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#BlackHistoryMonth – Great creator of Afro-beat music

by Barbados Today Traffic
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Fela Ransome Kuti was born October 15, 1938, in Abeokuta, Nigeria, and is viewed as one of the African continent’s greatest ever musicians. Also an activist, he launched a modern style of music called Afro-beat, which fused American blues, jazz, and funk with traditional Yoruba music.

Kuti was the son of feminist and labour activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti who won the Lenin Peace Prize. His father was Anglican pastor Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti who founded the Nigeria Union of Teachers. As a youth Fela took lessons in piano and percussion before studying (1959) classical music at Trinity College London. Fela’s family had wanted him to become a lawyer and in 1958 he left Nigeria for the UK, ostensibly to study law. But many of his close friends maintained that he never intended to follow that line, and that he had made his decision to be a musician from his schooldays.

Once in the UK Fela enrolled In the Trinity School of Music. The trumpet was his preferred instrument, as most of Nigeria’s leading highlife band leaders were trumpeters and at least two of them, Rex Jim Lawson and Victor Olaiya, were early heroes of Fela’s. Although his father encouraged him to play the piano, he had begun to practise the trumpet on his own before leaving secondary school, and sat in with many of the popular groups of the day. Fela once said that it was the discovery of Miles Davis’ early recordings with the legendary Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker that strengthened his commitment to the instrument when he began studying in London.

While in London, he encountered various musical styles by playing piano in jazz and rock bands. Returning to Nigeria in the mid-1960s, he reconstituted Koola Lobitos, a band with which he had played in London. The Afro-beat sound emerged from that group’s experiments.

Following his 1969 tour of the United States, where he was influenced by the politics of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and other militants, Kuti’s music became increasingly politicized. He exhorted social change in such songs as “Zombie,” “Monkey Banana,” “Beasts of No Nation,” and “Upside Down.” Fela (as he was popularly known) and his band, which was known variously as the Nigeria 70, Africa 70, and later the Egypt 80, performed for packed houses at the early-morning concerts that they staged at Fela’s often-raided nightclub in Lagos.

The firebrand singer, who gyrated over the keyboard as he sang in English and Yoruba, struck a chord among the unemployed, disadvantaged, and oppressed. His politically charged songs, which decried oppression by Nigeria’s military government, prompted authorities to routinely raid his club, beat he and his followers and look for reasons to jail him. Near there he also set up a communal compound, which he proclaimed the independent Kalakuta Republic. As head of the commune, he often provoked controversy and attracted attention by promoting indulgence in sex, polygamy (he married 27 women), and drugs, especially marijuana. For his part Fela declared polygamy an African tradition and claimed that by marrying them he was protecting his wives against charges that they were prostitutes. Ever the contrarian, in 1986, he divorced them all, saying that no man should own a woman’s body.

His music and outspokenenness made Fela a hero to Africa’s poor, but he would pay a high price for his insurrectionary micro-republic. In early 1977, the military junta had had enough – Fela’s record Zombie, mocking the army’s do-as-you’re-told mentality, may have been the tipping point for head of state General Obasanjo, who had once been in the same primary school class as Fela. A thousand soldiers overwhelmed Kalakuta, brutalising and raping as they went, then razing the compound to the ground. Fela was beaten close to death, and his elderly mother thrown from an upstairs window, afterwards dying of her injuries.

In 1979 Fela formed a political party, the Movement of the People, and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Nigeria. Five years later he was jailed for 20 months on trumped up charges of currency smuggling. Upon his release, he turned away from active political protest and left his son, Femi, to carry the torch of Afro-beat music.

Fela was jailed again in 1993 on murder accusations, but the charges were eventually dropped. He died as a result of complications from AIDS in 1997 at age 58.

Fela left behind seven children, 50-odd albums and a musical legacy that has been kept fiercely alive by his sons Femi and Seun. (Britannica.com/guardian)

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