Once upon a time, in Abeokuta, Nigeria, there was a child with a name too long to fit in the heavenly registers: Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti. He was the son of a Protestant pastor and a mother who protested more than all the pastors put together.

A lion does not give birth to a goat, says a Yoruba proverb. And Fela was born into a family of lions: the Ransome-Kutis, “the Kennedys of Nigeria”.

His grandfather preached, his father taught.

His mother, Funmilayo, was one of those women who don't wait for history to knock on their door: they break it down. Funmilayo, the matriarch, was a feminist ahead of her time, a thorn in the side of the British colonialists. Fela inherited her fire, transformed it into sound and soon learned that music and rebellion are born of the same beat.

As a child, he conducted choirs, caressed pianos and beat drums. Then one day he announced, with the conviction of a saint departing, that he was going to London to study medicine. But his body already knew the truth: his heart did not want to heal people, it wanted to make them dance — and perhaps wake them up. So he enrolled at Trinity College of Music, where he learned the classical language of white people and translated it into the jazz of the poor.

In the 1960s, Fela formed a band with a name that sounded like a tropical joke: Koola Lobitos. Then came Afrika 70 and Egypt 80, and Afrobeat, a word that alone was enough to make imperialism sweat. He had decided that no white man would write his story, and in fact he wrote it himself, with saxophone and truth.

Afrobeat was the sound of a continent seeking a voice: a mixture of funk, jazz, Yoruba, calypso and boldness, a rhythmic cry that lasted fifteen minutes, or an hour, or however long it took to make it clear that Africa was no longer silent. His 1969 Afrobeat album, The '69 Los Angeles Sessions, was the thunder that woke Africa from its colonial slumber. Since then, his rhythm has taken on a thousand passports: from Brazil to Japan, every time an Afrobeat band strikes the first note, somewhere a Yoruba deity starts dancing. Even modern Afrobeats, those with the final “s” and glossy production, owe him a debt: every golden beat comes from one of his scratches.

Fela sang in Pidgin English and Yoruba, languages that smelled of the street and truth. In his lyrics, he slapped corruption, greed and blind obedience in the face. With “Zombie”, he ridiculed soldiers who carried out orders without thinking, and with “V.I.P. (Vagabonds in Power)”, he invited people to rebel against the vampires in suits and ties. When he released “Beasts of No Nation” in 1989, the cover featured Thatcher and Reagan drawn as vampires with bloody fangs: Fela was not afraid of monsters, because monsters were afraid of music.

But the price of freedom in Nigeria is paid in baton blows.

Fela was arrested two hundred times, beaten, tortured and humiliated. Before the military killed his beloved mother and destroyed his life, he was shooting an autobiographical film, The Black President.

Fela wrote, acted and directed: he wanted to tell his story, but in reality he was building a monument to all Africans who had no voice.

He carried the map of pain on his body, but also that of resistance. Every scar was a note, every prison a new verse. He wrote, played and shouted, and Africa listened to him dancing, because dancing is the most serious way to survive. Because there is not only Fela the artist, there is also and above all the man, theatrical, contradictory, brilliant. The man who married 27 women in a single ceremony and then divorced them all, as if marriage, for him, were just another form of imprisonment, the man who gave interviews in his underwear while smoking weed, who laughed at himself and the world.

“Expensive Shit”, one of his most famous songs, was born when the police tried to arrest him for marijuana possession and he swallowed it to hide the evidence. They waited hours for the evidence to leave his body; he wrote a song.

He produced more than seventy albums, some signed Sodi, others the offspring of African nights where there was no electricity but plenty of soul.

He had three children with his first wife, Remi: Femi, Yeni and Sola. All musicians, all condemned to the same legacy: to play as they breathe. Sola died shortly after him, of cancer, almost as if to follow him into the eternal jam session that Fela had already begun on 2 August 1997, in Lagos, when AIDS took him away.

That day, a million people took to the streets. His funeral was a never-ending concert: drums, tears, dancing and the silence of those who understood that not only a man had passed away, but a revolution in four-four time.

Today, in Ikeja, in his home in Kalakuta, there is his tomb. But those who listen to Africa at night know that, somewhere between the generators and the humid sky, you can still hear a voice saying, laughing:

“Music doesn't change the world. But it lets the world know that it's playing the wrong beat.”

That is why Fela is called a prophet: because he had already played the future, and the future has not yet caught up with him.

Yes, because almost thirty years after his death, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is more alive than ever.

The “Black President”, as he liked to call himself, has never ceased to occupy space, much more so in Europe and the United States than in his native Nigeria. He is encountered in London museums more than on the streets of Lagos, in the banlieues of Paris and the favelas of Brazil, like an African deity who has found a home in the turntables of the world. Wherever there is talk of freedom, rhythm and resistance, his spirit is there, with a lit cigarette and a defiant smile.

His vinyls have been reissued in more colours than he ever wore, documentaries have been made, and even a musical has been staged. Everyone, in different ways, tries to grasp him. No one succeeds: Fela cannot be grasped, he can only be listened to and, at most, danced to.

Today in Nigeria, he is celebrated in the Felabration festivals. Each generation rediscovers him, and each time it seems like hearing the same truth for the first time: freedom is not a word, it is a rhythm.

Fela created his own myth, and then he died, leaving us the score to continue it.

And we, as good Africanists or simply as human beings, never stop playing it — with melancholy, with anger, with love — because, as he knew, Africa does not die: it changes key.