Reporting from Lagos, Nigeria —
The white house on Gbemisola Street has a circular grave with a granite pyramid instead of a headstone and no name.
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Fela Kuti's voice still rings loud and true
People in Lagos, Nigeria, continue to speak of the musician-activist in the present tense, even though he's been dead 14 years.
It isn't needed. Everyone here knows Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nigeria's revered protest musician arrested by Nigeria's military rulers some 200 times for his defiant lyrics, jailed and beaten on countless occasions.
He's been dead 14 years, but Nigerians still go misty-eyed at Fela's name. He's loved not just for his music but because he was one of the few brave enough to attack the country's loathed military rulers. People see him as a prophet who sacrificed everything to confront corruption and abuse of power.
Young people share a joint near Fela's grave (appropriate, given his love of the stuff). Inside the bare house, a recording of Fela playing saxophone squawks happily, floating up the yellow stairwell like a ghost.
A glass bookshelf holds dozens of pairs of shoes, their extravagant hues cloaked with a thick gray blanket of dust. A broken-down piano stands silenced, ivories stained, the panels eaten away, as sorry as a dog whose master never came home.
Fela called his house the Kalakuta Republic and declared independence from Nigeria, whose tyrannical and corrupt leaders he abhorred. He electrified the fence to keep the police out. Twenty-seven of Fela's 28 wives — his backup dancers and lovers — lived here with him, along with many groupies and hangers-on. His first wife, Remi, and her children, Yeni, Femi and Sola, lived elsewhere, though he visited them often.
In 1977 Olusegun Obasanjo the military ruler (later president) sent the army in to break up Kalakuta, beating Fela's wives and raping some of them with bottles, throwing his 78-year-old mother out the first-floor window and arresting Fela and everybody else on the scene. One dancer, Alake, had her eye put out by a soldier.
Fela's mother never fully recovered, according to him, and died a year later. A government inquiry blamed unknown soldiers for the violence.
Najite Kuti, 41, wanders into the front gate and banshee-shrieks at the girls chain smoking joints in the front yard. Once a willowy dancer, she's thick-waisted, her eyes raggedly outlined with kohl, her hair chopped short, wearing fancy pink sandals, crimson floral earrings and a hot pink wrap that keeps coming adrift.
She left her village in the Niger Delta of southern Nigeria at 14 and traveled to Lagos. A friend took her to the Kalakuta commune. Fela gave her pocket money and she stayed, later joining his band, Africa 70, as a dancer and singer.
"He used to help people. Anyone who came to Fela, Fela would do everything for them. What your mother or father could not do for you, Fela would do for you," she says, a common refrain.
She smiles vaguely, remembering. Fond memories of his generous love. And terrible ones, of the day the army came. "I was the first lady that they attacked. They beat me and made me naked. All the women were beaten and made naked and taken to the army barracks. Sorrow, tears and blood. That's what it was."
Fela's angriest songs — and his most fearless acts of protest — followed the assault. He wrote perhaps his most powerful work, "Sorrow, tears and blood," about the raid. "Everybody run run run, Everybody scatter scatter, Some people lost some bread, Someone nearly die, Someone just die, Police dey come, army dey come. Confusion everywhere."
His condemnation of corrupt politicians still strikes a chord in a country that feels betrayed by its leaders in the half century since independence — with half the population still living in poverty despite the billions of dollars flowing in oil revenue.
"Fela, he's our legend," said bookseller, Ade Adeyemo, 31, who stocks copies of the musician's biography.
"To me, Fela is like a prophet. When Fela speaks he's ready to face it; he's ready to go to jail for his speech."
The bookseller uses the present tense, as if Fela is alive. To many followers, his music and his message live on.
Fela continues to inspire
Fela's story was made into the critically acclaimed musical "Fela!," which played on Broadway and London's West End, after New York commodities trader Steve Hendel stumbled on the music online. He thought Fela's biography made Western protest musicians look tame.
"It just blew my mind. I'd never heard anything so powerful. I became sort of obsessed by it," Hendel said. "I said to myself, 'I'm convinced that Fela is the greatest musician in my lifetime and nobody in America knows about him.'"
He approached Rikki Stein, Fela's longtime manager, with the idea of making a Broadway musical. It was the first interesting idea that Stein had heard in years.
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