When Fela Anikulapo-Kuti died in August 1997,
Nigeria lost one of its most controversial and inspirational
cultural figures. Here, the Africa-based writer Lindsay Barrett
maps the extraordinary trajectory of Fela's life, detailing the
emergence of his patented brand of Afrobeat, his anarchic
lifestyle, and the ongoing battles with the Nigerian authorities.
This feature was originally published in The Wire 169
(March 1998).
No one who knew him well was surprised when
Nigeria's greatest musician Fela Ransome-Kuti changed the first
part of his double-barrelled surname to Anikulapo in the mid-1970s.
He was just being consistent. Throughout his career, up to that
point, Fela had constantly changed his mode of living and
transformed the nature of his music. Eventually this process of
change was to become the force that motivated his entire life.
The renaming was instructive. Anikulapo means 'I have death in
my pocket', which is to say, as he often did, 'I will be the master
of my own destiny and will decide when it is time for death to take
me'. When he died in August of last year at the age of 58, Fela
appeared to fulfil the prophecy implicit in that earlier name
change; and the manner of his dying was as dramatic and unruly as
the manner of his living.
In the weeks leading up to his death, Fela's condition
deteriorated while he refused to accept treatment from
Western-trained doctors, in spite of the fact that many of his
family were illustrious medicos (Koye, the eldest, and former
Minister of Health; Beko the younger, who was once President of the
Nigerian Medical Association, detained incognito by the Nigerian
government for his outspoken protests against what he believed to
be the anti-democratic activities of the military; and his elder
sister, a former matron in Nigeria's health services). To the end
Fela was a conscious rebel. The themes of his rebellion never
changed, and the anarchy which often seemed to surround his life
and music was always tempered by the fundamental truths which he
sought to elucidate with regard to both African society and the
ongoing exploitation of people in African nations.
Fela's family wanted him to become a lawyer, and in 1958 he left
Nigeria for the UK, ostensibly to study law. But many of his close
friends maintain that he never intended to follow that line, and
that he had made his decision to be a musician from his
schooldays.
Once in the UK Fela enrolled In the Trinity School of Music. The
trumpet was his preferred instrument, as most of Nigeria's leading
highlife band leaders were trumpeters and at least two of them, Rex
Jim Lawson and Victor Olaiya, were early heroes of Fela's. Although
his father, the Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, encouraged
him to play the piano, he had begun to practise the trumpet on his
own before leaving secondary school, and sat in with many of the
popular groups of the day. Bandleaders such as Roy Chicago, Bobby
Benson, Eddie Okonta and the late anarchic genius Billy Friday all
encouraged him and spoke highly of his youthful talent. However,
Fela once told me that it was the discovery of Miles Davis's early
recordings with Charlie Parker that strengthened his commitment to
the instrument when he began studying in London.
During his stay in London, Fela also listened to Afro-Cuban
music, and began performing in venues frequented by African
students and workers with a group of dedicated Nigerian musicians
which included the pianist Wole Bucknor, who became the Musical
Director of the Nigerian Navy Band, and the fine jazz drummer Bayo
Martins. In fact Martins was a seminal influence on Fela's
listening habits, and was largely responsible for steering him in
the direction he was eventually to take in building a close link
between jazz and highlife music.
Fela returned to Nigeria in the mid-60s, and was employed by
Nigeria's National Broadcasting Corporation, but he seemed to have
little interest in working there. He formed his first professional
group, The Koala Lobitos, and in their earliest performances the
musical influences which had exercised Fela's imagination in the UK
came to the fore. The group made some recordings, and while Fela's
trumpet playing, though lyrical, sounded weak in interpretative
power, his singing was innovative, more discursive and rational
than the general run of highlife vocalising of the time. Fela's
musical sensibility drew on the principles of West African popular
music, especially its hypnotic, cyclical rhythm patterns, and he
was always conscious of the ability of music to carry a social
message in a powerful way. Accordingly, the lyrics he wrote for The
Koala Lobitos also demonstrated a desire to bring new subjects into
the purview of the music.
