At 60, Yeni Anikulapo-Kuti, a dancer, businesswoman, media personality and the first child of Fela, the Afrobeat Legend, is arguably one of the sassiest women of her generation. She is a co-host on the breakfast show YOUR VIEW on TVC. Raised by a maverick father who was once married to 30 wives, Yeni has fast become a reference point in coordinating a blended family comprising five surviving children and some loyal ‘Kalakuta queens.’ Upon her father’s death on August 2, 1997, YK, as she is fondly called, took on the mantle of uniting the family and immortalising her father’s music legacy by instituting the annual week-long music festival Felabration. A vivacious grandmother who turns 60 on May 24, Yeni recounts her story of self-determinism, single motherhood, trauma, perseverance, and tolerance in this interview with Yinka Olatunbosun
Being 60 is a milestone for Nigerians, especially for professionals in show business. It also came with a different reality for Yeni Anikulapo-Kuti, whose father died at 59. In her younger years, Yeni was a dancer with her father’s band and later joined the Positive Force- her brother’s band in 1986. She retired almost two decades later but remains inseparable from her brother.
“To be 60, I don’t feel much different from when I was 50,” she began. “I feel a lot different from when I was 21 and when I was 30 and 40. The difference between 50 and 60 is not that much except for more bones hurting than when I was 50. When I was 50, I didn’t have ankle pain, but now I have ankle pain. The pains are increasing with age. For me, it is really exciting. I was driving here today, and I was thinking, wow! I am going to be 60.”
“Sixty is the age that a lot of people retire and use drivers. I was just thinking to myself that very soon, I may not be able to drive myself. Let me just make use of my ability to drive and feel young. I call 60 the young age of old age. We are the babies of old age. Fifty is the ‘agbalagba’ of youth,” she said in her usual bubbly self.
Dancing was an unpopular profession at the time she ventured into it. Even though she had trained as a journalist at the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, she loved the stage and was even happier knowing she was dancing with her family members. But that doesn’t mean she was oblivious of the public perception of dance at the period.
“It wasn’t easy. People say ‘dancer’ with derogatory tones. I just love to be proud of who I was and what I wanted to do. I wouldn’t let anybody judge me. As long as I am not begging anyone for money and I am making my own money and earning my respect. We (myself and my sister) just weathered the storm. I am happy to see that dance has become a recognised profession in Nigeria. I look at myself as one of the forerunners and flagbearers of dance. With due respect, I mustn’t forget Tessy. She died last year, and she was quite big in her time. She danced for Shina Peters, and she was an inspiration to me as well. I am still dancing. I can still move, and I can still shake if I want to. I wouldn’t dance on stage anymore because the other girls are much younger than I am, and there is no way I can have that same energy. All the pains I told you about are there. Also, there is a time in your life where you make way for the younger people to take up the mantle. What I can do is to do a few dances here and there but not professionally,” she said.
As the eldest child of Abami Eda, her responsibility is huge owing to the generational legacy that trails her consciousness. Apart from music, her family members are renowned human rights activists. Her grandmother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a women’s suffrage activist documented as the first woman to drive a car in Nigeria. Yeni’s ease at wheels in a busy city has some maternal genesis. Very likely, too, her leadership streak may have been cultivated firsthand from her father in the way he led his commune and the band.
It is an unusual turf for a woman to take a prominent lead in a Yoruba household because, according to tradition, the first male child is naturally bequeathed with such a role. Yeni thinks her family shares a realistic point of view in this regard.
“That doesn’t happen in my family. All of them give me that respect as the eldest. I think it happened naturally. Starting from Femi, who gave me the respect that is due, the rest just followed. I am there for all of them. They can call me. Sometimes, we quarrel, but they give me that respect. And when it comes to the inheritance, I don’t cheat them. Everyone takes equal share. I won’t say because I am the most senior, then I should take the lion’s share. No, I don’t do that,” she said.
Panning away from her matriarchal role, she reminisced on her life as a divorced mother raising her daughter, Rolari. She explained why her only child did not continue in the music business like others in the family.
“First and foremost, when my daughter was growing up, I was broke. I couldn’t afford piano lessons for her. I would have really loved her to learn the piano, and I remember stopping at a school to ask how much it would cost, and I simply turned away. I would have loved her to play the piano. It was tough, and at that time, I had to pay for her school fees. Her father supported me, but then it was not easy. I couldn’t afford to buy a new car because I saved all my money towards her university and my daughter was so fixated on going to England for her education. But, my daughter draws very well. She is a very good artist. So I used to beg her to do the arts and bring some money to the family. But she did Computer Science. She has started developing her love for arts. But I don’t think that she has much interest in the arts. I am not the kind of person that will force you to do what you don’t want to do,” she explained.
