At Afrobeat Rebellion, Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s Artistry and Legacy Come Alive

In honor of Fela Kuti’s 87th posthumous birthday on October 15, OkayAfrica is rolling out a week of stories, from October 13 to 17, spotlighting the Afrobeat pioneer's life, activism, and legacy. Read them all here.

It is hard to imagine that there is anything still to be learned about Fela Anikulapo Kuti. He is one of the most referenced, studied, and revered figures of African music and Black consciousness. Musically, he is venerated for spearheading the Afrobeat music movement, not to be mistaken for the more recent pop-driven Afrobeats genre. He was also an outspoken political activist who used his music and resources to fight against oppressive governments while championing radical thinking and Black liberation. Through generations, Fela’s influence has remained ubiquitous. It has also given way to presumed knowing; the deceptive notion that to be aware of the most popular part of Fela’s life (his multiple arrests or his stellar musical prowess, for instance) is to have known him intimately.

A new exhibition in Lagos challenges that notion. For three months, Fela Anikulapo Kuti: Afrobeat Rebellion (October 12 - December 28) will ask its audiences: how much of Fela Anikulapo Kuti do we actually know, and what space does he occupy in today’s socio-political context?

“It was important to relate Fela to the current generation of Nigerian youth who are trying to find historical references for the current condition and how they can position themselves within it,” Papa Omotayo, founder of A White Space Creative Arts Foundation and producer of the exhibition, tells OkayAfrica a few days before the exhibition opened.

“There is a desire to resist the status quo and find a sense of true identity, whether that's from a point of view of gender or how you want to engage with authority.”

Afrobeat Rebellion was originally imagined by and staged at the Philharmonie de Paris from October 2022 to June 2023. In its reimagined state — curated by Seun Alli and now featuring additional local context, including photographs from contemporary Nigerian artists and an extensive exploration of Fela’s current legacy — the exhibition is staggering in scale and depth.

The exhibition is set in the Ecobank Pan-African Center. It is divided into different wings, including his early life, his home, Kalakuta Republic — which served as both a refuge to the marginalized and a self-governing state — his musical legacy, his political ambitions with the founding of the Movement of the People (MOP) party, and various aspects of his personal and artistic life. This exhibition engages with Fela’s life, legacy, and craft from a thoroughly intellectual position. 

“What the exhibition in Paris did was offer a very globalist view, and it was almost archival in its presentation. A lot of things sort of felt reflective,” Alli says. “For us, it's almost like we're back in the Fela renaissance and centering him where it all started.”

Through cinema, an art and photography exhibition, music performances, and a range of creative activations, including a children’s corner, sound installations, and a library, Fela is once again thrumming with life. This time, he is not performing on stage with a biting and sharp-tongued critique of sloppy governance; he is much bigger than that. At Afrobeat Rebellion, Fela is a timeless, generational ideology, manifested through physical space. It’s a crucial and ambitious project that comes at a time when many Nigerians are feeling politically adrift, struggling to find and maintain a nationalistic center.

“This exhibition feels important in connecting to the younger generation to just show them that we have an archive of an individual that represents many of the questions [they] may be asking now. It's not to say that he was a perfect human being, but there is so much to learn from him and his life,” says Omotayo.

Many programs, one man

At the center of the Afrobeat Rebellion exhibition is its programming. Across the 12 weeks that the exhibition will be open, Fela’s legacy will be explored through film, music, literature, conversations, and intellectual stimulation. For its opening month, the music curator Lanre Masha has curated musical performances featuring Ezra Collective, Seun Kuti, Femi and Made Kuti, Chike, and others. These performances will also run alongside workshops designed to introduce the current generation of musicians to the instruments and musical processes that defined Fela’s genre, Afrobeat. There will also be workshops around movement, dance, literature, transformative thinking, and other areas that intersect with Fela’s life and interests.

As a subject of numerous films and documentaries, Fela’s legacy will be explored through film screenings curated by filmmaker Abba Makama in the Kalakuta Cinema wing. Also lined up are book readings and activities designed to bring children closer to Fela’s rich artistic heritage.

Makama himself grew up listening to Fela. “I saw him as this remarkable figure that was very accessible,” Makama says. After his first encounter with Fela growing up, Makama would find Fela again through a documentary he watched while living in New York. “I was very homesick. I discovered a documentary film called Fela Kuti: Music Is The Weapon. I bought the DVD and watched it over and over again. Anytime somebody foreign wanted to know anything about Nigeria, I'd play it for them.”

Makama’s seven film selections include Music Is The Weapon, along with other films specific to all the things Fela stood for.

“Panafricanism, anti-colonialism, racism, human rights, etc. We have two documentary films that cover the music and the man. We have other films that talk about African spirituality, Fela was deep in tapping into the core of traditional African religion,” Makama says. 

In Afrobeat Rebellion, Fela is stretched between fact and fiction, surrounded as much by acts of bravery in his politics as he is by the myths of his unknowable nature. The exhibition used material (a large glass case containing is performance outfits and another containing the underwear he enjoyed wearing), to tackle many of the outlandish rumors about Fela; one of which is that he wore briefs to perform on stage, (though he did perform in briefs many times, it was always in the comfort of his home, never in public). 

Ultimately, the exhibition is biographical, familiar to people who grew up on Fela, and revelatory to younger audiences who will be learning more about him. However, he isn’t the sole subject. Lagos, Nigeria, and the country’s knotty social-political landscape he cared deeply about, are also as present and crucial to the story as the man in the middle of it all.

For its curators, the exhibition’s existence is a manifesto. “I want people to come into the space and leave with this spirit of doggedness and almost positivity as well because as much as Fela was thinking about very serious topics, he was also a jester,” Alli says. “In all of this, I really want people to have that spirit with them that, wherever you go, you're going to be courageous. You have to be aware of what you're doing, but you must also maybe try and try and live a little.”

And for Omotayo, the hope is to encourage alternative thinking, a culture of radical imagination, just as Fela wasn’t afraid to do. “I want them [audiences] to feel exhilarated. I want them to feel that sense of hope and power,” he says. “We can actually just create a new reality. We can create anything we want, any world that we want. That sort of exhilaration of possibility is what I really want people to leave with.”