Fela Kuti

Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti was born on 15 October 1938 in Abeokuta, in the Yoruba Egba heartland of south-western Nigeria, into one of the country's most remarkable families. His mother was Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the women's-rights leader who organised thousands of market women; his brothers grew up to be doctors and activists. Sent abroad to study, Fela trained in music in London, but it was a 1969 journey to the United States — and his meeting with Black political movements there — that turned his music toward justice.

Back home, he forged a brand-new genre he called Afrobeat: traditional Yoruba rhythms and West African highlife braided together with American jazz and funk, played by a large band — first Africa '70 (with the great drummer Tony Allen), later Egypt '80 — over long, hypnotic, danceable grooves. He sang mostly in Nigerian Pidgin English so that listeners all across Africa, not only the educated few, could understand exactly what he meant.

And what he meant was usually defiance. He made his Lagos home into the Kalakuta Republic, a commune for musicians that he declared independent of military rule, and he played at his own Afrika Shrine. His 1977 album 'Zombie' mocked soldiers who obey orders without thinking — and the army answered with fury. Hard history, told plainly: in February 1977 soldiers raided and burned Kalakuta, and his mother Funmilayo was thrown from a window; she never recovered and died the following year. Fela mourned her, and kept singing.

They called him 'the Black President'. He founded the Movement of the People and even tried to run for president; he was arrested again and again, yet he never stopped. When he died in Lagos in 1997, an enormous crowd filled the streets. Today his children carry his fire: the New Afrika Shrine in Lagos hosts the yearly Felabration festival, and a whole new generation of African pop — now known worldwide — traces its roots back to the beat he invented.