“You can’t drink Fanta.” You’ve Got to Smoke Marijuana: Artist Fela Kuti Recalls Their Wild Collaboration | Art and design

There were flames everywhere. Soldiers carrying military rifles were dragging people into the streets, dazed, naked and bleeding. No one knew if Villa was still inside the burning building.

Lemmy Garioko paused. In most of our video calls, the 70-year-old happily relives his years as a friend and confidant of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer whose legacy was recently celebrated with a high-profile podcast produced by the Obamas and a career-spanning film set, The Best of the Black President, conceived by Garioko.

However, his mood darkened when he recalled the authorities’ attack on Kuti’s headquarters in Lagos, Republic of Kalakuta, on February 18, 1977. For years, tensions had simmered between Kuti and the Nigerian military junta, with the singer/band leader chronicling injustice and corruption in recordings including Zombie, Expensive Shit and No Covenant. But the destruction of Kalakuta marked a tragic turning point in the Kotte struggle against the government. It also led to the disintegration of his friendship with Garioko.

Garioko had first crossed the threshold of Kalakuta three years earlier as an 18-year-old engineering student, accompanied by Kuti’s journalist friend Babatunde Harrison, who had discovered Garioko’s portrait of Bruce Lee hanging in a Lagos bar and deemed him skilled enough to illustrate the sleeves of the musician’s album. As he waited for his meeting with the Black Chief, in the middle of a nap, Garioko took in his surroundings. Gifted the city of Kalakuta from his mother, the revered African activist, Funmilayo Ransom-Kuti, Kuti redesigned it into a fiefdom for his followers, complete with a recording studio and swimming pool. “Calcutta was already notorious for the villa lifestyle; young men from all over the neighborhood would flee to live there. There were scantily clad women everywhere.”

When Kuti finally woke up, he handed Garioko a photo of himself that Harrison had requested. “Vela was groggy, his eyes were bloodshot, and he was wearing only his underpants, which were hanging down so that all his pubic hair was visible. I was frightened. He looked at the picture and said: ‘Awesome.’ the curse.’ He wrote me a check for 120 naira, four times what I was charging for a selfie. But my soul told me: Don’t take the money. I told him it was a gift from the bottom of my heart, and he smiled and wrote me an entry pass to visit Calcutta whenever I wanted. “It was a ticket to my fate.”

They met again two weeks later, after police raided Kalakuta for the first time and Kutty was taken to hospital with a head wound. “The room was packed,” Garioko recalls. If their previous encounter had introduced him to the star, now he saw the steel beneath the playboy’s glamor. With a police guard at the door, Vella spoke loudly about how the authorities had found it so easy to get into Kalakuta. “I’ll electrify the fence, so next time they’ll be shocked and say: ‘This guy’s crazy!’ “I will write a song to make fun of the police.” Then he saw me and called me. “The artist!”

Kuti commissioned Garioko to illustrate the cover of his next release, Alagbon Close, which protested the regime’s dehumanization of the Nigerian people. “Alagbon Close Restaurant was where Fela became a rebel against the regime,” says Garioko. “I did not simply illustrate the words – my drawings were more metaphysical. I depicted Fela emerging from prison, in a ceremonial pose, chains broken, and a victory sign drawn on the Calcutta wall because he had triumphed over the evil police. When Fela saw it, he said again: ‘Wonderful.’” the curse.’ But I cashed the check this time.

Kuti took the artist under his wing. “I was already a Pan-Africanist,” Garioko says. “But Fela taught me a lot. He gave me books on African history, George J. M. James’s The Stolen Legacy, Joseph Ben Jocannon’s Africa: Mother of Western Civilization, and The Autobiography of Malcolm

Kuti also wanted to open Gariukwu’s mind to the powers of marijuana, but the teetotal artist was hesitant. “Some of the 80 or so people living in Kalakuta were simply rolling boards,” he recalls. “But I always refused. I took Fanta instead.” However, when Garioko was commissioned for the second cover for his 1975 album No Bread, Kuti said: “How can my artist drink Fanta? You have to smoke.” igbo“, to straighten your head.” “He was a hero to me, a demigod, so I said, ‘Okay,’” Garioko adds.

