On This Day 40 Years Ago, Fela’s Kalakuta Republic Was Burned Down By ‘Unknown Soldiers’

Fela at home in Kalakuta Republic.
On February 18, 1977, a battalion of soldiers descended on Kalakuta Republic – the sprawling compound where Afrobeat icon Fela Anikulapo Kuti lived.
By the time the day was over, the building was in flames, the man locked up in jail and his 78-year-old women’s rights activist mother Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti laying critically injured from being tossed out of an upstairs window during the rampage.
Fela’s unending squabbles with successive military governments in Nigeria is stuff of legend: he openly mocked them mercilessly in his songs. He lashed out at them without fear and coined disparaging terms to describe their reign.

The abami eda