Fela Kuti's Ex-Wife Reveals Shocking Details About Him

Laide Anikulapo-Kuti, Nee Babayale, one of the wives of the late Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, has revealed some shocking details about the late legend. Though the interview was conducted months back, it recently surfaced online.

Fela Kuti & Laide Anikulapo-Kuti
Speaking about how she met Fela, she said she met him when she was 16-years-old at a Sunday Jump in 1974 and they began dating after an incident with one of his boys who harassed her friend. She went to spend some time with Fela when she was on break from school for two weeks and after the two weeks, she refused going back to school. She said her father tried persuading her to come back but she refused.

On how she married Fela, she narrated: "When Kalakuta Republic was invaded and we all had different injuries, mine was on my navel, and all the other women making jest of me that I would never have a baby, even though I was just about 20 years old then. I really wanted to have children because of the special treatment Fela gave his children. I then decided to look outside because Fela didn’t want to have any more children then. He went to one Baba JK in Idi Oro in Mushin to make his sperm watery.

 He was always drinking African medicine there, and that was what neutralized his sperm. So many women were always getting pregnant for him that he was terminating about six different pregnancies per day. It was Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti that used to terminate it then. They’re all dead now; me too, I’m going to die one day, but it’s always good to put things right for the records. I had my baby for a journalist, Steve, with Punch Newspapers. This is a true life story. I want you to bring it out and let people know.

"After that time, Fela now called Steve and the press that ‘these women have suffered a lot with me, so if anyone of them wants, they can marry me and be having children.’ Steve said if that was what he wanted, then, no problem. So Fela put out a notebook and said that the people who want to marry him out of all the women in the shrine should put their names down. In all, we were 27 that wrote our names. On the day of the wedding ceremony, Fela’s best pal, Tunji Braithwaite, who was supposed to join us together, ran away from his chambers, saying that he had never seen such a thing before for a man to marry 27 women at the same time. The following day, Fela called an Ifa priest and they came to join us together at Hotel Parisona in Anthony, Lagos. Fela put money on everybody’s heads and we collected our certificates of marriage to him."

Fela was a Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, musician, composer, pioneer of the Afrobeat music genre, human rights activist, and political maverick.

He was born on October, 15, 1938 in Abeokuta, Ogun State, and passed away on August, 3, 1997, from Kaposi’s sarcoma, which was brought on by AIDS. More than a million people attended Fela’s funeral at the site of the old Shrine compound. A new Africa Shrine has opened since Fela’s death in a different section of Lagos under the supervision of his son Femi Kuti.