Google the phrase “Queen of Afrobeat,” and you will likely be greeted with images of Tiwa Savage. Ms. Savage has earned every bit of that accolade—and personally, I’d rock out to “Somebody’s Son” any day of the week. In the history of Nigerian popular culture, however, the title recalls the collective who form the protagonists of Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion. The members of this collective were the working-class women behind Fela Kuti’s music and activism, and they emerged as important cultural figures in the early 1970s. In writing the first book-length study about the Queens, I challenged myself to craft refreshing narratives about the women whose underappreciated artistic work propelled Afrobeat music. Their lives as dancers and backing vocalists in Fela’s nightclub, alongside the moral controversies surrounding their sexual entanglements with him (as some of them were still in their teens), meant that Fela, alongside the “girls,” were hotly debated in the 1970s. The closest equivalent today would be going viral—except doing so for years.

Writing about the iconic Queens initially felt daunting. However, as I have long been mentored by a phenomenal Black feminist and queer scholar of performance, it felt like a doable challenge and, as I later came to realize, a gift. After years of listening to Fela Kuti’s music, miming his lyrics and instrumentation with demonic familiarity, I was determined to base my doctoral research on Afrobeat music and its corollary subculture. The bigger issue I faced was how to enter (and push the limits of) an already robust scholarly conversation about Fela Kuti’s life, activism, and discography while thoughtfully carving out a space for textured stories about women in a genre coded squarely around the mystique and celebrity of Fela. Early on, I found myself confounded by how such hyper-visible creative artists could elude serious scholarly attention for so long. Their creative work appears at first glance to have been too sullied for usable political, let alone feminist, ends. Their historical silencing also likely stems from some having taken at face value Fela’s musings in sound and rhetoric about women and gender as incontrovertible evidence of the actual women’s worth and worldview. It became quickly clear that focusing too narrowly on Fela’s music, which was high in shock value (on gender topics), proscribed a meaningful encounter with the women who defined Afrobeat. 

Queens of Afrobeat moves in the direction urged by Tejumola Olaniyan (in his critically acclaimed biography Arrest the Music) that we resist the urge to view “Fela’s women” as hapless victims or as individuals who exercised complete free will. How both things could be simultaneously true and contingent upon specific historical circumstances became a guiding principle for the conceptual and historical thrust of Queens of Afrobeat. I uncovered valuable and fitting interdisciplinary work around the concept of play as a meaningful social action. These texts explore how playing may emerge within recognized social and cultural frames, posture as anti-structural, or produce such effects. Playing almost universally induces pleasure, confers agency on the player, fosters connection, and can be both subversive and difficult to pin down. This frame also contains risk and potential for harm within its frame. There is a rich bibliography around play theory, but the four listed below proved helpful for my own analysis: 

• Achille Mbembe’s articulation of play / homo ludens in On the Postcolony
• Theatrical Jazz by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones: its exploration of play, improvisation, and Black queer community (as well as the eloquent translation of the book’s argument into a fluid, syncopated form)
• Kyra Gaunt’s Games Black Girls Play
• Benjamin Shepard’s Play, Creativity, and Social Movements

The ostensible paradox in which frivolity and indulgence may be understood as serving a vital purpose or as moving towards meaningful political ends was not only conceptually rich but also capable of facilitating fluid and dynamic readings of the pleasurable and the activist, which have manifested (sometimes simultaneously) in the Queens’ Afrobeat work. As forms of embodied behavior that shape and construct reality, play—and the notion of “serious play” specifically—has been proven to be useful for interpreting a wide range of aesthetic and everyday acts, from improvised solo dancing and backup singing onstage to experiments with design in facial makeup and yabis, Afrobeat’s practice of jocular verbal abuse (as in “roasting”). Anything less than a frame that absorbs pleasure, risk, agency, harm, and subversion while holding these renegade impulses in generative tension, would fail to do justice to the complex lives led by successive generations of women who worked to give Fela’s music its pulse. Below is a partial sketch of three categories of texts and scholarly works to which I repeatedly returned in my efforts to scaffold the narratives of women in Afrobeat over multiple decades. 

Queens of Afrobeat engages a panoply of African/Black feminist scholars and texts on African/Black women’s craft and creativity, spanning more recent writings to feminist classics such as Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women; Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Nina Mba’s For Women and the Nation; Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought; Mary Modupe Kolawole’s Womanism and African Consciousness; and Ama Ata Aidoo’s essay, “To Be an African Woman Writer: An Overview and a Detail.” Abosede George’s Making Modern Girls, a book on the historical contestations over the meanings and boundaries of girlhood in late colonial Nigeria, and Ayo Coly’s “Un/clothing African Womanhood” were particularly insightful. Other texts about women’s labor and presence as dancers in popular dance music bands were equally generative: these include Msia Kibona Clark’s Hip-Hop in Africa, especially its chapter on gender and sexuality in African hip-hop; Achille Mbembe’s “Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds,” and Lesley Nicole Braun’s “The Artistry of Kinshasa’s Concert Danseuses.”

