The “father of Afrobeat” Fela Kuti has made history by becoming the first African to get a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys.
The Nigerian musician, who died in 1997, posthumously received the commendation along with several other artists at a ceremony in Los Angeles on Saturday, on the eve of the 68th Annual Grammy Awards.
“The family is happy about it. And we’re excited that he’s finally being recognised,” Yeni Kuti, Fela’s daughter, told Al Jazeera before the ceremony. “But Fela was never nominated [for a Grammy] in his lifetime,” she lamented.
The recognition is “better late than never”, she said, but “we still have a way to go” in fairly recognising musicians and artists from across the African continent.
Lemi Ghariokwu, a renowned Nigerian artist and the designer behind 26 of Fela’s iconic album covers, says the fact that this is the first time an African musician gets this honour “just shows that whatever we as Africans need to do, we need to do it five times more.”
Ghariokwu said he feels “privileged” to witness this moment for Fela. “It’s good to have one of us represented in that category, at that level. So, I’m excited. I’m happy about it,” he told Al Jazeera.
Fela was born in Nigeria’s Ogun State in 1938 as Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti (later renaming himself to Fela Anikulapo Kuti), to an Anglican minister and school principal father.
In 1958, he went to London to study medicine, but instead enrolled at Trinity College of Music, where he formed a band that played a blend of jazz and highlife.
After returning to Nigeria in the 1960s, he went on to create the Afrobeat genre that fused highlife and Yoruba music with American jazz, funk, and soul. That has laid the groundwork for Afrobeats – a later genre blending traditional African rhythms with contemporary pop.