Fela, the Nigerian singer and band leader who combined pulsating Afro-beat rhythms and scathing pidgin English lyrics to goad Nigeria’s leaders and denounce their authoritarian regimes, died Saturday at his home in Lagos. He was 58 and had been Africa’s most famous musician and his country’s foremost political dissident.
The immediate cause was heart failure, but he had suffered from AIDS, his older brother, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, said at a news conference in Lagos, Reuters reported.
Fela was a showy, insolent, marijuana-smoking performer who often made appearances wearing only bikini underwear. In more than 30 years as a dissident songwriter and saxophonist, he was arrested and imprisoned at least a dozen times, most recently in 1993.
His songs, some an hour long, were influenced by James Brown and fused American funk and jazz with traditional African music. The titles were written in initials like “MASS” (Music Against Second Slavery), “BBC” (Big Blind Country), “ITT” (International Thief Thief) and “VIP” (Vagabonds in Power). In addition to railing against governmental corruption and military abuses, he also sang introspectively about shortcomings in Nigerian society.
For years, Fela was merely Nigeria’s most popular musician. He labeled himself “the chief priest,” lived in a commune that he called the “Kalakuta Republic” after the nickname of a prison cell he had once occupied, smoked marijuana and recorded about a half-dozen albums a year that were banned on government radio because of a dispute over copyright payments. The records, with their roiling groove and subversive lyrics, sold wildly across the African continent.
Then, in 1977, came the Fela affair, which overnight catapulted him into a symbol of government opposition and raised unsettling questions about civil liberties in Nigeria and about the future of civilian rule in a country that had broken free of colonial England only to fall into authoritarian military rule.
On the steamy afternoon of Feb. 18, a swarm of 1,000 soldiers gathered around Fela’s Kalakuta Republic, a two-story yellow building in the sprawling Lagos slum of Surulere. In the ensuing siege, the house was burned to the ground and most of its 60 occupants were taken to hospital. Fela was beaten unconscious and held under armed guard in a hospital room. His 77-year-old mother was thrown from her bedroom window and died of her injuries the next year.
Once free, he announced a lawsuit against the army that was later dismissed. For the rest of his life, he was an enemy of various Nigerian governments, as much a political figure as a musical one. He often said he would one day be president of the country, but his political showmanship never left the band stage. In recent years, he was less vocal, remaining mostly at home in Ikeja, a working-class section of Lagos, and performing only infrequently at his club, the Shrine.
Fela’s mother, Funmilayo, had a flair for politics. In 1948, she led the women of Abeokuta, who were not represented in local government, in a successful crusade against a tax on women. She also strove for Nigeria’s independence.
