Femi Kuti, first son of the late Afro beat King, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, has come of age as a respected musician/songwriter and composer, many years after he cut his musical teeth playing on stage with his father as a young boy. In this interview with PAUL UPKABIO and VIVIAN OKORIE, he bares his mind on life as Fela’s son, the challenges he faced in his career, coping with bad press, views on marriage, joy of fatherhood, the Nigerian music scene and other issues. Excerpts
How will you say that your background has influenced the person that you are today?
It has most definitely shaped a lot of things in me
What memories do you recall of your early beginnings?
What part are you talking about?
Your early childhood, things that you recall that now influence the person that you are today
I have a lot of memories about my father; so that has definitely shaped my career and what I am doing now.
Who will you say influenced you most, your mum or your dad?
It is hard to say. I am very much like my mother, I like my privacy. But then my father was always in the limelight, and his music, his political views. But I will say 50-50. I will not say one has more influence over me. People don’t know my mother but I have a lot of my mother in me.
Was your mum a quiet woman and how much of her did you see?
I saw her probably every day, I lived with her for a very long time. I grew up with her, and so I do have a lot of my mother in me.
Was your mother a music-loving person too? Did she play any instrument? What kind of person was she?
She studied a bit of piano but nothing too serious. But in our family, our father was a trombonist, a band leader in England. In our family, our mother too played a bit but nobody is as big as my father.
At which point did you decide that music is what you wanted to do?
I have always known; it is just a question of when and how. When I was very young, I decided to leave school and join my father’s band in 1979.
Understudying your dad at that early time, did you think at that point in time that you would continue the legacy after he might have gone?
It was about continuing the legacy. It was about, will I be able to live up to what he was doing? He was a magnificent, big person in front of me. To play in the band for me was already a big deal for me. I knew all the composition. My challenge then was, will I be able to live up to the big heritage in front of me? That was more of my worry. Then I told myself that I won’t be here forever. At that point, I knew I had to break off from the shell, get my life, feel my pain and experience my own down fall, lift myself up again. I suddenly knew that I had to live my life, not his life. So I left.
What were the challenges of breaking out?
Probably the biggest challenge of my life was that everybody was totally against me, everybody, including journalists, criticised me. Just one or two journalists were in support of me. And they were the ones who told the others to give the young man the chance to express himself. I decided to make my name more in Europe and in America before I broke into Nigeria. So I was touring with my own band from 1988 extensively outside Nigeria and I was already making a big name for myself outside Nigeria. This is because people outside Nigeria liked the fact that I wasn’t copying my father totally and I was trying to express myself and find my identity. That gave me an edge and they probably wanted to see what will become of me. So, they gave me more of the chance.
Here in Nigeria, it was like, you must be like your father, nothing less; we don’t want to hear anything. If you are not going to be a carbon copy of your father, forget it. There wasn’t room to express myself. So, I decided to make my name outside there. It wasn’t until ‘Wonder wonder wonder’ in 1994 that people started hearing my music here.
That means there were earlier achievements before Wonder wonder wonder outside.
Yes, because I was touring the biggest festivals. I was playing in big club I had already made a name outside before here.
It was not just the burden of fitting into his large shoes, but also the burden of taking over the administration and also his women. How did you overcome all that?
Well, it was something that I already knew as a child, people were already telling me from childhood that I would take over. So psychologically, at the back of my mind, I had already known. So I will say that I was mentally prepared for it. It wasn’t much of a big deal. I didn’t change to please people. That is because I knew that if I fail, I will not have the people to blame for my failure and if I succeed, I will not blame people. I will have to take the praise. Therefore, I do not allow people to influence me or decide for me, a way for me to go. I will rather fail on my own than have somebody make me succeed because of their own wish. I am not that kind of person. What I am doing now is no big deal for me. I knew what I wanted to do, how I was going to do it, and what it will do for me. So till today, you will still see me practise.
