# The Kalakuta Compound *A Biography of Fela Kuti* — Legendary Biographies No. 062 - **Subject:** Fela Anikulapo Kuti (born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti) - **Written by:** Khari Ousmane - **Shelf:** Music / Afrobeat - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 190 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 190 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-072-0) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Nadia Kerr (ISBN 979-8-90623-228-1) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/062-the-kalakuta-compound.html ## About this book February 18, 1977, the Kalakuta Republic compound in Lagos. One thousand Nigerian soldiers, on the personal orders of General Olusegun Obasanjo, surround the compound where the Afrobeat musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti lives with his band, his retinue, and his seventy-eight-year-old mother, the activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. The soldiers throw Funmilayo from a second-floor window. They burn the compound to the ground. They beat Fela with rifle butts. He is thirty-eight years old. He has just released Zombie, an album attacking the Nigerian army as mindless automatons. His mother dies of her injuries the following April. Fela carries her coffin to the gates of the Dodan Barracks and leaves it there. Khari Ousmane's biography opens earlier — in the Abeokuta missionary household where Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti was born in 1938, the second son of the Reverend Israel and Funmilayo — and follows the arc through Trinity College of Music London, the 1969 Los Angeles year that produced the Black-Power conversion, the Africa '70 band and the Afrika Shrine residency in Lagos, the long campaign against the Nigerian military governments, the 1984 currency-trafficking imprisonment under Buhari, the twenty-seven marriages of 1978, the AIDS denial of the early 1990s, and the death at fifty-eight on August 2, 1997. What emerges is a portrait of the Nigerian Afrobeat musician who built the most uncompromising body of political protest music in twentieth-century African popular culture — and whose Kalakuta Republic compound the army of his country burned to the ground. ## Contents 1. Abeokuta 2. London 3. America 4. The Sound 5. The Afrika Shrine 6. The Kalakuta Republic 7. Unknown Soldier 8. Coffin to the Barracks 9. Twenty-Seven Wives 10. Tony Allen 11. The Music 12. The Arrests 13. The Political Philosophy 14. The Decline 15. August 2, 1997 16. Femi and Seun 17. Fela! The Musical 18. Afrobeats' Debt to Afrobeat ## Questions **Who is The Kalakuta Compound about?** Fela Anikulapo Kuti (born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Kalakuta Compound — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,657 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 190 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Born and raised in Dakar, Khari Ousmane has dedicated his career to examining the legacies of African political and cultural figures of the post-colonial era. His essays and criticism have appeared in major outlets including Africa Is a Country, the New York Review of Books, and the Mail & Guardian. His research-driven biographies explore the intersection of art and activism. In The Theater Kid, he charts the developmental years of political stage performers, while The Kalakuta Compound reconstructs the daily lives and struggles of counter-cultural artistic communities. Ousmane continues to work as an independent researcher and cultural archivist. He currently lives in Dakar, where he spends his free time restoring mid-century vinyl records and hosting a local community radio show.