Fela Kuti’s voice still rings loud and true

Reporting from Lagos, Nigeria —

The white house on Gbemisola Street has a circular grave with a granite pyramid instead of a headstone and no name.

It isn’t needed. Everyone here knows Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Nigeria’s revered protest musician arrested by Nigeria’s military rulers some 200 times for his defiant lyrics, jailed and beaten on countless occasions.

He’s been dead 14 years, but Nigerians still go misty-eyed at Fela’s name. He’s loved not just for his music but because he was one of the few brave enough to attack the country’s loathed military rulers. People see him as a prophet who sacrificed everything to confront corruption and abuse of power.

Young people share a joint near Fela’s grave (appropriate, given his love of the stuff). Inside the bare house, a recording of Fela playing saxophone squawks happily, floating up the yellow stairwell like a ghost.

A glass bookshelf holds dozens of pairs of shoes, their extravagant hues cloaked with a thick gray blanket of dust. A broken-down piano stands silenced, ivories stained, the panels eaten away, as sorry as a dog whose master never came home.

Fela called his house the Kalakuta Republic and declared independence from Nigeria, whose tyrannical and corrupt leaders he abhorred. He electrified the fence to keep the police out. Twenty-seven of Fela’s 28 wives — his backup dancers and lovers — lived here with him, along with many groupies and hangers-on. His first wife, Remi, and her children, Yeni, Femi and Sola, lived elsewhere, though he visited them often.

In 1977 Olusegun Obasanjo the military ruler (later president) sent the army in to break up Kalakuta, beating Fela’s wives and raping some of them with bottles, throwing his 78-year-old mother out the first-floor window and arresting Fela and everybody else on the scene. One dancer, Alake, had her eye put out by a soldier.

Fela’s mother never fully recovered, according to him, and died a year later. A government inquiry blamed unknown soldiers for the violence.

Najite Kuti, 41, wanders into the front gate and banshee-shrieks at the girls chain smoking joints in the front yard. Once a willowy dancer, she’s thick-waisted, her eyes raggedly outlined with kohl, her hair chopped short, wearing fancy pink sandals, crimson floral earrings and a hot pink wrap that keeps coming adrift.

She left her village in the Niger Delta of southern Nigeria at 14 and traveled to Lagos. A friend took her to the Kalakuta commune. Fela gave her pocket money and she stayed, later joining his band, Africa 70, as a dancer and singer.

“He used to help people. Anyone who came to Fela, Fela would do everything for them. What your mother or father could not do for you, Fela would do for you,” she says, a common refrain.

She smiles vaguely, remembering. Fond memories of his generous love. And terrible ones, of the day the army came. “I was the first lady that they attacked. They beat me and made me naked. All the women were beaten and made naked and taken to the army barracks. Sorrow, tears and blood. That’s what it was.”

Fela’s angriest songs — and his most fearless acts of protest — followed the assault. He wrote perhaps his most powerful work, “Sorrow, tears and blood,” about the raid. “Everybody run run run, Everybody scatter scatter, Some people lost some bread, Someone nearly die, Someone just die, Police dey come, army dey come. Confusion everywhere.”

His condemnation of corrupt politicians still strikes a chord in a country that feels betrayed by its leaders in the half century since independence — with half the population still living in poverty despite the billions of dollars flowing in oil revenue.

“Fela, he’s our legend,” said bookseller, Ade Adeyemo, 31, who stocks copies of the musician’s biography.

“To me, Fela is like a prophet. When Fela speaks he’s ready to face it; he’s ready to go to jail for his speech.”

The bookseller uses the present tense, as if Fela is alive. To many followers, his music and his message live on.

Fela continues to inspire

Fela’s story was made into the critically acclaimed musical “Fela!,” which played on Broadway and London’s West End, after New York commodities trader Steve Hendel stumbled on the music online. He thought Fela’s biography made Western protest musicians look tame.

“It just blew my mind. I’d never heard anything so powerful. I became sort of obsessed by it,” Hendel said. “I said to myself, ‘I’m convinced that Fela is the greatest musician in my lifetime and nobody in America knows about him.’”

He approached Rikki Stein, Fela’s longtime manager, with the idea of making a Broadway musical. It was the first interesting idea that Stein had heard in years.

In April, the Broadway show came to the New Afrika Shrine, the club opened by Fela’s children Yeni and Femi — she’s a dancer-choreographer; he followed in his father’s tracks to be a famous saxophonist and musician. It’s named after Fela’s club the Afrika Shrine, closed by the military regime in 1997. The show later played at the Eko Hotel. “Fela!” heads to the Netherlands from Lagos. It is scheduled to play at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles next spring, opening in April.