You may not have chosen everything about your father. But you definitely chose some things like his style of songs, part of his stagecraft and even his dance steps…
I didn’t take his dance steps o, but even if once in a while I dance like him, I believe it is okay. I mean if I don’t look, talk, sing sometimes like him, then you will have to ask my mother some questions about who my real father is. So whether I like it or not, I have to do some things like him. I think every son wants to be like their father. You grow up wanting to be like your father. If something happens in your family and you branch out, and decide not to go the way of your father, it is understandable. But a child grows up admiring the father. And this is just human trait. It is a culture in Africa. A son understudies the father. There was no exception in my case. I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to play music because my father was playing music.
Three things that you admire about your dad till today?
His courage, his honesty, and sincerity. When he believed in something even if he was supporting what was wrong, just because of his pride, he would stick to it till his death. There, I am a bit like him. If he gave you his word, even if both of you were wrong, he would defend you. That is because he had agreed to defend you. And he would protect you because of the love he has for the person. If he had given you his word, even if death comes, he would stick by you. He was very honest and sincere.
Your dad had many wives. But you chose to have one. Why did you do that?
I am divorced now. I won’t tell you that I don’t like women. I like women but I do not believe in marriage. I got married but I do not believe in marriage. I know that in Nigeria, many people are against my views but that is their business. It does not stop what I believe. I still do not believe in marriage. People have a right to believe in what they choose to believe. I believe that if two people want to be together, they should live together. And if they do not want to do so any longer, they should just agree within them. If they want to involve their family in their relationship, that is their wahala. But they should know that the more people they put in their relationship, the more problems they will have. I love a very peaceful, quiet life. When you start getting involved with family, then you won’t rest. There are some families, they won’t let you rest. I am not saying that of my ex-wife’s family, but I don’t like the idea of somebody saying to me, I pronounce you husband and wife. I don’t like it. Who is the person to pronounce me husband? Maybe it is my upbringing.
Then again, when you are married, the problems that you get into when you don’t want the marriage again is so complicated. The family will come, everybody will talk, they will discourage you. Meanwhile, both of you know that you are tired. Then again both of you will continue and become very unhappy again. If the two of you are tired and decide to go your separate ways, it is easier, but it is another wahala again because you have to go to court, sign papers upon papers, everybody puts their mouth into the matter and the wahala over it is so much. The more popular you are, the more complicated it is.
So, all that discourages me from that institution. Like I said, I have a little of my mother in me. I like peace and quiet. I hate to be disturbed. I do not like it when people bring their problems all over me. That is because I already have my problems too. So I mind my business and face my problems squarely. My relationships are already complicated, so if I get married to all the women in my life, it will be a total mess. Most of my children are from different mothers. They all play together. We all have an understanding that I take care of the children; they see their children and they go about their own businesses. The children are here enjoying their lives and I try as much as I can as a father to make them happy. My children mean the world to me.
But are you looking forward to marriage again?
No, I don’t believe in marriage. I will never marry again. I never believed in it. When I got married, I was not sure it would work. I wanted to give it a try. I knew that being in showbiz, to have a wife that will be like my mother, is probably impossible; someone who will tolerate women hanging around you even when you do not have anything to do with them emotionally. It is difficult for women to be tolerant and understand at such points. It doesn’t mean that a man always agrees to every woman who wants him. But a wife will not hold her jealousy and let you be. It is very hard to find such women who will hold themselves, comport themselves and not complicate your life.
It is the same way with a man who marries Madonna in the US, for instance, or Beyonce and you think that men will not be flirting with her, then you have a problem. It is not a matter of a masculine saying, it is the nature of that business. So to find a partner that understands is very difficult, so why starting that kind of relationship that will even complicate your life that is already complicated? Because when your are in the music business, you have to keep writing songs, you are selling your talent and people must admire your talent and you are trying not to sell your lifestyle. So it is very complicated because then, many people put your lifestyle ahead of your talent, and Nigerians have not fully developed into a position where they accept your talent over your lifestyle or they marry the two or they put your lifestyle ahead of your talent.
