In Queens of Afrobeat, the women of Afrobeat music--a unique blend of jazz, soul, highlife, and West African rhythms--are finally given the recognition they deserve. This extensive study takes a multifaceted view of the storied lives of the women behind Fela Kuti's activist music. Dotun Ayobade's wide-ranging research pulls from interviews with surviving queens, ethnographic narratives, the exploration of newspaper archives, and close readings of album covers, photographs, and promotional materials to help us see and understand the women who surrounded Fela Kuti on stage and in everyday life. Not only were these artists crucial performers and backup singers for Kuti's most important compositions, they also played key roles in his activism and campaigns of social protest against the Nigerian government in the 1970s. Drawing on previously untapped material, Queens of Afrobeat weaves together an intricate narrative of women's participation in popular music. The stories of these remarkable women transform and uniquely personalize our understanding of the politics and performance of one of the major modern musical traditions in Africa.
Dotun Ayobade is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He studies how embodied forms of popular culture shape the meanings of community, justice, and activism in postcolonial West Africa. His writing covers late twentieth century dance, performance, and popular music in Anglophone West Africa, with an interest in the impact and trajectories of Afrobeat music.
Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Birth of a Restless Collective: How the "Girls" Converged 2. From FRK to "Lady": A Revised Genealogy of the Music's Other Women 3. To Improvise a Precarious Freedom: Before FESTAC 77 4. Unknown Soldier: The 1977 Kalakuta Invasion and the Geopolitics of Intimacy 5. "Spirit Catch Am": Possessions, Paranoia, and the Tumultuous Egypt 80 6. Facing the Music: AIDS and Alienation after Fela 7. "Where We Fall Is Where We Pick Ourselves Up From": A Legacy in Fragments Conclusion: What Afrobeat Owes Women It May Never Repay Notes Works Cited Index
"That Fela Anikulapo 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 M. Cole, University of Washington "Of all the African musical innovators of the post-independence era, Fela Kuti was the one whose art was most strongly and explicitly predicted on the erotic. Until now, however, no writer has given full voice to Fela's queens, the female partners who helped him transmute the erotic impulse into sonic, political, spiritual, and philosophical forms of power. Dotun Ayobade's landmark study is thus a long-overdue corrective that gives the queens their rightful acknowledgment as crucial collaborators in one of the most revolutionary musical episodes in Africa's post-independence history."-Michael E. Veal - Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music, Yale University "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."-Oyeronk Oyewumi, author of The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses
