On the last Saturday of most months, in an open-air hall in Ikeja, a saxophone cuts across a thirty-piece band and a crowd that has come to stand in a dead man’s house of sound. The player is Seun Kuti, Fela’s youngest son, fronting Egypt 80, the band he inherited at fourteen. The venue is the New Afrika Shrine. The man it honours has been gone since 1997, yet a night here immerses you in the experience of the man himself as if he were still alive. For fans of the legend, Fela Kuti, a night in this gathering is the end point of a pilgrimage. However the route that leads to this climax runs through some of the hardest chapters in Lagos history.
To walk Fela’s life is to trace a fight through the city of Lagos. The places matter because of what happened in them, and what happened was rarely gentle.
Early Life
Fela was born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti in Abeokuta on the 15th of October 1938, into a family already at war with the authorities. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a towering figure in Nigeria’s anti-colonial and women’s rights activism and is often referred to as the first Nigerian woman to drive a car. His father, Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, was an Anglican minister, school principal and the first president of the Nigeria Union of Teachers, who also played active roles in Nigeria’s anti-colonial movement. Fela was not the only child. He had two brothers, Beko Ransome-Kuti and Olikoye Ransome-Kuti who both garnered fame in Nigeria as medical doctors.
In his early years, Fela attended the same school his mother had famously attended as the first female student, Abeokuta Grammar School, and from there travelled to study classical music at the Trinity College of Music in London. There, he formed the band, ‘Koola Lobitos’ and played a blend of jazz and highlife, setting an early trajectory for his eventual discovery of an absolutely new and different music genre in Africa, Afrobeat — a fusion of jazz, highlife, Apala, funk, calypso, salsa and traditional Yoruba music.
In 1960, Fela married Remilekun Taylor, his first wife, and together they had three children. Three years later, Fela moved back to Nigeria, revived the Koola Lobitos and trained as a radio producer for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. In April 1976, Fela would completely stop using the name ‘Ransome’ considering it a slave name and rename himself ‘Anikulapo - he who has death in his pocket.’
The Rise of Fela Kuti
1969 marked the dawn of a new turn in Fela’s life, being the year he traveled to Los Angeles with his band. Spending approximately 10 years there, Fela discovered the Black Power movement, a political slogan for a series of ideologies that centred on achieving self-determination for black people. This movement set a new trajectory for Fela’s beliefs, ideologies and actions, and eventually came to influence his music and political views. There and then, Fela renamed the Koola Lobitos, ‘Nigeria 70’ and recorded the album ‘The ‘69 Los Angeles Sessions.’
In the 1970s, Fela’s political views became even stronger and his music reflected the same. First, he renamed the band yet again to ‘Africa ‘70’ and subsequently formed the Kalakuta Republic which functioned as home, recording studio, a free clinic run by his brother, Dr Beko Kuti, and a community for all those who were connected to the band. During the same period, Fela declared Kalakuta Republic independent from the Nigerian government.
It was during this period that Fela opened a nightclub, originally named the Afro-Spot before it was renamed the Afrika Shrine. The venue became the home of his electrifying performances, while he also officiated traditional ceremonies. His music quickly became even more popular among Africans after he began performing in Pidgin English, making his music more accessible to ordinary people. However, Fela’s music remained largely unpopular with Nigeria’s government who consistently raided the Kalakuta Republic.
Around 1972, Fela deepened his relationship with the Yoruba traditional religion and subsequently released the popular album, ‘Zombie’ in 1977. The Zombie album was a direct literary attack on the Nigerian military, wherein he compared soldiers obeying orders to the walking dead. The regime answered in kind. On 18 February 1977, by widely cited accounts, around a thousand soldiers surrounded the compound, beat the residents, raped its women, and burned it to the ground while preventing the fire brigade from reaching it. According to the music legend, he was almost beaten to death save the timely intervention of a commanding officer. However, much damage had already been done. Master tapes, instruments and vehicles were destroyed. Fela’s skull was fractured. His mother, then in her seventies, was thrown from an upper window and died the following year from her injuries.
True to his confrontational style, Fela retorted by delivering his mother's coffin to Dodan Barracks in protest against the military regime. He further immortalised his anger in two of his most politically charged songs, "Coffin for Head of State" and "Unknown Soldier," the latter being a direct response to an inquest purportedly held by the government to determine the circumstances of the raid which had eventually claimed that an unknown soldier had raided Kalakuta Republic.
Following the destruction of the Kalakuta Republic, Fela, unlike many, did not fold. He rebuilt the Kalakuta Republic in the heart of Lagos city, Ikeja, where he lived until his death in 1997. The three-storey house now stands as the Kalakuta Republic Museum, opened on 15 October 2012, on what would have been his 74th birthday. His bedroom sits behind glass. His saxophone, his stage clothes and his books remain. A simple rooftop tomb carries the dates 1938 to 1997.
In 1978, to mark the anniversary of the raid, Fela married 27 women, many of whom he worked with. The marriages served to address several ongoing issues at the time but primarily to silence rumours that Fela was kidnapping women. In his musical career, growing tensions amongst his team mates led to the formation of a new group known as Egypt 80.
