QUEENS OF AFROBEAT, women, play, and Fela Kuti's music revolution

361pp, illus., paperback, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2024

ISBN: 9780253068644

Dotun Ayobade on the lives of the women behind Fela Kuti's music. 

Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti (1938-1997) pioneered Afrobeat, a music genre that combines West African rhythms with jazz, soul and highlife, in the 1960s. The women who regularly surrounded Kuti on stage and in everyday life were crucial performers and backup singers for his most important compositions and played key roles in his campaigns against the Nigerian Government in the 1970s. 

"That Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti was a man of profound contradiction is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the lives of his collaborators, the Queens. These women—so crucial to Fela's success and arguably the "engines" of Afrobeat style and sound itself—were nevertheless consistently upstaged and disenfranchised from an empire they helped to build. In this book, Dotun Ayobade takes us backstage, back in time, and out into the community in search of the Queens' stories. Insightfully argued, rigorously researched, and lyrically written, Queens of Afrobeat portrays the creative contributions and personal hardships endured by these remarkable women as they navigated the charged geopolitics of intimacy and performed as savvy cultural managers within an unequal and highly gendered field." Catherine Cole, University of Washington

"This book rocks! In lyrical prose, Dotun Ayobade brilliantly composes the much-awaited feminist account of the life, times, troubles, and triumphs of the women artists of Kalakuta Republic. Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti's Music Rebellion unearths their significant contributions despite their precarious positioning, sandwiched between the everyday male dominance of Fela's establishment and the brutal jackboot patriarchy of the military state. Reading the Nigerian Republic from the audacious experiment that was Kalakuta Republic, and the experiences of these female citizens, reveals much about the fragility of existence in a postcolonial state. By focusing skillfully on their performances, onstage, offstage, and in between, this treatise overturns, once and for all, the erasure and gender eclipse that has been their lot in the scholarship on Fela Kuti and Afrobeat. This is essential reading." Oyèróbke Oyěwùmí, author of The Invention of Women: Making an African sense of Western gender discourses

Dotun Ayobade is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University.