Most times when they put your lifestyle ahead of you, they give you a very bad name, they forget your talent and your career can come to a close. When you are dealing with this kind of business, you have to be very observant of the industry you are relating with, and I knew this because of my father’s lifestyle. Everybody might be talking of Fela today, but I tell you Fela did not have it easy in the press and even in many homes. Even us as Fela’s children, we were kicked out of the house if they heard we were Fela’s children, my sisters had the same problem with their boyfriends. ‘You want to marry Fela’s children? No, don’t come here again!’
Growing up, we knew in many circles in this country that we were not loved because we were Fela’s children. So all this is part of my upbringing, all these made me come to a lot of decisions in my life that ‘When I’m independent, this is what I am going to do’, this is what I am going to ignore’. And I can still assure you there are still many homes that, if they hear Femi Kuti, they don’t like my name. Even if am popular in the street and in many areas, they will still say he is too much like his father. But if I as an artist starts to put my mind in that, I will never progress because my objective is to write as many good songs as possible in my life. I am selling my talent, I am not selling my life.
How do you manage with those things you read about yourself in the media?
We live in a quite terrible society, if I let those things I read about myself bother me, I will not attend to you. I will judge every journalist that comes here as a bad journalist, I will generalise. In my life, I don’t generalise. Nigeria is a difficult and sometimes bad country, but we are not all that bad. There are good Nigerians but they are not even in the limelight. And there are honest Nigerians too. It’s just that some people are bad heads and they generalise that Nigerians are bad. I don’t fall into that category.
If you go with what they said about me, you will totally misjudge me but when you see me, you will see a different person altogether. In the beginning of my career, they first lambasted me that why will I leave my father? When I started to be successful, they say you are only successful because of your father. They gave every excuse not to give me honour for my hard work, and I’m hardly praised; only in a few quarters that I have been praised for my own hard work. By the time I built the shrine I thought it was a good deal, they said, oh he built a shrine, he has gone mad, he is smoking igbo (hemp). I was in the toilet one day, I was reading. Femi was seen in Ojuelegba walking stark naked holding a big igbo and I said, ‘Am I mad?’ as I checked the mirror.
I left here for five months.I was even thinking of moving to Paris. I was seeking political asylum in Holland. I had a lot of diplomatic friends who were willing to help because they all knew me and they were wondering that how can your people be so nasty to you? Don’t they see all the things you are doing to your country? Don’t they see how you put your country in the world scene? They even came to me, I don’t want to mention their names, they blackmailed me, if I don’t pay them a lot of money they will keep on writing bad stories, and I said, ‘Ha in this Nigeria! It has gotten to this point?’
I remember winning the Kora award. There was a time they said I brought in N27million; armed robbers came to meet me. When did Kora ever give me N27 million? I have never had N27 million. If I had N27 million, I don’t think they would have even been able to talk to me. I was still struggling to pay N35,000 rent in Omole then because I was not getting the kind of shows. I was travelling with a 15, 16/17 piece band at different times. Then, it was N5,000 to travel out, it was a lot of money to travel out of Nigeria then. Now, we are paying N250,000 as ticket, it is still a huge amount of money. They never thought that I was struggling then as a young man. These journalists just hated me for no good reason. There are maybe two or three of them who are very friendly to me. If you go by what you have read about me, there is no way you can love me, there is no way you will even want to listen to my music. It has been a battle front between me and this group of people for my career.
I’m a very consecutive, private and peaceful person. I understand the entertainment world. Even in my younger days, I could take off my shirt when I would be doing one hundred press ups and sit up which was part of selling my talent at that time. Now at 50 I don’t see why I want to be showing that, I don’t even have the muscles to do press ups again. Don’t see why I should suffer at this stage and be doing press ups, is it a young girl that I want to attract? My conception of selling my talent now has changed. Now I sell more of my music, the intelligent part of me and not the physical aspect of me. I got a phone call from South Africa saying that they have been reading many bad stories concerning me and wondered why. This just happened last week. She said she seems to be talking with a very intelligent person, so why is this?
