Fela Kuti’s Legacy Returns to Hull for Felabration 2026

WHO ARE YOU? is the official theme of Felabration 2026, and this year we are bringing that question to Hull through music, photography, film, conversation and the enduring legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti. For the third consecutive year, The Gidi Vibes™ is bringing the licensed celebration of Fela’s life and legacy to the city, with a programme that moves beyond simply remembering the man and his music and asks instead what his story means to us now.

A question that travels  

Fela was asking questions about identity, power, society and belonging long before Afrobeat became a global musical language, and his influence can now be heard across generations and continents in ways he could hardly have imagined. Millions of people encounter sounds shaped by the tradition he pioneered, yet the story behind that sound is not always as familiar as the music itself. Felabration is our opportunity to close that gap — to introduce Fela to people who know the sound but have never really met the man behind it, to hold onto the ideas and history that shaped his work, and to let a new generation decide for itself what that legacy means. That is where WHO ARE YOU? stops being a theme and becomes a question we can all answer for ourselves.

 

What We Keep, What We Lose, What We Become

At the centre of this year’s programme is The Felabration Forum: WHO ARE YOU? What We Keep, What We Lose, What We Become, a conversation about identity, heritage and belonging in the African diaspora. It asks what happens to the language, traditions, memories, food, music, stories and ways of seeing the world that we inherit when we grow up away from where those things began — what we hold onto, what changes without our noticing, and what we become when different cultures, generations and experiences meet. None of these are questions with tidy answers. They are questions that many people in the African diaspora carry with them, whether they arrived yesterday or have lived away from their ancestral home for generations.

A day of Fela, art, film, conversation and music 

Felabration Hull 2026 takes place at Browse Studios on Saturday 17 October, across four connected parts of the celebration. The Underground Spiritual Game opens the day at 10am, a photography and art exhibition curated by The Gidi Vibes™ that continues the visual storytelling strand which has become such an important part of our programme. At 4pm there is a documentary screening, offering another way into Fela’s story, before the conversation begins properly at 6pm with The Felabration Forum. And from 8pm until 2am, the Felabration Hull Tribute Session brings the day back to where so much of Fela’s legacy still lives — in the music itself.

Three years in Hull

Felabration Hull began in 2024, when our first edition was supported by Hull Museums and developed in collaboration with The Black Heritage of Hull Collectives, with TransferGo also lending its support during the company’s twelfth anniversary year and helping strengthen our connection with the African diaspora community here. In 2025 we expanded the artistic ambition of the programme: The Underground Spiritual Game was presented at the historic Wilberforce House Museum with support from Hull Museums, bringing Fela’s world into conversation with one of Hull’s most significant spaces for telling the history of slavery, abolition and human rights, while the wider programme brought together artists, cultural practitioners and audiences around Fela’s influence on music, arts, media and fashion. Now, in 2026, we are continuing that journey.

Fela’s music has travelled further than any of us could have imagined. You can hear the influence in music being made around the world today, yet many people discovering those sounds may never have encountered the man who helped shape the tradition. For me, Felabration is about keeping that connection alive. It is about bringing Fela’s story into the present, not preserving it behind glass, but allowing new audiences to question it, interpret it and find their own relationship with it.

Fágbèmí Ọ̀ṣìnúgà, Founder, The Gidi Vibes™

From Lagos to Hull

Felabration was conceived in 1998 by Yeni Kuti, Fela’s eldest daughter, as a celebration of her father’s life and legacy, and every October, around Fela’s birthday on 15 October, it brings people together through music, art and cultural expression.

 

Felabration Hull has been continuously licensed by the Felabration Organising Committee in Lagos, Nigeria, since 2024, which makes Hull part of something bigger than a single evening — not simply an event about a Nigerian musician, but part of an international cultural movement that began with Fela’s family and continues through the Committee’s work and celebrations held around the world.

Why Fela still matters

Fela Kuti’s music was never only about music. His Afrobeat was inseparable from his worldview, his experiences, his politics, his Yoruba heritage and his determination to speak directly to the realities around him, and his influence has travelled a long way since.

 

In January 2026 Fela was posthumously honoured with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, another recognition of the extraordinary contribution he made to music and global culture — though awards and records only tell part of the story. The more interesting question is what happens when that story reaches people who were not there: people who did not grow up listening to Fela, who know contemporary African music but have never explored its history, who are in the diaspora trying to work out what parts of their heritage they carry, what parts they have lost, and what parts they are creating for themselves. That is the conversation we want to have in Hull.

WHO ARE YOU? Come and explore the question with us.