The Kalakuta Compound

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.