French president Macron to visit Fela’s Afrika shrine

A prominent media event during President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Nigeria will be  a visit to the New Afrika Shrine, located in Ikeja, Lagos.

The New Afrika Shrine was first started in the early 1970s by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti but was burnt down. The new replacement is now run by his son Femi and daughter Yeni Anikulapo-Kuti. Aside the live music, the shrine also provides other services.

“When my father built the original Shrine, he was tricked into believing he owned the land around it, but it was actually on a lease, said Femi Kuti in an interview.

“So when he died, we couldn’t claim it. At some point we could not continue fighting. We let it go. Then in 2000, when we made some money from licensing his back catalog, my mother and my sister and I decided to build the New Afrika Shrine in his honor and to take it a step further and make it a place where we honor people like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Lumumba, Thomas Sankara…all the great Africans who fought for emancipation. Some names we don’t even know—Africans who have suffered at the hands of slavery and wickedness—but we still pay homage.”