”“Culture is not entertainment, but power.
ByProf. MarkAnthony Nze
Investigative Journalist | Public Intellectual | Global Governance Analyst | Health & Social Care Expert | International Business/Immigration Law Professional
Prologue: The Man Who Refused Silence
There are artists, and then there are architects of history. Fela Aníkúlápó Kútì belongs to the latter order, those rare visionaries who transform music into movement, rhythm into resistance, sound into sovereignty. To speak of Fela is to speak not of entertainment but of insurgency. His art was never an accessory to power; it was its most persistent adversary.
Born in colonial Nigeria, raised in the turbulence of independence, and forged in the crucible of exile and return, Fela carried within him the contradictions of the African twentieth century. He was at once musician and philosopher, hedonist and ascetic, prophet and provocateur. To some, he was dangerous. To others, divine. But to all who heard him, he was unforgettable.
Afrobeat—his invention, his gospel, his weapon—was more than a genre. It was an operating system for resistance. Built on polyrhythmic grooves, horn blasts, and pidgin invectives, it dismantled the machinery of authoritarianism and mocked the hypocrisies of global imperial power. Every note was a charge sheet, every performance a tribunal, every album a manifesto. Where politicians issued decrees, Fela issued basslines. Where soldiers patrolled streets, his rhythms patrolled memory.
But Fela was not content with music alone. He built a republic, declared independence from a corrupt state, and transformed a nightclub into a parliament of the people. He suffered raids, arrests, imprisonment, and exile, yet refused to be broken. Each assault deepened his defiance. Each scar was another verse. Each silence imposed upon him became another song waiting to be born.
This series, Fela Lives: Afrobeat as Global Political Power, does not approach him as myth or relic. It approaches him as blueprint. For Fela is not finished. His rhythms echo in London jazz clubs and São Paulo favelas, in protest squares from Lagos to Minneapolis, in academic conferences and dance floors alike. His voice is still weaponized against tyranny, still instructing new generations that art must risk everything or risk irrelevance.
Fela lives because he remains necessary. He lives because every age of injustice needs its soundtrack. He lives because Afrobeat is not nostalgia, but a pulse that continues to summon courage where fear thrives. To study Fela is not to look back, but to look forward—toward the futures he insisted were possible.
