Seun Kuti: Carrying the Fela Kuti Afrobeat torch

Two hours later, I sit with him inside the Kalakuta Museum, Fela Kuti’s former home, situated in the heart of the ever-busy Allen Avenue in Lagos. The building houses Fela’s personal belongings and artefacts.

Giant footsteps

I ask Seun what inspires his lyrics. Those lyrics.

“My songs are mostly inspired by my spiritual connection to my environment, and also by my political awareness. Those are the two main sources for the things I write,” he says.

He quickly adds that Giant of Africa is one of the two songs on the album written by his former trumpeter, Muyiwa Kunnuji.

With four studio albums under his belt, Seun has continued to fly the Afrobeat flag around the world; a fifth album is already within view. He refuses to disclose the album title but attributes the long gap between the fourth and fifth to Covid-19.

“I generally release an album every three years, on average. But since 2018, I have not been able to release my project because the pandemic stalled my process. But we have finished recording now and I’m mixing the new record.”

Fela’s big shadow

Born Oluseun Anikulapo Kuti, the youngest son of Nigeria’s afrobeat legend, Seun has left no one in doubt about his intention to follow Fela’s footsteps, no matter how outsized they may be.

After Fela’s eldest son, Femi, left home to assemble his music group, Seun inherited their father’s Egypt 80 band. Although only 14 at the time of Fela’s death, he had been performing with the band since he was eight.

On the day of our interview, I arrived at the fabled three-storey building where Fela lived and was just in time to see Egypt 80 rehearse. They practise every Wednesday and Friday inside a building beside the museum.

Fela’s influence looms large. Paintings of him and his children are displayed on the walls of the museum’s building. Inside the adjoining structure that serves as a rehearsal venue, photos of Seun and his family adorn the walls.

Two giant generators hum inside the compound.

Seun had not arrived yet. Adedimeji ‘Showboy’ Fagbemi was holding court while the band played Colo Mentality from Fela’s 1977 album, Sorrow Tears and Blood.

Standing in the middle of the room and clutching a sachet of dry gin in his left hand, Showboy conducted the band like an orchestra. There are 17 of them – 14 men and three women.

One, two, go!

Once Fela’s lead baritone soloist but now wizened by age, Showboy has made room for a younger saxophonist and remains an integral part of the group. Four members of Fela’s original Egypt 80 band perform with Seun.

I ask Seun how he feels about working with the older members of his band.

“I’ve known them all my life,” Seun says. “Working is working, we’re musicians, there is no way working with them is or isn’t. The only thing that is different is that they are people that I grew up with,” he says.

“We have a great professional relationship. But time is the great enemy in things like this. As time goes on, new musicians will come and fill those spaces that are left behind,” Seun adds.

“But the thing is, we can pass on the knowledge from these original players to the new people who will become the new masters and the new originals who will pass it on to the next. That is what dynasty and legacy are all about. It is the Egypt 80 band, at least for now.”

Talking about the Fela dynasty, he admits that Femi and Made (Femi’s son) have kept his father’s legacy going.

I ask him if there are other younger members of the family being groomed to carry the torch.

“I think the torch is already passed. My nephew [Made] is 20 years younger than me!”

Technobeats

At 41, Seun straddles two important generations of the music world: one with technology, and one without. He agrees that there have been a lot of changes over the years.

“[In] my dad’s time, music was something that was directly tied to a person’s ability to really be a musician,” he says.

“These days, because of technology, fans are becoming musicians. That kind of removes the magic of music. That’s the difference today, the magic of music is lost. Thanks to technology, anyone can be a musician.”

He is not wrong. The advent of technology means it is no longer necessary for a musician to learn to play a musical instrument.

But can someone who can’t play a musical instrument be called a musician? Veteran Nigerian musician, Victor Uwaifo, fuelled this debate in 2019 when he said “good and real musicians” must be able to play at least three musical instruments to be classified as musicians.

While he was alive, Fela coordinated his band in a Jack-of-all-trades manner, grabbing a saxophone here, and tapping a keyboard there, leading to the belief that he could play nearly all the musical instruments.

“People say that all the time. My dad could play the trumpet, piano and the saxophone. But people say Fela can play anything,” Seun says.