In 1968, by which time he had consolidated the membership of The
Lobitos, new elements began to surface in the music which were
strongly influenced by James Brown's recordings. In that year Fela
gave a number of press interviews claiming that Brown had actually
"stolen my music". Whatever the truth of the matter, what was clear
was that in emphasising the rhythmic and improvisational elements,
Fela's music was drawing closer to the kind of extended trance-like
workouts that defined Brown's music of the period.
Later the same year, Fela went on a maverick tour to Ghana, the
acknowledged home of highlife. He was accompanied and guided on the
tour by Benson Idonije, a well-known Nigerian producer who was
responsible for the presentation of jazz on Radio Nigeria. But
while his music was well received by both Ghanaian audiences and
musicians, he felt that in Nigeria his talents were still not
appreciated. He either lost or left his job at the radio station
after that. While still in Ghana he met a promoter called 'Duke', a
Ghanaian who had relocated to California, and together they began
to plan a tour to the USA.
The tour took place in 1969, and turned out to be a frustrating
sequence of triumphs and disasters. It was halted when it was
discovered that the promoter had not obtained the proper work
permits for all the group's members. In addition, some members
absconded, and in a legal fight with some of the local promoters,
Fela seized a collection of hired instruments and shipped them back
to Nigeria. He left the USA under a cloud of debt and threats of
legal action, but in the few months he had been there he also met
many musicians and other artists, especially writers and painters,
who were harnessing their creative energies to the kind of radical
politics that were being espoused by groups such as the Black
Panthers. It was on this trip that he realised how valuable an
understanding of Africa's history could be to the expansion of
music's outreach, and it was during this trip too that he was able
to record some of his latest compositions with a new group of
musicians who interpreted his musical vision with a greater level
of commitment and ability. He called this group Nigeria 70.
On his return to Nigeria Fela renamed the group a second time,
calling it Africa 70. He hired the Kakadu (Parrot) nightclub in
Yaba, a suburb of Lagos, renamed it the Afro-Spot, and instigated a
programme of three live sessions a week that were to produce some
of the most extraordinary events in African musical history.
Liberated by the music's new open-ended forms, some of the
members of Africa 70 emerged as performing geniuses in their own
right: tenor saxophonist Igo Chico Okwechime (replacing Isaac
Olasugba), drummer Tony Allen, guitarist Fred Lawal and
percussionist Henry 'Perdido' Kofi. Fela gradually dropped the
trumpet and concentrated on leading the group by conducting it from
the front and singing. Eventually his rudimentary keyboard riffs,
which he used as part of his conducting formula, began to become
more integral to the arrangements. By early 1971 he had stopped
playing trumpet solos entirely and Tunde Williams, playing second
trumpet, developed into a key player, taking over the important
brass parts which Fela introduced into the arrangements.
By now Fela was virtually composing his songs in public. Each
week at the Afro-Spot new works were premiered, and Fela would talk
the audience through the meaning of the lyrics and work the group
through the arrangement on stage. In this way classics such as
"Lady", "Go-Slow", "Water No Get Enemy", "Chop And Quench",
"Palava" and "Shakara-Oloje" emerged to become part of the urban
folklore of Lagos. Not only were the songs massive local hits, but
for many Lagos citizens it became imperative to attend these
sessions, where Fela's interactive style made the audience a part
of the performance.
That year – 1970-71 – Fela set a pace which was incredible, not
only in terms of his musical growth but also his philosophical and
ideological trajectory. The issues he raised as he discussed the
lyrics of his songs grew increasingly topical, and he began the
form of public speaking which he termed 'yabis' in which he would
excoriate government officials for their inefficiency, or preach a
new form of freedom of expression which he equated with the right
to smoke 'igbo' (marijuana). Before his trip to the USA, Fela had
neither smoked nor drank. He was a serious and committed musician,
definitely no libertine. Back in Lagos, he claimed that a young
woman he had met in America (who was later to sing on one of his
albums) had introduced him to marijuana, and he was now convinced
that the use of stimulants was not taboo provided the user was
'conscious'. This attitude was eventually to contribute greatly
towards his many confrontations with the Nigerian government, and
his public criticisms became increasingly focused on specific
instances of what he considered to be government hypocrisy and the
betrayal of national potential.
