One important thing about Fela in his relationship with women was his absolute honesty. Almost every woman in his life commented on it as a reason for their falling in love with him in the first place and for remaining friends when a relationship was transformed. He did not pledge fidelity. He did not demand total subservience. Despite his pronouncement about “mattresses,” he allowed the women in his life—wives and ex-wives, mistresses and girlfriends, daughters and employees—plenty latitude to develop their talent and lives.17
On the heels of his divorce, Fela faced yet another traumatic crisis—the break with his would-be-heir musician son, Femi, who had kept the organization from falling apart during his father’s imprisonment. A composer in his own right, the budding musician was on his personal journey of creative self-affirmation; father and son no longer saw eye to eye on the most basic front—music. Moreover, Femi had introduced housecleaning changes in the commune that Fela swiftly discarded. As Femi would recall later, “By the time he came out [of prison], he had so many yes-men and the household was very crazy at this time. So … I decided to leave. . . . I was tired of agreeing with everything I saw. So I said, ‘This is enough.’”18 In 1986, Femi walked away from his ten-year membership in Fela’s band and set up his own Positive Force; father and son would remain estranged for five years.
Fela reacted to the shrinking of his commune by withdrawing even farther into himself and becoming ever more immersed in his invasive mysticism. In the process, his music was metamorphosing from the joyous, bouncy, infectious tunes of the 1970s to slower, somber compositions more in line with the spiritualism he now professed. He even came to reject the term “Afrobeat” and began describing his compositions as African classical music. The shift was more than metaphoric; it indicated a change in the way Fela had come to regard and harness his own creativity. The term “Afrobeat” denoted irreverent slackness, whereas “African classical music”—besides placing his creativity on a par with Europe’s well-recognized musical traditions—was more in tune with his new, more subdued mood.
Fela continued to work at a furious pace during the second half of the 1980s. In 1986, he undertook successful tours of the United States and Europe, where his music seemed to be catching on, performing in Giants Stadium in New Jersey for an Amnesty International event and touring in several U.S. cities. But the fact that Africa’s most prolific musical revolutionary still had to share the stage with others highlighted the long road still ahead for Fela.
The following year, in October 1987, the rebel musician’s creeping sense of isolation was heightened by another personal blow. In Burkina Faso the revolutionary leader Captain Thomas Sankara—the only African ruler to have publicly embraced Fela and his music—was assassinated in a coup d’état apparently orchestrated by the West. A revolutionary, Sankara had seized power in a bloodless coup in 1983 at the age of thirty-three; since then he had attempted to pry his landlocked country away from French imperial control. Some months before the assassination, the leader had personally hosted Fela in Burkina Faso. “Underground System”—one of Fela’s most beautiful compositions of the period—was a tribute to the fallen Pan-Africanist hero. According to the song, Africa had fallen under the control of a complex network of subterranean, transnational institutions whose aim was to perpetuate the subjection of its peoples; Sankara had been felled by this gargantuan, imperialistic cobweb. The tune was a big hit when released in 1992.
Sankara’s murder most likely increased Fela’s awareness of the hovering threat to his own life, but his trip to Burkina Faso had its own tragic personal resonance: in the middle of his sojourn, lesions erupted over the musician’s body, causing him to cut the trip short and rush back home to consult soothsayers and herbalists. It would take nearly a decade to become dramatically clear that the unsightly breakout was the first sign of AIDS. Fela, however, was induced to interpret the mysterious lesions as concrete signs of his ongoing “spiritual transformation.” He was merely “changing skin,” he would later explain to the press.19
Coming from someone as well read as Fela, such gullibility may seem, today, incomprehensible. However, it must be viewed with an understanding of two elements—the fluid ideological framework within which Fela operated to form his political opinions and the wholesale ignorance about the AIDS pandemic that was preponderant at the time. In the 1980s, AIDS was still a mysterious phenomenon unknown to most people, including heads of states and governments. Fela, consequently, denied its existence, claiming that the purported disease was an “invention of the white man.” Later on, he would also argue that, “Africans cannot get AIDS—[because] Africans eat fresh meat and vegetables; most of our food are all fresh, as a result we have natural immunity against those white man diseases.”20
As a principle, Fela thoroughly rejected the use of any form of birth control by Africans as politically irresponsible, because he believed that the West and Asia were seeking outlets for their own population overflow. He surmised that these hegemonic regions wanted to scare Africans into adopting practices of sexual abstinence and condom-protected sex that would in fact depopulate the continent, opening the way for their own settlement. He contended that Africa was already depopulated as a result of the Arab and European slave trade, and the West was now using the AIDS scare to deter Africans from having large families to repopulate the continent. Europe, China, and India, he suspected, wanted to impose a Malthusian solution on Africa in order to hoard the continent’s resources and gain land to absorb their own demographic overflow.
Therefore, in 1991, when the AIDS alert began to be sounded throughout Africa, Fela had no qualms in composing what would be the most reckless song of his entire career, “Condom, Scaliwag, and Scatter,” a tune in which the rebel musician roundly condemned the use of condoms by Africans and decried protected sex as “unnatural.” It is clear that Fela tragically—as many people at the time—did not understand what AIDS really was.
