Once persecuted Nigerian singer Fela Kuti's star rises

LAGOS, Nigeria — All is quiet in this West African nation's largest city except for the area around the New Africa Shrine, home to the annual weeklong Felabration, which this year commemorates what would have been activist musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti's 75th birthday. In the closed-off street in front of the theater, a thousand admirers watch the action on big screens. Inside, some 4,000 young Nigerians dance to recordings of Fela's Afrobeat music and chant, "Baba! Baba!" ("Father! Father!")

Fela was repeatedly jailed and tortured by a string of military regimes in Nigeria from the 1970s until his AIDS-related death in 1997. Despite — or perhaps because of — that and the unyielding political message of his music, Fela's legacy is booming. His legend has been evangelized by the Broadway musical "Fela!" and hip-hop artists often sample him. ?uestlove, drummer for the Roots, is a champion, and helped organize a Felabration in Brooklyn, N.Y. Today there are at least 20 such festivals around the world, and more are started each year.

Fela's big band Afrobeat was a compelling setting for his incendiary lyrics. In his song "I.T.T.," for example, he took aim at the telecommunications giant, which he called "International Thief Thief." Britain's Margaret Thatcher, former South African Prime Minister P.W. Botha and Nigerian generals Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbun, who were behind Fela's 1984 incarceration, are all targets of his lyrics in "Beasts of No Nation (B.O.N.N)."

But some of Nigeria's current leaders have begun to embrace the country's best-known musical star. Felabration was started in 1998 by his daughter Yeni Kuti. For the last three years, it has been co-sponsored by the government of Lagos state, an administrative area that includes the city of Lagos. The government was instrumental in turning Fela's communal compound, known as the Kalakuta Republic, into a museum, which opened in 2012. ("Kalakuta" means "thieves" — a wry reminder of Fela's prison time.) The vindication of Fela is all the sweeter because his original compound was destroyed by the military in 1977.

Though Fela's music spoke to the disadvantaged, he was born into a prominent Nigerian family. Under British colonialism, his father and grandfather, rejecting traditional spiritual beliefs, were well-known Anglican priests and educators; his grandfather translated Christian hymns into Yoruba and recorded them in London. But Fela's mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, led women's protests against the British. She was the first woman to receive a Nigerian driver's license and met with Mao Zedong in China. The Ransome part of the family name was adopted from a British missionary. Fela and his mother later shed it in favor of Anikulapo, meaning "he who holds death in his pouch."

Fela's then-radical pan-African views — he even started his own political party, the Movement of the People — were developed outside Nigeria. He spoke of first experiencing racism as a music student in London. A tour of the United States in 1969 introduced him to the African-American struggle and the Black Power movement and also awoke him to the oppression and corruption at home in Nigeria, then just emerging from 100 years of British rule.

Starting out playing South American–inflected jazz in the 1960s, Fela gradually developed Afrobeat over the next decade, a musical journey that paralleled his growing political awareness. His orchestras played a fusion of funk, jazz and village rhythms, topped by his pungent political lyrics. (The immense popularity of his album "Zombie," a critique of military mindlessness, was a factor in the destruction of his compound.) His work was an effort to reimagine Africa and help reconstruct an identity for independent Nigerians after decades of colonialism. Thus his music repurposed traditional instruments like Ghana's 10-foot-long Akuba drum, and he and his band painted their faces with abstract symbols as precolonial signifiers.

But his efforts were as threatening to the independent Nigerian government as they would have been under British rule. The more popular Fela's music grew, the more he became a target for a series of military regimes. He became notorious for his outrageous lifestyle — heavy marijuana consumption, a harem of women and a habit of giving interviews dressed only in bikini briefs.

But today the government of Lagos state views Fela as a national hero. At the museum's opening, Babatunde Fashola, governor of Lagos state, told the media, "I thought that if we give (Kalakuta) a face-lift, it will continue to keep (alive) Fela's ideas about humanity, about governance, about social contracts, about the power of black people."

Thus the Fela Museum represents a shift in official thinking — at least in the state of Lagos — that is indicative of a generational shift in the country as a whole. "You have to remember that some of the politicians grew up listening to Fela and believing in his message, so it is understandable that they relate to him," says Yeni Kuti. "I didn't want Fela's message to die. I knew he had a lot to impart, so I decided to carry on the legacy. Now Felabration is a worldwide activity."

Fela was one of a small group of headstrong, popular 20th century musicians in the developing world whose politics were so inflammatory that their governments were determined to silence them, whatever it took. He stands symbolically alongside the Jamaican reggae artists Bob Marley, who was also honored at this year's Felabration, and Peter Tosh. They were all musicians who were believed to have lengthy CIA files and were ready to pay with their lives for expressing their beliefs. They all very nearly did.  

Tosh's radical rants provoked years of savage beatings by Jamaican police that left him in permanent pain. Marley survived four assassins' bullets in the kitchen of his Kingston home in 1976. The following year came the destruction of Fela's compound in Lagos by nearly a thousand Nigerian soldiers.

President Olusegun Obasanjo's military is believed to have attacked the compound in part because of what was seen as Fela's transgressive lifestyle; his compound was often in the news for allegedly harboring runaways and many female consorts. But another reason, many believe, was to silence a man whose music was mobilizing the masses in opposition to the country's repressive regimes. In the fight, Fela was tortured and nearly died. His band members were brutalized, and many of the women living in the compound were raped. His mother, 78 at the time, was thrown from a window and later died as a result. The house was burned to the ground, along with irreplaceable master tapes. Fela went into a lengthy self-imposed exile in Ghana.

The destruction of Kalakuta proved to be a turning point for Fela. As a sign of continued resistance, he married all 37 of the women who were attacked. He moved his Kalakuta Republic to a new building, which is now the museum.

While Nigeria's vigorous press still uncovers plenty of government corruption to denounce, just as in Fela's day, Lagos has changed since the days of his brutal harassment. Whereas once a journalist would be jailed for covering Fela, now his name might get an approving nod at late-night military street checkpoints.

Tonight in the Shrine, a larger version of a club started by Fela, the mood is upbeat. Local stars include Sound Sultan, Weird M.C., Burma Boy and leading African rapper Olamide. "As a musician and a citizen, Fela left a legacy for us — to know our rights,” says Olamide. "He inspires me to be a soldier (in music), fighting for my people."

Says Toby Okunade, a student working at the Felabration, "Fela sang about 'suffer, suffer,' and Africa is still suffering 20 years on. We want the world to listen to Fela. He taught us to think and speak for ourselves without violence and guns."

Proof that the messages of Fela and those like him have stuck comes in the wee hours of tonight's concert. Some 4,000 Nigerians raise their voices in unison and sing the words to Marley’s anthem "Redemption Song," in the Shrine built by Fela.