Fela Kuti — Listening as Resistance
By Rafi Mercer
Fela Kuti did not raise his voice to be heard. He slowed the room down until listening became unavoidable.
Long before his name settled into history, before Afrobeat was neatly labelled or his image fixed into poster form, Fela was doing something far more unsettling: he was paying attention. To the way soldiers walked. To how politicians spoke in circles. To the quiet accommodations people made just to survive. In 1970s Nigeria, attention itself was dangerous. To listen too closely was to notice patterns others relied on remaining unseen.
That is where Fela began.
What distinguishes Fela Kuti from so many artists described as “political” is that his work was never built on reaction. He wasn’t responding to moments; he was observing systems. His music unfolds slowly because systems move slowly. Power repeats itself. So do grooves. The length of a Fela track is not excess — it is accuracy.
Afrobeat, as Fela shaped it, is often described as a fusion: jazz horns, funk basslines, Yoruba rhythms, highlife swing. Useful, but incomplete. Afrobeat is better understood as a way of listening. It absorbs influences without rushing them into agreement. It allows friction to remain unresolved long enough for meaning to emerge.
In times of conflict, sound is usually designed to compress attention. Short slogans. Fast chants. Urgency without reflection. Fela chose the opposite path. He stretched time. He repeated phrases until they became uncomfortable. He let humour sit beside anger, boredom beside joy. In doing so, he created something rare: music that insists the listener stay.
This is why the beat matters so much in Fela’s work. It is not decoration. It is discipline. Rhythm steadies the body while the message unfolds. It keeps the listener anchored in the present — not an imagined future, not a softened past, but the lived now. You cannot skim Fela. You have to inhabit him.
Listening, for Fela, was never passive. It was investigative. He listened to authority the way a journalist listens for evasion. He listened to religion the way a sceptic listens to comfort offered too cheaply. He listened to colonial thinking lingering in everyday language. And once he heard it clearly, he reflected it back — calmly, rhythmically, without flinching.
That accuracy is what frightened power. Anger can be dismissed. Precision cannot.
When Kalakuta Republic was destroyed, when his mother was killed, when his own body was broken again and again, Fela did not abandon listening. If anything, he leaned further into it. Grief slowed the music. Grooves became heavier, almost ceremonial. These records do not ask for sympathy. They document. They remember. They refuse to let events dissolve into silence.
Looking back now, it becomes clear that Fela was not trying to fix the world overnight. He was trying to train attention. To show that sustained listening is a form of resistance — perhaps the most durable one. Governments change. Rhetoric shifts. But the ability to listen deeply, to notice what repeats beneath the noise, endures.
That is why Fela still matters.
We live in an age overflowing with opinion and starved of attention. Everyone speaks. Few listen. Music is increasingly shaped to fit distraction rather than challenge it. Against that backdrop, Fela’s work feels almost radical again — long, demanding, human. It asks for time. Presence. Patience.
And in return, it offers clarity.
Fela teaches us that the future is not shaped by shouting louder, but by listening longer. That rhythm can carry truth when words alone collapse. And that sometimes the most defiant act is simply to stay with what you hear, long enough to understand it.
To listen, as Fela did, is to refuse to look away.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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