As his group grew from nine to 16 members, the music became less
lyrical and more strident, the arrangements more complex. In 1974
Fela had a serious falling out with his tenor saxophonist Igo
Chico, and in one of the legendary feats of his life, he vowed to
replace Igo himself in 24 hours. According to the legend, Fela
practised for 17 hours straight, and when the group appeared at the
Afro-Spot that Friday night, he played all the famous Igo Chico
tenor saxophone solos, not nearly as brilliantly as the master but
with enough competence to satisfy his loyal audience.
This period also marked a turning point in Fela's commercial
strategies. He moved from the Afro-Spot to a new club located in
another part of Lagos called Surulere. The club was owned by a
legendary Lagos entrepreneur, Chief SB Bakare, and Fela began to
operate a full week's schedule. It was here that he first referred
to his club as the Shrine, and began to speak of his musical
existence as a religious rather than a purely commercial
experience.
Fela's recording strategy was a particularly unique one at this
point. Almost monthly he would go into the EMI studios in Apapa and
produce extended versions of two of the group's most popular and
topical compositions. EMI would release the songs immediately,
their remarkable sales fuelled by the fact that a few weeks after
they were issued on vinyl, Fela would stop singing them in his
club. Fela continued this strategy for two years, issuing records
like news bulletins, so that he served as a symbol of Nigeria's
united national consciousness, as his songs would be heard blaring
from loudspeakers across Nigeria as soon as they were released. The
fact that his lyrics were in a very direct form of pidgin English
was crucial, as it made his records accessible throughout Nigeria
and much of Anglophone Africa.
Now Fela decided to build his own management team and control
the release and performance of his music himself. In the early 70s,
multinational record companies such as EMI, Decca and
Philips/Phonogram had a stranglehold on recording and management of
groups in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa, bankrolling watered
down versions of US soul and Fela's patented Afrobeat. But as Fela
developed into a megastar he sought to gain greater benefits from
his recording contracts by encouraging competitive bidding among
the rival companies for his independently recorded tapes.
The strain of this strategy caused cracks to appear within
Fela's own organisation. He tended to be informal and careless with
his finances, and some of his musicians broke away when it became
difficult for him to pay them regularly. This was the period too
when he began to expand his team of female dancers and establish a
commune in his mother's house at Mosholashi-Idi-Oro. His sexual
appetite was legendary, and many young women submitted themselves
to a life of virtual enslavement as he preached an ideology of
chauvinistic control and established a lifestyle that was based on
his theories of female submission.
With the departure of certain musicians, the nature of the group
changed drastically. Fela added more percussion and developed a new
style of rhythm guitar voicing, laying a greater emphasis on the
guitars and bass to carry the melody lines. He gave control of the
reed and brass sections to Lekan 'Ani' Animashaun, a baritone
saxophonist and one of the stalwarts of Fela's music, and spent
more time refining his keyboard playing. Along with the ensemble
singing of his female chorus, these developments became the
signatures of his music, and the most distinctive sound of Afrobeat
emerged from this era.
Some time In 1974, Fela moved from his Surulere base to the
former Ambassador Club, a famous nightspot owned by the Lagos-based
Ibo businessman and entertainment tycoon, Chief Kanu. This club was
rechristened the African Shrine, and it was here that Fela began to
incorporate ritualistic elements into his performances, including
the pouring of libations and ceremonies performed by a succession
of visiting traditional priests, some of whom appeared from
nowhere, it seemed, and disappeared just as mysteriously. There was
a Camerounian High Priest who, it was claimed, had sacrificed a
human being at the Shrine and brought the victim back to life. Then
there was a Ghanaian who performed magic tricks, and a Yoruba
'Babalawo' who gave Ifa divinations for selected members of the
audience. Eventually Fela himself was declared High Priest of the
Shrine, and each of his performances was prefaced with an elaborate
ritual ceremony, replete with face painting, libation pouring, wild
dancing and special prayers offered to the ubiquitous 'God of
Africa'.
