Fela Kuti in Prison

How Nigeria literally went to war against one musician—and lost

They just called him Fela—although his birth name was Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti. And from his first breath, he flirted with danger.

Fela considered himself an abiku. That Yoruban term translates literally as “predestined for death.” In traditional folklore, these are children who straddle the spirit realm and real world. They often die as infants, but their spirits get reborn—so they never develop a strong attachment to the comforts of life.

That was Fela Kuti at every juncture. He sought out conflict and confrontation—or perhaps they came hunting for him.

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“Fela loved to buck the system,” explains dramatist Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s only Nobel laureate and also first cousin to the famous musician. Fela was supposed to become a doctor like his two brothers, and his parents sent him to London to study medicine. But he rebelled against expectations even at that early stage, switching to music.

Fela had already gained some knowledge of his future vocation from his father, a preacher and educator who taught music. But this learning came painfully.

“He wouldn’t hesitate to use his atori (cane) to whip the back of his students,” Fela later recalled. “I was among his best students in music, but that didn’t keep me from getting beaten with the atori….If you offended him while he was beating, you would get beaten with three times the force.”

Fela later estimated that, between his strict father and equally tough mother (“she would flog you like a man”), he received three thousand strokes in punishment between the ages of 9 and 17. So leaving for London was already a victory of sorts.

He studied at the Trinity College of Music from August 1958 to December 1962. And almost from the start, Fela got a reputation as a problem student.

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“There was no use talking to him,” a teacher later complained. “He was not interested in classical music. He liked jazz better.” As punishment for inappropriate attire, Fela got removed from the school orchestra. But here’s the irony: Fela Kuti is now the most famous alum of this very British conservatory—although he gets some competition from Mantovani and Sir John Barbirolli.

A British music education didn’t help much back in Lagos. Fela gigged in Nigeria and Ghana, but many dismissed his music as too jazzy. Kuti then tried his luck in the US—where he arrived in 1969 with $10 in his pocket.

Fela’s music evolved during his ten month stay—documented by recordings he made while living in Hollywood and performing on Sunset Boulevard. But his activities off the bandstand proved even more decisive.

Fela got politicized after meeting the Black Panthers and reading Malcolm X. When he returned to Lagos, he had a new vision for his music—assertive, strident, and attuned to social issues.

“He had changed completely, man,” relates his close friend J.K. Braimah. “It was the American thing, you know. He saw the light over there and everything came out in him.”

But Nigerian authorities had different ideas.

Fela’s first arrest took place on April 30, 1974. Fifty cops came to his house—ostensibly to investigate his pot smoking—and took him into custody. But the police got a shock when they brought the beloved singer to his cell. The other prisoners started cheering him on—shouting out: “Fela you are going to be our president in this prison.”

Has any other recording in history led to the mobilization of a thousand soldiers and a military assault on a musician’s home?

The name stuck, and he even adopted it himself. Fela started calling himself the Black President. At the jailhouse, he found himself placed in a cell known as Kalakuta—a reference to the Black Hole of Calcutta. But Kuti turned that name around as well. He later renamed his home compound the Kalakuta Republic—a personal declaration of independence from Nigeria’s oppressive military regime.

Other singers have protested abuses. But how many have declared that their house is an independent republic? Only Fela Kuti.

Anyone who didn’t grasp the defiance in his music before, clearly did so now.

Fela Kuti in Detroit, 1986 (Photo by Leni Sinclair/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

That first stay in jail only lasted eight days. But as soon as Fela regained his freedom, his house got raided again.

Kuti refused to back down, and put up three-and-a-half meters of barbed wire around his home. He knew he needed protection—not from criminals, but from his own government.

So when authorities returned in November, they brought axes and tear gas. In the resulting raid, Fela got beaten with clubs, and was injured so severely he spent the next three days in the hospital, instead of jail. When Fela showed up in court he was still in bandages, and the case got thrown out. But more police raids took place in February while Fela was performing in Ilorin.  

These tensions reached a breaking point with the release of Fela’s album Zombie—first in Nigeria in 1976 and in the UK in 1977. Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating when I describe this as the most politicized moment in twentieth century music. But has any other recording in history led to the mobilization of a thousand soldiers and a military assault on a musician’s home?

The country of Nigeria literally went to war against Fela Kuti.

Soldiers set fire to his home commune, the self-declared Kalakuta Republic—and prevented anyone from putting out the flames. Fela’s recording studio was destroyed, along with his instruments and master tapes. Every member of his household got arrested. Even the animals were killed.

Fela was beaten unconscious, and taken to the hospital. He was lucky to have survived—some of the soldiers wanted to kill him on the spot, but were stopped by the commanding officer.

