Online publication : AFROBEAT! FELA AND THE IMAGINED CONTINENT

A revised version of “AFROBEAT! FELA AND THE IMAGINED CONTINENT” by Sola Olorunyomi was published on the 22^nd of June 2023 by Africae and is freely accessible online following this link. Africae publishes academic works in the humanities and social sciences on Africa that shed light on political, economic and social dynamics in the past and in the present. Africae promotes the open access dissemination of knowledge and encourages publication in the languages of the territories concerned by the research. In this way, Africae aim to contribute to the circulation, without commercial barriers, of the products of contemporary scientific research in all regions of Africa.

In the seventies, as signs of decay began to show in the capitalist experiment of the newly independent African countries, a “bard of the misrule” emerged on the streets of Lagos. Often shirtless and armed with his trademark saxophone, Fela Anikulapo Kuti tore his way into popular culture with Afrobeat music. Blending ethno-traditional forms with the reigning highlife and jazz rhythms, Afrobeat drew lyrics from the flip side of neo-colonial society and Fela’s London and American experience in the sixties.

In the two decades that followed, Fela ruled the nights from Afrika Shrine, his signature night club, and the days from the turntables of the restless city dwellers along the Atlantic coastline. Fela’s Afrobeat became a dynamic mode of expression in the social history of post-independent West Africa and generated a counterculture that bonded through music, drugs, resistance politics—and ultimately, the nascence of an Afrocentric contemporary global culture.