The first thing I had noticed when I arrived in Lagos was how the city had been plastered with posters announcing that Fela would be performing that night at his own club, the famous Shrine. I had never seen Jimi Hendrix perform, nor had I seen Miles Davis – two other musical heroes of my youth – and having been a fan of Fela since college, I was determined not to miss his show.

Fela came from Abeokuta, a remarkable city in the country’s southwest that is located a couple of hours’ drive from Lagos. The city was founded in the 1830s by refugees from the Yoruba civil wars, and since many of its 500,000 residents came from the same clan, the Egba, many claim that is makes Abeokuta the world’s largest village. In a badly divided country, though, the city’s main source of renown was the extraordinary gallery of national leaders it had produced. The famous sons and daughters included the once and future president Olusegun Obasanjo; the rightly elected and now imprisoned president, Abiola; and Ernest Shonakan, an interim president installed as a puppet of the military in 1993, before Abacha seized power outright. Abeokuta had also produced Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winning author and political exile, and his aunt and Fela’s mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, a matriarch of a clan as impressive as any in Africa and a political firebrand who successfully led a two-year demonstration to repeal a “women’s tax” in 1948, twelve years before independence.

In Nigeria, easily the most famous person from Abeokuta, though, was her son Fela, the dissident musician-bard who had been arrested by the army and police as many as two hundred times because of his unrelenting criticism of military misrule. In one bid to silence him, Fela’s mother was thrown off the balcony of his home in 1977, killing her.

Fela’s music, Afro Beat, had its roots in Highlife, a creolized dance-band music that first blossomed in Ghana in the 1920s, catering to a semi-Westernized elite. Fela’s songs usually eschewed the feel-good themes of Highlife, though, and swiftly evolved into a bitter and incisive oral history of Nigeria and, by extension, of the African continent. “I no be gentleman at all. I be African man. Original,” Fela declared in one vintage song from the 1970s that bristled with African pride at a time when many Africans were soaking up Western influences as fast they could. With time, his songs became even more trenchant and political, with titles like “Zombie,” “Army Arrangement” (about the country’s rigged politics), “ITT” (“International Thief Thief,” about Abiola), “Colonial Mentality” and “Coffin for Head of State” (about the murder of his mother) that denounced the soldiers and dictators laying Africa low.

Our driver, David, took us to Fela’s famous home, which was known as the Kalakuta Republic. It was a sprawling urban commune with a large open courtyard where people smoked pot, washed clothes, cooked and dozed by day. Fela didn’t have Abiola’s excuse of being a Muslim, but he had married twenty-eight women simultaneously in the late 1970s nonetheless. Many of that original number had long since left him, but new women, for the most part the statuesque dancers who enlivened his shows, were constantly joining his lair.

We were scarcely noticed when we walked in, so utterly preoccupied were the people with either getting high or sleeping off the effects from previous highs. I spotted a gorgeous woman, nearly six-feet tall, who was grilling fragrantly spiced chicken over charcoal by the building’s concrete outer stairway, and approached her to ask if we could see Fela. With a low-key nod, she directed me upstairs, where I advanced feeling a touch of trepidation.

People were smoking dope everywhere on the second floor, either sitting or lying on the ground with vacant stares. I asked someone where Fela was, and was directed to the end of the hall, where we found the musician asleep in a room, sprawled on a bed with several women. The man who had directed us asked to sit down in another room while someone announced us, and after a few minutes, he came back to tell us that Fela had invited us to be his guests at the concert that night. Fela did not feel like talking now, but if we liked, the man said, we could interview him after the show. Purnell, warming to the idea of doing a radio piece on the concert, asked if he could use a tape recorder at the Shrine, to which Fela’s aide said, No problem. “If anyone gives you trouble, just ask for Morgan, and I will straighten things out.”

David had not wanted to drive us for a concert late at night, and hooked us up instead with Friday, another trusted driver I occasionally worked. Friday had been an amateur boxer, and though not huge in size, exuded a tough, take-no-nonsense attitude.

