By Bergotte
Fela Anikulapo Kuti built a nightclub in Lagos, declared it an independent republic, married twenty-seven women simultaneously, recorded nearly eighty albums, was beaten, imprisoned, and raided by the Nigerian military so many times that he began to treat the violence as material, and in the process created one of the most original and most politically uncompromising bodies of work in the history of popular music. Afrobeat — the music he invented and that no one else has ever quite replicated — is not simply a genre. It is a philosophy made audible: the philosophy that the dispossessed have not only the right but the obligation to be loud, to be long, to take up space, to refuse to end. The songs run to twenty minutes because injustice runs longer than that, and anything shorter would be a lie.
The house in Abeokuta
He was born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti in Abeokuta, in what is now south-western Nigeria, in 1938, into a family that was already exceptional by any measure. His father Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti was an Anglican minister and educator, one of the first Nigerians to compose music in a Western form while drawing on Yoruba tradition. His mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was more remarkable still: a political activist of national significance, founder of the Abeokuta Women’s Union, a woman who led mass protests against the colonial administration and against the traditional Alake — the regional king — and who was one of the most formidable figures in the Nigerian independence movement. She was the first Nigerian woman to drive a car. She travelled to the Soviet Union and China. She met Mao Zedong. She continued organising and agitating into her seventies, until Fela’s soldiers threw her from a window during the 1977 raid on the Kalakuta Republic, an assault from which she never recovered and which killed her the following year.
This is the family that produced Fela Kuti. The fury was inherited. The willingness to confront power directly, at personal cost, without capitulation — this was not something he developed in adulthood. It was the atmosphere he grew up in. His mother had shown him, before he had the music to show it with, that the appropriate response to an unjust authority was not accommodation but organised, principled, noisy defiance.
He went to London in 1958 to study medicine, lasted the summer, and enrolled instead at the Trinity College of Music — the same institution where Mulatu Astatke would later study — where he learned Western music theory and jazz harmony and played in various ensembles and bands and began the long process of understanding what he wanted to make. He returned to Lagos in 1963 and spent the rest of the 1960s leading a series of bands that played a hybrid of highlife — the dominant popular music of West Africa, a joyful, danceable fusion of African rhythms and Western brass-band harmonies — and American jazz. The music was good. It was not yet what it would become.
The Black Panthers and the discovery of the self
The transformation happened in America. In 1969 Fela took his band — then called Koola Lobitos — on a tour of the United States, and in Los Angeles he encountered Sandra Isidore, a Black American activist with connections to the Black Panther Party, who introduced him to the political thought that was circulating at the burning edge of Black American life: Malcolm X, the writings of the Panthers, the intellectual tradition that was reframing the African diaspora’s relationship to Africa as one of pride and solidarity rather than distance and shame.
He had grown up in a nationalist family and had always been aware of the political context of being African in a world shaped by colonialism. But this encounter gave him a different framework — pan-Africanist, explicitly anti-imperialist, rooted in a reading of African history that ran counter to every version of that history he had been given by his British education. He read voraciously. He argued. He stayed in Los Angeles long enough to be radically changed by what he was encountering. When he returned to Lagos, he was no longer the same musician.
He renamed the band Africa 70. He renamed the music Afrobeat. He began writing lyrics in Pidgin English rather than standard English — a deliberate choice to communicate not with the educated Nigerian elite but with the ordinary people of Lagos, the market traders and bus drivers and night-shift workers who were the subjects of his songs and who he understood as his true constituency. He opened a club called the Shrine. He turned the Shrine into a nightly event that was part concert, part political rally, part ritual gathering of a community that did not otherwise have a place to be itself. He played every night for as long as the music demanded. Sometimes that was two hours. Sometimes it was five.
What Afrobeat is
Afrobeat is not a simple music to describe, because it is not a simple music. It is a synthesis of at least four distinct traditions — Nigerian highlife, Yoruba traditional music, American funk, and jazz — that is coherent and unmistakable as a sound while being more internally complex than any of its sources. Let me try to get at what it actually does, because the formal understanding is the emotional understanding.
