Which west african country is fela kuti from

Asked, in , which musician he most respected, Fela declared it was George Frideric Handel and said that he particularly admired Dixit Dominus and was making "African classical music". Music ran in the Kuti family; Fela's Anglican father was a gifted pianist, while his grandfather had recorded hymns in Yoruba for a forerunner of EMI back in one of which is used in Fela!

Fela first called his music "Afrobeat" in , but it was a visit to Los Angeles with his group in that completed Afrobeat's alchemy. Fela met black power activist Sandra Smith, who introduced him to the politics of black militancy, to the rhetoric of Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael and LeRoi Jones, to the sight of dashikis on the pavement, to the "black and proud" mood of soul music.

While Smith tried to learn what being "African" meant, Fela suddenly perceived the process of neocolonial control that reigned in his homeland. They called it 'vernacular', as if only English was the real tongue. On his return to Nigeria, Fela renamed his band Africa 70 and started writing the strident, satirical numbers that would make him both hero and renegade, always using pidgin English to cast his message wide. Musically, the early 70s was Fela's golden era; the peerless Tony Allen left following the Kalakuta raid — "I'm a musician, I didn't sign up to be a fighter," he told me, and other musicians disliked the "hengers on" that proliferated at court.

Fela changed his name to Anikulapo Kuti at this point, rejecting Ransome as a "slave name"; his new title meant "One who holds death in a pouch". His advocacy of African tradition extended to religion, running contrary to his father's Christianity, though it's tempting to see Fela's "Shrine" as a version of his father's pulpit. His denunciation of corruption and support for the underclass tied in with his mother's crusading, though her championship of women's rights must have been affronted by her son's sexual politics.

On "Lady" Fela castigated modern womanhood for thinking itself equal to men, while his infamous marriage to 27 "wives" — mostly his singers and dancers — has often been brandished against him. For his part Fela declared polygamy an African tradition and claimed that by marrying them he was protecting his wives against charges that they were prostitutes. Ever the contrarian, in , he divorced them all, saying that no man should own a woman's body.

His daughter Yeni has ambiguous feelings about this. For me, as a kid, it was fun having so many stepmothers, though now, at 49, I wonder how my mother Remi, who was born and raised in England, really felt. The paradoxical character of Fela was there even at his death. His last record, "Condom Scallywag and Scatter" deplored condoms as un-African. Aids, he declared, was a white man's disease. Yet confirmation that it had indeed laid waste to Fela — news delivered by his brother Beko, a noted doctor and public health campaigner — jolted Aids awareness in Africa.

As his group grew from nine to 16 members, the music became less lyrical and more strident, the arrangements more complex. In Fela had a serious falling out with his tenor saxophonist Igo Chico, and in one of the legendary feats of his life, he vowed to replace Igo himself in 24 hours. According to the legend, Fela practised for 17 hours straight, and when the group appeared at the Afro-Spot that Friday night, he played all the famous Igo Chico tenor saxophone solos, not nearly as brilliantly as the master but with enough competence to satisfy his loyal audience.

This period also marked a turning point in Fela's commercial strategies. He moved from the Afro-Spot to a new club located in another part of Lagos called Surulere. The club was owned by a legendary Lagos entrepreneur, Chief SB Bakare, and Fela began to operate a full week's schedule. It was here that he first referred to his club as the Shrine, and began to speak of his musical existence as a religious rather than a purely commercial experience. Fela's recording strategy was a particularly unique one at this point.

Almost monthly he would go into the EMI studios in Apapa and produce extended versions of two of the group's most popular and topical compositions.

EMI would release the songs immediately, their remarkable sales fuelled by the fact that a few weeks after they were issued on vinyl, Fela would stop singing them in his club. Fela continued this strategy for two years, issuing records like news bulletins, so that he served as a symbol of Nigeria's united national consciousness, as his songs would be heard blaring from loudspeakers across Nigeria as soon as they were released.

The fact that his lyrics were in a very direct form of pidgin English was crucial, as it made his records accessible throughout Nigeria and much of Anglophone Africa. Now Fela decided to build his own management team and control the release and performance of his music himself. But as Fela developed into a megastar he sought to gain greater benefits from his recording contracts by encouraging competitive bidding among the rival companies for his independently recorded tapes.

The strain of this strategy caused cracks to appear within Fela's own organisation. He tended to be informal and careless with his finances, and some of his musicians broke away when it became difficult for him to pay them regularly. This was the period too when he began to expand his team of female dancers and establish a commune in his mother's house at Mosholashi-Idi-Oro.

His sexual appetite was legendary, and many young women submitted themselves to a life of virtual enslavement as he preached an ideology of chauvinistic control and established a lifestyle that was based on his theories of female submission. With the departure of certain musicians, the nature of the group changed drastically. Fela added more percussion and developed a new style of rhythm guitar voicing, laying a greater emphasis on the guitars and bass to carry the melody lines. He gave control of the reed and brass sections to Lekan 'Ani' Animashaun, a baritone saxophonist and one of the stalwarts of Fela's music, and spent more time refining his keyboard playing.

