FELA ANIKULAPO KUTI (ABAMI EDA)

"The secret of life is to have no fear"

Some weeks back, i wrote an article about how our political and socio-democratic system is failing us (Coward System) and how its affecting the forseeable rise of youth's development (The Future Of Our Tomorrow). A lot of times this happens as a result of we youth setteling for less than we deserve, in actual sense behaving like cowards, who only goes active and rampant on social medias but lack the balls when push comes to shove. Today, i am going to celebrate one of the few people who actually stood for what is right and human justice till their last breath, Olufela Anikulapo Oluwasegun Ransome-Kuti.


 BIOGRAPHY
Born on 15 October 1938 in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria into the family of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, who was a feminist activist in the anti-colonial movement and Reverend Israel Oludotun
Ransome-Kuti, an Anglican minister and school principal, he was the first president of the Nigeria Union of Teachers.
His brothers, Beko Ransome-Kuti and Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, both medical doctors, are well known in Nigeria. Fela is a first cousin to the Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Fela and family

EDUCATION 
He attended Abeokuta Grammar School and Later he was sent to London in 1958 to study medicine but decided to study music instead at the Trinity College of Music, the trumpet being his preferred instrument.

MUSIC CAREER
While in London, he formed the band Koola Lobitos, playing a fusion of jazz and highlife and in 1963, he moved back to Nigeria, re-formed Koola Lobitos and trained as a radio producer fo
r the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. He played for some time with Victor Olaiya and his All Stars.
In 1967, he went to Ghana to think up a new musical direction, that was when Kuti first called his music Afrobeatand in 1969, he took the band to the United States where they spent 10 months in Los Angeles. While there, Fela discovered the Black Power Movement  through Sandra Smith (now Sandra Izsadore), a partisan of the Black Panther Party and this experience heavily influenced his music and political views and he renamed the band Nigeria '70. Soon afterwards, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was tipped off by a promoter that Fela and his band were in the US without work permits. The band immediately performed a quick recording session in Los Angeles that would later be released as The '69 Los Angeles Sessions.

“You cannot sing African music in proper English.”

In 1977, Fela and the Afrika '70(the new name of his band) released the album Zombie which was a scathing attack on Nigerian soldiers using the zombie metaphor to describe the method
s of the Nigerian military. The album was a smash hit and infuriated the government, setting off a vicious attack against the Kalakuta Republic, during which one thousand soldiers attacked the commune. Fela was severely beaten, and his elderly mother (whose house was located opposite the commune) was thrown from a window, causing fatal injuries.
The Kalakuta Republic was burned, and Fela's studio, instruments, and master tapes were destroyed.

Fela claimed that he would have been killed had it not been for the intervention of a commanding officer as he was being beaten. His response to the attack was to deliver his mother's coffin to the Dodan Barracks in Lagos which was General Olusegun Obasanjo's residence, and he wrote two songs, "Coffin for Head of State" and "Unknown Soldier", referencing the official inquiry that claimed the commune had been destroyed by an unknown soldier.

CONCLUSION
Lookıng around nowadays ıts hard to fınd any youth, be it the school boys or working class possess such zest and hunger for a long lasting change of a non-existing system as far as i am concerned, without the hidden agenda of acquiring wealth, power and fame in the process.

"I hold death in my pouch, I cannot die"

We as a the future leader, bar any racism, tribalism or religious/ethnic divide should have a rethink about our future and beyond that, the future of our un-born children, Anikulapo kuti lived all his life for the people, but he was not loking forward to impress them but fight for first, human right which he is a part of at a larger community and also justice.
Rise with your thougth or die with a fault, no matter how many times we push from within without an outlook of the real barrier, we will continue to hit a roadblock, according to Fela then, our leaders have failed us, and now its more or less a continuation of generational failure with little or no feel at all for the stamped.