The foundation of any Afrobeat composition is the rhythm section: a drummer, a percussionist playing congas and shakers and additional drums, and a bassist whose job is to lock into a groove and sustain it, without variation, for as long as the song requires. This groove is not simple repetition in the manner of a rock backbeat. It is polyrhythmic — multiple rhythmic patterns layered on top of each other, each pattern complete in itself, the combination creating a rhythmic texture of great complexity in which the listener’s body responds to several pulses simultaneously. The effect is immersive in a physical sense: you do not hear Afrobeat at a distance. You are inside it.
On top of this rhythmic foundation, Fela built a horn section — typically five to seven players, saxophones and trumpets, playing in tight unison or close harmonies derived from the jazz tradition — and a keyboard section, and his own saxophone or keyboards, and a chorus of singers, and his own voice. The songs are structured in long sections: an instrumental introduction that might run for five minutes, establishing the groove and the horn theme before any words are sung; then Fela’s vocal, delivered in Pidgin English with a specificity and a wit that is entirely its own — direct, funny, furious, often obscene, always precise about its political target; then a return to instrumental sections that extend and develop the opening material, building in intensity, the horns adding layers, the rhythm section tightening, until the music reaches a collective peak that is simultaneously musical and political.
The length is not indulgence. It is the point. The groove must be established before the argument can be made, and the establishment of the groove takes time — time for the body to surrender to it, time for the polyrhythmic complexity to become familiar, time for the listener to move from hearing the music to being inside it. And the argument, once made, must be sustained, developed, returned to, because the issues Fela was addressing — corruption, military brutality, neo-colonialism, the looting of African resources by African elites in the service of Western corporations — were not issues that yielded to a three-minute summary. They required the same relentlessness that they themselves embodied. The music was long because the problem was long.
The Shrine and the Kalakuta Republic
The Afrika Shrine on Pepple Street in the Surulere district of Lagos was not simply a nightclub. It was the physical instantiation of a political and cultural argument: that there was a way of being African and modern that owed nothing to either the colonial inheritance or the corrupt post-independence states that had replaced it, and that this way of being could be lived collectively, nightly, in public.
The Shrine had an altar. The altar bore images of the figures Fela considered sacred: African freedom fighters, the founding figures of pan-African thought, his mother. There was always cannabis — changa, in the Yoruba tradition, understood by Fela as a sacrament, a way of opening perception rather than closing it. There were dancers — the Queens, who performed in the elaborate ceremonial movement that was part of every Afrobeat performance. There was the music, of course, which went on until Fela decided it was finished, which was sometimes dawn. And there was the crowd: the ordinary people of Lagos who had found in the Shrine the one place in the city where they were not being told, by the architecture and the dress code and the price of the drinks, that they did not belong.
Fela’s home compound adjacent to the Shrine he declared, in 1970, the Kalakuta Republic — a sovereign state independent of Nigeria, owing no allegiance to the military government, subject to no law but its own. This was not a legal fiction that anyone took entirely seriously in formal terms. It was a symbolic act of extraordinary boldness: a man saying, in public, that the state that claimed authority over him had no legitimate claim to his life, and that he was prepared to defend that position with everything he had. The Nigerian military took it seriously. They raided the compound repeatedly, in 1974 and most devastatingly in 1977, burning it to the ground, beating its inhabitants, and throwing his mother from her window.
Fela rebuilt. He renamed himself. He had dropped the British surname Ransome-Kuti — the surname that bore the mark of slavery and colonial nomenclature — and replaced it with Anikulapo, meaning “he who carries death in his pouch,” signifying that he would determine the manner and time of his own death and that no government would determine it for him. He married twenty-seven women in a single ceremony in 1978, partly as an act of solidarity with his female collaborators, partly as a defiance of the respectability politics that his enemies used against him, partly — and this must be said honestly — in a way that was patriarchal and contradictory, that sat in uncomfortable tension with the feminism his mother had embodied and that his music nominally upheld.
The contradictions of Fela Kuti are real and they are important, and the essay that refuses to acknowledge them does him a disservice. He was a man who sang about the oppression of ordinary Nigerians and who could also be tyrannical toward the people in his compound. He was a man whose music drew on and honoured African women and who maintained a polygamous household whose internal dynamics were often coercive. He was a man who refused every compromise with political power and who made, in the middle of his career, a brief and bewildering attempt to enter electoral politics. These contradictions do not cancel the work. They are part of what makes the work human rather than hagiographic — the record of a flawed person with a genuine vision, pushing the vision as far as it could go.
The albums that changed the argument
The Afrobeat canon is vast — nearly eighty albums, recorded between 1969 and Fela’s death in 1997 — and navigating it requires some orientation. The recordings vary in production quality, in the precision of the horn arrangements, in the focus of the lyrics, and the best entry points are not necessarily the most famous titles.
“Zombie,” released in 1977, is the album that the Nigerian military responded to with the Kalakuta raid, which tells you something about its power. The title track is a twenty-minute evisceration of the Nigerian army — its soldiers reduced, in Fela’s analysis, to unthinking automata following orders without moral agency, killing and beating because they have been trained to kill and beat without asking why. The musical arrangement is relentless, the horn riff locked into a groove that becomes, over twenty minutes, a kind of physical representation of the mindless repetition Fela is describing. And then, underneath that representation, the rhythm section doing something that mindless repetition never does: becoming more complex, more urgent, more alive, with every passing minute. The soldiers are zombies. The music is the opposite of a zombie. The contrast is the argument.
“Lady,” from 1972, addresses the colonisation of the African female mind — the way that African women educated in Western contexts had absorbed a model of femininity that, in Fela’s reading, made them less free rather than more, replacing the relative independence of traditional Yoruba women with the dependency structures of Western gender norms. The analysis is imperfect and the song’s framing is at times its own kind of condescension, but the musical realisation is extraordinary: the vocal moves between tenderness and mockery with a precision that a lesser musician could not have managed, and the horn arrangement underneath it has a delicacy that the polemical content of the lyric doesn’t prepare you for.
“Coffin for Head of State,” from 1981, is among his most explicitly political works — a direct response to the 1977 raid and his mother’s death, a twenty-minute funeral procession turned into an act of accusation, in which Fela and his entourage literally delivered a coffin to the gates of Dodan Barracks, the military headquarters in Lagos, as a symbolic indictment of the government that had killed his mother. The recording captures something of the event’s nature: funereal and furious simultaneously, the groove neither celebratory nor defeated but something harder to name, a sustained anger that has been refined past the point of explosion into something more durable.
“Sorrow, Tears and Blood,” from 1977, may be the most musically perfect thing he made: eighteen minutes in which a single horn theme is developed, varied, layered, and ultimately accumulated into something that feels like the whole history of Nigerian suffering organised into sound. The lyric’s central observation — that Africans have learned to run at the sight of soldiers because the soldiers are always coming for them — is devastating in its simplicity. The music is not simple. It is as complex and as disciplined as anything in the jazz tradition, and it builds to a collective intensity that very few recordings in any genre have matched.
After Fela
He died of complications from AIDS in August 1997, in Lagos, at the age of fifty-eight. His body was carried through the streets of Lagos by an estimated million people. The Nigerian government, which had imprisoned him, beaten him, killed his mother, and attempted his erasure for thirty years, sent an official delegation to the funeral. He had outlasted every military government that had persecuted him, survived every raid and every imprisonment, and died in his own city, celebrated by the people he had always made his music for.
His son Femi Kuti has carried the Afrobeat tradition forward with considerable skill and genuine musical intelligence, performing at the Shrine that was rebuilt after the 1977 destruction. His grandson Made Kuti represents a third generation. The tradition he created has been absorbed into global electronic music, into hip-hop, into the Afrobeats movement — note the added s, distinguishing the contemporary Nigerian pop genre from Fela’s original — that has made Nigerian music one of the dominant forces in global popular culture in the early twenty-first century. Burna Boy, who has become one of the most internationally celebrated African artists of his generation, carries Fela’s influence visibly and has spoken about it without reservation.
But influence, in Fela’s case, is a complicated thing to trace, because what he did was so particular to himself that it does not easily transfer. The long form, the polyrhythmic complexity, the political specificity, the total integration of music and politics and community and daily life — this is not a template that can be lifted and applied elsewhere. It was the product of a specific person in a specific city at a specific historical moment, and the attempt to replicate it wholesale produces, at best, homage and at worst pastiche. What has transferred is the attitude: the conviction that popular music can and should say the unsayable, should name the people in power and the things they do, should take the time it needs and the space it demands, should be unapologetically African and unapologetically political and unapologetically itself.
