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Filmed in 1982 in Lagos, Nigeria, by the French producer Stéphane Tchal-Gadjieffand cinematographer Jean Jacques Flori, this 53-minute documentary combines concert footage and interviews with Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938-1997), the legendary innovator of Afrobeat. The directors establish and describe Fela's musical activism from the global world to the local arena-Kalakuta Republic in Lagos. While Fela samples and describes Nigeria, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and South Africa in the context of Africa and uses Lagos to represent Nigeria, he visualizes Kalakuta Republic (the residence of the King and Black President) as the ideal.
A biographical sketch includes his birth in 1938 to a middle-class Christian family and travels to England and the United States. Details of his ten-month stay in Los Angeles highlight his contact with the works of Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement, experiences that would change his life and ways of thinking, and which...