Queens of Afrobeat

"That Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti was a man of profound contradiction is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the lives of his collaborators, the Queens. These women—so crucial to Fela's success and arguably the "engines" of Afrobeat style and sound itself—were nevertheless consistently upstaged and disenfranchised from an empire they helped to build. In this book, Dotun Ayobade takes us backstage, back in time, and out into the community in search of the Queens' stories. Insightfully argued, rigorously researched, and lyrically written, Queens of Afrobeat portrays the creative contributions and personal hardships endured by these remarkable women as they navigated the charged geopolitics of intimacy and performed as savvy cultural managers within an unequal and highly gendered field."

~Catherine M. Cole, University of Washington  

"Of all the African musical innovators of the post-independence era, Fela Kuti was the one whose art was most strongly and explicitly predicted on the erotic. Until now, however, no writer has given full voice to Fela's queens, the female partners who helped him transmute the erotic impulse into sonic, political, spiritual, and philosophical forms of power. Dotun Ayobade's landmark study is thus a long-overdue corrective that gives the queens their rightful acknowledgment as crucial collaborators in one of the most revolutionary musical episodes in Africa's post-independence history."

~Michael E. Veal - Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music, Yale University

"This book rocks! In lyrical prose, Dotun Ayobade brilliantly composes the much-awaited feminist account of the life, times, troubles, and triumphs of the women artists of Kalakuta Republic. Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti's Music Rebellion unearths their significant contributions despite their precarious positioning, sandwiched between the everyday male dominance of Fela's establishment and the brutal jackboot patriarchy of the military state. Reading the Nigerian Republic from the audacious experiment that was Kalakuta Republic, and the experiences of these female citizens, reveals much about the fragility of existence in a postcolonial state. By focusing skillfully on their performances, onstage, offstage, and in between, this treatise overturns, once and for all, the erasure and gender eclipse that has been their lot in the scholarship on Fela Kuti and Afrobeat. This is essential reading."

~Oyèrónke Oyěwùmí, author of The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses