“I don’t really like to use the word activism, because activism is a bastardized word.”
Over a Google Meet, Seun Anikulapo-Kuti tells me why he prefers the word liberation to activism. At first, one may think it’s a semantic choice, but the more you speak to Kuti, the more you understand his philosophical ideals. His distinction runs through everything he does: his music, his movement-building, his refusal to be boxed in by anyone’s expectations.
The night before our conversation, Kuti had just played in Sorocaba, Brazil. He’s on tour, traveling, performing, and tracing the shared cultural and political threads between Nigeria and Brazil. “There’s a nice cultural historical connection here,” he explains. “We’re already pre-integrated into Brazilian society due to our shared cultural and historical experience.”
Born into the Kuti family as the youngest son of the legendary Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Seun Kuti inherited, more than a name, a commitment to freeing his people through music and consciousness. Growing up in Kalakuta, the commune his father founded, Kuti was surrounded by revolution. His mother was a disciplinarian; his father, less concerned with rules. “He always believed that we would find our way as everyone finds their way in life,” Kuti recalls.
But finding your way as Fela’s child came with its own burden. There was stigma, oftentimes, discrimination, the weight of a legacy that demanded you be more than yourself. Kuti grew up closest to his sister Motun, who is just five days older than him. “We grew up like twins basically,” he says. “We were the only kids in Kalakuta when I was growing up. Being Fela’s children, we went through the same kind of stigma and discrimination from people, judging us. Our reality was really shared.”
Fela was right, Seun did find his way, and today, he carries the torch of liberation forward on his own terms. Seun’s newest venture, Bird’s Eye View, a podcast he co-hosts with his political mentor, Kenyatta Diallo, is an extension of liberation work—conversations that had been happening privately between the two men for years, now shared with a global African audience.
“Many of these things we are discussing on the show are discussions that we’ve had personally together about life, about what it means to be Black in this life that we are living today,” Kuti explains. “We just felt this discussion should be shared with our people globally. It shouldn’t just be us in our ideological sparring sessions.”
Partnering with OkayAfrica, Bird’s Eye View is laser-focused on one goal: raising consciousness. Seun Kuti is clear about this—he believes the level of African existence in the world today mirrors the consciousness of African people. A nation, he says, cannot grow beyond the awareness of its citizens; raise that awareness, and you raise the nation. The podcast emerged from what Seun considers a critical moment, one where Africans globally are being divided along lines manufactured by their oppressors. He points to a growing divide between Africans on the continent and those in the diaspora, fueled by rhetoric spread across social media. Gender, class, religion, fault lines that once felt distant are now deepened. And suddenly, Africans are quarreling because one is from New York, another from Lagos, each convinced of their superiority.
His favorite episode so far is the first one, titled First Blacks, an episode that interrogates the very concept of “firsts”—the first Black person to do X, Y, or Z in Western spaces, and challenges the capitalist framework that celebrates these milestones while ignoring systemic exclusion. The episode unfolded with the kind of mischievous banter Kuti and Diallo revel in, their jokes softening the edges of a deeper interrogation into the idea of “first Blacks.” Beneath the goofiness, though, was a cutting critique: the obsession with “firsts” is one that nudges Black people to accept Western rules and hierarchies instead of challenging the systems that created them.
The show is unscripted beyond its title and core points. “How we get to those points, we largely just come off the top,” Kuti says. It’s free-flowing, but grounded, a reflection of both men’s commitment to speaking truth without performance.
The same duality exists in Seun’s public image. If you Google Seun Kuti, you’ll find a media personality known for being unflinching in his political stance. What you won’t find is the goofball he insists he is. “Everybody takes everything I say seriously,” he laughs. “This is one thing I find in Nigeria—people don’t think that I’m just a goofball, and I can do goofy and say goofy all the time. When I say anything in Nigeria, it is written in stone. Nobody thinks, oh, this guy could be joking.”
Case in point: Afro-noise. When someone dismissed his music as noise, Kuti flipped the narrative, joking that if “Afro-noise” was doing this well, then he had inadvertently created a thriving genre. The joke stuck so much that journalists now ask him about it in earnest. He only laughs, “It was never that serious, but people are free to make it as real as they want.” It’s the same quality people often misread in Fela. Just as they took his father too seriously, few imagined he had a sense of humour or could simply be playful. Fela, Seun insists, was gentle, cool, and far funnier than the myth around him suggests.