The African Shrine was located right opposite his mother's
house, where his commune was still based, and his presence
attracted a lot of commercial activity to the area, including a
swarm of marijuana dealers. It was in this period, from 1974-76,
that both his lifestyle and political attitudes coalesced into a
flagrant challenge to the Nigerian authorities.
Apart from openly advocating the smoking of 'igbo' on the theory
that "the God of Africa created this herb to enlighten his people",
he also paraded his harem of young women all over Lagos. For a
while they were appendages to his entourage, but in mid-1975 he
began to incorporate them into his show, first as dancers and then
as members of the vocal chorus. Later that year he undertook the
famous single-day traditional marriage in which he pledged himself
as husband to 28 women.
There followed another change of name for the group. Fela had
begun reading esoteric literature promoting the belief that African
history had been distorted and misrepresented by Western academics,
and his interpretation of these ideas and transformation of them
into musical themes became his main concern. Reflecting this
embrace of pan-African revisionism, he now called his group Egypt
80.
Fela began applying these radical ideas in a pungent and
systematic criticism of the Nigerian Government's own decrepit
value system. Inevitably, the state began to fight back against
both his political criticisms and what some government officials
referred to as his 'immoral' lifestyle, and in what would turn out
to be just the first of many raids on his club and commune, Fela's
house was raided in daylight by teams of soldiers and police.
During the raid Fela was arrested and taken to the notorious
Alagbon Close jail, where he was hailed as a hero by the prisoners
and installed as 'president' of one of the toughest cells, named
after the infamous dark hole of Calcutta but pronounced 'Kalakuta'.
On his release he immortalised this experience in the extraordinary
protest song "Kalakuta Show", and renamed his commune the Kalakuta
Republic. This marked a major turning point in his life, and in
many ways may have sealed his fate.
Fela's domestic lifestyle, and his battles with the Nigerian
authorities, became major selling points for Nigerian tabloids. One
newspaper, The Sunday Punch, serialised a set of features
about the Kalakuta experience, liberally sprinkled with pungent
quotes from Fela himself, and sold in numbers hitherto unknown for
independent newspapers in Nigeria. His reputation also began to
spread abroad: The New York Times ran a major feature on
him, and his comments began to surface in foreign articles
surveying Nigeria's economic and political climates. It is a moot
point whether this attention was responsible for his increasing
militancy or whether it was the other way round. Whatever the
cause, Fela's radicalism increased and his music became even more
powerful as a result. The consistency with which he interpreted
political events and issues in musical terms was remarkable. The
anti-military pieces "Zombie" and "Unknown Soldier" were seminal
products of this period. They indicated that Fela was unbowed in
the face of sustained attacks from the police and military.
Eventually he fell out seriously with his record companies and
began to attack them also. It was clear to Fela that the government
had been putting pressure on these organisations to undermine his
independence, and he set out to prove that he could survive without
them. One of his most famous songs emerged during this period,
"ITT" ("International T'ief T'ief"), in which he heaped abuse on
Chief MKO Abiola who was then 'Vice President for Africa and the
Middle East of ITT', owners of the Decca label.
In a further break from the conventions of the record industry,
some of Fela's closest friends were drafted into his organisation
to handle contractual and promotional matters. These included the
late Kanmi 'People's Lawyer' Osobu, Alhaji UK Buraimoh, the late
Akin Davies and Barrister 'Wole 'Feelings Lawyer' Kuboye. Now Fela
began to tour Nigeria playing concerts that drew up to 50,000
people at a time in places such as Port Harcourt, Aba, Benin City,
Warri, Enugu, Jos, Kaduna and Calabar. These were not club dates
but fully fledged stadium concerts. This strategy, and Fela's
increasing popularity, seemed to anger the government even more,
and towards the end of 1976, after Fela had returned to Lagos
following one of his major national tours, one of the most vicious
attacks on his home took place.
The timing of the raid was strategic. Nigeria was about to host
the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts (FESTAC 77),
and the government obviously wanted to silence Fela before the
expected large contingent of international visitors arrived in
Lagos for the festival. If this was the intention, it backfired
badly. The raid was covered widely in the media, and the songs Fela
wrote by way of response emerged as some of his most popular
international hits. In fact, during the festival the African Shrine
was packed almost every night, proving more popular than any of the
official FESTAC events, so much so that most nights Fela and Egypt
80 had to play four shows instead of the normal one or two.
