The Nigerian musician who was Afrobeat's principal architect and turned it into a weapon — fusing Yoruba rhythm, highlife, jazz, and funk into long, hypnotic, brass-driven songs in pidgin English, aimed squarely at the corruption and brutality of Nigeria's military rulers. Beaten, jailed, and burned out of his own commune, he became one of the most important African popular musicians of the twentieth century and a Pan-African icon, while embodying in his own life the contradictions of liberation.
In February 1977, a thousand soldiers surrounded a fenced compound in Lagos that its owner had declared an independent country. They burned it to the ground. They threw an elderly woman from an upper window; her injuries killed her the next year. She was Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, one of Nigeria's pioneering women's-rights campaigners. The compound was the Kalakuta Republic, and the man who had named it and dared the army to come was her son, Fela Kuti, the most popular musician in the country and the loudest enemy its generals had. He had mocked their soldiers in a song called "Zombie," and they had answered with fire. Fela survived, counted his broken bones, and kept singing. The question his life leaves is how one man could be that brave, that gifted, and that wrong about so much at the same time.