In February 1978, the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti got married. It was an unconventional ceremony, with 27 brides lined up to wed the groom. Comprising backup singers and dancers in Kuti’s band, they were known as the Queens and, through their energetic choreography and call-and-response singing, helped shape his style and sound. But, according to former Radiolab host and Kuti devotee Jad Abumrad: “In the years since Fela’s death they’ve basically been erased, and they’re not considered part of his legacy.”
The story of the Queens, their musical contribution and often dubious treatment by their husband, makes up one chapter in the epic audio series Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. Three years in the making and hosted by Abumrad, it leaves no stone unturned as it investigates the life, loves, sounds, philosophies and politics of Kuti who, through his music and activism, was a thorn in the side of Nigeria’s authoritarian regime.
Described in a Nigerian newspaper as a “Marxist musical coup-plotter”, he and his music were deemed so dangerous that the compound where he lived — which he declared a sovereign state — was regularly raided. He was arrested more than 100 times. After his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, died as a result of her injuries after she was thrown from a window in her son’s house during a military raid, Kuti took her coffin and put it on the doorstep of a government building. “How did he become that guy?” Abumrad wants to know.
The series comes from Higher Ground, the production company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama, and you can hear the love and money that have been poured into it. Abumrad and Walsh travel to London, Los Angeles and Lagos, where Kuti spent his adult life, in pursuit of interviewees. They include Afrobeat musician and Kuti collaborator Dele Sosimi, who tells a gut-wrenching story of watching his father murdered when he was a boy; Sandra Izsadore, the Black-rights activist whom Kuti met during a tour of California in 1969 and who introduced him to the politics of Malcolm X and Angela Davis; and Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka, who, alongside writer Cheryl Johnson-Odim, recalls a protest in the 1940s led by Kuti’s suffragist mother to end market taxes.
We also hear from producer and synth wizard Brian Eno who, talking about Kuti’s music, reflects on a “field of sound that sits there for a long time and you explore it. You kind of enter it and live in it.” This conversation occurs in the third episode which tells of the Shrine, the club that became the epicentre of Kuti’s creative life, and morphs into a heady sound sequence where echo-laden clips from interviews about Kuti’s 24-hour jam sessions are wound around his 1984 song “Army Arrangement”.
It feels fitting that this series about a musical pioneer should come with such immersive and imaginative sound design. It’s a measure of the rich storytelling, the wonderful music and the wild anecdotes that run through Fear No Man that, even after 12 episodes, I didn’t want it to end.
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