Fela Kuti to Receive Recording Academy® 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award

Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s music has never waited politely for recognition. If you've listened, you know it arrives on its own terms, loud with purpose, rhythm, and dissent. Now, nearly three decades after his passing, the Recording Academy has formally acknowledged that impact, announcing that Fela Kuti will receive a 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award during Grammy Week in Los Angeles on January 31. He joins a class that includes Carlos Santana, Chaka Khan, Cher, Paul Simon, and Whitney Houston.

The timing feels right. 2025 has been a banner year for renewed engagement with Fela’s life and work (any time is the right time, right?). His 1976 album Zombie was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, making history as the first Nigerian album to receive the distinction, just ahead of its 50th anniversary. Long recognized as one of the most potent albums of political protest ever committed to tape, Zombie fused funk and confrontation into something both irresistibly danceable and deeply unsettling.

That same sense of complexity animates Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, a 12-episode podcast series that premiered this fall. Hosted by Jad Abumrad, the series draws on more than 200 interviews with family members, collaborators, historians, and admirers. Presented by Audible and Higher Ground, and produced by Talkhouse and Western Sound, the podcast landed at number one on The New Yorker’s Best Podcasts of the Year list, praised for balancing joy, humor, grief, and hard-earned insight.

On the archival front, Partisan Records issued its first vinyl edition of The Best of the Black President, a four-LP limited box set featuring newly imagined artwork by longtime Fela collaborator Lemi Ghariokwu and packaging designed by Taofeek Abijako. The set doubles as a playable Ludo board, a reminder that Fela’s work was never meant to sit quietly on a shelf.

Live celebration continues as well. Felabration, the annual Lagos festival held at the New Afrika Shrine, marked its 25th anniversary this October. More announcements are expected in the coming months as the Fela Kuti estate prepares to honor the upcoming 50th anniversaries of Zombie.

Born in 1938 and gone far too soon in 1997, Fela was not just the architect of Afrobeat but one of the great cultural disruptors of the 20th century. His music folded jazz, funk, and traditional Nigerian rhythms into a form that could carry both pleasure and protest. That stance brought him into repeated and often violent conflict with Nigeria’s military regimes, including the destruction of his Kalakuta Republic compound and the death of his mother following a brutal raid. Fela rebuilt. He kept recording. He kept performing. He refused silence.

That refusal still resonates. His influence threads through modern music, political art, and popular culture, and his legacy is actively stewarded by his family through performances, festivals, and preservation of the Afrika Shrine and Kalakuta Museum. The Lifetime Achievement Award does not close the book on Fela Kuti. If anything, it confirms what his music has been insisting all along. This story is still unfolding, and the beat has not stopped.