Fela Anikulapo Kuti (Fela)

Best known for his reporting on Chad Algeria and the Western Sahara in the British and French press John's first trip to Africa was to Nigeria where he was hosted by Fela Anikulapo Kuti the Afrobeat music star in 1973...

At the time few people outside Nigeria had heard of Fela and his marriage of African highlife and jazz with a cutting social commentary on the ruling elite and their foreign accomplices...

An energetic advocate for Fela and the Africa 70 band in Europe John saw him as creating a new musical form Nigeria's Duke Ellington...

John was a regular guest at the Kalakuta Republic Fela's compound in Lagos which served as an impromptu hotel for itinerant musicians such as such as Lester Bowie of the Chicago Art Ensemble and the British jazz drummer Ginger Baker late of the rock supergroup Cream...

Those trips and a starring role in the 'Worst Dancer' competition at the Africa Shrine in Lagos provided the raw material for John's perceptive memorial to Fela published in the New Left Review a few weeks after his death in 1997 (Fela Anikulapo Kuti An honest man)...

The families of three late Nigerians who had opposed Abacha also turned down the awards: Chief Moshood Kahimawo Olawale Abiola the publisher and businessman whom Abacha had imprisoned for four years before he died of poisoning in 1998 and whose wife Kudirat Abiola was shot dead; Fela Anikulapo Kuti the dissident singer composer and band leader; and leading human rights lawyer Gani Fawehinmi (AC Vol 53 No 2 How the fuel row caught fire)...

A showdown is expected in the Lagos Central senatorial race between Oluremi Tinubu wife of ACN baron Bola Tinubu and Yemisi Ransome-Kuti the late Fela Kuti’s cousin and matriarch of the Kuti family who is standing on the ticket of the Social Democratic Mega Party...

He starts with a portrait of the late Nigerian star Fela Anikulapo Kuti whose career in music and protest politics mirrored the rise of his country's oil economy and its growing political disarray...

His elder brother the Afro-beat musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was also frequently gaoled by the generals and he immortalised the iniquities of military rule in such songs as 'Zombie' 'Authority Stealing' and 'Coffin for Head of State'...

Beko and Fela were hospitalised with broken limbs but their 78-year-old mother Funmilayo was thrown out of a first-storey window and died a few months later...

Current President Obasanjo was Nigeria's military leader at the time and set up an official inquiry which found an 'unknown soldier' responsible for ordering the attack; a conclusion lampooned in Fela Kuti's song of the same name...

Fela started his own political party and ridiculed the military ever more fiercely in his music; Beko threw himself into organising the country's doctors in the Nigerian Medical Association and trying to raise the standards of public healthcare...

MD has friends all over western Nigeria being one of only two northerners praised by Wole Soyinka in The Man Died and oddly for a northern aristocrat he was a fan of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's Afro-beat music...

'When I am President' intoned Fela Anikulapo Kuti at the height of his political campaigning 'all Africa will dance to my music'...

Fela's death on 2 August was the loss of an African hero who has made the rest of the world take African music seriously...

In a continent profoundly sceptical about Nigerian military rulers and petrodollars Fela was one of the best loved and best known Nigerians...

The obsequies leading up to Fela's burial at his home in Ikeja Lagos on 12 August would have befitted the passing of a head of state...

Soldiers and policemen Fela's old sparring partners were sternly told to remove their caps before passing the body...

Other fans some say over a million lined the streets as the funeral cortege moved slowly across Lagos to the tune of Fela's music blasting from hundreds of record shops and a truckload of his musicians following in the wake of the hearse...

His elder brother Professor Olikoye Ransome-Kuti a former Health Minister who now works for the World Bank in Washington announced that Fela had died of a heart attack after his body had been weakened by AIDS...

Some three million Nigerians have contracted AIDS says a United Nations survey released shortly after Fela's death...

The family was unable to get permission from the Federal High Court for Fela's younger brother and business manager Beko Ransome-Kuti in gaol on political charges to attend the burial; the African representative on the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and leader of the Campaign for Democracy Beko is serving a 15-year sentence imposed by a military tribunal in 1995 for faxing a copy of the defence statement of a military officer accused of trying to overthrow Abacha...

These are harrowing times for the Ransome-Kutis one of Nigeria's most eminent families; Fela died on Beko's 57th birthday and then days after the funeral his niece the dentist and jazz singer Frances Kuboye (née Ransome-Kuti) collapsed and died in Lagos...

However Fela's son Femi who follows his father's Afrobeat style fusing jazz with African rhythms is carrying on the musical tradition...

Nor is the political furore around the family likely to end: hundreds of establishment figures paid quiet tribute to Fela and offered support to the family...

Even First Lady Maryam Abacha extolled the way that Fela had projected Nigerian culture...

Strange praise given that one of Fela's last public appearances was on state television handcuffed by police having been arrested for smoking marijuana...

In memory of Fela's prodigious consumption of igbo (Nigeria's tropically roasted marijuana) a large wrap (joint) was placed between his fingers just before his body was laid in the ground as Femi played a funereal lament on saxophone...

Growing up in Abeokuta one of Nigeria's cultural and intellectual wellsprings Fela studied at London's Trinity College of Music and visited the United States at the end of the 1960s where he exchanged political and musical ideas with many African-Americans...

Musicians such as Roy Ayers Lester Bowie Ginger Baker and Paul McCartney came to play at Fela's 'Africa Shrine' in the 1970s...

To the annoyance of African ruling elites Fela always sang or 'yabbed' in Pidgin English allowing Anglophone Africans to hear his latest onslaught on government corruption or the impotence of the Organisation of African Unity...

Fela's mother (who had been active in the anti-colonial struggle and introduced Fela to Kwame Nkrumah) later died from her injuries and when Gen...

Olusegun Obasanjo handed power to the civilian government of President Shehu Shagari Fela presented the out-going regime with a replica of his mother's coffin...

Fela was the first African musician to acquire super-star status in the West while still based in Africa...

Fela was unique both in musical innovation and in the way he used his lengthy songs to a political end; songs such as Zombie (satirising the military mentality: 'Zombie no go walk unless you tell am to walk') and Authority Stealing International Thief Thief (mocking a US multinational and its local representative the now gaoled election winner Chief Moshood Abiola)...

The baton has now passed to international stars from elsewhere in West Africa such as Youssou N'Dour Ismael Lo and Baaba Maal from Senegal and Salif Keïta and Ali Farka Touré from Mali and the hyperactive Angélique Kidjo from Benin a paid- up Fela admirer...

Yet all are now based in Africa as was Fela...

Yet Nigeria once a political powerhouse has produced few international stars to match Fela Kuti other than his son Femi and Ju Ju King Sunny Ade although among Nigerians at home and in the diaspora Shina Peters has become a cult hero...

Fela Kuti would have disapproved of such an establishment event but it was a clear sign that African music is playing and the West is listening...