The work of Fela Kuti as an artist in music and stage performance has made him the first African to be honoured with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, decades after his death.
Stars of Nigerian music, including Davido and Kuti’s children Yeni and Femi, gathered in Los Angeles yesterday (31 January) to celebrate the award by the Grammy Academy, which is being conferred on the late, great bandleader today.
Fela was a saxophonist, singer, composer, arranger, bandleader and activist who broke boundaries in music, society and politics, attracting a huge following across the African diaspora.
Born Olufela Ransome-Kuti in Abeokuta in 1938 to a prominent Yoruba family (both parents were unionists and education pioneers, his mother a campaigner for women’s rights, the first woman in Nigeria to drive a car), he abandoned the medical path his family thought he would follow to study music in London in 1958, at first focusing on the trumpet.
The London years exposed Fela to a range of black music, from the soul and R’n’B of Sixties Motown stars to the Afro rock of Osibisa to the cool of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Blue Note.
Returning to West Africa in the early 1960s, he steeped himself in the highlife scene on a sojourn to Ghana and became fascinated by it.
A crucial visit to the United States in 1969 widened his horizons further, bringing him into contact with the Black Panther Movement, African-Americans’ militant struggle for civil rights and scholarship around Africa’s diasporan history. Fela began to see how music could be a tool for education and awareness-raising about political and social reform.
Back again in Nigeria, he pioneered Afrobeat, which blends West African rhythms, Nigerian highlife and juju sounds with jazz and funk. He also Africanised his name, changing it to Fela Anikulapo Kuti (Anikulapo meaning “he who carries death in his pouch”).
Beyond music, Fela was outspokenly opposed to military rule and social injustice, and was forced into exile – again in Ghana – after soldiers raided the Kalakuta Republic, his Lagos compound, in 1977, leading to the death of his mother. He was welcomed as a hero by young Ghanaians but did not find favour for long with Ghana’s rulers in the military government of Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, who saw Fela as a threat. They deported him to Nigeria within a year.
Fela used his art as a platform for resistance. The “independent” Kalakuta Republic and the nightclub in its grounds, the Shrine, became a laboratory for avant-garde protests of all kinds. His work still has a profound influence on African and global music.
The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award makes a fitting start to Black History Month 2026. His classic 1976 album Zombie, recorded with his Afrika ’70 band, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame last year.
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