Fela Kuti

Fela Anikulapo Kuti was born in Abeokuta into a family of clergymen, teachers and campaigners. His father was a school principal and Anglican minister; his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was the most famous women\'s rights activist in Nigeria. In 1958 they sent him to London to study medicine. He registered at Trinity College of Music instead and spent his grant on a trumpet and a jazz band.

Back in Lagos in the 1960s his highlife-jazz group did modestly. The turning point was a 1969 tour of the United States, where a Black Power activist, Sandra Izsadore, lent him books and told him his music had nothing to say. He came home with a new sound, long and hypnotic, built on James Brown, Yoruba drumming and political lyrics in pidgin English, and called it Afrobeat.

He turned his compound into a commune, declared it the independent Kalakuta Republic, and ran a nightclub, the Shrine, where he attacked corruption and the army from the stage. In 1977, after the song Zombie mocked soldiers as mindless, about a thousand of them stormed Kalakuta, burned it down and threw his 77-year-old mother from an upstairs window. She died of her injuries the following year. He carried her coffin to the gates of the army barracks and wrote a song about it.

He was jailed on trumped-up currency charges in 1984 and released after twenty months. He died in 1997, and more than a million people lined the streets of Lagos for his funeral.