By 1979, Fela had evidently decided that music alone was no longer enough to challenge the system. He ventured directly into politics by establishing the Movement of the People (MOP), a political party he envisioned as an instrument for sweeping away corruption and transforming Nigerian society. Drawing inspiration from the ideals of pan-Africanism and the philosophy of Kwame Nkrumah, the party championed African unity, self-reliance and social justice. Yet, like many of Fela's political ambitions, MOP struggled to gain traction amid constant confrontations with the military government and never evolved into a significant political force.
In 1980, Fela’s influence began to stretch beyond Africa. After signing a management deal with French producer, Martin Meissonnier, he took his first major European tour on an international record contract. During this tour, he performed before thousands across cities such as Paris, Brussels and Vienna, and boldly carried his political message alongside his songs. A particularly remarkable trait about Fela was his resilience. Despite playing on international platforms, he never stopped targeting the many social vices manifest in Nigeria.
By 1983, Fela finally declared his intention to run for presidency. His candidature was however rejected. Unfazed, he continued to preach his ideologies in his songs, especially through songs such as I.T.T. (International Thief-Thief) through which he accused powerful political and business figures of exploiting the Nigerian people.
The seeming lapse in military attack was temporary. In 1984, under the administration of Muhammadu Buhari, Fela was arrested on allegations of currency smuggling and sentenced to prison. By then, Fela had garnered enough international acclaim to gain the support of human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, which denounced the charges as politically motivated and recognised him as a prisoner of conscience. After spending about twenty months behind bars, he was released following the rise of Ibrahim Babangida. Shortly afterwards, Fela dissolved his remaining marriages, stating that marriage inevitably bred jealousy and competition considering his wives were always competing for superiority.
Despite repeated arrests and government harassment, Fela refused to retreat. Throughout the late 1980s, he continued touring Europe and the United States while recording music that challenged oppression across the world. In 1989, he released Beasts of No Nation, a fierce condemnation of apartheid and global political hypocrisy that expanded his views beyond Nigeria to embrace the struggles affecting Black people everywhere.
By the early 1990s, however, Fela's musical output had begun to slow. His encounters with the authorities however persisted, leading to another arrest in 1993 alongside members of Egypt 80. At the same time, rumours about his deteriorating health began to circulate, though Fela publicly remained silent on the speculation. It would prove to be the beginning of the final chapter in the life of Africa's most defiant musical revolutionary.
The Afrika Shrine, Then and Now
Remember the nightclub Fela opened and named the Afrika Shrine in the 1970s? Well, it did not end with him. Much like the Kalakuta Republic Museum, it became a resilient symbol of Fela Kuti’s ideologies. Back in 1971, the Shrine became Fela’s pulpit and performances ran past midnight into the small hours. Between songs he addressed the crowd directly on corruption, soldiers and power, treating a nightclub as a parliament for people the formal one ignored. He called them the “sufferheads,” the urban poor, and dozens of young Lagosians were given work and a footing through the Shrine each year. However, the building fell into disrepair after Fela’s death.
In 2000, the New Afrika Shrine opened in Ikeja, built by Fela’s eldest children, Yeni and Femi Anikulapo-Kuti. The raids from local authorities did not end with Fela’s death. As the new shrine rose up on the Lagos landscape, it endured police raids for years. However, the shrine survived all of that. Femi Anikulapo-Kuti described the resurrection and maintenance of the shrine as the most important thing he has ever done aside from his children. On a given week, the Shrine still puts on free shows, with Seun, the new leader of the Egypt 80 holding performances.
Felabration, a Celebration of the Fela Music Culture
Once a year a crowd gathers for Felabration, an idea conceived in 1998 by Yeni Anikulapo-Kuti, in celebration of Fela’s October birthday at the New Afrika Shrine. It is a music festival with the structure of a memorial and the energy of a street party: performances by Nigerian and international acts, parades, photo exhibitions, and symposia on the social questions Fela built his songs around. The Lagos State government, an offshoot of the same government that once burned his commune, now recognises Felabration as an official tourist event. The irony is not lost on anyone, and it is part of what makes the week worth attending.
Fela’s reach now stretches beyond the borders of Lagos. His catalogue of roughly fifty albums testifies to a vibrant global afterlife: a Tony-winning Broadway production, Fela!, ran from 2009, and his fingerprints sit under the Afrobeats that artists like Burna Boy and Wizkid have carried onto world charts.
Similarly, the museum is a house someone lived and died in; the Shrine is a working club, not a plaque. Fela spent his life fighting the same forces that, decades earlier, had stripped Nigeria of treasures like the Benin Bronzes, and his children have refused to let his own work be taken or tamed. Like the royal architecture preserved at Uganda’s Kasubi Tombs, this is a living tradition rather than a display. Fela meant his music to be a weapon, and a weapon is no use behind glass. Go to Lagos, stand in the Shrine on a Saturday night, and the point makes itself: the volume is still up, and the argument he started is still going.
