Femi Kuti, an afrobeat legend and son of the pioneer of the music genre has revealed the hurdle he scaled to continue his father’s legacy. According to the legendary saxophonist, to rebuild his father’s Afrika Shrine, he faced some difficulties which included police harassment and attacks from thugs.
In Lagos Nigeria, Afrika Shrine is synonymous with the Fela Anikulapo-Kuti dynasty. During the life and times of the Afrobeat legend, he performed most of his shows at the Afrika Shrine at Ikeja, Lagos, except when he went on tours. However, it was later destroyed with some alleging it was from the then-military government due to the singer’s criticism of the regime.
Upholding his father’s legacy, Femi, during a chat in a podcast revealed to his son, Made, stated how it was possible to build the New Afrika Shrine which is an open-air entertainment centre located in Ikeja, Lagos State. The venue further serves as the host location of the annual Felabration music festival, which aims at celebrating the life of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.
The multiple Grammy nominee told his son, “They don’t know what we went through to build the shrine. When we lost the old shrine, nobody wanted to sell us land. How we got that land was that a friend of ours pretended that he was buying the land. When he had bought the land, he told them that it is Femi Kuti buying the land and they said okay, but he had already paid.
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“The next mission was to build on it before they stopped us. So, we built the shrine in about eight months. While we were building, do you know how many bags of cement they stole? We will buy 1,000 bags, then we go on tour and by the time we come back they have stolen it.
“After we built it, the first month was good then the police now came; it was raid after raid. Where was everybody then? They started to send thugs. They were sending thugs to come and that was when I now moved into Shrine. I had to train 2o security boys and we used to jog around every corner.
“We knew every corner so when the thugs attacked us, we would chase them into Agidingbi. If they attacked us and they were too much, we had someone to go to Ikeja to the old Shrine to call the boys that we knew there to come and help overpower the thugs that were sent. They don’t know all this history. They don’t care about this history.”
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