Fela Kuti

Abeokuta, London, Los Angeles

Olufela Ransome-Kuti was born in Abeokuta in 1938. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was an anti-colonial feminist activist. His father, an Anglican minister and school principal, was the first president of the Nigeria Union of Teachers and started him on piano. The writer Wole Soyinka was his cousin. In 1958 he went to London to study at Trinity College of Music, where he preferred the trumpet, and he formed a band, Koola Lobitos.

Back in Lagos in 1963 he re-formed Koola Lobitos as a jazz-highlife group and trained as a radio producer at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1964 he auditioned the drummer Tony Allen and asked how he came to be the only drummer in Nigeria playing jazz and highlife together. In 1969 the band, renamed Nigeria 70, spent ten months in Los Angeles, where Sandra Smith introduced him to the Black Power movement, before immigration expelled them for lacking work permits.

Africa 70 and the Kalakuta Republic

He named his style Afrobeat: apala, funk, jazz, highlife, salsa, calypso and traditional Yoruba music in songs of ten to thirty minutes, with Allen as drummer and musical director of the band now called Africa 70. In 1970 he founded a commune that declared itself independent of the state, and in 1972 he opened the Afrika Shrine club. Paul McCartney, recording in Lagos that year, called Africa 70 "the best band I've ever seen live". The estate counts Gentleman (1973) as the first fully formed Afrobeat album.

In April 1974 police raided his house and tried to plant a joint, which he swallowed. He spent three days in a cell at Alagbon Close that inmates called the Kalakuta Republic, and gave his house the same name. The episode became Expensive Shit (1975), whose B-side is Water No Get Enemy. That year he dropped Ransome as a slave name and became Anikulapo-Kuti, glossed as he who carries death in his pouch.

Zombie and the raid

In 1976 the military government told soldiers to horsewhip erring drivers. Harassed himself, Fela answered with Zombie, an attack on the army's abuse of power. It was a hit across Nigeria and was banned from the airwaves. On 18 February 1977 about a thousand soldiers attacked Kalakuta. The compound was burned, residents were beaten, master tapes and instruments were destroyed, and his mother was injured. She died the following year. A tribunal blamed an unknown soldier. Fela carried her coffin to Dodan Barracks, the head of state's residence, and wrote Coffin for Head of State and Unknown Soldier.

In 1978 he married 27 women in a traditional Yoruba ceremony on the anniversary of the raid, and a riot at an Accra concert during Zombie got him banned from Ghana. At the Berliner Jazztage that November he announced a run for president. It was the last concert he played with Tony Allen, who soon left, taking many members with him.

Egypt 80, prison and the end

With a new band, Egypt 80, he founded the Movement of the People in 1979 and was barred from that year's presidential election. A second bid in 1983 was refused. In June 1984 he headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. That September he was arrested at the Lagos airport on his way to an American tour and jailed on a currency charge by the Buhari regime. Amnesty International named him a prisoner of conscience, and his son Femi led Egypt 80 through the American dates without him. Freed in 1986, he toured internationally into the early 1990s.

He died in Lagos on 2 August 1997, aged 58. His brother Olikoye announced the cause as heart failure from complications of AIDS. The estate says more than a million people attended his farewell.

Legacy

His children Femi, Seun and Yeni carry on the music and the Shrine. Seun leads Egypt 80, and the annual Felabration, Yeni's idea, has run since 1998. The musical Fela! reached Broadway in 2009 and won three Tony Awards. From 2009 Knitting Factory Records reissued the catalogue, with commentary by the Afrobeat historian Chris May, and vinyl box sets were curated by Questlove, Brian Eno, Erykah Badu and others. In 2025 Zombie became the first Nigerian album in the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2026 he became the first African to receive a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named him for its Early Influence Award. Michael Veal, who played saxophone with Egypt 80, wrote the standard biography.