LAGOS, Aug 3 (Reuter) - Nigerians on Sunday mourned the death of maverick Afrobeat superstar Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, who helped bring the continent's music to a global audience. ``The music legend of our time, Fela, joins his ancestors,'' said the majority state-owned Sunday Times in heavy black type across the front page. The singer, composer and saxophonist, known to his fans simply as ``Fela,'' died on Saturday after several weeks of illness. He was 58.

A star of the Nigerian and international music scene in the 1970s and 1980s, 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. Newspapers reported scenes of shock and disbelief at ``The Shrine,'' Fela's club in a working class district of Nigeria's humming commercial capital.

In recent weeks Fela had been critically ill with an undisclosed sickness. He initially refused treatment by both Western and traditional Nigerian doctors. Although under pressure from his family Fela was moved into a clinic, it was not made public whether he was accepting medicinal drugs -- against which he had always taken a stand on principle.

For decades Fela got under the skin of the military governments that have dominated Africa's most populous nation. He was detained several times and even imprisoned on a variety of charges. Earlier this year he was held by the drugs 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.

In his final two years Fela made no effort to challenge military strongman General Sani Abacha, even though his brother Beko Ransome-Kuti, a democracy activist, is serving a prison sentence for involvement in an alleged coup plot. Beko Ransome-Kuti, who is kept alone and banned from hearing news from outside his prison cell, had his 57th birthday on Saturday. It was not clear whether he had been informed of his brother's death.

Local newspapers recently reported Fela's death, something which was later said by the same papers to have amused him. They speculated that he had been suffering from AIDS, given a life during which he reputedly slept with hundreds of women, dozens of whom hung around his home until the end.

During his heyday Fela changed part of his family name from Ransome to Anikulapo -- which means ``one who keeps death in his pouch'' in his local Yoruba language. ``After years of raising hell, doing what mere mortals with a healthy respect for death would not dare, death uncorked itself from Fela's pouch and sneaked in on him,'' said the Punch newspaper on Sunday.