In early 1978, a few months after FESTAC, Fela's home was raided
again, and this time the raid was carried out entirely by the
military - with tragic consequences. Fela believed that the raid
had been ordered personally by the then Head of State General
Olusegun Obasanjo, a fellow Ogun State indigene, who had been
humiliated by the amount of attention Fela had received during
FESTAC. During the raid, Fela's mother, Funmilayo, who was then
around 75 years old, was thrown from a first floor window by "an
unknown soldier". In addition, Funmilayo's house, and an adjoining
clinic belonging to Dr Beko Ransome-Kuti, were both burned to the
ground. Official explanations for the raid were cynically off hand,
which angered Fela even more.
When his mother died some months later from complications
arising from the injuries she had received during the raid, Fela
led a protest march carrying a coffin to the official residence of
the Head of State in central Lagos, and also wrote one of his most
tragic hits, "Unknown Soldier", which contained the heart-rending
lamentation, "Dem kill my mama, political mama, the only Mama in
Africa".
Shortly after the death of Funmilayo, Fela and his group went on
a European tour, where he was surprised to discover that he had a
massive following, especially in France. He toured for about three
months, but on his return to Nigeria some of the key members of
Egypt 80 - percussionist Henry 'Perdido' Kofi and drummer Tony
Allen - left the group. In addition, one of its brighter young
stars, the guitarist Kologbo, absconded and remained in Europe. The
European tour was a success both critically and commercially, but
once again Fela's casual approach to finance led to disagreements
within the group. Moreover, he seemed increasingly depressed over
the death of his mother.
Although he had never been a big drinker Fela had created a
special compound which he called 'Felagoro' made from marijuana
mixed with the local gin 'ogogoro', and he used it extensively
during the European tour. The compound was a powerful
hallucinogenic and sometimes, when under its influence, his
performances were erratic, and the music was mostly held together
by Lekan 'Ani' Animashaun, who had developed into a powerful
baritone saxophonist, and was officially designated musical
director of the group.
During the European tour Fela introduced his teenage son Femi on
stage in the heat of a hard-driving performance in a circus tent
outside of Paris. It was a real baptism of fire, as Femi was
breaking in a new alto saxophone, and previously had only practised
with the group during rehearsals. But before a crowd of more than
10,000 Fela ordered Femi to take his first major solo. Fela stood
by the side of the stage driving his son on with shouts of
encouragement and derision. The experience proved its worth. Femi
now leads a group called Positive Force, and has developed a streak
of determination in almost direct response to his father's
unorthodox method of apprenticeship.
After his return from Europe, Fela's life and music took on a
doomed brilliance which was overshadowed by a cloud of inevitable
confrontation. Raids by the police and military became even more
regular when he moved to Ikeja and took over another club, where he
installed the New African Shrine. His hangers-on from
Mosholashi-Idi-Oro followed. They virtually repopulated the area
around the Shrine bringing hard drugs, especially 'bana' (heroin)
and crack, with them. Fela spoke against the use of any drugs other
than igbo, but many members of his entourage, including some of his
wives, had already become junkies, a development which only seemed
to reinforce the allegations of immorality and criminality that the
government was levelling against him.
The confrontation between Fela and the security forces now
developed into one of the saddest displays of state terrorism ever
seen in Africa; sometimes it appeared that individual government
members and departments were vying with each other to see which one
was more anti-Fela.
In 1983 Fela announced that he would be standing for President
in the forthcoming Nigerian elections on the ticket of his own
party, the Movement of the People (MOP), in order to "clean up
society like a mop". Following the elections, the military
overthrew the new civilian government and the attacks on Fela
increased again. He was accused by one agency of flouting the
country's currency laws because he returned from an overseas visit
with about 1000 US dollars. He was arrested, charged, and kept in
detention for almost two years. He was released in 1986 after yet
another coup had occurred, but just a few months later he was
charged with kidnapping one of the young women who lived at his
house and whose father was said to be a senior official in one of
the security agencies. Fela was acquitted, but a year or so later
he was accused of murder after someone had been killed in a fight
at the Shrine. Years later, Fela told me that he believed the dead
man was killed and planted in the club by yet another branch of the
security services.
