Fela Kuti remembered...

Neil Spencer recalls Fela Kuti.

He was meant to be a doctor, an upstanding member of Nigeria's elite like his father, an Anglican pastor who had founded the Nigeria Union of Teachers, and his mother, an aristocrat, nationalist and fiery feminist who had won the Lenin peace prize. His two brothers were already committed to the medical profession to which he was likewise promised. At 20 he would study in England, where his first cousin, Wole Soyinka, was already making waves as a literary lion.

Instead, Fela Ransome-Kuti became infamous, an outlaw musician who declared himself president of his own "Kalakuta Republic", a sprawling compound in the suburbs of Lagos that housed his recording studio and offered sanctuary to the dispossessed. At his club, the Shrine, his band played until dawn while dozens of singers and dancers writhed and glittered amid drifts of igbo smoke. Here, Nigeria's corrupt dictators were denounced and ancient Yoruban deities honoured, all to a relentless backdrop of the "Afrobeat" that Fela had distilled from the musical collision of Africa and black America.

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