YEMI Taylor-Kuti, the widow of the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti and mother of their musician son Femi, has died at home in Lagos after a brief illness, the family said on Sunday. Taylor-Kuti, who married then aspiring jazz musician Fela Ransome-Kuti in London in the 1960s, was the only legal wife of a man who went on to found a new musical style, known as Afrobeat. A musician herself, she tolerated with some grace her husband’s well-known penchant for extra-marital affairs, including his highly-publicised decision to ‘marry’, in a mock traditional ceremony, all 27 female members of his backing band on a single day, as well as his other heirs, produced out of wedlock. Femi, their son and the legal heir to the family fortune, went on, himself, to form a band and now tours Europe and the United States, recently producing a new album. In 2000 he was voted African musician of the year at a ceremony in South Africa. Fela Kuti died of an Aids-related disease in 1997. – AFP
THEY SAID IT
‘But the dogs were looking at him funny.’
– White House representative Ari Fleischer, recounting how President George Gush fainted after choking on a pretzel
“Happily the Danish tradition is that people stay perched on their tree until they fall off, like a bird.”
– Danish Prince Frederik, heir to the throne, remarking on the Danish tradition of lengthy rule
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