His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, did not fare so well. She was thrown from a second-story window, and also sent to the hospital—where she fell into a coma and died eight weeks later.

Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was 77 years old, and had been an influential human rights activist even before her famous son was born. Thousands of people attended her funeral, and many stores and markets shut down in support of the family and its opposition to the dictatorship.

Other musicians might have backed down after these devastating losses. But Fela—living up to his reputation as an abiku who flirts with death—did the exact opposite.

Kuti had a symbolic coffin made for his mother, and led a long procession to Nigeria’s military headquarters and presidential residence. He laid the coffin at the gates to the military compound—a historic moment of public shaming that only enhanced Fela’s outlaw status.

But his most powerful weapon was his music. Fela commemorated his mother and this macabre protest on the searing album Coffin for Head of State—even more defiant than the Zombie album that had stirred up the assault on his compound in the first place.

The music is extraordinary. This album would be a classic even without the historic back story. In fact, the first time I heard it I knew almost nothing about the political and personal crisis behind its creation. But I was still mesmerized, just by the intensity of the groove and the powerful call-and-response vocals.

In the 1980s, Fela Kuti was more famous than ever. But even as regimes and leaders shifted, Fela still remained a target of political enemies, who wanted to punish this outspoken and defiant musician.

They had their chance on September 4,1984, when Kuti returned to Lagos from an overseas tour. He was arrested at the airport on currency smuggling charges—although he was simply retaining British pounds that he planned to use on his next tour. This tiny infraction led to a five-year sentence—an intensely punitive response to the alleged crime.

But the Nigerian government had overplayed its hand.

Nigeria suddenly found itself the target of an international protest. Many famous musicians joined the “Free Fela” campaign—including Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Ginger Baker, and others. Amnesty International got involved too, and a hundred thousand people signed a petition demanding the musician’s release.

In a later interview, Fela described the situation:

“It was real prison, man. I’d never stayed more than 30 days for any kind of grievance before. This was 18 months…. people were dying every day. They were carrying bodies out of the prison every day.”

But even here, Fela found that most of the prison guards were on his side. Even more shocking, the judge who sentenced him actually visited him in prison, and allegedly apologized. The judge admitted that he had simply responded to government pressure. He now wrote letters in support of Fela to officials, demanding the prisoner’s release.

In the face of this outcry, Fela regained his freedom—after serving less than half his sentence. He was also granted unconditional release, with all charges dropped from his record. A single artist had triumphed over an entire political establishment.

Kuti’s comments at the time are worth sharing:

No one in Nigeria likes to play political music now, because the political situation is very bad. Africa is not like Europe in any way at all. If I can go to jail for 18 months, think how long an ordinary musician would go. But people want to hear political music….

I’m not your average politician. I believe in higher forces. I believe that suffering has a purpose. I cannot suffer like this for no reason.

I’m not working for any selfish reason or ulterior motives; I’m working for the improvement of my fellow man. So I have nothing to fear. I suffered a lot, but I feel fine now. I’m happy for the suffering, because I believe it’s opened the eyes of many people.

In the aftermath, Fela continued his political activism, but with a greater focus on international issues. His 1989 album Beasts of No Nation was a searing attack on apartheid in South Africa, and Underground System from 1992 expressed the musician’s anger at the assassination of Burkina Faso’s president Thomas Sankara.

But Fela’s problems at home were never really over. He was arrested again several times in the 1990s. In 1997, Kuti was even paraded in chains in front of the press—again for smoking pot. This time he served just five days, and sued  Nigeria’s drug enforcement agency for illegal detention after his release.

But his health was already precarious. On August 3, 1997, Fela Kuti died, probably as a result of AIDS. He was 58 years old. And his death provided one last opportunity for the beleaguered musician to show his triumph over the political establishment.

A million people took to the streets of Lagos on the day of Fela Kuti’s funeral. This was forbidden, of course. General Sani Abacha, the military dictator who had seized control of Nigeria’s government in 1993, issued a prohibition of public gatherings. But on that day of mourning, the only people hiding indoors were the military and police.

That was fitting. They had long battled Fela Kuti—and the intense public mourning following his death, not just in Nigeria but around the world, made clear his ultimate and enduring victory. Fela’s legacy, just as much as his life, stood for the triumph of art over authority.

That’s a large theme in music history. Maybe the largest of all. And Kuti’s music—defiant, irresistible and, above all, liberating—thus demands our lasting respect.

I love it for the groove. I love it for its fire and fervor. But, above all, I celebrate its odds-beating testimony to the power of song—even when a single musician must face down an entire regime.