Lifestyle
Buhari vs Fela: How Buhari Administration illegally Jailed Fela in 1984
In September 1984, Nigerian music legend Fela Kuti found himself in a familiar position: under arrest.
Sent to England to study medicine decades before, Kuti had instead invented Afrobeat, an infectious version of James Brown’s funk gone global. Radicalized in the United States by his contact with the Black Panthers, Kuti became more than a pop star, but a political force in Nigeria — a marijuana enthusiast, polygamist and sometime presidential candidate who became “the voice of Nigeria’s have-nots, a cultural rebel,” as AllMusic put it.
“In the last military regime I was the only one to speak out against the government and the army,” he said in 1978. “Anything could happen in Nigeria. If they get to the point that everyone trying to rule the place isn’t making any headway they might drop their guard and ask, ‘Fela, do you want to rule us today?’
”Continually running afoul of his country’s powers-that-be, Kuti was repeatedly detained. In 1977, government forces even raided his compound — which the singer had declared independent of Nigeria — with a 1,000-man force, resulting in the death of his mother. And the singer was on his way to the United States seven years later for a tour when he was arrested for what the Guardian called “sham currency smuggling charges.”
In 1984, Muhammadu Buhari’s government, of which Kuti was a vocal opponent, jailed him on a charge of currency smuggling
When it came to Fela Kuti, democratic principles didn’t seem get in Buhari’s way many years ago. Buhari’s government was behind Kuti’s arrest, and the singer was quickly sentenced to five years amid allegations reported by Amnesty International that witnesses were prevented from testifying on his behalf. There were even reports that the judge who sentenced Kuti later apologized to him.
“He went and declared to Fela that, ‘Man, you were not guilty, I was under pressure, I was instructed to put you behind bars,’ ” Rilwan “Showboy” Fagbemi, Kuti’s former saxophonist, claimed in 2012. “‘And as a judge, if I don’t tell you the truth, I will never forgive myself. I came for your forgiveness, forgive me. You did not commit any offense. You were jailed because I had the order to put you behind bars from above.’”
Buhari’s chief of staff was unmoved. “I hope he will rot in jail,” he said.
But that was not Kuti’s destiny. After Buhari was unseated — by another coup — in 1985, the singer was released. He lived to take musical revenge on Buhari — name-checked in Kuti’s less-than-complimentary song “Beasts of No Nation,” reportedly the first song he wrote after he got out of prison.
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