FELA - his story

^{On this day, 15th of October, the legendary  FELA was born, so I decided to put up this piece in honour of  this African musical icon. I hope you enjoy it?}

 Fela whose real name is Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti was a multi-instrumentalist, musician and composer, pioneer of Afrobeat music, and a  human rights activist was born in Abeokuta, Ogun State Nigeria into a middle-class family. His mother,Fumilayo Ransome-Kuti  was an activist in the anti-colonial movement and his father, Rev. Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti , a Protestant minister and school principal, was the first president of the Nigerian Union of Teachers. His brothers, Beko Ransome-Kuti and Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, both medical doctors, are well known in Nigeria. Fela was a first cousin to the Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, the first African to win a Nobel Prize for literature.
Fela was sent to London in 1958 to study medicine but decided to study music instead at the Trinity College of Music. While there, he formed the band Koola Lobitos, playing a fusion of jazz and highlife.In 1960, Fela married his first wife, Remilekun (Remi) Taylor, with whom he would have three children (Femi, Yeni, and Sola).
His songs were mostly sung in Nigerian pidgin, although he also performed a few songs in the Yoruba
 language. Fela's main instruments were the saxophone and the keyboards , but he also played the trumpet, electric guitar, and took the occasional drum solo. Fela refused to perform songs again after he had already recorded them, which also hindered his popularity outside Africa.
Fela was known for his showmanship, and his concerts were often quite outlandish and wild. He referred to his stage act as the Underground Spiritual Game. Fela attempted making a movie but lost all the materials to the fire that was set to his house by the military government in power. Kuti thought that art, and thus his own music, should have political meaning In 1963, Fela moved back to Nigeria, re-formed Koola Lobitos and trained as a radio producer  for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.
In 1967, he went to Ghana to think up a new musical direction. That was when Kuti first called his music Afrobeat. In 1969, Fela took the band to the United States.

1970s

After Fela and his band returned to Nigeria, the band was renamed The Africa '70, as lyrical themes changed from love to social issues. He then formed the Kalakuta Republic , a recording studio, and a home for many connected to the band . He also set up a nightclub in the Empire Hotel, named the Afro-Spot and then the Afrika Shrine, where he performed regularly. Fela also changed his middle name to Anikulapo (meaning "he who carries death in his pouch"),stating that his original middle name of Ransome was a slave name. The recordings continued, and the music became more politically motivated.
Fela's music became very popular among the Nigerian public and Africans in general. In fact, he made the decision to sing in Pidgin English  so that his music could be enjoyed by individuals all over Africa, where the local languages spoken are very diverse and numerous. As popular as Fela's music had become in Nigeria and elsewhere, it was also very unpopular with the ruling government, and raids on the Kalakuta Republic were frequent.
In 1977, Fela and the Afrika '70 released the album Zombie, a scathing attack on Nigerian soldiers using the zombie metaphor to describe the methods of the Nigeria military.. The album was a smash hit and infuriated the government, setting off a vicious attack against the Kalakuta Republic, during which one thousand soldiers attacked the commune. Fela was severely beaten, and his elderly mother was thrown from a window, causing fatal injuries. The Kalakuta Republic was burned, and Fela's studio, instruments, and master tapes were destroyed. Fela claimed that he would have been killed had it not been for the intervention of a commanding officer as he was being beaten. Fela's response to the attack was to deliver his mother's coffin  to the Dodan barracks in Lagos, General Olusegun Obansanjo's residence, and to write two songs, "Coffin for Head of State" and "Unknown Soldier", referencing the official inquiry that claimed the commune had been destroyed by an unknown soldier.
Fela and his band then took residence in Crossroads Hotel as the Shrine had been destroyed along with his commune. In 1978, Fela married twenty-seven women, many of whom were his dancers, composers, and singers to mark the anniversary of the attack on the Kalakuta Republic. The year was also marked by two notorious concerts, the first in Accra in which riots broke out during the song "Zombie", which led to Fela being banned from entering Ghana. The second was at the Berlin Jazz Festival after which most of Fela's musicians deserted him, due to rumors that Fela was planning to use the entire proceeds to fund his presidential campaign.
Despite the massive setbacks, Fela was determined to come back. He formed his own political party, which he called Movement of the People. In 1979, he put himself forward for president in Nigeria's first elections  for more than a decade, but his candidature was refused. At this time, Fela created a new band called Egypt '80 and continued to record albums and tour the country. He further infuriated the political establishment by dropping the names of ITT Corporation vice-president Moshood Abiola and then General Olusegun Obasanjo at the end of a hot-selling 25-minute political screed titled "I.T.T. (International Thief-Thief)".