And I had to explain the same thing to you. It was a time when in the social media, you cannot defend yourself, now you can defend yourself on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, you can say your own side of the story and people might listen to you. Then, it was the journalist that had a say, if they put a bad story on you on front page, you are in trouble. You owe your life to the journalist. You have no say, instead you will go begging. They could manipulate and say all kinds of things about you, so you owe them your career, so it was me that now said, ‘ok I have had enough of Nigerians and the press, go to hell. And I just decided to concentrate on the shrine, my business and just live a quiet life and I have been doing that. But in doing so, I have never decided that every journalist is bad or every Nigerian is bad because then I will be generalising myself too, saying am bad. And I have a lot of friends that are good. A lot of friends too in the media that are good.
What about the Grammy award?
If it is not about Nigeria, I will not even think about it. I didn’t start my career based on awards, I thought I will have a very quiet smooth life. Which was my wish, just to play music to the best of my ability and die. I am somebody that knows and have accepted that death would come one day, so I have decided this is what I want. I know I would die, so I wanted peace. Unfortunately, maybe because I’m Fela’s son, I have had trauma upon trauma, problems upon problems but I’m thankful that I have been able to overcome most of these problems.
If I was thinking of awards, I know that I would get more awards now. If I had wanted the Grammy so badly, so many times I would have moved to America to play the game, I would have won the Grammy. I don’t know how to play; I don’t know how to hustle; I don’t know how to hustle for you to like me or love my music, but the fact that my album four times consecutively have being nominated means I’m doing well whether I won or not. It takes a lot to win the Grammy, you must be in America, you must be promoted on the radio stations, going from city to city, town to town, I can’t do that.
How do you feel about doing music with wizkid?
I have done music with most misicians, Olu Maintain, the girl Eva, Weird MC, JJC. I have done over 10 collaborations, the last one with Dbanj and others
How do you feel about the growing music industry and what the younger generation of musicians are doing?
The only problem I have with them is that I wish most of them play musical instruments. What they are doing is good. I think you should be thankful that they all want to progress in their lives. And they are finding a way in this very difficult situation we find ourselves in Nigeria. What if they were drug addicts or peddling guns or doing terrorism? We will not sleep. It shows that there is a lot of energy, and young people want to do things, it’s for the government to want to set up avenues for young people to excel. Unfortunately, the country is not like that. The only problem I have which is not their fault because they want to play music is just they never have the means to study it. Or the means to learn an instrument. I always tell them it is never too late to pick up an instrument, it is for their own good. The kind of music they are playing is for a young audience.
One day they will be 50, what will they do? In music, if you don’t have anything to offer at any point in your life, you will just fade away. And it is such a very terrible profession, it’s not like a doctor, with the more experience you have, people will say that man has an experience, he’s a heart surgeon. So you will get more customers, or lawyer, you will get SAN. The day you don’t have anything to offer, the world will bring you so down. If you don’t have any savings or other avenues to make money, it is the same people that would say, now look at his life, useless bobo. He was popular before, now he drinks and smokes.
So I can only prepare them like I would prepare my children. Take it and do these for the rainy day; there would always be a rainy day in everybody’s life and if you are not prepared for it, that would be your end. End does not mean death. You will see some people, they live very old, they pray every day to die and God won’t take them. I even think death is a very easy way out of this life. The worst is to be alive and be suffering. Won’t it be better to be dead than be alive and suffer? I will rather be dead than suffer. So I will rather prepare the young people because they all want to do this, nobody wants to pick up and study the musical instruments. If I am relevant after nearly four decades of my career, it’s because I have something to always offer musically, so whether the world critics like it or not they cannot toy with my achievements musically, I may not have won the Grammy but whether they like it or not, I have been nominated four times and they just have to bring one Nigerian that has achieved the same.
