Nigerian Afrobeat superstar Fela
dies
Maverick artist brought continent’s
music to the world
LAGOS,
Nigeria — Nigeria’s maverick
Afrobeat superstar Fela Anikulapo-Kuti,
who helped bring the continent’s
music to a global audience, died at
58 after weeks of illness, national
television said.
The
television quoted the musician’s
brother, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, a medical
doctor, as saying the artist died
Saturday afternoon.
A
star of the Nigerian and international
music scene in the 1970s and 1980s,
Anikulapo-Kuti, known to fans as “Fela,”
won a reputation for smoking marijuana,
sleeping with large numbers of women
and dressing only in his underpants
“It’s
not true, Fela will live forever,
he can’t die,” said one
of the local toughs, known as area
boys, outside the Reuters office in
the heart of Lagos when told of the
news.
In
recent weeks Fela had been critically
ill with an undisclosed sickness.
He initially refused treatment by
both Western and traditional Nigerian
doctors.
For
decades Fela got under the skin of
the military governments that have
dominated Africa’s most populous
nation and he was detained several
times and even imprisoned on a variety
of charges.
Earlier
this year he was held by the drug
squad, which said it hoped to reform
his character and wean him away from
marijuana, but the narcotics agents
later released him and admitted defeat.
“I
have been smoking for 40 years. It
helps my music. People know I smoke
worldwide. It is not drugs, it is
grass,” Fela said.
Fela
was long a thorn in the side of military
governments in Nigeria, mixing his
music with social criticism and advocacy
of radical pan-Africanist ideas.
His
music reached its peak in the 1970s
when his outspoken social comment
was expressed in songs that preached
human dignity in Africa and abused
soldiers who seized power.
“He
is the first person to make democracy
and human rights serious issues in
Nigeria,” said Nigerian journalist
Dulue Mbachu.
