By Norm Dixon
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, one of Africa's most popular, courageous and politically outspoken musicians, has finally been silenced, much to the relief of Nigeria's corrupt political and military elite.
Despite having suffered decades of persecution and several bouts of imprisonment from successive Nigerian regimes, Fela's death on August 2 was not at the hands of the brutal Abacha dictatorship, but from heart failure linked to AIDS.
Fela was a persistent critic of police brutality, militarism, corruption and the servility of Nigeria's rulers to the west and big business. Fela's political views, his enormous popularity among Nigeria's poor and youth and his unconventional lifestyle made him a target for persecution from Nigeria's rulers.
He was born in 1938 in the village of Abeokuta in the Yoruba region of south-west Nigeria. His father was headmaster of the local grammar school and his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, a feminist and radical nationalist. She led demonstrations through Abeokuta's streets against British rule in the 1940s and was Nigeria's first woman MP. It was through her that the young Fela met the revolutionary Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah in 1957.
In 1958, his parents sent Fela to London to study medicine. As soon as he arrived, he instead enrolled at the Trinity College of Music.
Fela came face to face with racism. Attempting to rent a room, he was confronted with signs saying "No coloureds, No dogs". Upset by these experiences and inspired by the growing anti-colonial movements in Africa, Fela paid less attention to his studies of European classical music than to playing African-influenced music in the Koola Lobitos, a popular jazz and highlife band.
Returning to Nigeria in 1962, Fela championed African culture and traditions over the western influences that were swamping the local music scene. By 1968, his music had evolved into what he dubbed "Afrobeat".
Afrobeat incorporated elements of west African highlife, supercharged James Brown-style funk, jazz and traditional Yoruba rhythms with intensely political lyrics delivered by call-and-response vocals.
A visit to the US in 1969 further developed his radicalism and encouraged his already militant African cultural nationalism. He was introduced to the ideas of the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Stokeley Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, and to the revolutionary music of the Last Poets.
Fela returned to Nigeria in 1971 and renamed his band Afrika 70. He opened the Shrine Club in Lagos and immediately scored a big local hit with "Jeun Ko'ku" ("Eat and Die"). By 1972, Fela was a star in Nigeria and throughout west Africa.
His decision to sing in west Africa's English-based lingua franca made his political songs even more dangerous in the eyes of the elite. In Nigeria there are hundreds of languages, but by singing in "broken" English he could be understood by all Nigerians and in all west African nations that had formerly been British colonies.
Beginning in 1971 with Why Black Men Dey Suffer, Fela released a steady stream of albums that addressed the concerns of the poor and exploited, and furiously condemned Africa's ruling classes and their armies and police.
Fela became a folk hero in the urban shanty towns, amongst the poor, the youth and the politicised. He was also soon in trouble with the government.
The harassment began with drug raids on his club and home, searching for the traditional Nigerian herbal intoxicant, igbo. Despite several detentions, the authorities could never gain a conviction. Fela delighted in detailing these failures and the ineptitude and brutality of the police in songs on subsequent albums.
In 1977, 1000 armed soldiers descended on Kalakuta, the commune where Fela and his band lived in the slums of Lagos. They surrounded the building, smashed their way in and set upon those inside.
Residents were stripped, beaten and tortured. Fela was beaten senseless, sustaining a fractured skull and broken bones. His mother, then 82, was flung from a second floor window and died soon after. The troops then set fire to the building and refused to allow fire fighters to put it out.
In 1984, Fela was jailed on trumped-up currency charges and spent 18 months in some of Nigeria's worst prisons. He was adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience.
Repression only increased Fela's political musical output. In 1978 he released Coffin for Head of State, which blamed the president for his mother's death.
Through the 1980s, albums like International Thief Thief (which criticised the US telecommunications company ITT), Vagabonds in Power and Authority Stealing (both attacking government corruption and the abuse of human rights), Zombie (dealing with soldiers who follow the orders of tyrants), and Beasts of No Nation (which slams apartheid and singles out Thatcher and Reagan for their collaboration with it) maintained his and his band's alignment with the poor and dispossessed.
Fela faced the gallows in 1993 when he was falsely charged with the murder of a man who died at his club (Fela was not even at the club at the time). The charges were later dismissed.
In March 1996, Fela's house was attacked by gunmen. Beko Ransome-Kuti, one of Fela's brothers, was jailed for 15 years in 1996, on trumped-up charges of involvement in a coup attempt. In April, Fela and 100 others were arrested for possession of marijuana after the drug squad raided his club.
Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, former deputy director general of the World Health Organisation, said on August 3 that Fela's death highlighted the Nigerian government's failure to address the country's AIDS crisis. He said AIDS cases at Lagos University Hospital had risen from less than 10 a year to more than 300 since 1992.