A-Z of Music: F is for... Fela Kuti

Icon: Fela Kuti, pictured in 1984
Getty Images
Jochan Embley19 May 2020

It’s all the effervescence of James Brown’s funk, sparking against the bold, bright horns of jazz. It’s the entrancing repetition of Yoruban polyrhythms, electrified by the unassailable energy of Ghanaian highlife.

It’s Afrobeat, and it’s the sound that sprung from the restless mind of Fela Kuti — a giant of African culture; a musical revolutionary and a political firebrand.

Born in 1930s Nigeria, with an Anglican minister for a father and a feminist, anti-colonial activist for a mother, Kuti was destined for an impassioned life. He was sent to London in 1958 to study medicine, but the charade was short-lived. Before long, he became entangled in the city’s jazz scene, and would soon return to Africa to begin his own music career.

It was some time later towards the end of the 60s, thousands of miles away and amid the simmering politics of Los Angeles, that Kuti would be truly awoken. A meeting with Sandra Smith, a member of the Black Panther Party, introduced him to the notion of black power, and in turn helped him forge fiercely held convictions of pan-Africanism. His experience of jazz and funk, pioneered by black Americans, had a profound and lasting influence on him.

It was a many-sided epiphany, but it had a singular effect on Kuti. On his return to Nigeria, he approached Afrobeat — the genre fusion he had christened a couple of years before — with a renewed zeal. His band, which had up until then been called Koola Lobitos, was renamed Nigeria ‘70, and soon became Africa ‘70. His lyrics, sung in Pidgin English so they could be easily understood across the continent, became intensely socio-political. He denounced Nigeria’s social ills as a colonial wound gone septic — the country had only been independent of the British Empire since 1960. He also chastised Nigeria’s new leaders, rallying against their flagrant corruption.

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Over the course of the 1970s, Kuti’s music became more popular. He released a dozen superb albums in the first half of the decade, and unleashed his enigmatic stage presence: sometimes face-painted, often in some state of undress, and never not magnetic. But as his legend grew, the government backlash against him became all the more brutal. His 1976 song Zombie was an incendiary, 12-minute tirade against the mindlessly obedient Nigerian military, and was a huge hit. It enraged the country’s military head of state, General Olusegun Obasanjo. He ordered more than a thousand troops to storm the Kalakuta Republic, a commune set up by Kuti in the early 70s to house his musicians, family and recording studio.

The attack was merciless. Kuti was beaten half to death, while his elderly mother was thrown from a window by drunken soldiers. Her injuries were ultimately fatal, and it spurred Kuti towards two of his boldest ever artistic statements: he wrote the mournful, seething song Coffin For Head Of State, and delivered his mother’s own coffin to Obasanjo’s residence, leaving it out front for all to see.

The endless political pressure heaped upon Kuti throughout his career — his determined run for presidency of Nigeria in 1979 was blocked by the ruling elite, and he was arrested some 200 times — became too much for others around him. Soon after the Kalakuta raid, Kuti’s drummer, the recently passed Tony Allen, walked away from Africa ‘70, exasperated by the battle against the authorities.

It was a huge blow. By Kuti’s own admission, “without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat”. It was Allen’s bewildering drumming style, in which all four of his limbs would play independent, interlocking rhythms, that gave Afrobeat that irresistible shuffle. When Allen left, Kuti was forced to hire four new drummers to replace him.

Kuti’s attitude towards women was another point of grim controversy. He had a famously voracious appetite for sex and, for some time, staunchly believed men had a right to polygamy — in 1978, he married 27 wives at once. Some of his songs were baldly sexist, such as Mattress, in which he painted women as nothing more than a bed to lie on. The tendency for his lyrical misogyny to spill over into physical violence against women was well documented, too. In 1986, he divorced all of his wives, claiming then that “no man has the right to own” a woman’s body.

Despite his looming profile in Africa, Kuti failed to ever become a global star. Some pointed to the length of his songs — many would easily break the 10-minute barrier, and some stretched on towards the hour mark when played live. There were also some instances of bad luck: he was arrested on flimsy charges of currency smuggling just before embarking on a world tour in 1984. Or perhaps it was simply because the Western world wasn’t willing to embrace a music so proudly African.

Even though Kuti receded in his later years, eventually succumbing to an AIDS-related illness in 1997, his star remained bright — more than one million people attended his funeral in Lagos. And now, it seems like his music is more relevant than ever. A new tranche of African artists, many of them Nigerian, such as Burna Boy and Wizkid, are going global with music greatly indebted to Kuti’s sound. The Afrobeat goes on.

Listen: Anthology 2 by Fela Kuti

Watch: Finding Fela (2014)

Read: Fela: This Bitch of a Life by Carlos Moore

A-Z of Music: So far

F is for... Fela Kuti

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