Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti known by the various pseudonyms "Fela Anikulapo Kuti", "Fela Kuti" and "The Black President" was a Nigerian singer, composer and human rights activist, inventor of the Afrobeat musical genre and considered among the most influential African artists of the 20th century. Fela was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria on 15 October 1938 into an educated middle-class family. Her father, Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti, was the first president of the Nigerian Teachers' Association, and her mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was a feminist activist and the first Nigerian woman to hold a driving license. After his primary education in his home country, Fela moved to London in 1958 with the intention of studying medicine. However, he enrolled at Trinity College of Music, where he graduated a few years later with trumpet. In 1970, Fela founded his first musical group: "Africa 70". In 1975 the album “Zombie” was released, in which the musician compared the Nigerian police and army to willless zombies, trained to shoot on command. The album was a huge success in Nigeria and provoked a violent reaction from the government, which attacked the commune with more than a thousand soldiers, setting the studios on fire, destroying the structures and killing numerous people. Fela's mother was thrown out of a window and died a few days later (Fela Kuti later described this tragic event in his song “Coffin' for Head of State”). The musician himself was saved just in time from a fatal beating at the hands of the military. In 1978, on the first anniversary of the destruction of Kalakuta, Fela married twenty-seven women, many of whom were his backing vocalists or dancers, divorcing many of them shortly thereafter. In 1979 he entered active politics, founding his own party which he called the "Nigerian Movement of the People", running in the primary elections but seeing his candidacy rejected. In 1984, the government of Muhammadu Buhari, of which Kuti was a staunch opponent, imprisoned him on smuggling charges, and Fela Kuti was released after 20 months of detention. Upon his release he divorced his 12 remaining wives. On August 2, 1997, his death was announced in Lagos and it was later discovered that Fela was suffering from AIDS. It is estimated that more than a million people attended his funeral.
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