Do we like Fela Kuti?
Our score: 3 out of 10. Real courage against a dictatorship and a huge musical legacy, set against his own recorded words demeaning women and dismissing safe sex.
Fela grew up in an activist family. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, organised market women into a protest movement against colonial-backed taxation, and Fela was there as a kid. He went on to father Afrobeat and used it as a weapon against Nigeria's military rulers, drawing a huge youth following.
The 1976 song “Zombie” got the regime's attention. In 1977 soldiers raided his Kalakuta compound and burned it, and his mother was thrown from a second-floor window; she died a year later. In 1984 he was arrested, charged with trying to illegally export foreign currency and sentenced to five years. Amnesty International argued he was unfairly convicted, and he was released unconditionally in April 1986.
Now the harm check, and it's ugly. In Carlos Moore's biography he is quoted as saying “Equality between male and female? No! Never! Impossible!” Elsewhere he is quoted saying “Woman got no other role than making the man happy,” and he blamed homosexuality on things like age-of-consent laws. His own family has since said he was not perfect.
The public health side is worse. A Village Voice investigation reported that Fela dismissed condoms as unnatural and as a white plot to cut the Black birthrate, and said African herbs could cure nearly anything. His brother, a former health minister, said Fela believed “all doctors were fabricating AIDS, including myself.” The report says that denial lingered among fans and young men after his death.
On women, the picture is tangled. He married 27 of his backing singers and dancers in one day in 1978, which the reporting describes as part publicity stunt and part way to keep the band together. The women interviewed by Jad Abumrad insist they joined by choice, and Abumrad calls Fela “an abuser at times, but also a liberator in a weird way.” In the biography, nearly all his wives reportedly admitted he had slapped them.
The good stuff is real and it cost him. He was jailed, beaten and raided for taking on generals, at a time when speaking up could get you killed. He used a platform that millions listened to for people with no power, and that is the case for loving the music.