Kutty would have his cooks heat marijuana until it produced its oil, package it and store it in his bedroom. “It was very Strong. He put a drop on the end of the spoon for me to lick off. Within 30 minutes, I was extremely hungry and had this floating feeling. I went to the bathroom, and I could see my digestive tract like the plumbing of a house, and urine was traveling through the tubes inside my body. “I told Fela and his friends, and they all laughed at me.”

Later that day, Kuti realized that Garioko needed to go home. “He drove us in his Range Rover, and when we got to my parents’ house, the kids in the street were screaming: ‘Fella! Villa!” When I got out of the car, he hissed: When you get in, no talk to your parents, no Answer any questions – just say “goodnight” and go to sleep. But when you sleep, contemplate the work of art. I woke up at noon the next day. Thoughts were flooding my mind. I forced as many as I could.”

The cover of “No Bread” carried a wealth of images and metaphors: men fighting over food and money, women exposing their breasts, mice wearing sunglasses, empty gas pumps, and a balloon labeled “Mr. Inflation in the City.”

“When Villa saw it, he jumped for joy, and shouted: ‘See?’ As I always should have smoked marijuana. But I can’t handle intoxicants. So I analyzed the inspiration I got from that high and have used it as my composing style ever since.”

Garioko remained teetotal, but his work continued to develop over the next several years. On biting satirical sleeves like Ikoyi Blindness (mocking a lawyer from the affluent Ikoyi neighborhood), Yellow Fever (naked African women using skin bleach), and Upside Down (colonial developers invade while children starve), Ghariokwu created a visual identity as unique as Pedro Bell’s work for Funkadelic. “Fela treated me like one of his own children and always received my work with a ‘wow’. the curse.“And if he was particularly impressed, ‘Motherfucker.'” I was his youngest advisor, his comrade-in-arms. With two other friends I formed Kalakuta’s political youth wing, the Young African Pioneers. Fela could no longer use public transport, so we told him what was happening in the city, and that was the inspiration for his songs.

Garioko was at home when a neighbor told him that Kalakuta was on fire. He raced to the complex. “The raid was already in full swing. The police had caught Fela’s mother. I didn’t see her fall out of the window.” Suspecting that Kutty was hiding in a nearby warehouse, soldiers arrested the owner. “They cut off his finger with a cleaver, and he immediately confessed. They quickly dragged Fela into the street, naked and bleeding. They opened his bodyguard’s stomach with bayonets, and his intestines came out. Fela saw me and whispered: ‘Bring my lawyer.'”

Kutty went on to sue the government for $1.6 million, and rebuilt Kalakuta and his nightclub, which had also been demolished by soldiers, a block away. But Funmilayo never recovered from being thrown from the second floor window. “Losing his mother was a huge shock to Fela,” says Gariukwu. “On the coffin of the head of state, he sings: ‘They killed my mother, they killed my mother.’ And he was crying his soul out. He felt extremely guilty: ‘If it weren’t for my troubles, she would still be alive.’ And he was never the same after that.”

Garioko and Kuti disagreed over how to proceed in the aftermath of the raid. “We had to be diplomatic, we had to sit down and negotiate,” Garioko says. “Vela was having none of that and my loyalty was in doubt.” When he drew a young African man in denim and flats falling from a plane on the cover of Johnny Just Drop, which mocked Africans in the diaspora who believe they are superior to their compatriots, Kuti scrapped the cover (“I don’t want it to look like I’m attacking young people”) and asked Garioko to draw an old bourgeois man with an umbrella instead. This was the first time Kuti told him what to draw. Against his boss’s wishes, Garioko had the label manufacture an expensive gatefold cover with Kuti’s favored image on the front, and the rejected image on the back. “He was very angry,” he laughs. “You hit me below the belt!” I ran. The next day he calmed down.

But then Kuti rejected Garioko’s next cover, for Sorrow, Tears and Blood. “Fella broke my heart,” says the artist, who has always had “100% freedom” working for Coty. Ghariokwo left Kalakuta, went on to complete over 2,000 album covers for other musicians, and pursued a career in the fine arts. After a decade of their falling out, he reconciled with Kutty, and worked on several more sleeves before the black president succumbed to AIDS in 1997.

“Our collaboration has been great,” he says now, proud of how Kuti’s music – and his album artwork – has helped spread African culture across the rest of the world. “A journalist once asked me if I was bored of being constantly associated with Fela, of living in his shadow,” he smiles. “But Fela comes from the lineage of Webb Du Bois, Malcolm