Fela Anikulapo-Kuti

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, on the fifteenth of October 1938, the son of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti — also placed in this archive — and the Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, a Protestant minister and head of the Nigerian Union of Teachers. He took music studies at Trinity College of Music in London from 1958, where he met the Nigerian drummer Tony Allen and formed the band that would become Africa '70.

He founded Afrobeat — the fusion of Yoruba percussion traditions, highlife, jazz, and James Brown-derived funk — in the late 1960s after a stay in Los Angeles in 1969 introduced him to the Black Panthers and to a new theoretical framework for understanding African and Black-diasporic politics. He returned to Lagos and built the Kalakuta Republic — a communal compound that functioned as a recording studio, a residence for his band and family, and a declared independent territory under the laws of Nigeria.

He produced more than fifty albums between 1968 and his death. Songs ranged from twelve to twenty-five minutes; most were direct political broadsides against the successive Nigerian military regimes that ruled the country during his career. "Zombie" (1976), the satire of the Nigerian armed forces, prompted the regime to send a thousand soldiers to attack the Kalakuta Republic in February 1977. The soldiers burned the compound to the ground; they killed Fela's mother, Funmilayo, by throwing her from a second-floor window. The regime denied responsibility. Fela responded with the album Coffin for Head of State (1981), which delivered an actual coffin to Dodan Barracks, the residence of the head of state.

He died of complications from AIDS in Lagos on the second of August 1997, age fifty-eight. His funeral procession through Lagos was attended by approximately one million Nigerians.

He is honored here as the founder of Afrobeat and the son of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti who carried his mother's politics into the most consequential African popular music of the twentieth century.