Fela’s Renegade Children?

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, A New Chapter for African Artefacts?. Buy the issue here.

A recurrent theme in studies that explore the origins of Afrobeats is the tendency to trace the genre’s roots to the music of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Fela, as he was more commonly known, pioneered a unique brand of music in the 1970s that took post-war Nigeria by storm. ‘Afrobeat’, as Fela called it, built on older, established genres like the very popular highlife, Juju, and drew influences from both the local organizations of sounds, as well as African American music. For Fela, Afrobeat (the distinction from its inflected progeny is essential) was unique, politically conscious music that was vibrant in its engagement and critique of postcolonial Nigeria. Afrobeat was the means through which Fela articulated trenchant criticisms of the Nigerian state and called out successive military regimes. He deployed his music as a weapon of social and political resistance.

By contrast, the more contemporary ‘Afrobeats’ is not tied to a single musical avatar. Afrobeats has numerous practitioners and has often been criticized as lacking social and political consciousness. Hence the insistence by gatekeepers of the Fela legacy on making the distinction between the older sound and the newer phenomenon. There are, indeed, significant differences between the two musical forms. Some of which are a product of the different pressures exerted on the artists within the eras in which their genres flourish(ed)—for instance, the internet vis-à-vis social media has played an important role in Afrobeats’ entrance to the global stage, an advantage Afrobeat did not enjoy in its time. Another distinction is that Afrobeats has jettisoned the use of the more traditional instruments that formed the bedrock of Fela’s music, and (perhaps, as a result) lacks the intricate musical and compositional details that went into the earlier sound. There is also the matter of the mixed reaction to the label ‘Afrobeats’ by contemporary artists. Burna Boy, who refers to his music as ‘Afrofusion’, for instance, has asked listeners to look beyond the label ‘Afrobeats’ in their appreciation of African music. In a July 2022 interview with the Million Dollaz Worth of Game hosts, he explained:

Burna Boy’s request for more specificity notwithstanding, his multiple samplings of Fela’s music have connected him solidly to the Afrobeat legacy, and Afrobeats is a useful marker of this connection. The ‘Afrobeats’ tag also proves useful (and convenient) in capturing the zeitgeist of the contemporary music scene in Nigeria, of which Burna Boy is a key figure. Regardless, foot soldiers of Afrobeat are often quick to resist any suggestion of a more than tenuous link between Fela and the mega-stars of Afrobeats today. ‘I call it Nigerian pop,’ Yeni Kuti, Fela’s first daughter, said in 2017. ‘The work that goes into Afrobeat is very different from what goes into hip hop. I love the music but I call it Nigerian Afropop.’