Fela Kuti: Fear No Man
(Higher Ground)
Fela Kuti was a pioneering musician and complex man, and this new 12-part series “leaves no stone unturned” in bringing his story to life, said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. The so-called godfather of Afrobeat was considered so dangerous to Nigeria’s authoritarian regime that his compound was regularly raided, and his courage as an activist and achievements as an artist get their full due. But so, too, do the 27 singers and dancers he married in a self-glorifying 1978 ceremony.
Fear No Man is hosted by Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad and produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground, and “you can hear the love and money that have been poured into it.” It can be shocking to learn “just how much brutality Fela endured,” said Michel Martin in NPR.org. For standing up to oppression, he was arrested more than 200 times and frequently beaten, and in a 1977 raid on his compound, his activist mother was thrown from a second-story window and suffered injuries she eventually died from. Those events forever changed him.
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