Focus Features has announced they are developing a biopic on the late ’70s afrobeat legend Fela Kuti. The Nigerian multi-instrumentalist’s story will be based off the book, “Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon” published in 2000.
A political maverick and a controversial, intriguing personality, Kuti’s story is rife with drama and should make for a fascinating story.
Kuti is known for many things; pioneering the jazz-funk fusion of afrobeat, his outspokenness about African political corruption, his abundant drug intake, his multiple harem of wives and sexual promiscuity, his imprisonment and subsequent physical abuse by police and wardens, and his death in 1997 from AIDS-related causes.
Perhaps his most famous anecdote is the story behind his excellent 1975 album Expensive Shit. In 1974, the police conducted an illegal raid of his house and Kuti swallowed all the drugs in the house to avoid being slapped with drug charges. But the police were wise to this and waited for him to defecate so they could examine it for drug traces. Kuti traded shit with another prisoner, was freed and found inspiration for his next album title.
Kuti also brazenly deemed his Kalakuta compound (a home, a recording studio, etc.) an independent republic, and when the Nigerian army raided it, they threw his mother out of a second story window, wherein she sustained injuries that eventually led to her death [thanks for remind us, P. Orlov]. After the incident, he wrote “Zombie,” a scathing attack on the Nigerian military and one of his most famous tracks in the North America.
Of course you need to cast an African actor, not an American trying to pull off the accent (though Forrest Whitaker did succeed in spades), but there’s gotta be someone less obvious and more fitting than say, Djimon Hounsou, no? This would be one rare biopic that we would greatly anticipate.
This 1975 track, “Water No Get Enemy” is one of our favorite Fela songs (which we included in our If I Were Jim Jarmusch Playlist).