She also recalled how Made and her other cousins, with whom they grew up together, enjoyed music lessons and how she never really showed any interest in joining them. Instead, she pursued her studies in Computer science even though art runs in the family. Yeni’s former mother-in-law, Mabel Segun, is a leading poet who still keeps a picture of Yeni, her daughter Rolari and grandchildren. For Yeni, the family bond is everything, and even if the marriage didn’t work out, she didn’t disconnect totally from her now 91-year-old mother-in-law after her son, Yeni’s ex-husband, died some years ago.
Whilst discussing other areas of life where tolerance is important, she narrated her experience on how many Africans still disparage others for their choice of religion. She described herself as a free thinker and a believer in the African religion but still open to attending church services.
“I really don’t like talking about religion because it is very controversial, and everyone is entitled to his or her own religion. Like I say, here again, tolerance — if you are a Christian or a Muslim, I am not going to hate you or disparage you. I will only tell you why I think the way I do. I really hate it when I say I believe in the African religion, and people say you are juju people. Believing in African religion doesn’t mean you are a juju person. African religion does not mean you are a witch doctor,” she explained.
Having lived for six decades, it is inevitable that she would like to rewrite some moments in those years if possible. Though she has no regret, she sees mistakes as opportunities to gain experience. But the trauma of the loss of her sister, Sola, would remain indelible in her mind.
“My sister’s death was the most traumatic thing that had happened to me. Growing up, we were close in age. I am 60, Femi is 59, and she would have been 58. We were all close in age, and I didn’t believe that she would die so young. I am sad about her death. I wished things had worked out differently, but they didn’t. We have to move on from there. But that doesn’t stop me from missing her or wishing that she were alive. Yesterday, I was going through my pictures. And I came across pictures of her, and I felt really sad,” Yeni said as she was moved to tears. After fetching some tissue paper to wipe her tears, she added, “I miss her.”
Yeni linked her sister’s death to the failure of the Nigerian health system. She finds it worrisome that despite its nagging problems, not much had changed since her sister died. Yeni insisted that the healthcare delivery needs to be revamped and all healthcare workers retrained to treat patients as humans. She recounted how own distressing experiencing.
“While pregnant, I didn’t miss antenatal sessions. At 38 weeks, I was told that the baby’s head was engaged. She came really late at 41 weeks. Then I got to the hospital. I was in labour. But I was told to lie down. I am the kind of person that can endure a lot of pain. So, I didn’t make noise while in labour. I kept quiet. Because I wasn’t shouting, I was there from 9 pm till 9 am. I gave birth at 9 am, and they gave me a caesarian section after I had been in pain for 12 hours. This was a private hospital. The nurse did not attend to me. When I was in pain, I was crawling to the bathroom. She would just say, ‘Eeya! Pele! Sorry!’ She didn’t call the doctor. She even said the doctor was sleeping – a doctor that was on call. It was until my mother called the son of the owner of the hospital that the doctor rushed in. I was five fingers dilated. My baby was breached. But she had not checked me. The doctor was furious,” Yeni recalled.
She compared her experience with her daughter’s own in the UK, which she was privileged to witness at NHS, and urged governments in Africa to improve on this current situation.
“Then, I remember my own experience, and I thought, ‘we have a long way to go.’ The mortality rate is so high here. You will go to a hospital, and you’d see dead mothers wheeled out of the wards. The child would survive, but the mother would have died. I realise that in England if you are going to die, it is your time. In Nigeria, whether it is your time or not, you’d go. I thought, ‘When are we going to be like this in Africa?’ The only thing I can do is to go on ‘Your View’ and talk about it. We need to change the narrative in Africa,” she said, with a look of pain etched on her eyebrows.
As someone from a family of activists, she had firsthand experience of how fighting against an oppressive system can impact one’s family financially, physically, and emotionally. But did she think this is the way Nigeria would be by the time she turns 60?
“No. When I look back at Nigeria then, Nigeria was 1,000 times better than it is today. As a child, how can I believe that Nigeria was going to be like this? We had military, and later civilians, and those ones chop, chop, chop and passed it to the military. It is just ‘football’ government. Fela had one song that he never released till he died with that title, ‘Football government.’ It is just like that. When I was a child, the naira was 60 kobo to one dollar. Today, it is N477 to one dollar. We were not rich people. So I didn’t go on vacation abroad. I remember when I told Fela I wanted to go for summer in England, Fela damned me. So, I went to England for the first time in my life, when I was 21. My mother bought the ticket for me as a gift. I changed money. I changed N500 to £498. The first car my mother bought was a Beetle brand new for N3,000, which was £2,800.
