Image from a live 1984 performance of ‘Beasts of No Nation’.
In 1984, Fela Kuti was arrested on trumped-up charges. A military tribunal said he hadn’t declared money he was travelling with when attempting to board a plane from Lagos to the US. Fela said he declared the cash on a Customs Declaration form; the police said the form had been “lost”. Fela was sentenced to five years in prison. The following year Amnesty International said he was a prisoner of conscience.
In 1986, Fela was released. The judge who had sentenced Fela visited him in prison and apologised, having been pressured by the military regime into giving Fela a long sentence.
The imprisonment did not deter Fela from speaking out. On his release, he held a press conference announcing the revival of his political party, Movement of the People (MOP), and his run for presidency. His music was as political as ever.
Beasts of No Nation (1989) was another two-track album produced by Willy Badarou, after 1986’s Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense. It’s another fantastic sounding record, again mixed and mastered by Hervé Marignac and recorded by Joelle Bauer and Serge Devevres.
The year of Beasts, Fela played two shows in support of James Brown, who had been arrested and imprisoned in 1988. Fela’s music was moving further away from Brown’s influence, but he sensed some sort of connection.
Although Fela also released ‘I Go Shout Plenty’ the same year (a comparatively Brown-esque song), ‘Beasts’ is more like ‘Teacher’: classical music-esque ambition and scope, and a huge band.
The title was taken from a 1986 speech by South African President P.W. Botha, in which he said, “This uprising will bring out the beast in us.” Botha was threatening ANC, a political party in South Africa. Botha is said to have also made a horrid, racist speech to his cabinet the previous year, though this is disputed. Indisputable is the fact that he was a staunch supporter of apartheid and white minority rule.
As well as calling out Botha by name, Fela names US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as two more “Animals in human skin”. On the album artwork, the three are depicted with horns and fangs. He also criticises the “animal sense” of the Nigerian government, who in the ’80s described the public as useless, senseless, and indisciplined, and led a “War Against Indiscipline”.
Ghariokwu Lemi, who designed the artwork for Beasts and 25 of Fela’s other album covers, said in a 2011 interview:
“Africa has not moved progressively one step forward in my own observations from the 1970s until now. All the problems Fela was singing about have become even worse.”
From 1:47, after horns and keyboard have played similar rhythms, slightly off-kilter, a single-note keyboard line introduces us to the vocal melody. It teaches us the tune so the vocals seem more familiar, even after the abrupt change from section to section. (It’s still abrupt even with that transitional keyboard line – only 5 beats from the previous section to the very different vocal section.)
It’s here when Fela first sings, “Many leaders as you see dem / Na different disguise dem dey oh / Animal in human skin”. Politicians wear disguises—ties, suits, agbada—but they’re still not human.
During that verse, or pre-chorus, a trumpet starts its phrases on the rare beats that the lower register horns are leaving free. Together with the keyboard, guitar (which both play a version of the vocal melody, in different registers), drums, and bass, there isn’t an inch to catch your breath. The “Beasts of no nation” chorus is then sung over this arrangement.
The “human skin” verse returns at 5 minutes. Following that, the feel is much calmer: the lead guitar plays the sunniest licks in all of Fela’s discography; the horn section plays a jubilant riff, before a sax solo.
At 10:40, Fela references the Underground Spiritual Game (as on ‘Pansa Pansa’)—“Let’s get down to the Underground Spiritual Game”—before playing a horn-and-vocal call-and-response with his backing singers. It’s a similar section to that on ‘Teacher’, only this time Fela plays a complete solo that the singers then imitate, rather than individual phrases that are sung one-by-one.
In live performances during his Underground Spiritual Game, Fela was fond of getting the crowd going by saying, “Everybody say, ‘Yeah yeah!’” Fela’s co-manager from 1982 onwards, Rikki Stein, said of Fela’s audience connection:
“He wanted you to be there in that moment, to share, to participate in whatever was taking place. That is the underground spiritual game. When he played at [his Lagos club,] the Shrine, nobody applauded. You were all playing, so who are you going to applaud, yourself?”
In ‘Beasts’, Fela says governments can’t possibly give us human rights, because they’re ours to begin with: “Human rights na my property”. In Nigerian Pidgen, “Na” means “is”; Fela is saying “Human rights is our property” (as said by a crowd depicted on the artwork). Later, when talking about the “united” United Nations, Fela points out that Thatcher and Argentina aren’t uniting; neither are Reagan and Libya, Israel and Lebanon, or Iran and Iraq. Fela questions the sense of one veto vote equalling “92 (or more)”. He asks, “Which kind sense be dat?” and answers, “Na animal sense”.
After 13 minutes, Fela warns, “Basket mouth wan start to leak again”. In Nigeria, a “basket mouth” is someone who says things others don’t want to hear. Fela’s conscience wasn’t limited to Nigeria. He wanted justice for everyone, and for Africa to come together. He references the students killed by authorities, including during the Soweto Uprising, the topic of ‘Sorrow Tears and Blood’.
The Nigerian government had been well aware of Fela’s influence for over a decade, and sought to reduce it with repeated attacks and imprisonments. The year before this record, a concert in Fela’s hometown was cancelled after soldiers threatened to shoot anyone trying to enter.
In the sections where the bass is played with more attack (such as from 14:48), the notes on both the One and the second beat makes the first half and the second half of each bar feel really different. On the one and two, you get two deep, sustained notes, played more aggressively. Then in the second note of the bar, the bass plays more subtly. You notice the hi-hat a lot more, even though it’s been playing throughout.
In Finding Fela (2014), Tony Allen talked about Fela’s later, trance-like music. In comparison with Africa 70 songs such as ‘Kalakuta Show’, the Egypt 80 groove of ‘Beasts of No Nation’ is extremely consistent. Allen said Fela wanted less changes. Elsewhere, Allen explained his own variable drum patterns, saying when he got bored of one, he’d create another.
The penultimate, brilliantly energetic “Beasts of no nation” chorus (from 24:18) is overflowing with polyrhythms. It starts off calmly enough, but then the different horn parts make you feel like there’s energy to expel in every possible direction, as though you’ve eight or ten limbs. It’s a cathartic moment because of what’s come before: the 20-plus minutes of build up and contrasting, minimalist sections.
At 26:29, Fela slows things down, repeating, “Easy, easy, easy” on the upbeats. His music was usually too full of hyperkinetic polyrhythms to detect that he’d been a habitual weed smoker for about two decades. This is the one occurence in his 50-plus-album discography where he sounds a little like Bob Marley. Fela was finally slowing down. After 1989, he released only one album (Underground System, 1992) of newly recorded material before his death in 1997.
Stein believes Fela died not of AIDs but from the repeated physical abuse inflicted on him by authorities:
“Fela died of one beating too many. His body was covered in scars and his mind and spirit had to cope with 200 arrests. The system can only take so much.”
The Friday Fela series will return intermittently, in the same manner as Friday Funk after its 2024 conclusion. We’ll explore songs of Fela’s vast discography that we didn’t have time for this summer, as well as songs by artists he influenced. In the meantime, “Everybody say, ‘Yeah yeah!’”