Fela Kuti was sentenced to five years in prison in 1984, but was released less than two years after his arrest. The experience profoundly affected his music in the following years.by Frans Schellekens/Redferns via Getty Images
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.
According to guesstimates and dozens of witness accounts, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was arrested by Nigerian police and security forces well over 100 times between the early 1970s and the early ‘80s. The most infamous of them turned out to be his arrest on September 4, 1984, at the international airport in Lagos, where he was remanded on allegations of attempting to smuggle currency. Kuti and his band, Egypt 80, were headed to the U.S. for a tour, and airport security stopped Kuti from boarding after claiming to have found about $1,000 on him that he failed to declare.
Kuti had been arrested in the past on more heinous allegations, from marijuana possession to a claim by mogul Chief Moshood Abiola that Kuti robbed his wife, but he had yet to serve any extended time in prison beyond months in detention. Two months after his September 1984 arrest, the judge heading the Port Harcourt zone of the Currency Anti-Sabotage Tribunal found the musician guilty of two-count charges of currency smuggling and sentenced him to five years in prison.
The Nigerian military government, led by Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, had successfully done what previous juntas had been unable to do: effectively shut down Fela Kuti. The gambit was that imprisoning the Afrobeat firebrand would put a halt to his crusade of criticizing the Nigerian military and its allied political elite on stages across the world.
Kuti had spent most of the ‘70s vehemently refusing to perform his music anywhere outside Africa, but the infamous Kalakuta raid of 1977 and other contractual issues left him in financial straits, so he took his music and his message across Europe and the U.S. in the following years. The music he was making at the time, too, was some of his most confrontational yet, eschewing the humor and profound metaphors of his previous work for pointed jabs and jibes at the political elite.
He called the ruling class “Vagabonds in Power,” insulted the physical appearance of General Olusegun Obasanjo — head of state at the time of the Kalakuta raid — on “Coffin for Head of State” and “I.T.T.,” and he narrated how he lobbed buckets of human faeces at the home of Abiola in “Give Me Shit, I Give You Shit.”
Nobody was off limits for Kuti during this time, and Buhari, a prickly-skinned dictator known for persecuting his critics, even as a civilian president, was having none of that. Better Fela in prison than be mocked.
“No be outside world Buhari dey,” Kuti sang with palpable disgust on “Beasts of No Nation,” the first song he composed after he was released from prison. Although his vitriol was aimed at several people at once, Buhari was one of those he called “animals in human skin.” Better late than never.
Fela Kuti composed “Beasts of No Nation” after his exit from prison, taking his social commentary into broader avenues.by Patrick Aventurier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
“Beasts of No Nation” was first performed at a comeback concert two years after his arrest and five months after his release by General Ibrahim Babangida, who had emerged as head of state after a palace coup deposed Buhari. The song was a statement of defiance, that Kuti hadn’t been broken by his time locked away. If anything, the song showed that the scope of his social commentary and barbs was expanding. In it, he ripped into the United Nations, where “1 veto is equal to 92 – or more,” the nonsensical racism of apartheid, and leaders like Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan for supporting the white minority rule in South Africa.
Through the ‘70s and earlier in the ‘80s, Kuti’s preoccupation with Nigerian affairs was definitive to the Afrobeat genre he created. The heady blend of Yoruba folk, jazz, and funk was a rollicking vehicle for social lessons and challenging the status quo. Post-prison, however, Kuti was eager to put his pan-African ideals on wax, even if Nigerian issues would remain central to his music.
To match his ambition, Kuti evolved his sound into its most complex form and even denounced the term Afrobeat as the descriptive tag for his music. He opted for ‘African classical music’ as the preferred tag, representative of the broad scale compositions he was creating and the hulking size of his band — an orchestra with about 30 members. The results were songs that aggregated everything he had done before, from his earlier highlife-jazz days leading the Koola Lobitos band to the varying flavors of Afrobeat he came up with over the years.
Perhaps the most symbolic song of that era, and arguably one of Kuti’s best songs ever, “O.D.O.O.” carried all the hallmarks of the African classical music style. It starts off with a percussive intro that builds expectation, followed by two rhythm guitar riffs dovetailing above a bass guitar riff, then a piano theme and a blast of horns usher in choral vocals, setting the tone for what Kuti wants to say on the track. In its recorded form, Kuti’s voice doesn’t come in until the 12th minute; the entire song lasts over 30 minutes.
Kuti’s Afrobeat songs were already long, lasting around 15 to 20-plus minutes, but his African classical music era stretched well past those temporal limits. These were songs with as many as six movements, like in “O.D.O.O.,” where a second bass guitar and a conga are ushered in midway for thematic emphasis.
Kuti starts the song laying into the autocracy that had gripped many African countries, deriding these military rulers for styling themselves as reformers, only to oppress the people they were claiming to liberate and/or redeem. Later on, he moves on to a story of a Nigerian man who has been saving to buy a fan to help with the mosquitoes that have been biting him at night, only for inflation to keep eroding his purchasing power.
“O.D.O.O.” was composed at a time ordinary Nigerians were dealing with the austerity measures of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) implemented by the Babangida junta, also a time when corruption scandals involving government officials were rampant. For Kuti, military governments across the continent had failed to show that they could improve the lives of Africans.
Fela Kuti’s ‘African classical music’ era was defined by a big band with about 30 instrumentalists and singers, and compositions pushing well beyond the half-hour mark.by Ebet Roberts/Redferns
“There’s also a sense that he was talking about himself on this song,” Jad Abumrad, host of the newly released podcast series Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, shared with OkayAfrica. “He’s referencing songs he made in the past on ‘O.D.O.O.’, where he has called out the government, and he brings back the killing of his mother from that raid.”
Kuti’s mother, activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a formative force in his conviction as a social campaigner. She died due to complications from injuries she sustained during the ‘77 raid, when she was thrown out the window of the upper floor of the house. Her death informed Kuti’s pugilistic stance in the following years, and it continued to inform his post-prison music, which writer Hanif Abdurraqib described in Fear No Man as “the sound of a man searching in the dark for a light switch.”
The tragedy of Kuti’s last decade on earth, after his prison stint, is how so little of his compositions from that period were properly recorded and released. That was mostly down to the musician’s financial situation, a lot of it self-imposed — according to his official biographer, Michael Veal, Kuti reportedly turned down a multimillion-dollar deal with Virgin Records around this time. He wanted full control over his music, but the cost of that, at a time of economic strife in Nigeria and years out from his commercial peak, proved to be restrictive.
On April 23, 1989, one day shy of the second anniversary of his release from prison, Kuti hosted an album launch for “Beasts of No Nation.” While speaking with a reporter, he explained the financial difficulties of properly recording and pressing a new album under the SAP-era economy, and his sensitivity to the plight of Nigerians who might not be able to afford the new record.
As a composer, Kuti remained productive, creating new songs even though most were not recorded, and many of them can only be found as ripped, low-quality recordings online. “Chop and Clean Mouth Like Nothing Happened…” called out Nigeria’s leaders since independence by name for looting the country, over a spaced out groove; “Big Blind Country” updated the talking points of “Colonial Mentality” with added humor; while the frenetic “Underground System,” his last officially released record, decried the assasination of former Burkina Faso leader Thomas Sankara and the attitude of African leaders to pan-African revolutionaries.
With over two dozen official albums released, Kuti has one of the most extensive catalogs in music history. At the same time, possibly a third — if not more — of the music he made isn’t cataloged or properly accessible. Somehow, it seems apt for such an enigmatic artist with a complicated persona.
