The Man Behind the Music of Fela!

By Kristen A. Lee
October 22, 2009

Loathed and loved, the man in the spotlight of the new Broadway musical Fela! was one of Africa's most influential and revered musicians.

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Who was Fela Anikulapo-Kuti? The late Nigerian musician and subject of the new Broadway musical Fela! had multiple identities over the course of his tumultuous life.

He was a pioneering artist who created Afrobeat, a fusion of African rhythms and American funk. He was a rebel, using his music to rail against corrupt regimes. He was also a hedonist who married 27 women, celebrated the use of marijuana and reveled in his sexually charged live performances.

Tony Award winner Bill T. Jones (Spring Awakening), who directed and choreographed Fela! Off-Broadway and is shepherding the show's Broadway move to the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, first heard Fela's music in the 1970s as a young dancer.

"The music is driving and it's really infectious," Jones says. Over six years of workshops, he and co-writer Jim Lewis developed a concept that imagines Fela telling his life story through songs and monologues during a concert at his nightclub, The Shrine.

Fela was born in 1938 to a Christian minister and a women's rights activist. Educated in England, Fela didn't find his voice until a 1969 trip to the U.S., where he learned about the black power movement, according to a biography by Michael Veal. He returned to Nigeria with a new political purpose, which he channeled into songs that were increasingly critical of his country's leaders.

His lifestyle was just as provocative. Trying to re-create an authentically African life, he lived with his family and followers in a communal compound he declared independent from Nigerian law.

But as his influence grew, so did the risk of retaliation from those he criticized. He was arrested over 200 times and carried scars from beatings during his imprisonments. In the most brutal raid on Fela's compound, his elderly mother was thrown through a window and fatally injured. "It never shut him up," says Rikki Stein, who was his manager and friend.

Fela, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1997, refused to back down in spite of the danger, just as he refused to change his music to suit commercial tastes. "The word compromise didn’t exist in his vocabulary," Stein says.

His life was full of contradictions. A rebel against authoritarian governments, he tolerated little dissent from his own followers. He was devoted to his feminist mother, but lived as a polygamist.

Jones says he did not want to smooth over those inconsistencies. Fela, as portrayed by Sahr Ngaujah, sometimes comes across as "a real son-of-a-bitch," Jones acknowledges.

"I don’t know if he made people necessarily love him, but there was something mesmerizing about him."