Baba Ani, 90, spent 32 years playing with Fela Kuti. Here’s why he still misses the Afrobeat legend and what he remembers about their last moments together.
Some friendships don’t fade, even when one person has been gone for almost 30 years. Just ask Baba Ani.
At 90, the veteran musician still lights up when he talks about Fela Kuti. He spent 32 years beside the Afrobeat king, and this week he opened up about it in an interview with the Podcast Network. The big thing he wants people to know? Fela wasn’t just his boss. He was family.
Asked who he misses most from those golden days, Baba Ani didn’t have to think. It was Fela. After that, he named other people he shared the stage with, like YS and Tony Allen.
So why Fela? It comes down to trust. Baba Ani says Fela believed in him and, in his words, “he took me in as a senior brother, not as an employee.”
That’s a soft side of a man most people remember as fiery and larger than life. And it’s not something we often hear.
Here’s the part that might catch you off guard. There was no big quarrel between them. The last time Baba Ani saw Fela was when he was taken to hospital in his final days. After that, it just ended.
Three decades of music and friendship, and it stopped that suddenly. You can almost understand why the loss still sits with him.
Ask him to pick a favourite Fela song and he can’t do it. He says there isn’t one of them he doesn’t like. Honestly, that sounds like a lot of Fela fans.
Baba Ani wasn’t a bystander in all this. He played through two of the biggest chapters in Fela’s career.
The Africa 70 band, which came together in the late 1960s, helped shape Afrobeat itself. It mixed traditional Yoruba music with jazz, funk and lyrics that didn’t shy away from politics. In 1979, the Egypt 80 took over as a bigger ensemble and kept that energy going.
Baba Ani was there for both. He shared stages and studios with Tony Allen, widely seen as a co-creator of Afrobeat, and with musicians like YS, Ego and Kofi.
Fela died on August 2, 1997, at 58. His son, Femi Kuti, announced it, and mourners came from all over Nigeria and beyond.
Nearly 30 years on, Baba Ani is one of the last living links to that era. When people like him speak, we’re not just getting music history. We’re getting the human side of it.
And maybe that’s the sweetest part. After all those stages, all that fame and all those songs, what he holds onto most is simple. Fela treated him like a brother.
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