Femi Kuti sits in a London hotel room plucking at a bass guitar, contemplating his many problems. “I’m risking my life. The newspapers keep attacking me. They say the club I’ve built is full of armed robbers and that they found dangerous weapons hidden there, so people keep away. I don’t know why they’re doing it. I want positive change in Nigeria, but the more political I get, I’m reminded of the things that used to happen to my father.”
Kuti has been both helped and trapped by his extraordinary family history. He can’t just be considered as a straightforward pop star or musician, though he’s a flamboyant and impressive saxophonist, bandleader and songwriter. He will always be seen as the son and musical heir of Fela Kuti, the most controversial musician that Africa has produced.
Fela has the reputation of an African hero, a wild and dangerous rebel with a penchant for women and drugs in abundance, a musical genius, and (to those politicians, soldiers and businessmen he constantly attacked) an enemy of the state.
The scourge of successive Nigerian military regimes, he was beaten, jailed and harassed by the authorities, but when he died of Aids four years ago there were extraordinary scenes in Lagos as an estimated one million people followed his coffin through the streets.
The memory of that day provides the starting point for the most personal, pained song on Fight to Win, a thoughtful new album that shows Femi continuing to expand his musical range and personal interpretation of his father’s Afro-beat style, while switching away from songs about fun and sex. “There was no room to put love songs on the album, because Nigeria is becoming so corrupt. The problems now are too serious for me to think about love songs.”
Numbers like Traitors of Africa echo Fela’s legacy by attacking the wrongdoings of politicians, and there are warnings on Aids, and bursts of fatherly advice, like Do Your Best, in which Fela’s Afro-beat legacy merges with US rap, courtesy of Mos Def. Then there’s the stand-out track ’97, an eloquent and powerful song of thanks to all those who attended Fela’s funeral, and a tribute to his younger sister Sola, a singer in his band, the Positive Force, who died of cancer that year.
Life has never been easy for Femi, and it hasn’t become any easier since his father’s death. Nigeria may have returned to civilian rule, but Femi sees no improvement. “There’s still corruption and the currency is even weaker than it was before. It’s sad that such a great country is ending up the way it is. If there is another war in Nigeria there will be chaos.”
In the past, Femi and his band toured right across Nigeria, but all that has changed with the increase in tribal tensions and the advent of Islamic fundamentalism in the north. “I stopped going to Kano when I heard they had imposed Sharia law. My band couldn’t play there now because of my dancers. They do sexy dancing and women there are supposed to be covered. They would beat them, stone them to death.”
He also refuses to perform in the capital, Abuja, and was horrified to receive an invitation to go there to play for President Obasanjo’s wife.
Nigeria’s civilian president is regarded as something of a demon in the Kuti household. Obasanjo led the military government back in 1977, at a time when Fela had declared the area around the club and compound where he lived to be an “independent state”, the Kalakuta (“Rascal”) Republic, after embarrassing Obasanjo by refusing to take part in a grand pan-African cultural festival in Lagos. There was a military attack on Kalakuta in which Fela’s mother was thrown from a window. She later died from her injuries, and Fela himself was wounded, taken to hospital, then jailed. Young Femi, who was at school, witnessed the aftermath. And there is no way he could play for the Obasanjo family today. “My father would turn in his grave. Bad luck would follow me all my life”.
Femi stays in Lagos, dividing his time between his modest home and the Shrine, the latest incarnation of his father’s much-raided all-night music venue. He’s clearly upset at the press stories about the club and reports that he has become a gang leader or gone mad. He sees them all as part of a campaign to vilify his father’s memory.
Earlier this year the situation became so bad that Femi considered leaving Nigeria and perhaps moving back to his birthplace, England. “It would help my career and I’d be at peace. But then my mother asked me: ‘Don’t you believe in all the things you’ve been saying in songs like Black Man Know Yourself?‘ I said I was no coward and I’m not moving out. I’ve got a fan base in Lagos and it would be wrong to be selfish and just think of my career, especially when people hope I’ll be part of a change. I won’t be forced to run away. My father weathered it and if I’m arrested or beaten I won’t just take it sitting down like he did.”
Fela married his first wife, Femi’s mother Remi, in London in 1961, but neither she nor her son had an easy time living with a womanising rebel.
Femi remembers seeing little of his father during his “difficult” childhood. “He was never in town.” His mother “tried her best to adapt, but she moved out many times. She truly loved him and I can understand her.”
It was only as a teenager that Femi began to question his father’s lifestyle and his choice of associates. “I understood the gravity of what was going on but I couldn’t understand why he was taking such a bunch of idiots around with him. They were there for his fame, or his money, or they were secretly members of the SSS (Nigerian Intelligence, the state security service). Nobody really loved him. Everybody took advantage of him. Yet his ideas were brilliant.”
One of the things that particularly angered Femi was when his father married the 27 female singers and dancers in his band in one day in 1978 — eight years later he divorced them all.
Through their music, Fela and his son were reconciled for a time. Femi joined the massed ranks of Fela’s band, playing at the Shrine and touring across the world, though, unlike his father, he had no formal musical training. He proved such a success that in 1984 at the age of 21 he found himself leading his father’s band at the Hollywood Bowl, while his dad was in jail once again — this time on a trumped-up currency charge that saw him declared a “political prisoner” by Amnesty International.
After his father was released, Femi quit, declaring that he had been underpaid for his efforts and that he wanted to explore his own form of Afro-beat.
Father and son didn’t speak for almost five years until one emotional night at the Shrine when they were reunited, both personally and musically, “though a lot of those around him didn’t want us to be friends.”
Femi is now nearly 40 with a colourful and painful history behind him and apparently reconciled to the fact that he will never fully escape the shadow of a father whose legend just keeps growing. However, he wants to expand his own Afro-beat beyond the fusions with rap and soul. “Maybe I’ll be working with some great jazz musicians next. I just love music and I go crazy if I go for more than two months without touring.”
Femi Kuti’s Fight to Win is available on Wrasse Records