One of the book’s tasks was to attend to the erasure of Afrobeat women’s robust contribution to the formation, development, and proliferation of the music as well as to youth activism in the throes of military autocracy. Their lifework should, therefore, be understood not simply through the narrow framework of their contribution to popular culture and the emergence of an important subculture (even though this is true) but also in terms of the contradictory outcomes of their efforts at expanding the terrain of women’s visibility and representation in the ever-dwindling access to citizenship in the wake of Nigeria’s independence. Therefore, Fela and his music can be understood as imperfect conduits for the women’s personal and political desires. We may also understand their work in the vein of the throbbing creative activism of youth collectives under the weight of authoritarianism—collectives whose vibrancy made them prime targets when the apparatus of state power was put to diabolical use. My sensibility was primed to the ways that these women artists put their voices, bodies, and creative acts into surfacing the palpable and sometimes elusive violence that permeated their everyday lives decades ago and that still saturates Nigerian life today. The state was, however, not the only target of their riposte; they also levied critiques against the organization of everyday life within the Fela-led commune, Kalakuta Republic, including how the women’s domestic and artistic labors unfolded in an organization for which they received only marginal rewards. Therefore, Queens of Afrobeat necessarily takes a multivalent interpretation of power that weaves the patriarchy of the state with that of the commune, wedging open the precious interstices within which the women made art. 

When I sat down to interview some of the surviving Queens alongside other women who worked closely with Fela, it was clear that the book’s perspectives on power needed to be nimble and honest. Performance ethnography scholars were especially helpful in pursuing an approach that, as D. Soyini Madison writes, simultaneously gives ventilation to suppressed voices and brings “to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control.” The works of Dwight Conquergood, E. Patrick Johnson, Amber Johnson, and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones was instrumental in articulating an ethnographic practice that centers the stories and perspectives of the previously marginalized. Reading Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History during my early articulations of the project felt empowering; the author emphasizes how the narratives that we produce about the past (be it as historians or as ethnographers attentive to history) are very much operations of power—fields of knowledge production that are open to contestation. If it is true that history is the field upon which contestations over evidence and narrative are borne out, then there had to be more to the lives of the Queens than has been permitted into Afrobeat historical discourse. The revelations I gleaned from Trouillot’s text (and others like it) were at once humbling and monumental.

A cadre of texts in what we may say belongs to the subfield of “Afrobeat studies” were instrumental in putting together the pieces necessary to paint a robust picture of creativity, survival, pleasure, trauma, girlhood, hedonistic adventure, collaboration, and sisterhood. While women have occupied the margins of nearly every major book and film about Fela and Afrobeat music, the fragments of their presence, when pieced together, contain dynamic stories bubbling just beneath the surface. In Queens of Afrobeat, I stitched together these fragments of the women’s presence in extant media: a passing mention here, a fleeting appearance there, a photograph here, a biographical snippet somewhere. I hope the book paints vibrant portraits of the lives of individual women, of the collective, and of the historical happenings in which women always were protagonists. In addition to Fela: This Bitch of a Life by Carlos Moore, a defining text in Afrobeat historiography, below are key texts from which I drew some of the most spirited fragments:

• Michael Veal, Fela: Life and Times of an African Musical Icon
• Tony Allen and Michael Veal, Tony Allen: An Autobiography of the Master Drummer of Afrobeat
• Tejumola Olaniyan, Arrest the Music!
• Sola Olorunyomi, Afrobeat!: Fela and the Imagined Continent
• Majemite Jaboro, The Ikoyi Prison Narratives
• Mabinuori Kayode Idowu, Fela: Phenomenon and Legacy
• Two essays: LaRay Denzer, “Fela, Women, Wives” and Vivien Goldman’s “Afrobeat Aesthetic and the Dancing Queens”
• Four documentary films: Fela Kuti: Music Is the Weapon by Stéphane Tchalgadjieff and Jean Jacques Flori; Ginger Baker in Africa; Konkombe: The Nigerian Pop Music Scene;  and Finding Fela by Alex Gibney

I always wanted to write an easy-to-read book—one that is accessible not only in the clarity of its arguments but also in its language and narrative form. I am most proud that I embraced the opportunity to write Queens of Afrobeat as both a critical-historical text and, hopefully, as a compendium of absorbing stories. Stories about the Queens as historical figures and as living, breathing contemporary actors. Stories about familiar events told in a slightly different register. Stories about my circuitous, serendipitous search for the legendary women. Ultimately, whether Queens of Afrobeat is picked up by an Afrobeat aficionado, a feminist scholar, or an “Afrobeats” fan who mistook the text for a biography of Tiwa Savage, I hope that each reader finds pleasure from reading a women’s history of Nigerian popular music or a bustling ethnography about the intriguing lives of women who have bided their time in the margins of history.