“I play the piano and the saxophone. I could play more but I’m lazy. As a composer, you need to have an idea of all the instruments. So you could say that I play the guitar, the bass and the trumpet. If you’re going to write music on those instruments you should be able to understand their range, what the bassist or guitarist can and cannot do on that instrument.”

Police story

Like his father, there has been no love lost between Seun and authorities; whether it is the grim-faced, gun-toting military dictators of his father’s era or the sly-tongued, agbada-wearing democrats of the present.

In May 2023, a video of Seun assaulting a policeman went viral on Nigeria’s social media. The afrobeat star accused the officer of trying to kill him and his family.

The biggest group of kidnappers in Nigeria are the Nigerian police

A few days later, he turned himself in after the head of Nigeria’s police ordered his arrest. The police detained him for one week before arraigning him before a magistrate court on a charge of assault of a police officer. He pleaded not guilty.

He is out on bail and the case was adjourned till 14 February.

Seun jokes that the Valentine’s Day court hearing is an indication of “a love affair” with the police. He takes a more serious demeanour: “After that [incident], I said to myself I will never – unless I’ve done something wrong – follow police anywhere again. We’ll die in that place.”

In an Instagram post on X (formerly Twitter) on 25 January, Seun touched on a variety of topics, the most controversial being his claim that “the biggest group of kidnappers in Nigeria are the Nigerian police”.

I asked him whether he knew his comment was trending on Nigeria X.

“Funny enough, I’ve never been on Twitter,” he says, laughing. “I have somebody that handles my Twitter. If I was the person handling my Twitter, what else would I be doing with my time? I will not be doing anything else.”

But he says he is briefed, every day, about the goings-on in cyberspace.

Nigeria to the world

Nigerian music continues to garner accolades globally. Whether it is eight Nigerian artists making it into the 2024 Grammy nominations list, or Rema’s Spotify surpassing the one billion-stream mark.

Seun is not a fan of music streaming. He says he didn’t have a Spotify account until last year but has averaged 400,000 monthly listeners ever since.

I ask him if he’s surprised he has more Spotify listeners than the Nigerian legend, 2baba, who has 319,000.

“I don’t want to judge our music or what we are doing in Africa by streams and numbers on these platforms,” he says. “What we as Africans need to concentrate on, is developing our musical industry. Move away from this music business thing and actually make an industry where we own our streaming platforms that are globally recognised.”

He says that the world should stop judging artists by their streaming numbers.

“We must understand that what drives the world’s interest on all these platforms is highly anti-African. Talib Kweli said it best when he said ‘the algorithm is racist’. That’s a fact.”

Seun has strong opinions about neo-colonialism and pan-Africanism. In his song Rise, he challenges multinationals like Haliburton and Monsanto who “use their food to make Africans hungry”.

In a world where big companies and brands control the lives of musicians, it has become increasingly difficult for artists to be their true selves or speak out against injustice.

“Music is so cheap today, it costs less than 10 cents or one dollar to listen to a song. They have to stream your songs one million times to pay you less than a thousand dollars,” Seun says.

“So that has put the musicians in control of the corporations and brands. Because once you have lost value in the music, many musicians have to sell their image to brands to partner with these corporations because now that is where the money comes from,” he adds.

“Musicians or artists who are supposed to paint a true picture of the world have become journalists,  spreading the narratives of the owners of their brands.”

Activist voice

Seun Kuti was born into music. And activism. He has carried both roles in his stride. He was an active participant in two of the biggest mass unrests in Nigeria in recent times – the 2012 #OccupyNigeria and the 2020 #EndSARS protests. The former was against the removal of the petrol subsidy and the latter against police brutality.

In revolutionary political work, there are no regrets, just experiences

Nigerians are facing untold hardship; the government removed petrol subsidies last year and inflation accelerated to its highest in more than two decades. Amid the suffering, the labour unions and civil society, which championed earlier protests against harsh government policies, remained silent.

Seun describes the mass movements as “one of the great errors of the working class” – allowing themselves to be used as negotiation tools by a disgruntled political elite.

“I think before people have a mass protest or movement, they must create a political platform that can take advantage, tap the energy for their benefit. And stop mobilising for the rich to come and usurp the energies for themselves.”

I ask him whether he regrets his participation in #OccupyNigeria with the benefit of hindsight.

“Not at all,” he says. “The experience that one gains from those mass mobilisations and political actions is also to study what happens in the background of such movements. In revolutionary political work, there are no regrets, just experiences.”