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Fela Kuta

Fela, 58, Dissident Nigerian Musician, Dies

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Fela, 58, Dissident Nigerian Musician, Dies

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 on 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 (pronounced FAY-la) was a showy, insolent, marijuana-smoking icon, 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 ''M.A.S.S.'' (Music Against Second Slavery), ''B.B.C.'' (Big Blind Country), ''I.T.T.'' (International Thief Thief) and ''V.I.P.'' (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 half a 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 hospitalized. 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 following 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 Ransome-Kuti was born on Oct. 15, 1938, into a prominent family in Abeokuta, a Yoruba town in the western part of Nigeria. His father, the Rev. Ransome-Kuti, was an Anglican priest, one of the country's best-known clergymen and educators. He raised his children to respect England, the colonial ruler, and saw to their education.

Two of Fela's brothers became doctors. One, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, later served as Minister of Health. The other, Beko Ransome-Kuti, became chairman of the Campaign for Democracy, a coalition of trade unions and civil rights groups that has opposed Nigeria's military rule. Like Fela, Beko Ransome-Kuti has been jailed for his political views.

His 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 and by the time it was achieved in 1960, she was the country's foremost female nationalist. Later, she became one of few female chiefs.

Both Fela and his mother de-Anglicized the family name, dropping Ransome in favor of Anikulapo, a name from Yoruba mythology that means ''he who carries death in a sack.''

Growing up in Abeokuta, Fela led a school choir and played piano and percussion. In 1959, he left Nigeria to study classical music in London. There, he was exposed to American jazz. He listened to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis and he began playing trumpet and keyboards in jazz and funk bands.

He returned to Nigeria in 1963 and formed his first band, Koola Lobitos. But American jazz was not popular, and his sound did not catch on. In 1969, he traveled to the United States where he discovered Malcolm X and the Black Panther movement.

''It was incredible how my head was turned,'' he told The New York Times in 1977. ''Everything fell into place, man. For the first time, I saw the essence of blackism. It's crazy; in the States people think the black-power movement drew inspiration from Africa. All these Americans come over here looking for awareness. They don't realize they're the ones who've got it over there. Why, we were even ashamed to go around in national dress until we saw pictures of blacks wearing dashikis on 125th Street.''

He returned to Nigeria and invented the genre known as Afro-beat, becoming a patriarch of modern African music. He called his band Afrika '70 and later changed the name to Egypt '80.

He once described his music this way: ''I am playing deep African music. I've studied my culture deeply, and I'm very aware of my tradition. The rhythm, the sounds, the tonality, the chord sequences, the individual effect of each instrument and each section of the band, I'm talking about a whole continent in my music.''

Musicians around the world followed his lead.

''We were influenced by Fela's pure African style,'' Salif Keita, a Malian singer and star of the African music scene, said in 1995. ''Fela's music is pure rhythm, with a groove. It is driven by percussions, bass and accented rhythm guitar, with the lead singer's voice floating over everything. He introduced the background chorus voices into modern African music. Fela's lyrics are very political and funny. He is a legend, and all modern African singers and musicians owe a lot to him.''

Fela wrote his lyrics in the pidgin language of the lower classes. ''You cannot sing African music in proper English,'' he once said. ''Broken English has been completely broken into the African way of talking, our rhythm, our intonation.''

In 1978, he married 27 of his dancing girls in a single traditional ceremony. All but eight later left him while he was in jail. At times it seemed that Fela could not shed his role as a Government opponent no matter who was in power. In a 1982 documentary, shown in the United States three years later on public television, Fela accused the Nigerian Government of ''criminal behavior,'' and said, ''Nigeria is worse than South Africa. In Nigeria, blacks mistreat blacks.''

But at the time the documentary was made, Nigeria was experiencing a brief period of democratic, civilian rule, which lasted from 1979 until 1984. In November 1984, he was arrested at the Lagos airport as he was leaving for a concert tour in the United States. He was charged with illegally exporting foreign currency, convicted and spent 18 months in prison. Amnesty International labeled him a ''prisoner of conscience'' and it was later revealed that the charges had been trumped up.

In 1993, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy and murder in the death of a man who worked as a technician for his band and whose body was found not far from his home. No one, however, accused Fela of witnessing the incident or being near the scene. He was released on bond and he called the arrest one more example of his family being harassed for its views.

Such harassment ''is almost a way of life in our family,'' said his niece, Morenike Ransome-Kuti, who is a lawyer in Lagos. ''It's the price you have to pay when you're fighting for certain things.''

Photo: Fela at the Apollo Theater, 1989. (Jack Vartoogian)

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