Along with the ensemble singing of his female chorus, these developments became the signatures of his music, and the most distinctive sound of Afrobeat emerged from this era. Some time In , Fela moved from his Surulere base to the former Ambassador Club, a famous nightspot owned by the Lagos-based Ibo businessman and entertainment tycoon, Chief Kanu.

This club was rechristened the African Shrine, and it was here that Fela began to incorporate ritualistic elements into his performances, including the pouring of libations and ceremonies performed by a succession of visiting traditional priests, some of whom appeared from nowhere, it seemed, and disappeared just as mysteriously.

There was a Camerounian High Priest who, it was claimed, had sacrificed a human being at the Shrine and brought the victim back to life. Then there was a Ghanaian who performed magic tricks, and a Yoruba 'Babalawo' who gave Ifa divinations for selected members of the audience. Eventually Fela himself was declared High Priest of the Shrine, and each of his performances was prefaced with an elaborate ritual ceremony, replete with face painting, libation pouring, wild dancing and special prayers offered to the ubiquitous 'God of Africa'.

The African Shrine was located right opposite his mother's house, where his commune was still based, and his presence attracted a lot of commercial activity to the area, including a swarm of marijuana dealers.

It was in this period, from , that both his lifestyle and political attitudes coalesced into a flagrant challenge to the Nigerian authorities. Apart from openly advocating the smoking of 'igbo' on the theory that "the God of Africa created this herb to enlighten his people", he also paraded his harem of young women all over Lagos. For a while they were appendages to his entourage, but in mid he began to incorporate them into his show, first as dancers and then as members of the vocal chorus.

Later that year he undertook the famous single-day traditional marriage in which he pledged himself as husband to 28 women. There followed another change of name for the group. Fela had begun reading esoteric literature promoting the belief that African history had been distorted and misrepresented by Western academics, and his interpretation of these ideas and transformation of them into musical themes became his main concern.

Reflecting this embrace of pan-African revisionism, he now called his group Egypt Fela began applying these radical ideas in a pungent and systematic criticism of the Nigerian Government's own decrepit value system.

Inevitably, the state began to fight back against both his political criticisms and what some government officials referred to as his 'immoral' lifestyle, and in what would turn out to be just the first of many raids on his club and commune, Fela's house was raided in daylight by teams of soldiers and police. During the raid Fela was arrested and taken to the notorious Alagbon Close jail, where he was hailed as a hero by the prisoners and installed as 'president' of one of the toughest cells, named after the infamous dark hole of Calcutta but pronounced 'Kalakuta'.

On his release he immortalised this experience in the extraordinary protest song "Kalakuta Show", and renamed his commune the Kalakuta Republic. This marked a major turning point in his life, and in many ways may have sealed his fate. Fela's domestic lifestyle, and his battles with the Nigerian authorities, became major selling points for Nigerian tabloids.

One newspaper, The Sunday Punch , serialised a set of features about the Kalakuta experience, liberally sprinkled with pungent quotes from Fela himself, and sold in numbers hitherto unknown for independent newspapers in Nigeria. His reputation also began to spread abroad: The New York Times ran a major feature on him, and his comments began to surface in foreign articles surveying Nigeria's economic and political climates. It is a moot point whether this attention was responsible for his increasing militancy or whether it was the other way round.

Whatever the cause, Fela's radicalism increased and his music became even more powerful as a result. The consistency with which he interpreted political events and issues in musical terms was remarkable. The anti-military pieces "Zombie" and "Unknown Soldier" were seminal products of this period. They indicated that Fela was unbowed in the face of sustained attacks from the police and military. Eventually he fell out seriously with his record companies and began to attack them also.

It was clear to Fela that the government had been putting pressure on these organisations to undermine his independence, and he set out to prove that he could survive without them. In a further break from the conventions of the record industry, some of Fela's closest friends were drafted into his organisation to handle contractual and promotional matters.

Moore, Carlos. Fela: This Bitch of a Life. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, The new edition features an introduction by Margaret Busby, a foreword by Gilberto Gil, and an epilogue covering events post by Carlos Moore.

Olaniyan, Tejumola. Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Olorunyomi, Sola. Fela and the Imagined Continent. It analyzes the Afrobeat phenomenon and its production through the lens of musical practices, countercultural and counter-hegemonic activities, indigenous cultural politics, and political ideology.

Ruskin, Jesse D. Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World New York: Bloomsbury Academic, Schoonmaker, Trevor, ed. This exhibition was later published as a book, which contains essays, documentary images, and catalogue of works.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, b. Veal, Michael. While in Ghana, he explored more forms of West African music, which influenced him. The lyrics he composed for The Koola Lobitos showed a willingness to introduce new subjects into the realm of music. Fela remodeled music influenced by West African traditions and made it his own by fusing different genres. He sang largely in Nigerian pidgin and Yoruba and integrated traditional dances into his concerts.

When The Koola Lobitos returned to Nigeria, Kuti declared his Kalakuta Republic, renamed the band to Afrika 70, and changed his lyrics from love to politics, said Idonije. The so-called Kalakuta Republic was a two-story building that housed his family, musicians, a recording studio, and a free health facility run by his younger brother Beko Ransome Kuti.

A track recording was burnt to ashes. Many cars were also destroyed.