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Banning Eyre
SENIOR EDITOR OF AFROPOP.ORG
FELA
INTRODUCTION
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was Africa’s archetypal Pan-African protest singer whose lyrics condemned neocolonialism in general and the Nigerian authorities in particular. During his turbulent lifetime, and particularly since his death in 1997, this controversial Nigerian creator of Afrobeat and spokesman for the poor and downtrodden masses, or “sufferheads,” of Africa, has generated an enormous level of international interest. He has been the subject of many books and PhD dissertations and thousands of column inches of newsprint, both in Nigeria and elsewhere. In the mid-1980s he became an official “prisoner of conscience” of Amnesty International. Throughout his stormy career he has been the source of more wild and uninformed gossip than almost any musician of the twentieth century.
Fela, the “chief priest” of Afrobeat; the aspiring “Black President”; “Anikulapo,” who carries death in his pocket; “Abami Edo,” “the weird one and strange being,” died in Lagos aged fifty-eight on August 2, 1997. Fela did two remarkable and unique things in his life. First of all, he almost singlehandedly created Afrobeat, a major new genre of African popular music that is adored by fans throughout Africa and that has influenced numerous African and international musicians. Second, with his unsurpassed militancy, he took African music into the arena of direct political action; a fighting spirit reflected in his own contrary lifestyle and his catalogue of antiestablishment songs dedicated to Pan-Africanism and the Nigerian masses.
Fela was a musical warrior who drew heavily on age-old connections between music, militancy, and violence. Lyrically, his music dwelt on the confrontational aspects of life, from which he obtained enormous inspiration. Indeed, if there was not sufficient confrontation to inspire a song, he would create that confrontation first—a unique creative device that often resulted in direct battles with the Nigerian authorities. In his songs Fela went much farther than the oft-quoted pantheon of international protest singers such as Bob Dylan, James Brown, and Bob Marley. Whereas their confrontations with established authority were couched in terms of “The Times They Are A-Changin,”’ “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and the evils of “Babylon,” Fela’s songs not only protested against various forms of injustice but often fiercely attacked specific agencies such as “Alagbon Close,” which mocked the police criminal investigation department (CID) headquarters in Lagos where Fela was imprisoned in 1974. His 1976 Zombie album was an insulting caricature of the Nigerian army mentality that became a battle cry across a continent that was plagued by military regimes at the time. Sometimes he named names. His song “Coffin for Head of State” was directed against Nigeria’s then military ruler (and later civilian president) General Olusegun Obasanjo. “International Thief Thief (ITT)” criticized the US multinational company, International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation, which set up a telecommunications system in Nigeria under Chief Moshood Abiola, who later stood for president of Nigeria.
As the dust settles over Fela’s fiery, promiscuous, rascally, and egoistic lifestyle, his Afrobeat groove lives on. He will always be remembered as the most radical musical spokesman of the African poor. His peppery character in the African soup continues to be sorely missed.
Fela’s Family Background in Abeokuta
Fela was born on October 15, 1938, in Abeokuta, a Yoruba town about fifty miles north of Lagos that is famous for its natural fortress, Abeokuta Rock.
Fela’s birth name was Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti. His older sister was Oludulopa, or Dolu, who became a nurse, and his older and younger brothers were Olikoye and Bekolari, who both became medical doctors. The famous poet-novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka was Fela’s cousin and was also raised in Abeokuta.
Fela’s maternal grandfather was Pastor Thomas, a Yoruba slave freed in Sierra Leone. Fela’s paternal grandfather was the Anglican priest, the Reverend J. J. Ransome-Kuti, a principal figure in the Christianization of the Yoruba who was also a pianist and composed many Yoruba hymns and patriotic anthems. Forty-four of these were recorded by the Zonophone/EMI company of Britain in the mid-1920s, and these included sacred songs with piano, two funeral laments, and two patriotic songs with piano—one being the Abeokuta National Anthem “K’Olurun Da Oba Si.”1 Fela’s father was the Anglican Reverend Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, a schoolteacher, music tutor, and a strict disciplinarian who became headmaster of the Abeokuta Grammar School that the young Fela attended and from where he obtained his music skills.
Besides the local hymns and Western-type music training coming from Fela’s father and grandfather, Fela was, as a youth, also exposed to other musical forms prominent in Abeokuta at the time, such as Yoruba juju guitar-band music, Yoruba-Muslim sakara and apala popular-music styles, and the deeper Yoruba drum and dance music of the Egungun and Gelede masquerade cults that were dedicated to the ancestors and fertility.
Fela’s mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (née Thomas), was a nationalist and women’s rights activist. In 1947–48 Funmilayo led a number of mass demonstrations of local Egba market women who opposed the British-instigated plan of taxing them via the alake (king) of Abeokuta, Olapado Ademola. Their demonstrations were successful, and these events are captured in Wole Soyinka’s autobiographical novel Ake: Years of Childhood.2 Shortly after, Fela’s mother went on to found the Nigerian Women’s Union and then became an executive of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, and in this capacity visited Moscow, Eastern Europe, and Beijing between 1953 and 1961.3 She met Mao Zedong, was the first Nigerian woman to visit Russia, where she received the Lenin Peace Prize, and was the first woman to drive a car in Nigeria. When the country became independent in 1960 she became one of Nigeria’s few women chiefs. Funmilayo was also a supporter of one of the leading figures of modern Nigerian nationalism, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, or “Zik,” and her nationalist inclinations also resulted in her (and also Fela) meeting Nkrumah, for instance, when the Ghanaian leader made trip to Lagos by boat in 1957.4
Fela’s younger brother, Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti, also inherited his mother’s radical streak. During the 1970s Beko was running his free Junction Clinic for the poor of Mushin at Fela’s Kalakuta Republic, which, in fact, was their mother’s Lagos house. Beko was also the general secretary of the radical Nigerian Medical Association, and after the burning of the Kalakuta and his clinic by the Nigerian army in 1977 he was radicalized and became chairman of the Nigerian Campaign for Democracy and so was imprisoned from 1995 to 1998. This was during the brutal Abacha military regime when Fela was also imprisoned on several occasions.
Fela’s Musical Background: Highlife, Jazz, and Soul
By 1954 Fela had completed his primary education at his father’s school and for four years attended the Abeokuta Secondary School. In 1955 Fela’s father died, and so Fela began making occasional trips to Lagos where he became friends with Jimo Kombi, or “J. K.,” Braimah, who finished school in 1956, became a clerk in a Lagos court, and in his spare time sang for various highlife dance bands in Lagos. One of these was Victor Olaiya’s Cool Cats, and the precocious Fela sometimes accompanied him to these shows. After the death of Fela’s father, his mother relocated to the family house at 14A Agege Motor Road, Surulere (which later became the Kalakuta Republic). By 1957 Fela had finished his schooling and so went to stay with his mother in Lagos and work there in a government commercial industry office. It was at this time Fela joined Olaiya’s band as a singer who, in turn had been influenced in the 1950s by Ghana’s pioneering highlife dance-band musician E. T. Mensah, who took his Tempos dance band on numerous tours of Nigeria beginning in 1951.
