Great Dynasties: The Ransome-Kutis

In 1925, the Reverend Canon Josiah J Ransome-Kuti, a Nigerian Anglican priest and composer of hymns, recorded a series of 78s, sung in Yoruba, for the pioneering Zonophone record label in London. The Reverend had adopted the name Ransome from the missionary who had converted him. Fifty years later, Ransome-Kuti’s grandson, also a musician, abandoned the slave name, calling himself instead Anikulapo, meaning “He who carries death in his pouch”. According to Michael E Veal, an ethnomusicologist and professor of music at Yale University, Ransome-Kuti’s musical descendant was not only “one of the most important musicians in the world of black music”, but also “one of the most important musicians of the post-world war two era”. He was Fela Kuti.

Olufela – “Fela” – Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti was born to middle-class parents in Nigeria in 1938, the fourth of five children. His father, the Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, like his father before him, became an Anglican priest and was also a union activist and a school principal. Fela’s mother, Funmilayo, was a human-rights campaigner who was awarded the Lenin peace prize (the Soviet Union’s equivalent of the Nobel peace prize) in 1970. “She beat the hell outta me, man,” said Fela. Fela’s older brother, Olikoye, became a doctor, and went on to become Nigeria’s minister of health and deputy director-general of the World Health Organisation. His younger brother, Bekolari, also a doctor, became secretary general of the Nigerian Medical Association. His sister Yemisi is executive director of the Nigeria Network of Non-Governmental Organisations. The Kuti family have been described as the Kennedys of Nigeria. But there was never a Kennedy like Fela.

Sent to London to study medicine, aged 19, Fela instead enrolled to study piano and composition at Trinity College of Music. He formed a band and during the late 1960s and early 1970s, began to develop his distinctive musical style, with long, polyrhythmic songs lasting up to 30 minutes, incorporating looping guitar riffs, bass grooves, chants and a two-saxophone horn section. He described his work as “African classical music”.

After touring in America and becoming politicised through the Black Power movement, Fela returned to Nigeria, where he set up his own studio compound, which he declared the Republic of Kalakuta, with himself as president. He also ran his own nightclub, the Shrine, and in 1977 he released his landmark album, Zombie, an outspoken attack on the Nigerian government and military. The government’s response was swift and brutal: they attacked the compound, razed it to the ground, beat up Fela, and threw his mother from a second-storey window. She died of her injuries.

According to the Nobel-prize winning Nigerian poet and playwright – and Fela’s cousin – Wole Soyinka, Fela was a “scourge of corrupt power, mimic culture and militarism” whose mission was nothing less than “to effect a mental and physical liberation of the race”. He was certainly a fearless opponent of the government, formed his own political party, was imprisoned, married 27 wives and when he died in 1997, aged 58, of an Aids-related illness, tens of thousands of people turned out on the streets of Lagos to pay their respects.

In his biography, Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (2000), Michael E Veal describes Fela as combining “the autocratic bandleading style and dancing agility of James Brown, the mystical incantations of Sun Ra, the polemicism of Malcolm X, and the harsh, insightful satire of Richard Pryor”.

Fela Kuti had seven children, and during his lifetime released more than 50 albums. His youngest son, Seun, now leads his father’s band, and his eldest son, Femi, has a band of his own, the Positive Force. Fela’s unique style has influenced musicians from Missy Elliott to Brian Eno and just about every skinny-jeaned English indie band. The musical Fela! is running at the National Theatre in London, and a film based on his life is due to be released in 2011.

Culled from guardian.co.uk