Nine and a half years later, I joined nearly a million people who thronged to the Tafawa Balewa Square for his funeral.

Influenced by trumpeters: Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown and saxophonists: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Harold Land, he chose music as a weapon for change in society

Fela Kuti as an artist embodied different things to different people. For the vast majority of Nigerians, he stood tall as a social crusader who championed the fight against oppression, government excess and corruption. To the authorities, he was just a dissenter, a cannabis-smoking saxophonist who was to be vilified, hounded and imprisoned. To the rest of the world, he was more like the eccentric performer whose unyielding lyrics gave jazz a rebel face. Indeed, Fela’s life as a maverick resonated in the genius of his art — Afro beat music so subliminal, so dissident and yet so persuasive.

Visit the new video site for Fly and watch Fela Kuti’s video for ‘Authority Stealing’

Born on October 15, 1938 in Abeokuta, South West Nigeria, Fela would become a cult figure in Nigeria for challenging everything that was devoid of humanity during the successive military dictatorships of that dark era and for championing the affirmation of traditional African culture. And he paid the price time and time again: severe beatings from soldiers (who also torched his house), court appearances, frequent harassment and incarceration by the authorities became his lot. But the message in his music was not lost to all.

…busy, lengthy arrangements of interlocking polyrhythms and blazing horns with fervently nationalistic lyrics…

Influenced by trumpeters: Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown and saxophonists: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Harold Land, he chose music as a weapon for change in society, he chose music as a weapon for change in society. Upon arriving back home from Trinity College of Music in England in 1963, Fela began to experiment with highlife music, the craze in West Africa in the fifties and sixties. Highlife enthusiasts were unimpressed with his fusion of jazz and highlife though.

At about the same period in the late sixties, he, along with his band Koola Lobitos took a music tour to the US, where he encountered the black revolutionary movement that had brought activism into the arts as well. He began to reflect on the cultural impact his music could have on his own long suffering African people.

With a blend of music genres, Fela clearly drew upon highlife, jazz and rhythm and blues but he Africanised the foreign jazz and soul elements while deconstructing dance band highlife and grafting them all onto a traditional West African rhythmic template.

The result was Afro beat: a style of composition that buttressed its busy, lengthy arrangements of interlocking polyrhythms and blazing horns with fervently nationalistic lyrics that railed against the rampant corruption in Nigeria’s halls of power.

His frown on Western imperialism resonated in every note from his saxophone and his music castigated the authoritarianism that was prevalent in Africa following independence

He chose to sing in Pidgin, a broken down version of the English language spoken by the vast West African underclass population, which endeared him to fans who had been cut off by earlier recordings in his native Yoruba tongue.

Michael E Veal in his biography of Fela highlights the impact it had on his compositions: “Pidgin enabled him to dart in and around the rhythm in a strongly jazz-inflected fashion, bending the stresses and accents of Standard English to the African syntax and tonal inflections. It also allowed him to integrate nonsense syllables which had a purely rhythmic value into his singing.”

Classics like the 1975 hypnotic ‘Water No Get Enemy’, the seditious ‘Zombie’ waxed in 1976, and the valiantly composed 1977 hit ‘Sorrow, Tears and Blood’ are all ensconced in a discography that boasts 77 recorded albums and several unreleased compositions.

Paul McCartney was so enthralled with Fela’s composition on one instance that he wanted to record with him on a visit to the Kalakuta ‘Republic’. But Fela was suspicious of his motives and the proposition was put on ice.

His frown on Western imperialism resonated in every note from his saxophone and his music castigated the authoritarianism that was prevalent in Africa following independence. Fela was empowered by an awareness that sprung from traditional Africa, where things were essentially ordered.

He ridiculed Christianity, Islam and feminism alike. Fela was spiritually rooted in traditional African mysticism and his legion of fans gave him the moniker Abami Eda, which translated roughly means ‘the weird one’.

This man made no pretence of perfection, he lived his life with apologies to no one. Fela was passionate, unpretentious, self-indulgent and above all unorthodox

But he also wondered why his home country Nigeria was earning a fortune in foreign exchange from the exploration and sale of crude oil and yet was so underdeveloped, lacking in basic infrastructure and desperately poor. Corrupt leaders and western collaborators were to blame and his voice can still be heard harsh as ever on ‘Authority Stealing’, ‘Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense’, ‘Beasts of No Nation’, ‘Army Arrangement’, ‘Why Blackman Dey Suffer’ and ‘Shuffering and Shmiling’. It is such a shame that the issues he sang about are still prevalent in Nigeria today.

Smoking cannabis or Indian hemp as it is commonly referred to in Nigeria turned off his more conservative fans and gave the authorities an excuse for their unbridled persecution of Fela. But getting high was not just for fun or to stimulate him while on stage as a music artist: Fela built a whole lifestyle around it and attributed some form of ritualistic symbolism to it.

Michael E. Veal describes the experience in his account of Fela: “Marijuana was clearly crucial to Fela’s musical and social vision in a number of ways. Sonically, it was reflected in the loping, insistent patterns, whose hypnotic effect was similar to the Jamaican reggae of the same period (in the creation of which marijuana also played an integral role).”

Fela passed away from AIDS related complications in August 2nd 1997, becoming one of the most celebrated personalities to succumb to that dreadful disease in his part of the world. The shock of his death was to reveal the sum of our collective burden: the angst of daily life.

This man made no pretence of perfection, he lived his life with apologies to no one. Fela was passionate, unpretentious, self-indulgent and above all unorthodox. He refused to be confined to the norm… he defined himself. A true renaissance man who not only influenced his family and friends but also every individual in the world today whose voice is fervent enough to be raised on behalf of someone else.

Notes:
Veal E. Michael, Fela: The Life and Times of an African Music Icon, p. 98.
Loftus Johnny, Fela’s Children (Metro Times Detroit).
http://biochem.chem.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~endo/EAFela.html

Also: read our Femi Kuti interview and see pictures of gigs at the Barbican and WOMAD