More About Fela

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• Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's Bio

  Fela Ransome Kuti was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, north of Lagos in 1938. His father was a Christian schoolmaster, minister and master pianist and his mother was a world-recognized feminist leader, who was very active in the anti-colonial Nigerian women's movement during the struggle for independence.
  
  Fela was educated in Nigeria amongst the indigenous elite. Ironically, many of his classmates in his Nigerian school would become the very military leaders he so vociferously opposed.
  
  With medical aspirations for their offspring (Fela’s older brother. Koye, was to become a Deputy Director of the World Health Organization and his younger brother, Beko, President of the Nigerian Medical Association) in 1958 Fela's parents sent him to London for a medical education. Instead, he registered at Trinity College's school of music where he studied composition and chose the trumpet as his instrument. Quickly tiring of European composers, Fela, struck by Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra, formed the Koola Lobitos in 1961, and his band became a fixture in London's club scene. Two years later, Fela returned to Nigeria, restarted the Koola Lobitos, and became influenced by James Brown. Trying to find an authentic musical voice, he added elements of traditional Yoruba, high life and jazz, and "Afrobeat" was born. In 1969, Fela's Koola Lobitos traveled to Los Angeles to tour and record. During his eight months in the US, with LA as a home base, Fela befriended Sandra Isidore, who introduced him to the writings and politics of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and other proponents of Black nationalism and Afrocentrism.
  
  With this new politically explicit and critical worldview, Fela reformed the Koola Lobitos as Nigeria 70 and returned to Lagos. He founded a commune/recording studio called the Kalakuta Republic, complete with his own private nightclub, The Shrine, and Fela dropped his given middle name "Ransome," and replaced it with a Yoruba name "Anikulapo" (meaning "he who carries death in his pouch"). Playing constantly and recording at a ferocious pace, Fela and band (who were now called Africa 70) became huge stars in West Africa and beyond. His music served as a rallying cry for the disenfranchised, critiquing the military government, and made Fela not only a pop star but thrust him into political life. People took to the streets singing his songs and the military responded by viciously harassing Fela, jailing him and nearly killing him on several occasions.
  
  In 1977, during a government-sanctioned attack on his Kalakuta Republic commune, Fela and other members of his commune were arrested; Fela himself suffered a fractured skull as well as other broken bones; a number of women living at Kalakuta were beaten and raped; and his 82-year old mother was thrown from an upstairs window, inflicting injuries that would later prove fatal. The soldiers set fire to the compound and prevented fire fighters from reaching the area. Fela's recording studio, all his master tapes and musical instruments and the only known copy of his self-financed film Black President were destroyed.
  
  After the Kalakuta tragedy, Fela briefly lived in exile in Ghana, returning to Nigeria in 1978. A year later, he formed his own political party, MOP (Movement of the People) and ran for president in two elections, although his campaigning was consistently blocked by the military. As the '80s ended, Fela recorded blistering attacks against Nigeria's corrupt military government.
  
  Fela Anikulapo Kuti was arrested more than two hundred times in his life, and charged with almost every conceivable crime, although only serving one eighteen month sentence in jail for a currency violation. Despite this constant harassment he continued to live in Nigeria even though, as an icon in the international world of rock and roll, soul, jazz and hip-hop, he could have at any point abandoned Nigeria and led the life of an international music superstar. His death on August 3, 1997 of complications from AIDS deeply affected musicians and fans internationally, as a unique and ineffable musical and sociopolitical voice was lost. In Nigeria one million people attended his funeral. His incredible body of work, almost 70 albums, is now available, through public demand, all over the world.

• An Excerpt from A Giant of a Man by Rikki Stein

  Fela was sweet; perhaps not an adjective that would normally be used to describe this tornado of a man, but Fela was sweet to me. The sweetness that I perceived in him emanated from his love for humanity; particularly for those who had drawn life’s short straw. Hundreds of people depended upon Fela for living. Many more than he needed to run his Lagos club, The Shrine, or to play in his band.
  