What the length was for
It is worth returning, at the end, to the question of duration, because it is the thing that most immediately distinguishes Afrobeat from everything around it and the thing that most directly expresses its philosophical position.
Most popular music, across all traditions and periods, is built on the premise that the listener’s attention is finite and must be managed — that a song must arrive at its destination before the listener’s patience runs out, that the economy of the form is a virtue rather than a constraint. Fela rejected this premise entirely. His songs took as long as they took, and what they took was the time required to establish the groove fully in the body, to make the argument fully in the language, to build the musical architecture fully in the horns and the rhythm and the call and response until the whole thing was standing, complete and self-sustaining, like a building that you could walk around and find no shortcuts had been taken.
This is a political position as much as a musical one. To insist on duration is to insist that the listener give something — time, attention, the willingness to be inside a thing rather than passing through it. It is to refuse the economy of the sound bite, the thirty-second clip, the greatest hit extracted from its context and made palatable without its political spine. You cannot easily extract a Fela song from itself. You cannot make “Zombie” into background music. The music demands to be the foreground, demands your body and your attention, and will not let you have the groove without the argument or the argument without the groove.
This was his genius and it was his principle: that joy and fury are not opposites, that dancing and thinking are not alternatives, that the dispossessed have the right to take up exactly as much space as the truth requires.
The Shrine is still there. The music is still long. The soldiers are still coming, in one uniform or another, in one country or another. And the groove is still the most honest response available to anyone with a horn and a rhythm section and something true to say.
Sources and further reading
Primary works — essential entry points
Kuti, Fela, and Africa 70. Zombie. Coconut / Creole, 1977. The most celebrated single album; the title track is the fullest realisation of the Afrobeat political aesthetic.
Kuti, Fela, and Africa 70. Sorrow, Tears and Blood. Coconut, 1977. Perhaps the most musically accomplished recording; the horn arrangements reach a level of sophistication that rewards repeated listening.
Kuti, Fela, and Africa 70. Expensive Shit / He Miss Road. Editions Makossa, 1975. A two-album reissue containing “Expensive Shit” — one of the most extraordinary songs in the catalogue, about Fela’s experience being imprisoned and forced to produce a stool sample to prove he had not swallowed a wrapped joint — and the more reflective “He Miss Road.”
Kuti, Fela, and Egypt 80. Coffin for Head of State / Unknown Soldier. Kalakuta Records, 1981. The most direct political statement of the post-1977 period; essential for understanding what the raid and his mother’s death meant to the work.
Kuti, Fela, and Africa 70. Gentleman. EMI Nigeria, 1973. Among the most accessible entry points for first-time listeners; the title track’s argument about the colonisation of the African male mind through Western dress codes is twenty minutes of sustained comic and musical brilliance.
Biographical and critical writing
Moore, Carlos. Fela: This Bitch of a Life. Lawrence Hill Books, 1982; revised edition 2009. The authorised biography, based on extended conversations with Fela himself; essential primary material, though the hero-worship in places requires critical distance.
Veal, Michael E. Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon. Temple University Press, 2000. The most rigorous academic study; Veal is a musicologist and the chapters on the formal structure of Afrobeat are the best available account of how the music actually works.
Olorunyomi, Sola. Afrobeat: Fela and the Imagined Continent. Africa World Press, 2003. Places Fela within the pan-African intellectual tradition; the best account of the political thought that underlies the music.
Stewart, Jesse. “Fela Kuti: Musical Practice and African Cultural Tradition.” In African Music, Vol. 8, No. 3. International Library of African Music, 2009. A concise musicological account of the relationship between Afrobeat and Yoruba traditional music; useful for readers who want to understand the African roots of the form rather than its American jazz and funk influences.
Documentary and stage
Finding Fela, directed by Alex Gibney, 2014. The most thorough documentary account of his life and legacy, drawing on extensive archival footage and interviews with musicians, family members, and political associates. The performance footage is indispensable.
Fela!, the Broadway musical created by Bill T. Jones, Jim Lewis, and Stephen Oremus (2009), is a remarkable piece of work in its own right — a genuinely Afrobeat-inflected theatrical event rather than a conventional jukebox show — and the cast recording and available footage give a sense of what the Shrine performances were like in their physical and communal dimension.
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