Fela a worthy Grammy Award recipient

When the news filtered through late last month that Fela Anikulapo Kuti was to receive the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, I just shrugged. This recognition has long been coming, I mused. The award might have come a bit late for Fela, who has now been dead for almost three decades. Still, it is a mighty recognition for Afrobeat, the musical genre he assiduously crafted and popularised not only in Nigeria but across the world. The fact that Afrobeat has survived and grown into a daily diet across musical media is attributable to Fela’s genius. Afrobeat is as contemporary today as it was when Fela, in his heyday, entertained generations of students from the 1970s.

About a decade ago, I wrote a tribute to Fela to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his death. In that tribute, I related how I came to be associated with Fela in those troubling years of his life. He was one of the culture shocks I encountered when I moved south to do my National Service in 1976. When in Lagos, the NYSC camped us for the month-long orientation, in the Yaba College of Technology, a walking distance from Kalakuta Republic – Fela’s sprawling compound housing his club, Africa Shrine, and home.

Fela had established his base in that part of Lagos in a cluster of dwellings, with an assortment of bars and other gaudy settlements. A nearby large barracks and its surrounding mammy market completed the picture. Actually, Fela living and operating in that environment was a kind of class suicide because he had been born into an upper-class family in Abeokuta. Both his parents were well-known. His father, Rev. Ransome-Kuti, was a school Principal and reputedly the first President of the Nigerian Society of Teachers, while his mother, Funmilayo, was a famous political agitator.

Fela, along with his elder and younger brothers, was sent to the United Kingdom to study medicine, but he chose music instead. After completing his studies, he lived in Ghana and the USA before finally settling in Lagos. By then, he had created the musical genre Afrobeat, which was a synthesis of Western classical music, which he had imbibed, and West African highlife, the rave of the time, plus Yoruba fuji and other local influences.

By the time we were encamped in Yaba, Fela was at the apogee of his popularity. His music and the pungent politics laced with it ruled the airwaves. His abode, Kalakuta, which he had christened a republic, possibly in a pugnacious gesture to the military regime of the time, which was constantly harassing him, was a must-visit place for young men.  In the first few days of our stay in Yaba, we decided to visit Kalakuta because it was the talk of the camp.

One night, a group of us sneaked out and walked across. I had seen rough areas in Sabon Gari, Zaria, where I was a university student, and Bulabulin in Maiduguri, my hometown. Still, nothing prepared me for the scale of what I saw in the surroundings of Fela’s Kalakuta Republic. It was a seedy, sordid environment. But we were determined to watch Fela’s show. After that first encounter, I visited the place whenever Fela was billed to perform, until the orientation camp closed, when I moved to my place of primary assignment in Mende village, Maryland.

While living in Lagos, whenever I had the opportunity, I went to watch Fela’s shows. They became my introduction to real live shows. He was the ultimate showman, whose gigs were a genuine pleasure to experience. Typically, his shows lasted several hours, taking the audience through several of his songs, interspersed with what were called yabbis: political talk on topics ranging from military rule and corruption to apartheid.

He was a consummate musician who evidently took his time to prepare for his shows. The meticulous way he coordinated his dancers and musicians gave way to Fela’s genius. That kind of thorough planning, the control and delivery, is what I, probably, only witnessed with one of Fela’s contemporaries, Bala Miller, whose show I frequented in the late 1980s in his Costain Club in Kaduna. Fela was multi-talented on instruments, particularly the saxophone, which he handled with great dexterity. I have not seen anyone in the Nigerian music scene blowing the saxophone the way Fela did. I guess his backup girls must have gone through rigorous practice as well.  To date, Fela’s extended song Colo mentality remains my favourite for its lyrical rhetoric and instrumental arrangements.

That period of my sojourn in Lagos was not the best of times for Fela. His Kalakuta Republic was burnt down in the infamous Unknown Soldiers episode in February 1977. Fela was always having brushes with soldiers, and it culminated in that sad occurrence. After a brief period of inactivity, he relocated to Ikeja and remained there till he breathed his last in 1997.

The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award is a significant notch, though coming late, on Fela’s long list of attainments. It is still worth celebrating.

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