Thursday 16 April, 2026

Fela Kuti and Sade Adu just became the first Africans in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Nigeria made both of them possible. Nigeria also tried to destroy one of them.

The announcement came on Monday. Fela goes in under Early Influence. Sade goes in as a Performer. First African artists in the institution's forty-year history.

Sade was born Helen Folasade Adu in Ibadan in 1959. She sold over 50 million records and never once compromised for commercial convenience. The Hall voted her in on her second nomination.

Fela goes in posthumously. He died in 1997. The man who created Afrobeat, fused highlife and jazz into political resistance, and built the Kalakuta Republic as an act of defiance in Lagos. The Nigerian military burned his compound in 1977. They threw his mother out of an upstairs window. She died from the injuries. He was imprisoned multiple times. He ran for president in 1979 and kept making music.

The induction ceremony is in November in Los Angeles. Femi, Seun, and Yeni Kuti will represent the estate.

Nigeria produces extraordinary things. What it does with them while they're alive is a separate question. But this week, two Nigerians are going into a hall of fame that didn't exist when one of them was still being hunted by his own government. That's worth pausing on.