Lagos, 1970

Lagos also is one of the world’s great centers for artistic creativity, most notably in music. This creativity continues despite — or, perhaps because of — the city’s explosive mix of divergent people and wealth. West Africa is a global center for musical achievement. New styles blending Ghanaian rhythms such as osibisaba, with Caribbean calypso, and North American foxtrot coalesced during the 1920s in neighboring Ghana. Known as Afrobeat, the new music travelled along trade and migration routes, accelerating with the arrival of radio airwaves. By the 1960s, the genre’s animating energy found a new home in Nigeria, adding layers of native harmonies and rhythms together with American jazz and rock-and-roll. The spirit of urban Nigeria infused this new Afrobeat. Fela Anikulapo Kuti pioneered this new style. Fela grew up in the household of an Anglican minister and school principal and a feminist activist in the anti-colonial movement. His first cousin Wole Soyinka won a Nobel Prize in literature; his two brothers became medical doctors. Fela set off to London to follow in his brothers’ footsteps before dropping out of medical school to study trumpet at the Trinity College of Music. London at the time was awash with American jazz and the first stirrings of Rock-and-Roll, influences which held great allure. By 1963, he moved his family back to Nigeria, Lagos is unknowable. The largest and wealthiest metropolitan region in Africa, Lagos is home to the continent’s largest port and urban economy. The region grew from around 800,000 residents at the time of independence in 1960 to 16 million at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Capital of Nigeria from independence until 1991 (when political power transferred to Abuja), Lagos has continued to control the country’s commanding heights. As the country’s financial center, Lagos dominates Nigeria’s economy, enriched in part by its stranglehold over export of the country’s largest commodity, oil, which in turn, has spawned unfathomable corruption, crime and violence. Inept democratic governments have often given way to brutal military dictatorships in a cycle of political degeneration. If Tokyo is the most manageable megacity, Lagos could well be the least. Spread out among several islands and extending deep into the mainland, Lagos incorporates skyscrapered international business centers, gold plated residential and commercial districts, together with impoverished slums and self-built migrant settlements devouring a massive landscape extending ever further into a peri-urban hinterland. Every sort of contemporary urban neighborhood can be found within its boundaries.

where he reconstituted his London band Koola Lobitos while training as a radio producer with the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. By 1967 he was travelling to Ghana to explore African sounds, which he combined freely with jazz, funk, salsa, Calypso and traditional Yoruba music.

Fela’s trajectory changed in 1969 when he took his band to the United States at the height of the Black Arts Movement. Living in Los Angeles for ten months, Fela married Black Panther Party partisan Sandra Smith. His views on race, politics and economics radicalized, as became apparent when his renamed band Nigeria ’70 explored new amalgams of popular music. Once back in Nigeria as The Afrika ’70, Fela and his band changed African popular music.

Fella’s musical innovations remained deeply connected to his political radicalization. Music became a means to a larger end, one of reclaiming African roots from post-colonial certainties. He formed the Kalakuta Republic commune, sharing its compound with fellow band members. The republic, named after the British colonial dungeon in India known as the “Black Hole of Calcutta,” declared its independence from Nigeria. On the musical front, he established the Africa Shrine club in the Empire Hotel, which became one of the most legendary clubs on the continent. There, he held sway producing an ever more Africanized sound drawing on traditional West African chants and rhythms as well as American funk and psychedelic rock. The Nigerian Government became increasingly suspicious as his new Afrobeat music gained widespread popularity; and as Fela became more outspoken about corruption and official violence. In 1977, his smash-hit album Zombie popularized music sung in Pidgin English excoriating the abuses of power and dignity by Nigerian governments and bureaucrats. The album set off a firestorm of protest music across Africa.

The Government had enough. One thousand soldiers ferociously attacked the Kalakuta Republic complex, brutalizing Fela and several band members and killing his mother by throwing her out a window. Fela, in turn, became an ever more vociferous critic of General Olusegun Obasanjo’s military rule even, at one point, considering a run for president. Efforts by subsequent governments to silence Fela only enlarged his international notoriety. Named by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience, Fela and his music found ever larger stages for their message. In 1986, he performed with Bono, Carolos Santana and many others in the massive “Amnesty International: A Conspiracy of Hope” concert in the United States.

Fela’s radicalization accompanied an incessant search for deeper African roots. In 1978, he married 28 women from his entourage of dancers, writers, composers and singers as a symbol of African tradition. He began publishing ever more bitter attacks on American and European

hegemony while gathering a growing musical and political following across Africa.

Fela, who died in 1997, reinvigorated Afrobeat as a signature popular music for the continent while turning Lagos into a destination of music pilgrimage. As rooted as Fela became in a continental African culture, his views and music remained embedded in the deeply complex urban realities of Lagos. By the early 2000s, he became the subject of a Broadway play by Bill T. Jones that ran for 15 months before touring internationally. By the 2010s, Fela was increasingly mentioned along with Bob Dylan and Bob Marley as an originator of popular music promoting powerful social and political messages.

Afrobeat continued to develop as dozens of younger musicians emerged in Lagos, Nigeria, and elsewhere in Africa to carry

Kalakuta Queens--A staged play in honor of the Women of the Kalakuta Republic, the home to Fela Kuti. Photo: Ozor Amani. Oct. 2018. Wikimedia Creative Commons. CC license 4.0.

the music forward. The genre evolved as electronic instruments joined with ever more complex African rhythms to produce the signature sound of Lagos. Musicians around the world drew on Afrobeat for inspiration, including jazz players Roy Ayers, Randy Weston and Branford Marsalis as well as rock musicians such as David Byrne, Jay-Z and Sting.

The city has hosted many important trans-African festivals including the famous month-long 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FASYAC77), attended by over 16,000 musicians. This festival in particular proved seminal in the development of African diaspora sound and political activism. Afrobeat, Nigerian and Lagos music spread their influence worldwide; and Lagos lives on as a global hotspot for music.