Remembering Beko and the other Kutis

One of the things that my busy week stopped me from doing was to acknowledge the passing of Dr Beko Ransome-Kuti, the last of an extraordinary set of siblings who strode across the Nigerian firmament in the last century. Together with his brothers, Fela, the dazzlingly gifted Afrobeat musician and activist and Olikoye the former health minister and tireless advocate for public health, Beko, a general practitioner and human rights activist provided a compelling alternative to the selfish, greedy and short-sighted mantra that seemed to grip a majority of their Nigerian contemporaries. Unorthodox, visionary and dogged, you could disagree with them or with their methods but you could not help but respect them. Their only sister, Dolu, one of the pioneer Western trained nurses and midwives was equally active and unorthodox as an interview I once read with her in which she described the maternity home she ran for poor women in their village and how she walked away from her marriage in the fifties because she felt she did not have to put up with her "husband's nonsense" revealed.

The Kutis were remarkable in many ways- in the way that Koye the paediatrician continued to drive his little Volkswagen Golf car throughout his period as Minister of Health; in the way that he gave up his 20 a day smoking habit on appointment to that position; in the way that Beko kept fighting injustice and oppression through several dictatorships, in the way that Fela electrified audiences with his Afrobeat with a message- How can I ever forget, dancing to his Beast of No Nation, which included the words "You can't dash me human rights, human rights na my property" in a bar in Abuja during the Abacha years and we all screamed the words throwing them back in the faces of the numerous security agents that swarmed the bar.....

The Kutis of course came from distinguished stock- their father, one of the earliest graduates and no-nonsense principal of Abeokuta Grammar School; their mother Funmilayo- firebrand woman activist- the first Nigerian woman to drive a car. Their cousin Wole Soyinka famous for his own activism and for winning the Nobel Prize in literature.

And the next generation continues- Nike, Beko's lawyer daughter was active in the pro-democracy movement during the Abacha years. The novelist Sefi Atta, whose groundbreaking unabashedly feminist novel Everything Good Will Come has raised eyebrows in Nigeria is married to one of Koye's sons, himself a doctor. Seun Kuti and Femi Kuti, Fela's sons keep the musical legacy going strong.......

There's a huge study waiting to be done exploring the lives of these remarkable people, a world which can be glimpsed in Wole Soyinka's Ake the Years of Childhood and Isara: A Voyage Around Essay but we're more likely to read commisssioned hagiographies of all the useless money-miss-roads that strut across the national stage displaying flamboyantly, their greed and ill gotten wealth........

Nigeria is the poorer this week