Kuti was exceptionally close to his father. By age eight, he was already performing with Egypt 80—Fela’s legendary band, known for its politically charged Afrobeat arrangements, marathon performances, and an ensemble of musicians whose sound had become synonymous with resistance. As a child, he opened shows, watching Fela command the stage night after night, absorbing every detail of his craft, his charisma, and the disciplined chaos of Egypt 80’s rehearsals. It was an early immersion that convinced him music was the only life he wanted; to his young mind, it seemed like the easiest, most extraordinary job in the world.
When Fela passed, Kuti didn’t step in as an outsider or a successor appointed by expectation. He was already embedded in the band’s fabric. His role simply shifted—from a young performer within the ensemble to its frontman. The transition into leadership, however, was gradual. It took many years before he could truly say he became the owner and steward of the institution that is Egypt 80, a band that outlived its founder and continues to evolve under his direction.
His gradual ascent into leadership also shaped how he views responsibility, not as a burden, but as a natural extension of purpose. Kuti doesn’t see his path as one of sacrifice. When asked about the personal cost of his liberation work, he bristles slightly at the framing. “Cost means you pay a price for something. I didn’t pay anyone to do what I’m doing,” he says. “You lose things, yes, but those things you lose were originally not meant for you.”
He’s clear-eyed about how the system works: those who align themselves with the dominant capitalist, imperialist order—one structured around white supremacy—are often rewarded with material wealth, mainstream approval, and global platforms. But Kuti has never been interested in that kind of reward. Raising consciousness comes with its own terms. He believes you cannot confront power and still expect to be embraced by it; you cannot challenge billionaires and simultaneously expect invitations into their world. To him, wanting both would be a form of self-deception. What keeps him steady, especially when people disagree, is the intention behind his work. He is not driven by validation or popularity. His compass is whether the information he shares is rooted in honesty and aligned with collective progress rather than personal gain. That conviction is enough, an internal grounding that doesn’t waver with public opinion.
The birth of his daughter has only deepened this resolve. “Having my kid strengthened my resolve about the kind of world I want to leave behind for her,” he says simply.
Kuti has been blessed, he admits, with a strong niche fanbase that connects deeply with his work. Though he believes the world has yet to meet him where he truly stands. In his view, the broader public hasn’t fully embraced his catalog, not because the music isn’t resonant, but because the world itself isn’t as revolutionary as he believes it should be. His ideal vision is clear: a future where his music serves as the soundtrack to an actively developing Africa—one where the continent is not only nurturing its people at home but representing them powerfully across the globe, from the Americas to Europe. In a world where African nations are self-determined, unified, and forward-driving, his art would find its truest home. For now, he remains grounded in the present reality, committed to creating within the conditions African people currently face, even as he imagines what could be.
Seun Kuti’s relationship with fashion is yet another extension of his politics, a visual language through which he communicates the same ideas that animate his music. On his current Brazilian tour, he jokes that his aesthetic is “punk rock prophet,” but beneath the humor is intention. For him, clothing is about building an image that binds revolution, culture, and spirituality. He wants his presence to announce that African spiritual traditions still sit at the core of his work.
This is why he bristles at how African culture is often commercialized, stripped of its depth, and resold as spectacle. Prints, rhythms, dishes, gestures: all flattened into souvenirs for global consumption. What troubles him isn’t the celebration of African aesthetics, but the selective extraction of whatever can be monetized. In that bargain, the intangible parts—the communal, the spiritual, the historical—are quietly abandoned, simply because they can’t be turned into products. For Kuti, those “uncommodifiable” elements are the very heart of who African people are.
His definition of success reflects that belief. It isn’t measured in charts, streams, or global visibility; it is measured in personal sovereignty. True success, he says, is the ability to live according to one’s own dreams and ambitions, so long as they nurture rather than harm one’s community. It’s the same ethos he hopes animates Bird’s Eye View. His wish is simple: “That anybody who encounters Bird’s Eye View would be impacted positively, especially as an African. I don’t think anything can be more of a success for me than that.”
In the end, Seun Kuti is not driven by fear of public judgment; he is driven by the fear of a world in which African people remain divided and endlessly commodified. So he works: through music, through conversation, through a podcast that refuses to perform respectability. What he pursues is not activism as we commonly define it, but something older and more elemental—liberation, in its raw, uncompromising form.
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