FELA

A Nigerian legend is brought to life in a graphic biography.

One of the first things that Fela Kuti—or Fagbamiye and McCreery’s version of him—says in this book is “They didn’t want a motherfucker like me.” The Nigerian musician is referring to his parents, who were perhaps hoping for a “normal” and “meek” child, which they definitely didn’t get. Kuti, the late founder of Afrobeat music, made a career out of being a challenger. As Fagbamiye writes in an introduction, “Fela’s story is your story—just if you were a punk as fuck musician who made over sixty records, had twenty-eight wives, got arrested two hundred times, and started your own country.” The authors begin by examining young Kuti’s life; the son of a suffragist and an activist teacher, he played trumpet in a band in London, then Lagos. In Los Angeles, he met singer and activist Sandra Izsadore, an American singer who introduced him to the Black Power movement. After returning to Nigeria, Kuti established the Kalakuta Republic in a Lagos compound; it was raided by police, and his mother was killed in the process. He would go on to marry 27 of his backup singers and dancers—his “Queens”—in one day. In 1979 he created a political party and tried to run for president of Nigeria. As Fagbamiye and McCreery show, Kuti was a complicated figure: “His ability to envision a better, more just society overlooked women’s oppression, the mere existence of the LGBTQ+ community, and the threat of AIDS in Africa.” The authors’ depiction of the musician’s final years is heartbreaking; the singer and band leader died of complications from AIDS at age 58 in 1997. Fagbamiye and McCreery do a superb job of outlining Kuti’s contradictions, and the book’s text is brought to life with vivid art that makes use of bright color palettes.

An excellent look at a larger-than-life musician whose sounds reverberate to this day.