On 18 February 1977, about a thousand Nigerian soldiers broke into Fela Kuti’s compound in Lagos and burned it to the ground.
The compound was the Kalakuta Republic, the house, studio and commune Fela had declared independent of the Nigerian state. The soldiers beat and assaulted residents, beat and arrested Fela, and threw his 77-year-old mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, from a first-floor window. His master tapes, instruments and the building itself went up in flames.
Why the army came
Fela had spent years attacking Nigeria’s military government in song. The album that brought matters to a head was Zombie, released in 1976, which mocked soldiers as mindless followers who march, stop and kill on command. It was a hit across Nigeria, and people began to shout “zombie” at soldiers in the street.
The raid came during FESTAC ’77, the huge festival of Black and African culture Nigeria was hosting in Lagos. Fela had refused to take part and had denounced it. The government was showing its best face to the world while its soldiers were burning down the home of the country’s most famous musician.
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti
Fela’s mother was a figure of history in her own right. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti led the Abeokuta Women’s Union in protests against unfair taxation in the 1940s, campaigned for women’s votes, and was one of the best-known Nigerian activists of her generation. She never fully recovered from her injuries in the raid, and she died on 13 April 1978.
“Unknown soldiers”
The government set up an inquiry. Its conclusion became infamous: the attack had been carried out by “unknown soldiers”. No individual was held responsible, and the family’s lawsuit came to nothing.
Fela turned the phrase into a weapon. He released “Unknown Soldier” in 1979, a long, furious account of the raid. After his mother’s death, he and his followers carried a coffin to Dodan Barracks, then the seat of the military government in Lagos, to deliver it to the head of state, Olusegun Obasanjo. The episode became the song “Coffin for Head of State”, released in 1981, in which Fela names the men he held responsible.
What it changed
The raid did not silence Fela. It made him harder. He married 27 women in a single ceremony in 1978, formed a political party, the Movement of the People, and tried to run for president. He was jailed again in 1984 on currency charges that Amnesty International considered politically motivated.
Kalakuta itself was never rebuilt as it was. Fela later lived at another house on Gbemisola Street in Ikeja, which is now the Kalakuta Museum, where visitors can see his rooms, his clothes and his instruments.
The music that came out of it
Listeners who come to Fela through his upbeat hits often find his post-1977 records hard going: long, slow-building tracks full of anger and specific accusation. They are the sound of a man whose home had been burned and whose mother had been killed, singing about the people he blamed by name.
Obasanjo returned to power as an elected president in 1999, two years after Fela’s death. “Coffin for Head of State” was still being played in Lagos when he took office.
