Fela All Life Story

HISTORY OF FELA ANIKULAPO - KUTI
Fela was born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti on 15
October 1938 in Abeokuta, the modern-day capital of Ogun
Statein the Federal Republic of Nigeria, then a city in the
British Colony of Nigeria into an upper-middle-class family.
His mother, Chief Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a feminist
activist in the anti-colonial movement; his father, Reverend
Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, an Anglicanminister and school
principal, was the first president of the Nigeria Union of
Teachers.His brothers, Beko Ransome-Kuti and Olikoye
Ransome-Kuti, both medical doctors, are well known in
Nigeria. Fela is a first cousin to the Nigerian writer and Nobel
laureate Wole Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize
for Literature.
Fela attended Abeokuta Grammar School. Later he was sent
to London in 1958 to study medicine but decided to study
music instead at the Trinity College of Music, the trumpet
being his preferred instrument.While there, he formed the band
Koola Lobitos, playing a fusion of jazz and highlife. In 1960,
Fela married his first wife, Remilekun (Remi) Taylor, with
whom he would have three children (Femi, Yeni, and Sola). In
1963, Fela moved back to the newly independent Federation of
Nigeria, re-formed Koola Lobitos and trained as a radio
producer for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. He played
for some time with Victor Olaiya and his All Stars.
In 1967, he went to Ghana to think up a new musical
direction. That was when Kuti first called his music
Afrobeat.In 1969, Fela took the band to the United States
where they spent 10 months in Los Angeles. While there, Fela
discovered the Black Power movement through Sandra Smith
(now Sandra Izsadore), a partisan of the Black Panther Party.
The experience would heavily influence his music and political
views.He renamed the band Nigeria '70. Soon afterwards, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service was tipped off by a
promoter that Fela and his band were in the US without work
permits. The band performed a quick recording session in Los
Angeles that would later be released as The '69 Los Angeles
Sessions.
After Fela and his band returned to Nigeria, the group was
renamed The Afrika '70, as lyrical themes changed from love
to social issues.He formed the Kalakuta Republic, a commune,
a recording studio, and a home for the many people connected
to the band that he later declared independent from the
Nigerian state. According to Lindsay Barrett, the name
"Kalakuta" derived from the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta
dungeon in India.Fela set up a nightclub in the Empire Hotel,
first named the Afro-Spot and later the Afrika Shrine, where he
both performed regularly and officiated at personalized Yoruba
traditional ceremonies in honour of his nation's ancestral
faith. He also changed his name to Anikulapo (meaning "He
who carries death in his pouch", with the interpretation: "I will
be the master of my own destiny and will decide when it is
time for death to take me").He stopped using the hyphenated
surname "Ransome" because it was a slave name.
Fela's music was popular among the Nigerian public and
Africans in general. In fact, he made the decision to sing in
Pidgin English so that his music could be enjoyed by
individuals all over Africa, where the local languages spoken
are very diverse and numerous. As popular as Fela's music
had become in Nigeria and elsewhere, it was also very
unpopular with the ruling government, and raids on the
Kalakuta Republic were frequent. During 1972, Ginger Baker
recorded Stratavariouswith Fela appearing alongside Bobby
Tench.Around this time, Kuti became even more involved in
the Yoruba religion.
In 1977, Fela and the Afrika '70 released the album Zombie, a
scathing attack on Nigerian soldiers using the zombie
metaphor to describe the methods of the Nigerian military.
The album was a smash hit and infuriated the government,
setting off a vicious attack against the Kalakuta Republic,
during which one thousand soldiers attacked the commune.
Fela was severely beaten, and his elderly mother (whose
house was located opposite the commune)[6]was thrown from
a window, causing fatal injuries. The Kalakuta Republic was
burned, and Fela's studio, instruments, and master tapes were
destroyed. Fela claimed that he would have been killed had it
not been for the intervention of a commanding officer as he
was being beaten. Fela's response to the attack was to
deliver his mother's coffin to the Dodan Barracks in Lagos,
General Olusegun Obasanjo's residence, and to write two
songs, "Coffin for Head of State" and "Unknown Soldier",
referencing the official inquiry that claimed the commune h ad
been destroyed by an unknown soldier.
