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    Fela: This Bitch of A Life
    Fela: This Bitch of A Life
    Fela: This Bitch of A Life
    Ebook408 pages5 hours

    Fela: This Bitch of A Life

    By Carlos Moore

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    About this ebook

    African superstar, composer, singer, and musician, as well as mystic and political activist, Nigerian Fela Kuti, born in 1938, was controversy personified.

    He was swept to international celebrity on a wave of scandal and flamboyance, and when he died of AIDS in 1997, more than a million people attended his funeral. But what was he really like, this man who could as easily arouse violent hostility as he could unswerving loyalty?

    Carlos Moore's unique biography, based on hours of conversation and told in Fela's first-person vernacular, reveals the icon's complex personality and tumultuous existence. Moore includes interviews with fifteen of his queens (wives); photos; and an updated discography.

    This November the Tony award-winning Broadway show FELA! – a musical celebration of Fela Kuti’s life – comes to the National Theatre, London. Kuti is also set to be the subject of a biopic from director Steve McQueen (Hunger) which is in development now.

    Carlos Moore is a political scientist and an ethnologist. He is an honorary research fellow at the School for Graduate Studies and Research of the University of the West Indies–Kingston and the author of Pichón: Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba.

    Gilberto Gil is a composer, a bandleader, a singer, and a guitarist and has served as the Brazilian minister of culture since 2003.

    Margaret Busby is a writer, a critic, a broadcaster, and the editor of Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writing by Women of African Descent.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOmnibus Press
    Release dateAug 1, 2011
    ISBN9780857125897
    Fela: This Bitch of A Life

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      A must read for every One of African descent!!!

    Book preview

    Fela - Carlos Moore

    1

    Abiku

    The Twice-Born

    After three years of waiting, my mother and father really wanted a baby. But it wasn’t me they wanted. No, man! No! They wanted any fucking baby.

    You know, the meek, quiet type. Well-mannered. Yes-Sir this. Yes-Sir that. They didn’t want a motherfucker like me, man! Well, here I am now. I came. In spite of them. In spite of everything. I was born twice, man!

    The first time I was born was in 1935. What I experienced twice I have no recollection of. Nothing! Zero! That’s one of our limitations, man, not knowing where we come from. Anyway, when I was born my father wanted to imitate his own father. They were both Protestant reverends. So to make some white man happy, my father asked this German missionary to … name me. Can you imagine that, man? A white man naming an African child! In Africa, man, where names are taken so seriously. There’s even a special naming ceremony each time a child is born. Without that, it’s said that a child can’t really enter the world of the living. And just to make some white missionary happy, my own father. … Oh, no, man! Nooooooh!

    You know what that motherfucker named me? Hildegart! Yes, man. Hildegart! Ooooooooh, man! That’s how much I wasn’t wanted. Me, who was supposed to come and talk about Blackism and Africanism, the plight of my people. Me, who was to try and do something to change that! Oh, man. I felt that name like a wound. My father had rejected me. And my mother too. The one whose very womb had born me. Here I was, tied hand and foot, being handed over to the executioner!

    Bear the name of conquerors? Or reject this first arrival in the world? The orishas they heard me. And they spared me. Two weeks after my first birth, my soul left my body for the world of spirits. What can I say? I wasn’t Hildegart! Shit, man! It wasn’t for white man to give me name. So it’s because of a name that I’ve already known death. Maybe that’s why a name is a matter of life or death, more for me than anybody else. What can I say about parents who wanted this motherfucking compromise? It’s only recently I’ve begun asking myself questions about them, their past. You see, till now I’ve been so busy with the whole African problem I rarely ever looked at my own ancestors because the other thing was more important. But things are beginning to fall into place.

    Both on my mother’s and father’s side, my ancestors came from Ilesha in Yorubaland. My father was the Right Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti. His middle name, Oludotun, means The Great Being Is Always Right. I think my father was convinced that he, too, was always right. In any case, that’s the impression he made. Oh, he could be so hard with his children! There was Dolu,¹ my sister, the eldest of all; then Koye,² then me; and lastly, my younger brother Beko.³ The only person who could call my father by his nickname – Daudu (The Good Teacher) – was my mother. We had to call him Sir. Yeh! That’s how it was! That’s what they call respect,

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