by VIVIEN GOLDMAN
Fela’s big band Afrobeat was a compelling setting for his incendiary lyrics. In his song “I.T.T.,” for example, he took aim at the telecommunications giant, which he called “International Thief Thief.” Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, former South African Prime Minister P.W. Botha and Nigerian generals Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbun, who were behind Fela’s 1984 incarceration, are all targets of his lyrics in “Beasts of No Nation (B.O.N.N).”
Felabration music festival is a global event — and for many in Nigeria, it represents redemption
LAGOS, Nigeria — All is quiet in this West African nation’s largest city except for the area around the New Africa Shrine, home to the annual weeklong Felabration, which this year commemorates what would have been activist musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s 75th birthday. In the closed-off street in front of the theater, a thousand admirers watch the action on big screens. Inside, some 4,000 young Nigerians dance to recordings of Fela’s Afrobeat music and chant, “Baba! Baba!” (“Father! Father!”)
Fela was repeatedly jailed and tortured by a string of military regimes in Nigeria from the 1970s until his AIDS-related death in 1997. Despite — or perhaps because of — that and the unyielding political message of his music, Fela’s legacy is booming. His legend has been evangelized by the Broadway musical “Fela!” and hip-hop artists often sample him. ?uestlove, drummer for the Roots, is a champion, and helped organize a Felabration in Brooklyn, N.Y. Today there are at least 20 such festivals around the world, and more are started each year.
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