Fela and his band took residence in Crossroads Hotel, as the
Shrine had been destroyed along with his commune. In 1978,
Fela married 27 women, many of whom were his dancers,
composers, and singers. The marriage served not only to
mark the anniversary of the attack on the Kalakuta Republic
but also to protect Fela, and his wives, from false claims from
authorities that Fela was kidnapping the women. Later, he
was to adopt a rotation system of keeping 12 simultaneous
wives.The year was also marked by two notorious concerts,
the first in Accra in which riots broke out during the song
"Zombie", which led to Fela being banned from entering
Ghana. The second was at the Berlin Jazz Festival after which
most of Fela's musicians deserted him, due to rumours that
Fela was planning to use the entire proceeds to fund his
presidential campaign.
Despite the massive setbacks, Fela was determined to come
back. He formed his own political party, which he called
Movement of the People (MOP), in order to "clean up society
like a mop".Apart from being a mass political party, MOP
preached "Nkrumahism" and "Africanism."In 1979, he put
himself forward for President in Nigeria's first elections for
more than a decade, but his candidature was refused. At this
time, Fela created a new band called Egypt '80 reflecting the
fact that Egyptian civilization, knowledge, philosophy,
mathematics, and religious systems are African and must be
claimed as such. As Fela states in an interview, "Stressing the
point that I have to make Africans aware of the fact that:
Egyptian civilization belongs to the African. So that was the
reason why I changed the name of my band to Egypt 80."Fela
continued to record albums and tour the country. He further
infuriated the political establishment by dropping the names of
ITT Corporationvice-president Moshood Abiola and then
General Olusegun Obasanjo at the end of a hot-selling 25-
minute political screed entitled "I. . (International Thief-
Thief)".
1980s and beyond
In 1984, Muhammadu Buhari's government, of which Kuti was
a vocal opponent, jailed him on a charge of currency
smuggling which Amnesty International and others denounced
as politically motivated.Amnesty designated him a prisoner of
conscience,and his case was also taken up by other human
rights groups. After 20 months, he was released from prison
by General Ibrahim Babangida. On his release he divorced his
12 remaining wives, saying that "marriage brings jealousy and
selfishness".
Once again, Fela continued to release albums with Egypt '80,
made a number of successful tours of the United States and
Europe and also continued to be politically active. In 1986,
Fela performed in Giants Stadium in New Jersey as part of the
Amnesty International A Conspiracy of Hopeconcert, sharing
the bill with Bono, Carlos Santana, and The Neville Brothers.
In 1989, Fela and Egypt '80 released the anti-apartheid
Beasts of No Nation that depicts on its cover U.S. President
Ronald Reagan, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and
South African State President Pieter Willem Botha, that title of
the composition, as Barrett notes, having evolved out of a
statement by Botha: "This uprising [against the apartheid
system] will bring out the beast in us.
Fela's album output slowed in the 1990s, d four
members of the Afrika '70 organization were arrested for
murder. The battle against military corruption in Nigeria was
taking its toll, especially during the rise of Sani Abacha.
Rumours were also spreading that he was suffering from an
illness for which he was refusing treatment.
Death
On 3 August 1997, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, already a prominent
AIDS activist and former Minister of Health, announced his
younger brother's death a day earlier from complication s
related to AIDS. However, there has been no definitive proof
that Kuti died from complications related to HIV/AIDS, and
much skepticism surrounds this alleged cause of death and
the sources that have popularized this claim.For example, it is
widely claimed that Fela suffered and may have possibly died
from Kaposi's Sarcoma, which is a symptom of HIV/AIDS
infection. However, there are no known photos of Kuti with
telltale lesions; moreover, Kuti was honored with a lying-in-
state in which his remains were encased in a five-sided glass
coffin for full public viewing.More than one million people
attended Fela's funeral at the site of the old Shrine
compound. The New Afrika Shrine has opened since Fela's
death in a different section of Lagos under the supervision of
his son Femi.