Afrobeat royalty Femi Kuti has publicly refuted claims that late drummer Tony Allen co-created the iconic Afrobeat genre alongside his father, the legendary Fela Kuti.
The controversy was reignited following a recent acknowledgment by the Recording Academy (The Grammys), which credited Allen as a co-founder of Afrobeat, citing his influential work with Fela during the 1960s and ’70s. While Allen, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 79, is widely celebrated for his powerful drumming with Fela’s Africa ’70 band, Femi is challenging the idea that Allen was a co-architect of the sound.
In a now-viral video, Femi passionately contested the claim, asserting that Fela Kuti was the sole visionary behind Afrobeat — composing every element of the genre, including the signature drum patterns for which Allen is often credited.
My father was the composer. He studied music. He knew every single part of the instrumentation,” Femi stated. “You probably heard people say Fela once claimed, ‘Without Tony Allen, I am nothing.’ That is the biggest — excuse me — bullshit ever said of my father. That’s a lie. They decided to sell Tony Allen.”
Femi described Fela’s meticulous creative process: a solitary journey of invention and reinvention, often stretching over weeks or even months. According to Femi, Fela’s approach to building a song was deeply personal and deliberate, allowing no room for external input in the music’s conception.
“Fela taught Tony his drumming style. Every drum pattern came from Fela,” Femi insisted. “I was there. I saw it. He would spend weeks shaping a song, then months refining it before recording. When Fela arrived at rehearsal, everything stopped. It was silence — complete reverence. He went into a kind of trance. Then he’d begin building the song: drums, guitars, percussion, bass, horns — step by step.”
Femi claims that recent efforts by Allen’s management and some international media outlets have distorted Afrobeat’s history, suggesting a co-creative relationship that never existed.
“There’s a false narrative being pushed, and if we don’t speak up, the truth gets buried,” he said. “There was even a journalist in America who suggested I was jealous of Tony Allen. I’m not. I loved Tony. But his team has been lying. I’m simply correcting the record.”
The 62-year-old son of Fela Kuti emphasized his responsibility to protect and accurately represent Afrobeat’s origins for the next generation.
“If we don’t teach the youth the truth, we rewrite history. So, I ask — show me the proof. Don’t say ‘Fela said.’ Show me the magazine, the interview, the recording. Where is it? It’s been five years, and I’m still waiting.”