  I saw him as a social engineer, concerned with issues of injustice, corruption, the abuses of power. He was ready to lay his life on the line in defense of such causes, which he did on countless occasions. For his trouble he was beaten with rifle butts, endlessly harassed, imprisoned, vilified by the authorities, despised by bourgeois society (whose sons and daughters were captivated by him). His house was once burned to the ground by a thousand soldiers, after they had raped and beaten his followers, thrown his mother and brother from a window, both of whom suffered fractures (his mother was ultimately to die from her injuries). Each time they were to beat him, though, he always bounced back with a vengeance, stronger than ever. It is my view that the only thing that kept him alive and the ultimate source of his strength was the love the people had for him.
  
  And his music – deliberate conspiracies of hot brass woven around the intricately hypnotic consistency of bass and guitar lines, all driven by the dual forces of lavish percussion and Fela’s own passion for the precision of his musical vision. The icing on the cake of a Fela performance were his singers and dancers, fabulous glittering unreal creatures from another world who would exude waves of sensuality and downright sexiness that you could cut with a knife. All in all, thirty something people on stage, each playing their part in what Fela called “the underground spiritual game."
  
  In the center of this audio-visual feast for the senses, Fela reigned supreme. He was everywhere at once; playing keyboards, soprano or alto, the occasional drum solo, a sinuous dance from one side of the stage to the other and then it was time to sing, the ever-present spliff held in his elegant fingers. No moon and toon and joon for this articulate firebrand. Only eloquent biting poetic social observation, expressed with a breathtaking clarity and natural authority, which placed him firmly in an unsurpassed realm in which he had no equal. To get a bead on who he was, once he had recorded a song, he would never perform it again on stage, no matter how record company exec may plead.
  
  Recently, however, he had ceased his endless harangue of politicians, big business, organized religion, the military, police, etc. (once, when running for President of Nigeria, he proclaimed that his first act upon being elected would be to enroll the entire population in the police force. Then, he said, “ before a policeman could slap you he would have to think twice because you’re a policeman too.” The authorities ultimately refused to allow him to enter the race. Too bad.)
  
  He now saw politics as “a distraction” saying that our only task was to enter into contact with our own spirit, without which “we would not survive”. His last years were spent in spiritual contemplation. He never left the house, except twice a week to go to the Shrine and play. He wouldn’t arrive until two in the morning. There would be fifteen hundred people waiting for him and he would finish at dawn.
  
  And now he has gone. AIDS they said. As far as I’m concerned it was one beating too many which had weakened his body sufficiently to allow disease to enter. He was a giant of a man, but a man nevertheless. The system can only take so much.
  
  He was finally laid to rest in front of his house, Kalakuta, in Ikeja on the morning of Tuesday, August 12th, 1997. His son, Femi, played a plaintive sax solo. A gentle rain fell; like perfume.

• A Note from Fela's Daughter, Yeni Anikulapo-Kuti

  It's a great privilege to be the daughter of a great man like Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. You know, Fela's name, Anikulapo, which I bear with pride, means "I have death in my pouch." Many people don't understand that name, but the real meaning is what we're seeing now: His name never dies. The interest in him is as if he were alive. For generations to come, Fela will be a source of inspiration to millions of people around the world. That is the real meaning of having death in his pouch.

• A Note About Fela Anikulapo-Kuti by Ian Ashbridge, Wrasse Records

  Fela: out of whom greatness comes
  
  Anikulapo: he who carries death in his quiver
  
  Kuti: he whose death cannot be caused by men
  
  For those who never knew Fela, the Black President of Lagos, Robin Hood of a ghetto of a hundred thousand souls; or who never spaced out in the grassy smog of the Afrika Shrine, the Master’s mythical nightspot, stunned by beer and the hallucinating Afrobeat; or who never saw Fela and his Queens in action, half-naked, daubed with kaolin as war paint; for all those, then, the re-release of the complete Fela collection will reveal the shores of an exceptional continent. The complete set forms a memorial dedicated to the first hero of the African slums.
  