Even during this incredibly fraught period, Fela's music
retained an innovative strength. Just before the breakdown of
apartheid in South Africa at the beginning of the 1990s he began to
turn his attention to the subject of world racism, and the economic
exploitation and international hypocrisy that sustained it.
His composition "Beast Of No Nation" evolved out of a statement
by South Africa's President PW Botha: "This uprising [against the
apartheid system] will bring out the beast in us." The song was
powerfully argued and the music showed that Fela had not lost his
sense of rhythmic vitality in his approach to composition. Many of
his last songs written between 1993-96 represent some of his best
work, containing large scale orchestrated arrangements with more
freedom for melodic interpretation. In a parallel with the
increased sophistication of his music, Fela announced that marriage
was an erroneous imposition of control on a fellow human being.
Accordingly, he granted freedom to all his wives, or at least those
who remained - more than half of the original 28 had already
absconded, although many of them remained resident in his house and
as members of his performing ensemble.
Even as Fela was revising his lifestyle, the authorities were
closing in. A few weeks before his death, his health shot to pieces
by years of official and personal physical abuse, he was paraded in
chains on state television in Lagos by yet another security agency,
the Anti-Drug Squad. Even in these harrowing circumstances, Fela
maintained his dignity, challenging the director of the agency
openly, and declaring that he did smoke marijuana and considered it
not only his right but a privilege ordained for humanity by the
"God of Africa".
By now, Fela's poor health was obvious. He was skeletal, but his
spirit was unbowed. He continued to appear at the Shrine, and
whenever the group, led by Lekan Animashaun, struck up its
signature tunes, he still found the strength to leap on stage and
blast his adversaries and proclaim his belief in the rejuvenative
power of his personal vision. To the end, Fela believed that this
vision was motivated by a spiritual link to the ancestral power of
Africa, and that even if it did not save his own life it had the
power to restore a sense of political renewal in the continent.
Fela died on 2 August 1997. Some members of his family announced
that he was suffering from AIDS, and have demanded that the
Nigerian government establish a campaign to officially recognise
the AIDS issue as a potentially catastrophic one for the whole of
Africa. In this way they probably hope that Fela's death might help
bring about the kind of fundamental changes in Nigerian society
which he strived for during his life, but failed to achieve, in
spite of his constant battles with officialdom.
Fela's funeral developed into a festival of joy and anger
unprecedented in Lagos. Three days of processions culminated in a
public service which brought the city of well over five million
people to a standstill - obviously, Fela's spirit still ran deep in
the hearts of the masses.
It is no exaggeration to say that Fela's memory will always
symbolise the spirit of truth for a vast number of struggling
people in Africa and beyond. His music and the determined
consistency with which he challenged authority and demanded that
popular ambitions and attitudes should be reflected in the official
objectives of the nation's leadership will continue to create a
basis for radical challenges to the complacency of officialdom. His
musical legacy is a solid one. His compositions are effectively
underscored by the huge number of records which he leaves behind.
Everyone who worked with him retained a deep sense of his musical
spirit, and in the future, his formal musical legacy will grow even
stronger as the extraneous elements of his wild, anarchic lifestyle
give way to reflective tributes to his talent and the philosophical
relevance of his ideas.
The members of Fela's group, devastated by his passing, will
find it difficult to keep the flame alive, but there is also a need
to preserve the traditions which Fela established. One of his
greatest legacies is the consummate technical proficiency which he
enabled his instrumentalists to achieve even without travelling
beyond Nigeria. Some of his soloists, such as the young baritone
saxophonist 'Showboy' and the leader Lekan Animashaun, have the
breadth of experience as well as the evanescent quality of stardom
in their veins.
Now that he is no longer alive, the eternal values which gave
birth to Fela's perpetual struggle to find justice in life will
gain new strength through the immortal power of his musical
vision.
