Fela Anikulapo - He Has Death In His Pouch.

By the time he died in 1997, more than a million people lined the streets of Lagos to see his funeral procession His funeral in Lagos drew bigger crowds than the burial ceremonies for the country’s former heads of state. 

Nearly two decades after his death, Fela’s 50+ album body of work has left a historic legacy, imperishable music that is indeed classical, above the music he became a fearless champion of the oppressed, Fela had the audacity to challenge those who were exploiting an entire land for their personal gain.

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was renowned for his eccentric character, musical talent and involvement in post-colonial African politics his music was inspired by the Black Panther movement, with lyrics that were infused with a social and political critique.

After formal training in London in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, he returned to Lagos and began playing a fusion of jazz and a regional pop genre known as highlife. In 1969 he and his group toured the United States, looking for the fame that had eluded them at home.

In Los Angeles, he met Sandra Iszadore, a former Black Panther who expanded Fela’s consciousness about black struggles and African American thinkers. The trip played a crucial role in shaping Fela’s signature “Afrobeat” sound and his increasingly revolutionary politics



During the 1970s, Fela and his group, Africa 70, became wildly popular. As the Yale ethnomusicologist Michael E. Veal notes in his brilliant study Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon, the music and its lyrics, sung in a pidgin English familiar to Nigerians, attracted a large following among the oppressed.

“Moreover,” he writes, “the very sound of Afrobeat, while championed by Nigeria’s underclass and progressives, offended the sensibility of its elite and sent an unsettling message to the country’s military rulership. Blaring from record shops throughout Lagos, its stabbing horn lines, aggressive jazz solos, and irresistible rhythm—all united under Fela’s coarse, hemp-smoked voice—came to be heard as the sound of rebellion itself"

Africans embraced songs such as “Shakara”, “Sorrow Tears and Blood”, “Upside Down” and “Why Black Man Dey Suffer” for accurately mirroring their frustrations. They welcomed the graphic words of “Expensive Shit” or “Who No Know Go Know” as down-to-earth explanations for their lowly condition. More importantly, Fela’s music was a clarion proclamation that it was possible to reverse their lot (“Water No Get Enemy”, “Africa Center of the World”).

Afrobeat is about social, political, and cultural literacy. It confronts the geography of world complacency, greed, and fear and calls for transformative insubordination.

Fela was a part of an Afro-Centric consciousness movement that was founded on and delivered through his music.



In an interview found in the Hank Bordowitz analysis Noise of the World, Fela stated: "Music is supposed to have an effect. If you're playing music and people don't feel something, you're not doing shit. That's what African music is about. When you hear something, you must move. I want to move people to dance, but also to think. Music wants to dictate a better life, against a bad life. When you're listening to something that depicts having a better life, and you're not having a better life, it must have an effect on you."

Fela had a strong sense of sharing humanist and activist ideas from the environment he was in. In interview footage found in Faces of Africa on CGTN Africa, he spoke of comparison between English love songs and his own music:

"Yes, if you are in England, the music can be an instrument of enjoyment. You can sing about love, you can sing about whom you are going to bed next. But in my own environment, my society is underdeveloped because of an alien system on our people. So there is no music enjoyment. There is nothing like love. There is something like a struggle for people's existence."



Expanding fame abroad was no guarantee of protection at home, Kuti's open vocalization of the violent and oppressive regime controlling Nigeria did not come without consequence. He was arrested on over 200 different occasions and spent time in jail, including his longest stint of 20 months after his arrest in 1984.

On top of the jail time, the corrupt government would send soldiers to beat Kuti, his family, and friends, and destroy wherever he lived and whatever instruments or recordings he had.

Nearly two decades after his death, vindication has come to Fela Kuti, Africa’s musical genius. Afrobeat, his gift to the world, is now an international staple on his own uncompromising terms.

Afrobeat has profoundly influenced important contemporary producers and musicians such as Brian Eno and David Byrne, who credit Fela Kuti as an essential influence.

More recently, the horn section of Brooklyn’s Antibalas, an Afrobeat band modeled after Fela Kuti’s Africa 70, featured on TV On The Radio's highly acclaimed 2008 album “Dear Science”, as well as on British band Foals' 2008 album, “Antidotes”.



Though critics and scholars may disagree over Fela’s morals and his role in Nigeria’s history, no one questions his courage or his place in popular music. “While his lifestyle was universally condemned,” Veal writes, Fela died a national hero, having “never wavered from his self-appointed role of calling attention to the sufferings of the common people.”

“77 albums, 27 wives, over two hundred court appearances. Harassed, beaten, tortured, jailed. Twice-born father of Afro-beat. Spiritualist. Pan-Africanist. Commune king. Composer, saxophonist, keyboardist, vocalist, dancer. Would-be candidate for the Nigerian presidency. There will never be another like him.”
–Jay Babcock, Mean Magazine (Dec 1999-Jan 2000)



Listen To One Of Fela's classics below

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