When Lemi Ghariokwu met Fela Kuti, the
pioneering Nigerian musician and bandleader
who is to his continent what James Brown
is to this one, Fela said two words to him:
“Wow, goddammit!”
Lemi had drawn a portrait of the Afrobeat star
music is still, nearly twenty years after his death,
at the behest of journalist Babatunde Harrison.
almost absurdly vital. It is a sound that seems to
Harrison had seen Lemi’s self-commissioned poster
have its own shape, its own body. It’s also highly
for Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon hanging in a Lagos
political music whose consequences seem hard, if
bar and immediately asked the artist if he could do
not impossible, to fathom from a North American
album covers. “I didn’t believe him,” Lemi says of
perspective; most famously, Fela’s Lagos compound
the journalist’s insistence that he and Fela had been
was once held siege by the Nigerian military, who
discussing the need for a new artist only days prior.
threw his seventy-eight-year-old mother out of a
“Fela was already huge thanks to his controversial
window, injuring her fatally. His album art needed
lifestyle,” he explains from his home in Lagos via
to be as conscious as his music. “I love to say that in
Skype. “He was popular in a notorious way. Like
the beginning it was the music, and the music was
Snoop Dogg.”
so powerful that it needed accompaniment,” Lemi
says. “My art played that role. My art had to act as a
That initial meeting in 1973 changed Lemi’s life.
megaphone for voicing Fela’s ideas.”
From there, he’d become one of Fela’s closest
confidants despite being seventeen years his junior,
It was a role he’d been prepared for long before
and, as he puts it, the two were “comrades in
he picked up a pen. “From when I was eleven
arms.” They studied metaphysics together, they
years old, I was conscious of my race and my
read Marcus Garvey and Malcom X, they discussed
African-ness. I knew when Miriam Makeba left
Pan-Africanism. “I became like his son,” Lemi says.
South Africa for exile in the US—I still have the
“When he was recording a tune, I was close to the
album of she and Harry Belafonte from 1965,”
process, so by the time he recorded the album, it
Lemi says. “I was conscious of when the Black
was almost a fait accompli for me to illustrate the
Panther movement was very strong in the United
album. Most of the time, ninety percent of the time,
States, and of when George Jackson was killed in
he’d say, ‘Lemi, it’s a motherfucker, man.’”
San Quentin Prison. I read about him in Drum
Magazine. I did a portrait of his. And I cried, and
With grooves deeper than a World War I trench
I felt like, ‘Wow, black people are suffering,’ do
and horn charts sharper than a bamboo fence, Fela’s
you understand?”
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