I Choose To Focus On The Positives After Fela’s Hall Of Fame Disappointment – Femi Kuti

Femi Anikulapo-Kuti has come out to react to Fela Kuti missing out as an inductee of the 2021 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite coming second in the fan vote category with over 500,000 votes.

He recently revealed this on his social media page, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to him, apparently, there was another voting process that was carried out by only the organizers of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to decide the inductees, so the organizers simply wasted our time.

He added that the positive he derived from the entire process is that #Fela kept trending and many who never heard of him got to hear his music and his story.

His words, “Apparently there’s another vote only members can take part in, and that’s what counts. So they kind of wasted our precious time, the positive side #Fela was trending and many who never heard of him got to hear his music and his story.”

What do you think?

Fela Anikulapo Kuti (15 October 1938 – 2 August 1997), also professionally known as Fela Kuti, or simply Fela, was a Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, musician, composer, pioneer of the Afrobeat music genre and human rights activist. At the height of his popularity, he was referred to as one of Africa’s most “challenging and charismatic music performers”.

Fela was born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti on 15 October 1938 in Abeokuta, the modern-day capital of Ogun State in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, then a city in the British Colony of Nigeria, into an upper-middle-class family. His mother, Chief Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a feminist activist in the anti-colonial movement; his father, Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, an Anglican minister and school principal, 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 attended Abeokuta Grammar School. 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. While there, he formed the band Koola Lobitos, playing a fusion of jazz and highlife. In 1960, Fela married his first wife, Remilekun (Remi) Taylor, with whom he would have three children (Femi, Yeni, and Sola). In 1963, Fela moved back to the newly independent Federation of Nigeria, re-formed Koola Lobitos and trained as a radio producer for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. He played for some time with Victor Olaiya and his All Stars.