Music Without Borders: How Fela Kuti Shook the Music World

Nigerian activist and Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti has cultivated a profound global impact on the music industry, inspiring generations of artists through his political Pan-Africanist songs.

Music has the power to transport listeners to cultures and places different from their own. In Music Without Borders, our writers introduce you to international artists, bands, and genres that explore the sounds that bring us together.

Written by C.S. Harper

Photo courtesy of Leni Sinclair

Content Warning: This article contains graphic language on death and violence. 

Fela Kuti led an undeniably fantastical life. Aside from recording a whopping 50 albums, the provocative deviant married 27 women and was arrested over 200 times throughout his career. But beneath his extravagant lifestyle and public antics, he led a movement that quietly changed the music world forever.

Kuti is best known for pioneering Afrobeat, a genre that combines West African music, Caribbean folk, and American jazz, blues, and funk. In the late 1950s, he began his musical journey as a jazz trumpet student in the Trinity College of Music. During his time in London, he started to develop his signature style of jazz, infusing elements of Ghanian highlife into his performances. When he returned to Nigeria in 1963, Kuti continued to explore this genre fusion with his first professional group, The Koola Lobitos. Although highlife was the most popular genre in Nigeria at the time, the band found little success because there was no demand for jazz. In the midst of his creative frustration, Kuti left for Ghana in 1967. There, he discovered Caribbean music, which inspired him to create a new genre he coined “Afrobeat.”  This final version of Kuti’s sound took “jazz, blues, soul, funk, afro latin, highlife and folksong elements and … [grafted] them all into a West African rhythmic template,” according to musicologist Dr. Albert Oikelome.

By blending these genres together, Kuti reclaimed music that was influenced by West African cultures and made it his own. “I found a heavy relationship between [jazz] and my culture. … I used this knowledge to penetrate into the culture of my people,” he explained in a 1989 interview.  Kuti found connections between the music of other cultures by inserting pieces of his own heritage into them. His songs explored diverse sounds,  but they were built on Nigerian music conventions: call and response chants, West African-style guitars and vocal techniques, and rhythm-driven instrumentals. In “Confusion Break Bone,” for instance, guitars and Ghanian Atumpan drums carry the rhythm as Egba chants drive the melody. Not only did Kuti explore West African traditions in his music, but he embraced them in his concerts. He incorporated traditional dances into his performances and sang primarily in Nigerian pidgin and Yoruba.

Although Kuti’s music had reached its final sonic form, it experienced a lyrical metamorphosis after a U.S. tour in 1969. During this time, he met singer and activist Sandra Iszadore, who introduced him to Black Power and encouraged him to embrace the movement’s ideologies in his music. When The Koola Lobitos returned to Nigeria, Kuti rebranded the band as the Afrika ‘70 and shifted the theme of his lyrics from love to politics. By 1971, he had stepped down from his position as trumpeter to focus on composing, writing, and singing for the band.

Over the next three decades of his career, Kuti devoted himself to activism. Soon after the 1969 tour, he built the Kalakuta Republic, a recording studio and commune that he declared independent from Nigeria’s military dictatorships. Under the Nigerian Armed Forces’ rule, the country experienced poverty and starvation, and the government frequently oppressed the Yoruba ethnic group to which Kuti belonged. As a result, he became a staunch proponent of Pan-Africanism, a movement that promotes the political and cultural unification of people of African descent. He focused on unifying his country by exposing the authoritarian government that undermined the people and culture he loved. To accomplish his mission, the Afrika ‘70 took ideas from the Black Power movement and used them to create relevant commentary on Nigeria. The band’s most successful album, Zombie, was a 24-minute satirical attack on the Nigerian military that portrayed soldiers as mindless zombies that were subservient to the dictatorship. By attaching protest themes to an accessible music format for Nigerians, Kuti and the Afrika ‘70 offered a voice to their country’s people.

This music infuriated Nigeria's military regime, and Kuti began to experience altercations with the government. His political outspokenness engendered hostility from officials, who routinely arrested and beat him. During Kuti’s worst episode with the military, authorities raided the Kalakuta Republic, burning down the studio and killing his mother, a women’s rights activist, by throwing her from a window. Despite losing everything he loved, Kuti was never silenced. He continued to make music until his death, expanding his message by addressing racism in other countries, including South Africa during apartheid.

Photo courtesy of ITV/Rex

Kuti was an enigmatic figure whose music showcased his uncompromising love for his Nigerian heritage. Because of his notoriety in the political and musical spheres, he gained the attention of American jazz musician Roy Ayers and Cream drummer Ginger Baker. Live!, a collaboration with the latter, was one of the first Afrobeat records released in North America and one of Kuti’s most influential works. Baker’s work with the Nigerian musician encouraged him to continue exploring African rhythms in his discography, helping foster the popularity boom of world music in the ‘70s. Through collaborations, Kuti introduced his trademark sound to the Western world, inspiring artists elsewhere to experiment with Afrobeat. As a result, he has influenced a variety of artists across decades and genres, from Bilal to Brian Eno, and he has even inspired an eponymous Broadway musical. Most notably, Kuti’s sonic ideas became an integral part of the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, which drew on his distinctive polyrhythms and groovy sound in its production. More recently, Kuti’s music has paved the way for a new wave of UK-based Afrobeat groups who continue to carry his legacy.

Not only has Kuti inspired countless artists through his music, but he has helped cultivate long-lasting political movements in Africa. In 1983, he founded the Movement of the People party, which promoted Pan-Africanism and Nkrumahism, an African socialist school of thought. Although the party disintegrated in 1984 after Kuti was imprisoned for 20 months, his forward-thinking rhetoric has endured in Nigeria, which has since become a democratic republic.

Fela Kuti is an unspoken music legend whose work has radically changed the world. A lifelong rebel, he challenged censorship and played an important role in African sociopolitical movements. In the process, he championed civil rights and established Nigeria as a harbor for musical innovation. Kuti’s songs defied political and cultural boundaries, offering a voice to the Nigerian people and touching the hearts of many listeners worldwide.