AL JAZEERA
Last Wednesday, Nigerian rapper CDQ pranced onto the stage at a Lagos bar as hundreds of people threw their hands in the air and sang as he performed risqué lines from his discography.
As the people swayed to the loud music, vendors wandered through the crowd hawking snacks and alcohol. Outside the venue, even more food vendors were selling as frustrated drivers honked loudly to passersby, bumping shoulders as they snaked in and out of the concert.
It was the third day of Felabration, a weeklong music festival held from October 9 – 15 in honour of Fela Kuti, the pioneer of Afrobeat, a horn-driven genre influenced by jazz and highlife sounds. The concerts, usually free and televised from the New Afrika Shrine in Lagos, feature a mix of recognisable and upcoming artists from Nigeria and across the world.
Since its first edition in 1998, thousands of fans have thronged the venue yearly to partake in the festivities. This year, Sade White, a fashion entrepreneur in her late forties, was among them, dressed in a yellow shirt with Kuti’s face emblazoned on the front.
The concert she says, is not only a celebration of the artist’s legacy but a cause to reflect on the condition of everyday people, for whom he sang in his lifetime. “Fela’s music still resonates with us even today because a lot of the issues he sang about then are still relevant today,” she said.
Until his death in August 1997, Kuti criticised successive military governments for corruption, human rights abuses and bad leadership.
Most of the regimes brutalised or jailed him and his relatives; he racked up more than 200 arrests even as his mother – popular educator and suffragist Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti – died after complications resulting from being thrown down from the second floor of a building by soldiers.
Even power has barely changed hands from yesterday’s men: two of the five leaders Nigeria has had in that period – Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari – were characters Kuti heavily criticised…
