'Fela broke my heart'

Lemi Ghariokwu recalls his artistic partnership with the Afrobeat pioneer-from designing iconic album sleeves to the violent raid that changed everything

- By Stevie Chick

There were flames everywhere. Soldiers with bayoneted rifles were dragging people out into the streets, staggering, naked and bleeding. Nobody knew if Fela was still inside the burning building.

Lemi Ghariokwu pauses. For much of our video call, the 70-year-old artist has joyfully revisited his years as friend and confidant of Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer whose legacy has been celebrated recently by both a high-profile podcast produced by the Obamas and a career-spanning box set, The Best of the Black President, designed by Ghariokwu.

His mood darkens as he recalls the authorities' assault on Kuti's Lagos HQ, the Kalakuta Republic, on 18 February 1977. Tensions had simmered between Kuti and Nigeria's military junta, as the singer/bandleader chronicled injustice and corruption on records including Zombie, Expensive Shit and No Agreement. But the razing of Kalakuta marked a tragic inflection point in Kuti's struggle against the government. It initiated the unravelling of his friendship with Ghariokwu.

Ghariokwu had first crossed Kalakuta's threshold three years earlier as an 18-year-old engineering student, accompanied by Kuti's journalist friend Babatunde Harrison, who had spotted Ghariokwu's portrait of Bruce Lee in a Lagos bar and deemed him skilled enough to illustrate the musician's album sleeves. As he awaited his audience with the Black President, then mid-siesta, Ghariokwu absorbed his surroundings.