How Fela Kuti changed the game with Afrobeat

Meanwhile, Fela furiously released a slew of landmark long players: Shakara (1971), Roforofo Fight (1972), Expensive Shit (1975) and the hugely successful Sorrow Tears And Blood (1977), all of which derided the government, the army and the establishment.

On 18 February 1977, even though Fela was Africa’s biggest selling recording artist, the regime sent 1,000 troops into Fela’s commune, who set fire to the compound, destroyed his recordings, burned the cars, looted, bludgeoned the men with rifle butts and raped the women. As a result, 55 people were hospitalised. They then dragged Fela by his genitals into the courtyard and battered him to a bloody pulp. Only the intervention of an officer saved his life. 

“I couldn’t understand why my father – a loving, funny, generous warm-hearted man – was beaten and attacked so often,” expounds Femi Kuti, who, watching from the sidelines, was 14 at the time. 

During the attack the militia threw Kuti’s 78-year-old mother out of a second-floor window; she died eight weeks later. Fela’s answer to this was to drop his mother’s coffin at the door of military head of state general Olusegun Obasanjo.

“The only thing that kept him alive was the unconditional love that the African general public had for him,” clarifies Stein. “Had they killed him there would have been massive riots.”

Fela moved into The Crossroads Hotel in 1978, where to protest against the Westernisation of African culture he married 27 women in one ceremony (he later restricted himself to a mere 12 consorts and employed a timetable that he pinned outside his bedroom so his wives would know whose turn it was), formed his very own political party, Movement Of The People, and stood for president in Nigeria’s first elections on 11 August 1979. 

Consequently, while touring Europe, his band, who he hadn’t paid, deserted him after they accused him of funding his political ambitions with their wages. The following year Fela formed new band Egypt 80, release a slew of astonishing albums including Black President and Unknown Soldier and toured the world with an entourage of 70 men and women. 

“They were wild,” chuckles Stein. “We [Fela and band] were banned from most five-star hotels in the world, not because they were wicked, but we would forget to turn the bath tap off and flood the hotel. They also all smoked weed all the time; there’d be the girls running through the corridors naked. Fela would show up in the lobby wearing nothing but his customary Speedos. But we never missed a plane.

“Fela did miss one plane, though. He didn’t carry money and, if he did, it was down his balls as he never carried a wallet or had pockets in his pants. So Fela filled in all the forms at customs going out but didn’t have that ‘little something’ the official asked for, so the form was ‘lost’. Fela was arrested and detained while the band left on the plane.” 

In 1984 a judge sentenced Fela to five years in prison for alleged currency violations. He served 20 months in Kirikiri, Nigeria’s toughest prison. The judge was later discharged after he admitted that the military had forced his hand.

“Even after his releases, they continued to arrest him and tried to charge him with murder, armed robbery, all kinds of shit,” rebukes Stein.” They arrested him some 200 times and beat him bad, real bad, but couldn’t nail him because he was innocent.”

Fela continued to release albums and tour (with his own personal witch doctor), preaching the merits of polygamy, sex and marijuana while attacking the Nigerian establishment, but the sentence and regular beatings were making life difficult.