The new Shrine is a barn of a building under a corrugated iron roof with large, slowly revolving ceiling fans. Daytime, it’s a haven from the chaos of Lagos. People sit reading newspapers and drinking beers; the herbal smell of marijuana smoke hangs in the air.

“For the audience, many of whom are serious Fela aficionados, to see these white boys climbing up onstage, they were like, ‘What is this?’” said Stein, referring to the New York backing musicians in “Fela!” But the skepticism vanished when the music started. “The place went wild. The whole thing was so vital, so strong, so dynamic.”

Days later, Fela’s daughter Yeni Kuti was in the crowd at the Eko as the crowd sang refrains to Fela’s songs and laughed raucously at Sahr Ngaujah’s portrayal of him.

“It’s our own Fela,” said Anote Ajeluorou, arts critic for Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper, singing along, his face shining with excitement. “It was never a question of liking it. You’ve got to love it.”

Making of a musician

Fela’s father was a school headmaster, music teacher and a Protestant clergyman who beat his children for the slightest misdemeanor. His mother was a revolutionary who fought the colonial authorities — and beat her children with equal vehemence.

“My mother wasn’t any better than my father. Ummmmmmmmmmm!!!” Fela says in the authorized biography “Fela: This Bitch of a Life” by Carlos Moore. “She beat the hell outta me, man. My mother was the most wicked mother ever seen in life when it came to beating. Oh-la-la! Every time I would say, ‘This is the end of me.’ Oh, how she would beat me.”

After school he worked in an office for six months, hating it. He went to London to study music and met his first wife, Remi Taylor, returned to Lagos and started a band, Koola Lobitos, discovered grass and developed music with its roots in the traditional African drumbeat, which he called Afrobeat.

With a throbbing drum section and a big brass section, he had some 70 musicians and dancers in his entourage. Some of his songs are 15 to 20 minutes long, but what makes them special — and loved by Nigerians — are his hard-edged, angry lyrics.

In 1969 he traveled to the U.S. and met Sandra Smith of the Black Panthers at an NAACP gig in Los Angeles. They became lovers. She gave him Malcolm X’s biography to read and told him about Black Power.

Back in Lagos, he opened the Shrine nightclub and changed the name of his band to Africa 70. His music got political, and he was harassed constantly by the military regime.

He used to blast his melodic, cheeky sax and urge his audience to dance and sing, joining what he called the “underground spiritual game.” One of his angriest songs, “International Thief Thief,” an attack on Western post-colonial corruption of African leaders, mentioned the military head of state Obasanjo by name.

On Oct. 1, 1979, the last day of rule by Obasanjo, Fela delivered his mother’s coffin to Obasanjo’s residence at Dodan Barracks. He and his wives and members of his family were severely beaten and jailed. His song “Coffin for the Head of State” wailed about the “bad, bad bad things” the government did.

Yeni Kuti, Fela’s oldest daughter, remembers the day before the protest well, because her father told her to get home in time to join the protest.

She thought about it. “I made sure that I was late. By the time I got there, they’d gone. When they got there, [to Obasanjo’s residence] they beat … them. When I went to visit them in jail, I was still thanking my stars that I hadn’t gone.”

The stairs behind the stage at New Afrika Shrine are crowded with photographs of Fela and Femi playing sax. Yeni sits in a back room, her blue high heels kicked off, a blue scarf wrapped around a cloud of thick hair.

Her pride comes from her father. Told by classmates as a child that black skin was inferior, she came home and smeared toothpaste all over her body. “My father sat me down and told me I should be very proud of my skin and my color.”

He wouldn’t tolerate weakness, even in his children. She cried the first time she saw her father in jail. He looked at her, mystified. “Why are you crying?”

It was Yeni who found her father in his room in 1997, close to death. She wept at the sight of him. “He opened his eyes and said, ‘Why are you crying?’ So I wiped my eyes.”

People still love her father, she says, because his songs still ring true. “There’s still a lot of corruption,” says Yeni Kuti. “They’re not answering him yet.”

To Nigerians like the bookseller, Adeyemo, Fela’s music makes them strong.

“When you listen to that music, like ‘Sorrow, tears and blood,’ that music makes you feel that you can fight for yourself, when you are suffering.” He breaks into song, then pauses, thoughtfully, sad that there is no official shrine for Fela from a government still discomforted by his message.

“The man really was a fighter, but he didn’t live to see what he was fighting for. Fela was a great man. And this fight is not based in Nigeria alone. It touches all of Africa.”

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

Dixon was recently on assignment in Nigeria.