Brass Trax

Afrobeat was born in the United States.

The word was coined by Fela Kuti to describe the formula he had devised along with his drummer Tony Allen and their band of Nigerian jazz musicians. It was a powerful fusion, taking elements of African pop music, particularly Ghanaian high life of the type made funky by E.T. Mensah, jazz, funk, and politics. Few genres of music are so intricately tied to the life and family of one innovator, and few musicians have been as iconoclastic and influential as Fela Kuti.

Listen to “Day by Day” by E.T. Mensah

As a musician, Kuti was classically trained at London’s Trinity College of Music, where he formed his first band, Koola Lobitos, which played a nascent form of Afrobeat. Soon, he migrated to the United States with his group. They encountered hard times and not a lot of gigs. After a cross-country ramble, the band ended up in Los Angeles, where they finally found steady work, and Kuti found something more consequential: political consciousness.

By many accounts, Kuti came to the United States ashamed of Africa and what he perceived as its backwardness. His middle-class family had sent him to Europe to study, after all; there was nothing similar in Nigeria. But in Los Angeles, Kuti met Sandra Smith, a member of the Black Panther party and an outspoken Black nationalist. They became lovers and lifelong friends. But, perhaps more consequentially, Smith invited Kuti into her library.

Nourished by the literature of Black power—The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver—and the sounds of James Brown’s “Say it Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” Kuti had the final elements of Afrobeat: politics and funk.

Listen to “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” by James Brown

Koola Lobitos recorded the result: a searing, polyrhythmic music, layered slackly across a taut groove: a new form of music that would allow endless variation, improvisation, and moments of mind-warping funk. The recordings were eventually issued as The ‘69 Los Angeles Sessions. Kuti was 31.

Kuti and co. had been in the United States without papers and returned to Nigeria after a vengeful promoter snitched. It was for the best. The time had come for Afrobeat to return to Africa. Kuti renamed the band Afrika 70 (later Nigerian 70) and got to work making things funky. He established a nightclub, called the Shrine, across the street from his home, a sprawling compound that he would eventually dub the Kalakuta Republic.

By 1971, Kuti’s friend from his London days Ginger Baker, the drummer for Cream, had joined him in Africa. Together they stitched together a scorching live set that was an immediate sensation. Afrobeat had returned to its home land.

Listen to “Black Man’s Cry” by Fela & Ginger Baker

Afterward came a flurry of albums, each one a more pointed critique of Nigeria’s military dictatorship and its human rights abuses than the last. Kuti’s albums would often respond to current events, being released to highlight particular abuses of power. His music was “the Black CNN” a decade before Chuck D picked up a microphone.

Eventually, Nigeria’s military struck back. Kuti’s compound was raided twice in quick succession, with Kuti facing a number of trumped-up charges. Most infamously, police attempted to plant cannabis on the musician, which he promptly ate. (That they couldn’t find any legitimate evidence on the man who once claimed that he only received gifts in the form of igbo—Indian hemp—remains puzzling.)

The police locked Kuti up and waited for the evidence to make its way through his digestive track to charge him. Somehow, he managed to excrete the drugs in private and produced a clean fecal sample for the authorities, who eventually released him. He recounted the episode in the hilarious anthem “Expensive Shit” (“They turned my shit into expensive shit”).

Listen to “Expensive Shit” by Fela Kuti & Africa 70

Like his other recordings, it was a smash hit across Africa. Kuti had a knack for taking injustice and boiling it down to a catch phrase or metaphor. “He Miss Road,” which is one of Kuti’s weirdest sides from the seventies, is about people (and gorillas) who get things wrong. Whether it’s a lawyer who gives away his case to the prosecutor or a musician who plays for the deaf and dumb—examples that allude to Kuti’s biography—those who “miss road” are bad news. The track was produced by Ginger Baker and is dominated by a repeated organ figure that drifts on a bed of reverb. Most of Kuti’s music is suitable for dancing; “He Miss Road” is just a head trip.