1980s and beyond

In 1984,Muhammadu Buhari's government, of which Kuti was a vocal opponent, jailed him on a charge of currency smuggling which Amnesty International  and others denounced as politically motivated. Amnesty designated him a prisoner of conscience , and his case was also taken up by other human rights groups. After 20 months, he was released from prison by General Ibrahim Babangida. On his release he divorced his twelve remaining wives, saying that "marriage brings jealousy and selfishness".
Once again, Fela continued to release albums with Egypt '80, made a number of successful tours of the United States and Europe and also continued to be politically active. In 1986, Fela performed in Giants Stadium in New Jersey as part of the Amnesty International, A Conspiracy Of Hope concert, sharing the bill with Bono, Carlos Santana and The Neville Brothers.
His album output slowed in the 1990s, and eventually he stopped releasing albums altogether. In 1993, he and four members of the Afrika '70 organization were arrested for murder. The battle against military corruption in Nigeria was taking its toll, especially during the rise of dictator Sani Abacha. Rumors were also spreading that he was suffering from an illness for which he was refusing treatment.

Death

On 3 August 1997, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti , a former Minister of Health, stunned the nation by announcing his younger brother's death a day earlier from Kaposi's sarcoma  which was brought on by AIDS. More than a million people attended Fela's funeral at the site of the old Shrine compound. A new Africa Shrine has opened since Fela's death in a different section of Lagos under the supervision of his son Femi Kuti.

Political views

“	Imagine Che Guevara and Bob Marley rolled into one person and you get a sense of Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti.	”
— Herald Sun, February 2011 [16]

As a supporter of traditional religions and lifestyles, Kuti thought that the most important thing for Africans to fight is European cultural imperalism. The American Black Power  movement also influenced Fela's political views; he was a supporter of Pan-Africanism and socialism, and called for a united, democratic African republic . He was a candid supporter of human rights, and many of his songs are direct attacks against dictatorships, specifically the military governments of Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s. He was also a social commentator, and he criticized his fellow Africans (especially the upper class ) for betraying traditional African culture.

Bypassing editorial censorship in Nigeria's predominantly state controlled media, Kuti began in the 1970s buying advertising space in daily and weekly newspapers such as The Daily Times and The Punch in order to run outspoken political columns. Published throughout the 1970s and early 1980s under the title Chief Priest Say,  Kuti addressed a number of topics, from explosive denunciations of the Nigerian Government's criminal behavior; Islam and Christianity's exploitative nature, and evil multinational corporations; to deconstructions of Western medicine, Black Muslims, sex, pollution, and poverty. Chief Priest Say was cancelled, first by Daily Times then by Punch, ostensibly due to non-payment, but many commentators and speculations that the paper's respective editors were placed under increasingly violent pressure to stop publication.

RECENT TIMES

In recent years there has been a revitalization of Fela's influence on music and popular culture, culminating in another re-release of his catalog controlled by Universal Music,
In 1999, Universal Music France, under the aegis of Francis Kertekian, remastered the 45 albums that it controlled and released them on twenty-six compact discs. These titles were licensed to other territories of the world with the exception of Nigeria and Japan, where Fela's music was controlled by other companies. In 2005, Universal Music USA licensed all of its world-music titles to the UK-based label Wrasse Records,  which repackaged the same twenty-six CDs for distribution in the USA and the UK.

The Lagos State Government have decided to turn Fela's home into a museum and tourist center.

There  is also a carnival been celebrated annually called FELABRATION in his  honour and it brings  artistes and fans from all over the world together to celebrate this legend.