Three decades after his death, the “Father of Afrobeat” Fela Kuti made history by becoming the first African to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys.
The Nigerian musician, who died in 1997, received the honor posthumously along with several other artists during a ceremony in Los Angeles on Saturday, the eve of the 68th annual Grammy Awards.
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For his family and friends – some of whom were in attendance – it’s an honor that they hope will help amplify Fela’s music and ideology to a new generation of musicians and music lovers. But they also admit that this recognition came quite late.
“The family is happy about it. And we are delighted that he is finally being recognized,” Yeni Kuti, Fela’s daughter, told Al Jazeera before the ceremony. “But Fela was never nominated [for a Grammy] during his lifetime,” she lamented.
This recognition “is better late than never,” she said, but “we still have a way to go” to fairly recognize musicians and artists from across the African continent.
Lemi Ghariokwu, renowned Nigerian artist and creator of 26 of Fela’s iconic album covers, says the fact that this is the first time an African musician has received the honor “just shows that everything we Africans have to do, we have to do five times over.”
Ghariokwu said he felt “privileged” to witness this moment for Fela. “It’s good to have one of us represented in this category, at this level. So, I’m excited. I’m happy about it,” he told Al Jazeera.
But he admits he was also “surprised” when he first heard the news.
“Fela was totally anti-establishment. And now the establishment recognizes it,” Ghariokwu said.
Regarding Fela’s reaction to the award if he had been alive, Ghariokwu says he imagines he would be happy. “I can even imagine him raising his fist and saying, ‘See, I have them now, I got their attention!'”
But Yeni believes her father would have been largely unfazed.
“He didn’t do it at all [care about awards]. He didn’t even think about it,” she said. “He played music because he loved music. It was being recognized by his people – by human beings, by his fellow artists – that made him happy.
Yemisi Ransome-Kuti, Fela’s cousin and head of the Kuti family, agrees. “Knowing him, he might have said, you know, thanks but no thanks or something like that.” She laughs.
“He really wasn’t interested in popular opinion. He wasn’t motivated by what others thought of him or his music. He was more focused on his own understanding of the impact he needed to have on his profession, his community, his continent.”
Although she believes the award may not have meant much to him personally, she told Al Jazeera he would have recognized its overall value.
“He would recognize the fact that it is a good thing for such establishments to begin the process of giving honor where it is due across the continent,” Ransome-Kuti said.
“There are a lot of great philosophers, musicians, historians – African – who haven’t been brought to the forefront, in the spotlight as they should be. So I think he would have said, ‘OK, fine, but what happens next?’
“Fela’s influence spans generations”
Fela was born in Ogun State, Nigeria in 1938 as Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti (later renaming himself Fela Anikulapo Kuti), to an Anglican minister and school principal father and a activist mother.
In 1958 he moved to London to study medicine, but enrolled at Trinity College of Music, where he formed a band that played a mix of jazz and highlife.
Returning to Nigeria in the 1960s, he created the Afrobeat genre which fused highlife and Yoruba music with American jazz, funk and soul. This laid the foundation for Afrobeats – a newer genre blending traditional African rhythms and contemporary pop.
“Fela’s influence spans generations, inspiring artists such as Beyoncé, Paul McCartney and Thom Yorke, and shaping modern Nigerian Afrobeats,” the paper read. quote on this year’s Grammys list of Special Merit Award winners.
But beyond music, he was also a “political radical”. [and] outlaw,” the quote adds.
By the 1970s, Fela’s music had become a vehicle for fierce criticism of military rule, corruption and social injustice in Nigeria. He declared his Lagos township, the Kalakuta Republic, independent of the state – symbolically rejecting Nigerian authority – and in 1977 released the scathing album Zombie, with lyrics depicting soldiers as mindless zombies without free will. Subsequently, troops attacked Kalakuta, brutally assaulting its residents and causing injuries that led to the death of Fela’s mother.
Frequently arrested and harassed during his life, Fela became an international symbol of artistic resistance, with Amnesty International later recognizing him as a prisoner of conscience after imprisonment for political reasons. When he died in 1997 at the age of 58 following illness, an estimated one million people attended his funeral in Lagos.
Yeni – along with her siblings – is now the guardian of her father’s work and legacy. She runs the Afrobeat hub,
the New Afrika Shrine in Ikeja, Lagos and organizes an annual celebration in honor of Fela called “Felabration”.
She remembers growing up with her larger-than-life father as something that seemed “normal” to her, because that was all she knew. But “I was impressed by him,” she also says – as an artist and a thinker.
“I really, really admired his ideologies. The most important to me was African unity… He totally revered and admired [former Ghanaian President] Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who fought for African unity. And I always say to myself: can you imagine if Africa was united? How far we would be; how progressive we would be.
Reflecting on Fela’s legacy, artist Ghariokwu says most of today’s great Afrobeats musicians have been influenced and inspired by Fela’s music and fashion.
But he laments that most “have never really looked into the ideological part of Fela – Pan-Africanism – and never really verified it”.
For him, Fela’s recognition at the Grammy Awards should mean to young artists: “If anyone [like Fela] who was totally anti-establishment can be recognized in this way, perhaps I can also express myself without too much fear.
Yeni says that through Fela’s work and life philosophy, he wanted to convey to young people a message of African unity and political consciousness.
“So maybe with this award, more young people will be encouraged to talk about it more,” she said. “I hope they will be more exposed to Fela and want to talk about Africa’s progress.”
