The World-Shifting Grooves of Fela Kuti

The rest of Fela’s story is largely a cat-and-mouse game, and then an outright battle, between art and the state, Fela and the authorities. One of the series’ great challenges is to keep listeners following a dense, twisty narrative—and, early on, to convince us that we should. The show is “presented” by Audible and the Obamas’ company Higher Ground, and the first episode has a familiar whiff of narrative anxiety. (Last year, “The Wonder of Stevie,” co-produced by Higher Ground, worked hard to convince us of Stevie Wonder’s already obvious greatness.) “Fela” opens with a suite of big-name pro-Fela testimonials, by people including Brian Eno, Flea, Questlove, Jay-Z, David Byrne, Ayo Edebiri, and Paul McCartney, who describes weeping at a Fela concert in Lagos in 1973. Barack Obama, who sounded overjoyed on “The Wonder of Stevie,” shows up dutifully, in top-button-unbuttoned, man-of-the-people mode. “Music like Fela’s is able to not just get folks movin’, get them on their feet, but it also makes them feel alive,” he says, accurately. “Our very best art and our very best music stirs the soul.”

Abumrad follows these testimonials with a “prologue”: a story from the seventies, in which we meet Fela, an international star, through the eyes of a Nigerian high-school student. The prologue is a bit of a risk—we don’t really know what’s going on yet—but a worthy one. The student, Dele Sosimi, is now sixty-two. During the volatile era after Nigeria’s independence, his father, a bank auditor about to reveal evidence of embezzling, was murdered, with a pickaxe, by men who stormed the family’s house in the middle of the night. Dele, twelve, found him in the hallway, in blood-soaked pajamas. “He was completely fucked up,” Dele says, choking up. Through a school friend, Dele later met Fela, who vowed to seek financial help for Dele’s family. “My life just changed,” Dele says. By seventeen, he’d joined Fela’s band; he eventually became an Afrobeat icon in his own right. The interview is in London, before one of his concerts.

The prologue also gives Abumrad the opportunity to plant a central theme about Fela’s art: his ability to conjure a transporting sonic space. Abumrad’s beloved sound manipulations often employ echoing or parallel bits of tape, and both he and Fela are unafraid to delve into the phantasmagorical. There were nights, Abumrad says, when the band would play a song that would go on for more than an hour, or when “Dele would settle into one riff that he would just have to keep playing,” repeatedly, exactly the same way. (One jam reportedly stretched to twenty-four hours.) Did the repetition make Dele nuts? “No way,” Dele says. Abumrad describes Dele’s process:

He would feel his body calm. His breath would slow down. He would slide his attention into his own lungs and then pretend he was pushing against the walls of his lungs, pushing them out. And then he would slow his heart rate, until his heart matched the kick. And after about twenty minutes of that, he would then drift back to the surface.

Fela, Abumrad says, gave Dele the opportunity to move beyond the suffering of his youth—“to step out of that cage and be free, at least for as long as he was playing that riff.” This is the same process that united Fela’s audience. “Imagine a million Deles having more or less the same experience,” Abumrad goes on. “Like atoms, one tiny explosion bumps into the next, into the next, into the next, until you have a cascade of energy, that creates something much bigger.” Later episodes delve into how Fela’s specific musical techniques—ostinatos looping around and around, often for fifteen minutes—induce in listeners a kind of flow state, priming them for the lyrics, when they eventually appear. “Your neurons are rewired,” Abumrad says. “You are open. And it is at this very moment that Fela begins to sing.”

What Fela sang was something that people needed to hear. Between 1973 and 1979, Fela released a “fire hose” of new music—more than two dozen albums, followed by many more. His lyrics, and his behavior, mocked the authorities (as in “Expensive Shit” and “Authority Stealing”) and said the unsayable (as in “Shuffering and Shmiling,” about the ways in which religion could encourage people to accept injustice, instead of fighting back). The public reacted with glee, relief, a feeling of liberation. Nigeria was ruled by a violent military dictatorship, with soldiers in the streets and public executions on the beach. In Lagos, Fela declared his club, the Shrine, and his domestic compound and recording studio, the Kalakuta Republic, to be a sovereign nation, independent from Nigeria. That nation had its own atmosphere and rules. Fela worked and lived with a formidable group of dancers and singers known as the Queens (in a 1978 “stunt,” he married twenty-seven of them at once); at the Shrine, they were theatrically costumed and visually astounding. Marijuana was highly illegal in Nigeria—half a joint would put you in prison—but go into the Shrine “and it’s just this alternate universe,” Lisa Lindsay, a professor who specializes in the history of West Africa, says. “People dancing and people stoned out of their minds. And it was such a contrast to how scared people were outside.”

The other side of this freedom was the reaction of the state. Fela was arrested, Abumrad says, a hundred times. There were constant cycles of provocation and retribution: Fela would react to injustice by singing about it; the authorities would harass him and his people; he’d sing about that. In 1976, Fela released a Molotov cocktail of a song, “Zombie,” that mocks soldiers as unthinking automatons. In the show’s ninth episode, which takes place the following year, everything comes to a head. Soldiers descend on the Kalakuta Republic, and Fela, ever defiant, takes to a balcony and plays “Zombie” on his saxophone. It’s an astounding image, followed by scenes of unimaginable horror—Fela’s elderly mother thrown out a window, Queens raped, Fela brutalized, the compound burned down—recalled by people who survived it. After the raid, the state reclaimed Fela’s land and shut down the Shrine—but he came back yet again. “Them kill my mama,” we hear him sing, choked with emotion, on “Unknown Soldier.” He kept resisting for another twenty years, until his death, from complications of AIDS, in 1997.

Music feels like it can change the world, Abumrad demonstrates throughout. Sometimes it actually can: Fela’s mother’s singing protesters, in 1947, helped topple a local tyrant. But more often it can work in humbler ways—to inspire, console, give us courage. In later episodes, we hear about young Nigerian activists inspired by Fela’s music; then we hear about a 2020 youth-led protest in Lagos that resulted in a massacre. Cycles and repetition, in music and in history, can be numbing, healing, or both. In the final episode, during a visit to Lagos, Abumrad is struck by the ongoing presence of “all the things that Fela had been railing about—poverty, lack of infrastructure, state neglect,” and also by the playfulness and humor of the locals, including Fela’s relatives. Struggle and joy, Abumrad says, are “coexisting and then repeating endlessly, over and over and over, like the cycles of the music.” Our choice, he concludes, is simple: “Which part of the groove are you going to move to?” ♦