Happy Birthday, Fela Kuti

1. You are very famous, but at the same time it feels like you are not famous enough.
2. For instance, on the Wikipedia page for the 15^th October, we find the following information regarding births, deaths, holidays, and “events.”
3. Born: your fellow Libra Kings Virgil, Foucault and Nietzsche.
4. Died: Mata Hari and Thomas Sankara.
5. Events: trial of Marie Antoinette, arrest of Alfred Dreyfus, creation of the Black Panthers.
6. Holidays: “Global Handwashing Day.”
7. Lots of other people were born and died, and many other events occurred, obviously, but these are the ones that stand out to me on this very long and comprehensive-seeming list. A lot of important stuff on happened on the 15^th October, which is fitting, because it is a famous-sounding date.
8. You know who is not on this list though, anywhere? You.
9. A truly stunning oversight, one which might have been a genuine mistake, seeing as there is an entry for you on the 2^nd of August, the day you died.
10. Sorry if this is boring, or if it seems like I am insinuating that you would care even slightly about being on a Wikipedia list of any description.
11. I am not and I would never.
12. I am merely interested in the space you occupy today, and the way you are discussed.
13. As I have said, you are extremely famous, but at the same time there are many people who don’t really know what to do with you. They want to talk about you but they don’t know how.
14. For instance, a recent article in the New Yorker referred to you as “a funk-obsessed firebrand,” which, hmmm.
15. “Funk-obsessed.”
16. Makes it sound like you had some kind of problem. Like a pathology centring around your uncontrollable fixation on funk music.
17. You were an exceptionally controversial figure in many respects, and your legacy is complex, and you did indeed have some quite serious problems, but being “funk-obsessed” was not one of them, surely.
18. Seems like an incredibly weird choice of words with which to sum up one of the most influential musicians who ever lived.
19. But this is how it goes with you, sometimes, in some places.
20. Kanye West pronounced your name in an extremely weird way on Instagram yesterday, to the extent that it took me a while to work out what he was even saying.
21. Maybe all Americans say it like that, I don’t know.
22. I probably would know if they did it more often.
23. You would have been 80 today.
24. Happy Birthday.

Rosa Lyster