We got to the Shrine at midnight, and it was still only sparsely filled. Fela’s concerts were famously late and long lasting, so we made our way through the security check, taking care to clear Purnell’s tape recorder, before filling some seats. The legendary club as it turns out, was a shoestring operation. It was a large performance space, with a huge elevated stage, as well as platforms for Fela’s female dancers along the sides. It was little more than a shoddy, rusting hangar, with cheap and uncomfortable metal chairs that were crowded closely together. I was more impressed by the crowd. True to Fela’s hell-raising popular image, at least 80 percent of the people who filled the seats were “area boys,” Lagos slang for the city’s hardened street youths. But there were plenty of other types, too, including radical-chic intellectuals and clusters of tourists from Europe and Japan.

Within minutes of striking up the first notes, Fela’s band had the place rumbling. Soon, huge joints were making their way back and forth between total strangers; the crowd was working itself into the kind of hypnotized frenzy that the music was famous for. Some area boys who had been smoking and drinking heavily were sitting immediately behind us. The higher they got, the more preoccupied with us they became, fixating on Robert’s cameras and pestering us with annoying questions. Friday kept a wary eye on them, though, and told us not to pay them any mind.

When Fela finally came out, the area boys behind us were content to flow with the music for a while, as were we. He seemed in particularly fine form, strutting and hopping bare-chested in his red tights, like a barnyard rooster. The music was angry and joyous by turns as Fela prowled the stage, shouting and preaching the ills of military rule and materialism. Every song was drenched in politics, but there was another constant theme as well – love; not love as in peace and love, but physical love as in bump and grind.

I had seen and enjoyed the best of Congolese soukous, arguably the most enthusiastic celebration of the female rear end anywhere in Africa, but the show Fela and his dancer-wives put on that night reached a whole new level. It was burlesque meets gymnastics, all set to driving, unrelenting rhythm, and it was as raw and powerful a display of sensuality as I had ever seen.

Sweating profusely, Fela stripped down to his red underpants and began by working his saxophone furiously, clearly influenced by both James Brown and Pharaoh Sanders. He was fifty-seven, but appeared to have the stamina of a man in his twenties as he blew his way through the chord changes, riffing against the insistent beat. Many minutes later, when he finally paused, Fela introduced the dancers one by one, and as he did so, each of these tall, powerful women performed a solo of her own, writhing under the spotlight like dancing yogis.

In the midst of this exhibition, though the area boys behind us interrupted our reverie. They had noticed Purnell’s tape recorder and were making an issue of it. One of them insisted that he was a member of Fela’s security force and demanded that we hand it to them. We stood our ground, encouraged by Friday’s calm, but the area boys were now passing word through the crowd that the Americans had snuck a tape recorder into the concert and were stealing Fela’s music.

As the crowd drew tightly around us I pleaded our case to all those who would listen, invoking Morgan’s name and recounting our visit to Fela’s commune. The threats continued to multiply, though, and it was obvious there was no way we could fight our way out of there. Eventually, the crowd began jostling us, and things started to look desperate. I urged one of the people confronting us to summon Fela’s security people. Agreeing, he threatened, “If you’re not telling the truth, you will be sorry.”

A few moments later, a huge security man walked up, parting the crowd by his mere presence. I had to crane my head to meet his gaze. I began to explain our story, but he showed no interest in hearing it, simply gesturing for the tape recorder and ordering us to follow him.

It was close to 4 a.m., and for most of the hall the concert continued undisturbed, as loud and frenzied as ever. But as we approached the exit, with the rowdiest elements of the crowd taunting us from behind, I saw one of Fela’s dancers and immediately recognized her from the courtyard. It was the woman who had been grilling chicken over hot coals that afternoon. “Don’t you remember me?” I asked desperately. Her face was as noncommittal as it was beautiful as she scrutinized me impassively, “You saw me this afternoon at Fela’s house. I asked you where I could find him.”

“Ah yes, I remember you now,” she said, and then turned to the giant security man. “These people are journalists. Fela invited them to the concert. He told them to bring their equipment.” At that, there was an audible sigh from the crowd and the pressure quickly dissipated. The huge security man handed Purnell his tape recorder, and we walked to Friday’s car and drove off, skipping our chance for a backstage interview with Fela. The sun would be coming up soon, and Abacha’s speech was due in a few hours.

* Excerpted from A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, published by Knopf Publishing in New York (2004). Reprinted by permission of Howard French and the Watkins/Loomis Agency. Howard French lives in Shangai where he is a senior writer for the New York Times. His doings can be followed on the web (hyperlink: www.howardwfrench.com)