors had barricaded the Lekki toll gate on one of the busiest highways in Lagos and disabled the security cameras. Then, at one point, the floodlights that illuminate the area go off, it’s dark and the soldiers that had assembled there start shooting. Oh yeah. They start shooting at their own citizens. People are getting shot and they start falling. Chaos.
Comments are streaming in on social media — hold up the flag! Sing the national anthem! And they do but the shooting continues. It’s a massacre.
In the end the government disbands the police force that was disappearing people and begins an investigation into police brutality. But does anything really change? I don’t know. In 2024, four years after the Lekki massacre another protest breaks out against police violence and the police again use lethal force to disperse the protestors. Twenty four people are killed. So maybe not, but a whole new generation of young people are hearing Fela’s voice and responding. That’s something.
After a long succession of coups and military dictatorships, Nigeria now has a civilian government and a duly elected leader. Since 1999 there has been a transition from military dictatorships to representative democracy, with elections and a peaceful transfer of power. There are still problems, big problems, but at least no more assassinations and coups and if the president is not responsive to the demands of the people they can vote him out.
Fela used music as a weapon, “the weapon of the future” he called it. Instead of bullets he shot pulsating hypnotic rhythms and highly charged lyrics. His performances were electric, sort of a James Brown/Mick Jagger/Bob Marley fusion. “Fear no man” was his motto and his voice hasn’t died even though he has. It’s still vibrant and alive at least in Nigeria.
Below is the soundtrack for the attached podcast with Fela playing keyboards and doing vocals. The name comes from a Yoruba proverb meaning “no one can be the enemy of water”. He is saying, in both English and Yoruba, that because water is essential for life, useful to everyone and resilient, no one can truly be its enemy, that the best way to fight oppression is with a peaceful flowing persistence.
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