  Fela the Unique.
  
  Fela alone, in command of the phantom city. Fela erect, microphone in hand, between the go-go dancer cages. Fela withdrawn in his bunker, Fela bare-chested, an Afro-calypso totem. Fela the icon, a combination of Miles Davis and the Che, of Bob Marley and Muhammad Ali, a tribal offspring of the early James Brown. Music and politics. Transe and liberation. Sex and militantism. The definitive manifesto of the Damned of the Earth.
  
  Fela was the physical response to colonialism, an uppercut to the allied corruptors of Nigeria. African neo-colonialism, the ultra-violence of the military rulers, fattened multinationals, and Mercedes Benz, gold-plated mobile phones and rivers of oil, such was Lagos, megalopolis of fear. Formerly the Kingdom of Benin, a jewel set in bronze and ivory, Nigeria is the richest and most populous country in Africa. But the Spartacus of the shanty-towns only invented the music of the downtrodden, of those who refused to die quietly. An agglomeration of English, Yoruba and pidgin formed an alphabet of stupefying protest. To the disinherited, Fela offered a Kingdom of Utopia in the size of a neighbourhood: the Republic of Kalakuta, a self-proclaimed bastion of liberty.
  
  Fela alone, armed with a saxophone, entrenched in his underpants in the community of Kalakuta, defying the authorities.
  
  As many nights spent in concert as in prison. Scores of arrests. From 1970 till his death, in the summer of ‘97, the Black President of muddy ghettos – where thieves met their fate in a necklace – rained down insults on the military.
  
  By the beginning of 1977, Fela had acquired worldwide status. And the generals decided enough was enough.
  
  Fela sensed the coming assault. He erected a 4-metre high, barbed-wire barrier around his compound. His inner circle and his twenty-seven wives, all dancers, formed a security wall around him. The Boss electrified the fence with a 65-watt generator. It was a massive toaster for the thousand soldiers staked out in ambush. Fela appeared on the balcony. The sound system poured out his music, including the famous song “Zombies,” a machette-charge against the army and a corrupt establishment. The response was immediate, an attack of rare violence. Fela turned on the electrified fence; it struck down several soldiers in action. But very quickly, the soldiers cut off the current and sacked the house. They pillaged and lit fires, beating, stripping and raping the Queens. Fela’s mother, 77, a former political activist, was assaulted and thrown from a window. She died from her injuries a year later. The Republic of Kalakuta, situated at 14A Agege Motor Road, Surulere, was in flames. Thrashed, with bones broken but not his spirit, Fela spent a month in prison. General Obasanjo thought Fela was finished, once and for all.
  
  Only just freed, to provoke the authorities Fela demanded the equivalent of thirty million dollars in damages. As a memorial to the butchery, he immediately released two albums dedicated to the victims: “Sorrow, Tears and Blood” and “Unknown Soldier.” Fela became a hero. The people were behind him. The rebel from the lumpenproletariat, the secret leader of “area boys,” servants, and apprentice cooks at fifteen dollars a month, remained free, rich, unpunished, and surrounded by beautiful women.
  
  Fela returned to the Afrika Shrine with his militia and musicians. He was reunited with his army of the shadows, a saxophone in one hand, a heavy gun in the other. The CIA fired up the army. Fela = a major destabilizing risk.
  
  Riddled with AIDS, Fela remained on the scene till the end, upright under the smoky ceiling of the Shrine. Several Queens, exhausted by the tours and living in constant fear, quit Kalakuta, but Fela was unswerving. Now, original bodyguards and area boys keep the flames of the Afrika Shrine burning, an ultimate communion of fire for the Damned of the Earth.

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