AFROBEATS GENESIS

Afrobeat is a music genre that involves the combination of elements of West Africa musical styles such as juju, fuji and highlife with a focus on chanted vocals, complex intersecting rhythms, and percussion. Afro beat was originated by a Nigerian musician Fela Aníkúlápó-Kuti, who began his career playing in an array of African highlife and jazz bands, absorbed the sounds of soul, jazz, soca =and rhythm and blues during various tours of America and the United Kingdom. He then unleashed this formidable creation in his band, Nigeria 70 (later Africa 70), debuting his unique new musical style in the early 1970s.

His music and outspokenness made Fela a hero to Africa's poor, but he would pay a high price for his insurrectionary micro-republic, which was repeatedly raided, and he and his followers would be arrested and beaten. In early 1977, the military junta had had enough – Fela's record Zombie, mocking the army's do-as-you're-told mentality, may have been the tipping point for head of state General Obasanjo, who had once been in the same primary school class as Fela. A thousand soldiers overwhelmed Kalakuta, brutalising and raping as they went, then razing the compound to the ground. Fela was beaten close to death, and his elderly mother thrown from an upstairs window, afterwards dying of her injuries.