Afrobeat artist Ọmorinmade Kuti, popularly known as Made Kuti and grandson of the legendary Fela Kuti, has recounted a troubling incident involving three members of his father Femi Kuti’s band who vanished shortly after arriving in the United States for a music tour.
During a Q&A session on Sunday, July 27, while discussing his album Where Does Happiness Come From, Made revealed that the bass guitarist, saxophonist, and trumpet player disappeared just two days after landing in the U.S. for the shows. According to him, the disappearance left his father in a difficult situation, especially with sixteen scheduled performances left across the U.S. and Canada.
“My father has been touring the world for four decades, and recently he took a lot of energy and sacrifices to get fifteen musicians out of Nigeria to America and every time he does that, there’s a risk of whether or not the Nigerians will run away or come back to Lagos,” he said.
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Made noted that although the U.S. embassy had initially been reluctant to grant visas to two of the musicians, those were the same individuals who ended up absconding. He also described how, moments before going on stage himself, he received word that the trumpet player had also gone missing.
“There were two people, and they did not want to give that Visa to. After two nights, those people absconded from the band, and my father had sixteen more shows, in the US and Canada at the time, and he didn’t have a bass guitarist or saxophonist and before I got on stage, just as I was backstage, I got a message saying, We can not find the trumpet player.”
He concluded by addressing the broader impact of such actions: “These people will blame President Bola Tinubu for whatever decision they made. But what they did was stop the opportunity they had for other musicians who would later work for the shrine.”
