Kalakuta Women Reclaim The Stage As AG’s Fela Musical Returns
THE grand return of Fela and the Kalakuta Queens to Lagos this festive season is stirring debates that stretch beyond theatre applause into the politics of cultural memory, historiography, and narrative power. Produced by Bolanle Austen-Peters Productions and co-produced by Joseph Umoibom, the musical is being staged at Theatre @Terra Kulture Arena in Victoria Island for 11 performance dates between 26 December 2025 and 11 January 2026. With two shows daily, the production is one of the most ambitious theatre programming schedules in Lagos since the post-COVID reopening of major cultural venues.
The musical arrives in Lagos with inherited momentum from Felabration and Afrobeat Rebellion, which together ran a three-month public remembrance arc for Fela’s music and activism. This timing has renewed longstanding concerns among historians about the flattening of Fela’s politics into “heritage entertainment” while the women of Kalakuta — many of whom sacrificed family, careers, and personal safety to sustain the republic — remain under-examined in mainstream narratives.
This edition of the musical insists on narrative correction. The production reframes the Kalakuta women not as passive followers but as co-architects of a cultural and ideological republic that challenged state authority, rejected neo-colonial economic dependency, and blended personal rebellion with political resistance. The women, known for their confrontational glamour, political theatrics, and cultural insurgency through fashion and dance, embodied what critics describe as a gendered counterpower structure that mainstream Nigerian historiography has struggled to categorise: neither formal feminism nor purely cultural symbolism, but a living political sisterhood built inside an artistic republic.
Yet investigative questions now swirl around the scaffolding of the stage itself. With 22 shows scheduled over 10 days, Lagos event-safety analysts note that Nigerian cultural venues still lack a unified public dashboard for emergency compliance transparency, making it difficult for audiences to verify fire auditing, medical readiness, or safety drill certification. The silence around these details reflects the broader paradox of Nigeria’s cultural sector: globally exportable narratives performed in locally opaque systems.
The NOC recently held its own constitution-mandated AGM review cycle this December, showing that Nigerian institutions can publish structured accountability frameworks when compelled by constitutional design. The theatre sector, critics argue, needs a similar cultural policy compulsion for public transparency, especially for productions interrogating systems that historically failed their subjects.
For now, the show’s loudest message may not come from the script, but from the silence surrounding the stage: cultural renaissance cannot thrive sustainably without governance renaissance.