Listen to “He Miss Road” by Fela Kuti & Africa 70

Eventually, the military raids turned from comical to tragic. In 1977, after the release of Zombie, Nigerian soldiers laid siege to the Kalakuta Republic, firing mortars into the compound, torching buildings, beating and raping Kuti’s many wives (Kuti believed that monogamy was a non-African fiction). Kuti’s mother was thrown from a second-story window, suffering injuries that would prove fatal.

In typical fashion, Kuti responded with music. “Coffin for Head of State,” recounts Kuti’s delivery of a replica of his mother’s coffin to Olusegon Obasanjo on the morning that his dictatorship officially ended and Nigerian democracy began. “Unknown Soldier,” a reference to the official state finding that the raid on Kalakuta had been undertaken by “unknown soldiers” unaffiliated with the government, tells the tale in full. The two albums, which, again, sold well across Africa, remain taut and upsetting: pure outrage fashioned as funk.

Listen to “Coffin for Head of State” by Fela Kuti & Africa 70
Listen to “Unknown Soldier” by Fela Kuti & Africa 70

The loss of his mother hit Kuti very hard, by many accounts, and by the end of the seventies he seemed like a changed man. Much of his humor had been replaced by grim certainty—about science, religion, and politics—fashioned in an Afrocentric narrative that rejected anything western. Major changes also shook his band at this time, which he had renamed Egypt 80. Drummer Tony Allen, his right-hand man, left for other projects. Kuti was left with one option: to run for president of Nigeria.

Despite Kuti’s popularity across Africa, his presidential bid was a washout. Authorities ensured that he would not be placed on any ballot, and the protests he anticipated did not come to pass. Still, he managed to issue a few scathing broadsides, including the 20-minute-long “I.T.T. (International Thief Thief)” that denounced, by name, the major corrupting influences of Nigerian politics.

Listen to I.T.T. (International Thief Thief)” by Fela Kuti & Africa 70

Kuti, whose compound had attracted the curious ears of James Brown (and entourage) and the Art Ensemble of Chicago never made much headway in the U.S. music marketplace. His 15-minute-long jams were too long and too improvisatory for pop fans and too funky for jazz heads. But interest from the likes of Talking Heads David Byrne and his co-conspirator Brian Eno brought western producers to Nigeria in the attempt to market Kuti’s sound. The result, “Army Arrangement,” which was produced by Bill Laswell, was lousy. Instead of anticipate and accentuate Kuti’s psychedelia, as Baker had with “He Miss Road,” Laswell toned it down, processing the session into a disco dancefloor nugget and not much else.

In the meanwhile, military rule had returned to Nigeria, and Kuti was subjected to his most brutal attack yet. In 1984, Kuti was jailed for currency smuggling, a charge that even the judge would later admit was trumped up. Kuti was savaged in prison, tortured and beaten. When he emerged, after an international amnesty campaign, he seemed irreparably different. He divorced his wives and made repeated trips to the United States and Europe. It was probably during one of those tours that Kuti contracted the AIDS that would kill him.

Shockingly, the man who was the first to speak truth to power would never admit that he had AIDS. He would not even admit that the disease existed. When he contracted the illness, in the late eighties/early nineties, it had not yet spread across Africa. It was still a European or American illness. Rumors abounded, of course, but Kuti denounced them. He told the press that the Kaposi’s sarcoma he suffered was a symptom of a spiritual transformation, that his skin was changing shape. On his deathbed, he rejected the use of condoms and denied that AIDS was his killer.

As unconscionable as Kuti’s position was on AIDS, it should not be seen as a fatal blow against his legacy. His son, Femi, has been a vocal advocate of AIDS awareness and prevention and an activist against its spread across Africa. Femi Kuti (along with, lately, his half-brother Seun) has demonstrated his patrimony through his music, which has continued as an unbroken family tradition into the 21st century.

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