“That is why I really hate it when one person who has been president maybe some 10 years ago come and start criticising the present government. I would think they did not fare any better while they were there. They are all trailing a bad system, so there is no exception. All leaders are to blame. They should stop throwing shades. They should beat themselves and say, ‘we are all useless leaders.’ I can’t believe that Nigeria is even worse than when I was 21 and even 13. I can’t believe that there is so much insecurity. I never thought it would be this bad – total mismanagement,” she said.
If there is any child of Fela who has the same fashion gene as the Abami Eda, it is Yeni. She often sports clothing and accessories with the same colour theme. She even had a stint as a fashion designer before embracing dance as a full-time practice. Dance paid off as it keeps her fit, camera-ready with a pulsating sex appeal. Unsure about throwing any party for her 60th birthday on May 24, she had contemplated travelling to a quiet place, but with the travel restrictions occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic, whatever celebration plan is low-key. Besides, she is weighing the cost of a birthday bash against her budget for a new car.
Many who had worked for or just encountered her father had written books and held lectures on their experiences. Still, Yeni is yet to write any memoir on her childhood with Fela. After prodding her for some hilarious chronicles, she remarked that she would rather do such in collaboration with her brother.
“Fela was a very hilarious person. People may not know that side of him except those who came to watch his shows then. Femi tells people some of these stories. We would roll in laughter. I wish to have a tape where we could record all those. Maybe one day, Femi and I would tell our story. It is just different aspects of our life. I am trying to think of when Fela took the coffin to Dodan Barracks, but no one knows the build-up to that. On the way there, they met one serious traffic on Eko bridge. There was a checkpoint there mounted to stop Fela. So, they were checking every car. Fela has passed Iddo to Ebute Metta and made it to Dodan Barracks. He caught them off guard because they thought he would have been arrested on the way. Fela and his people brought out the coffin and dropped it. The soldiers surrounded the bus and started to shake the bus. Fela said he would not carry any coffin, and so he came down. They started to beat Fela. Fela now held the commandant tightly, and when they were beating Fela, they were beating the commandant too. So as they were beating Fela, part of it would hit the commandant too,” she said, laughing really hard at the memory.
Meanwhile, the remaining people on the bus, including band boys and the backup singers known as the ‘Queens,’ were beaten. The soldiers reportedly formed a line all the way to the guardroom, and each soldier thrashed each passenger that disembarked from the Fela bus. Femi was the first to disembark from the bus after Fela.
“They beat him till he got to the guardroom. When he got there, he saw Fela laughing, and he asked his son, “They beat you?” Abdul (a journalist) was there too. He was beaten too. Before then, soldiers had been beating Fela. But this time, Fela carried himself to their ‘doormot’ to go and collect beating.
“Meanwhile, it was three days before Obasanjo would hand over to Shagari, so what they did was to lock all of them up in that police station on Awolowo Road, Ikoyi. They didn’t give them food. We went to see them, but they didn’t let us enter. They were chanting, ‘We are hungry oh! We are hungry!’ Fela would say, ‘Continue singing.’ Then they gave them watery rice. On the day after the handover, they put all of them in a Black Maria and took them to court. It was very stuffy inside the Black Maria. They didn’t want Fela to disrupt Obasanjo’s handover to Shagari. But they later released all of them,” she narrated.
Although unmarried at 60, Yeni is full of life and zest. In her view, many women have allowed themselves to be sucked in by societal pressure to get married, thereby missing out on great opportunities. While reflecting on the toxic nature of many marriages today, she encouraged people to make decisions based on the right motives.
“I don’t think people should be judged by their marital status. I was married before. I was very unhappily married. Na so I carry my bag comot and my baby’s bag. There was nothing that people did not tell me to convince me to go back, but I wasn’t happy there. I didn’t believe that should define me. I am in a relationship now, but we are not married – we are partners. I am happy as I am. I even believe that perhaps if we had married, we would have fought and maybe divorced by now. I went from my parents’ house to my husband’s house, and I had not experienced life. I was not a tolerant person at that time. Maybe if I had married a bit later, I would have been able to tolerate him, and I am not saying he was not the right person. I think we were too young,” she said.
