Music, because of its power to activate emotional intensities, inscribes experience with greater potency then any other art" (Olaniyan, pg. 5) The life and times of Fela Anikulapo Kuti are adoringly revealed by Tejumola Olaniyan, a professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and editor of the West Africa Review. The juxtaposition of the end of West African colonialism in the 1960's with Fela's revolutionary musical/political explosion onto the scene comprise the essence of the book
Fela Kuti was born on October 15, 1938 in Abeokuta, Nigeria to a middle-class family. His mother, Funmilayo, was Nigeria's foremost feminist activist, and his father was the first president of the Nigerian Union of Teachers. A mischievous child, he frequently found himself in trouble with both family and civic authorities for minor difficulties. Although his parents sent him to London in 1958 to study medicine, music became his "obsessive focus" (Olanyian, pg. 20) and he decided shortly thereafter to study music at the Trinity College of Music. It was in London that Fela was exposed to racism, and the antiestablishment of his youth was nurtured.
The 1960's saw much of West Africa in revolutionary turmoil. More than twenty countries had become independent by the time Fela returned from England in 1963. The heady essence of freedom, however, was very short-lived. Neighboring Ghana's first president and Kuti family friend, Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown by a military coup in February of 1966, and the Nigerian civil war started a year later. The situation in Nigeria was characterized by "tyrannical leadership, political instability, flagrant disregard for the rules, entrenched nepotism, economic malformation, impossible cities, recurrent devastating interethnic wars and anti-state rebellions. And the heart-breaking dispersal of populations." (Cosmopolitan Nativist, 2001)
Seemingly oblivious to the chaos around him, Fela and h...