The Light Dims
The glory days of the Kalakuta Republic were now clearly past; the “rascal republic” was crumbling. Fela was barely making ends meet, but he was known to grow in adversity and rebound from his defeats. He was a phoenix. His musical exigencies remained as demanding as before, and the new recruits to his loyal big band strained to follow the increasingly complex, solemn compositions of the master.
In the late 1980s he released “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,” an unforgiving satirical assault on the colonial education that was fostering cultural alienation among the surging generations of Africans. He fired two still more powerful shots: “Beasts of No Nation” and “Overtake Don Overtake Overtake.” These devastating commentaries delineated the emergent face of a new world order that a decade later would bear the name “globalization.” The rulers of this “global village”—an environment without borders, not to promote the free transit of humans but to incite the unencumbered flow of capital—were simply “Beasts of No Nation,” intent on pillage.
Fela’s hit tunes of the late 1970s, “I.T.T.” (International Thief, Thief), “V.I.P.” (Vagabonds in Power), and “Authority Stealing,” already betrayed a perceptive recognition of the local implications of an emergent transnational capitalism. In that new scheme, the ruling elites in Africa appeared as amoral and soulless comprador classes, devoid of any national interests or cultural moorings, people without any specific allegiance to nation, country, or continent. African despots, too, were beasts who belonged to no nation.
The Shrine was the only place where the anointed could listen to the new Fela music, so his enduring audience continued to pack the place, which was now declared to be a sort of spiritual mecca for all mankind, not solely for Africa. From just a nightclub the Shrine had evolved into the seat of a new religion, planted in the heart of one of Lagos’s most squalid, disinherited areas. There, Fela performed inventive rituals that he believed would engender Africa’s renaissance but that conformed to no particular traditional belief system. Even in that sense he was a creative
innovator.
In 1989, 1990, and 1991 Fela and his Egypt 80 band made sporadic forays into Europe and the United States; twice he played at Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater (the first time at a benefit concert for his musical mentor, James Brown, who was then in prison). Fela’s continuing refusal to compromise with the demands of the international music cartels was a significant factor in preventing those tours from having global repercussions. Thus he was unfazed when, while on tour in the United States, eleven not-so-politically-inclined members of his band left him. He was simply not interested in compromising his artistic creativity for money, even turning down a multimillion-dollar offer from Motown “on advice from the spirits.”21 On the other hand, according to former Fela aide ID, the musician also “went through a lot of economic embargo—no record company wanted to sign him. For example, one record company executive thought the ten million dollars Fela asked for the sale of his back catalog was crazy.”
Those who visited him in his shrinking commune or spoke to him during his foreign tours during the 1990s witnessed the unmistakable signs of battle fatigue and demoralization. “Fela told me there was nothing else to sing about, nothing else to talk about, because he’d said it all [and nothing had changed]. He was very sad,” commented his longtime friend Sandra. “This was a man who had been [a] very jovial-type person. He became a recluse. Fela was caught in his own world of Kalakuta. He was the king there, and he surrounded himself with a bunch of ’yes-men.’”22
The “old Fela,” whose fresh, boyish manners had charmed so many, whose iconoclastic lifestyle defied the stultifying neocolonial environment of the so-called New Africa, had repositioned himself as a spiritual guru. From the frolicking, energetic Fela of the 1970s and early 1980s, a somber, humorless, withdrawn, introspective Fela had emerged, who seldom left his commune. The “new Fela” was a tormented pessimist who, during his appearances at the Shrine, looked tired and haggard. But he had not lost his capacity to pour scorn on Africa’s neocolonial elites, as in his tune “Just Like That,” one of his very last releases. Thereafter, although he continued to compose, he steadfastly refused to record. “Why even bother?” he said in an interview, in 1991. “I’ve said everything. It’s all been said. It’s all been done.”23
But those who deduced that the rebel had copped out were unaware of another underlying reason for his less energetic performances and increasing penchant for seclusion. Unknown even to Fela, a lethal illness that had gained total control of his destiny was sapping his energies. Fela’s performances at the Shrine became more infrequent and shorter than usual. He appeared frail and at times walked unsteadily; he was losing his sight and had developed a persistent cough, but he refused to see a doctor or to consider what he derided as “toxic” Western medication.
The symptoms of AIDS continued to show up as blotches that appeared on parts of his body and face. Since Fela habitually performed bare-chested, these lesions were all too evident. Naively, the musician continued to insist they were “spiritual marks,” testimony to his ongoing spiritual transformation. Thus, he announced that on January 1, 1992, his entire body would be covered with “new skin.” In an interview the following year, he even claimed immortality. “I will never die,” he said, “my ancestors have told me so.”24 Fela had no idea whatsoever that he was the carrier of a fatal, undiagnosed illness.
The Final Round
The Babangida regime did not let up: in January 1993, when the police discovered a dead body near the rebel’s compound, Fela was arrested and charged outright with murder although he had had no involvement in the crime. For the three hundred and fifty-sixth time in twenty-five years, the musician was in court. Sent to the sordid Ikoyi Prison, he spent two and a half months there before his lawyers could win his release. Fela would have no cause to celebrate, for in November 1993 Nigeria experienced yet another military takeover, this time by the country’s most sanguinary leader to date—General Sani Abacha.
The new military tyrant wasted no time in showing that his rule would be more unabashedly lawless and bloody than all preceding regimes. The latter liberally relied on kangaroo courts to frame and imprison opponents. Abacha resorted to hired killers who gunned people down in broad daylight, in the streets or right in their homes before their very families. His trademark signature was visible when, within weeks of his takeover, unknown assailants sprayed Fela’s compound with bullets.
The message to Fela and his followers became even clearer when the new dictator moved against the country’s most prominent human rights advocate, the internationally known author Ken Saro-Wiwa. Despite a worldwide outcry against his imprisonment and secret trial, Saro-Wiwa and eight other human rights advocates were hung for treason in November 1995. As always, many Nigerians expected the people’s rebel to confront the new dictator on their behalf, but rumors were spreading that the he was suffering from a serious illness, which most believed to be prostate cancer.
Generally, Fela now maintained a very low profile but continued using the Shrine as a forum for his veiled attacks on the brutish Abacha regime. In his testamentlike composition “Clear Road for Jagba Jagga,” he called on Nigerians to rid themselves of immoral elites, corrupt politicians, and dictators, including the incumbent Abacha, whom he identified by name. So in February 1996 armed plainclothes policemen invaded his compound, arresting him and thirty members of his band on the charge of illegal possession of marijuana. After spending ten days in prison, the ailing Fela was released on bail, but he remained at the mercy of Abacha’s courts.
In July 1996, the police sealed off the Shrine. Even more ominously, Fela’s junior brother, Dr. Bekolalari Ransome-Kuti, a well-known civil rights advocate, was arrested along with others accused of plotting against the regime and swiftly sentenced to life imprisonment (commuted later to fifteen years). In April 1997, the regime ordered another raid on Fela’s home. Along with several cowives and about one hundred followers, Fela was arrested and charged once more with illegal possession of marijuana. This time the seriously ill Fela was sentenced to ten years imprisonment and interned in the Kirikiri maximum-security prison in Lagos. The Abacha regime now closed down the Shrine for good.
In July 1997, the televised sight of an emaciated, visibly ill Fela being dragged in handcuffs before the courts provoked a public outcry. Released on bail, the unrepentant rebel had exactly one more month to live. For the following weeks Fela remained at home, depressed and refusing visits. In the final days of that month, in a state of paranoid delusion, he locked himself in his room, refusing any food or contact with the outside world. “[M]y sister Sola came back from tour and he let her in,” recounted his son Femi. “She found him lying down, practically dead. At this point, he saw almost everyone around him as evil.”25
On August 1, Fela slipped into a coma, and his immediate family to rushed him to hospital. The next day, he expired at the age of fifty-eight, still unconscious. Only then did Nigerians and the world discover the real cause of the iconic musician’s death—complications associated with the AIDS virus. At the time of his death, thirteen self-identified wives were in the musician’s household.
His older brother, the former minister Dr. Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, told the press that had Fela known of his illness, he would certainly have revealed it himself. Nonetheless, how Fela could have remained totally ignorant until the very end about the real nature of his illness, despite having two medical doctors as brothers—one the former minister of health and the country’s most prominent AIDS-awareness activist—is cause for amazement. As for the women in his life, other than Fehintola—singer-artist Seun’s mother, who died of AIDS in 2007—it is still unclear how many of Fela’s wives became HIV positive or died as a consequence of AIDS.
As befit the choices he made throughout his life, Fela died a poor man. During his affluent years, the rebel was notorious for his habit of distributing weekly—in cash—a part of his wealth to the poor. Naive as such a gesture may seem, it underscored Fela’s conviction that humans are re
sponsible for their fellow humans. As Rikki Stein, Fela’s manager, would say of him
I saw him as a social engineer, concerned with issues of injustice, corruption, the abuses of power. He was ready to lay his life on the line in defense of such causes, which he did on countless occasions. For his trouble he was beaten with rifle butts, endlessly harassed, imprisoned, vilified by the authorities, despised by bourgeois society (whose sons and daughters were captivated by him). His house was once burned to the ground by a thousand soldiers after they had raped and beaten his followers, thrown his mother and brother from a window, both of whom suffered fractures (his mother was ultimately to die from her injuries). Each time they were to beat him, though, he always bounced back with a vengeance, stronger than ever. It is my view that the only thing that kept him alive and the ultimate source of his strength, was the love the people had for him.26
If there was any doubt about the special place that Fela Kuti held in the hearts of ordinary Africans, it was dispelled by the outpouring of grief that led one million Nigerians to file past the transparent casket displayed in the heart of Nigeria’s capital. On August 12, multitudes lined the route to Fela’s compound to bid good-bye to the man who gave voice to their silence. Their last image of their hero was that of an elegantly attired Fela, wearing one of his favorite many-colored shirts, with a large marijuana cigar defiantly held between his fingers, peace suffusing his emaciated face. Rikki Stein described the moment:
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