There is a moment in every great Fela Anikulapo-Kuti performance that feels less like a concert and more like a ceremony. The horns lock into a relentless groove. The dancers move with deliberate, almost ritual intensity. The call-and-response between Fela and the chorus rises like a communal prayer and a political indictment at once. The stage becomes a village square, a parliament, a temple, and a battlefield. Time stretches. The audience is no longer passive. It is implicated.
This is not entertainment in the narrow sense. It is theater of the highest order: long, layered, confrontational, and collective. It is, in many ways, a people’s opera.
Nikki Grimes captures this beautifully in her remark: “When I think of the Harlem Renaissance, I think of bright colors and bold, dynamic art. African American artists of the period were, in large measure, breaking out of the constrictions white society had set for them. They were claiming and remaking their own images and doing so in bold and striking ways.”
I live in Lagos, and I have never walked the streets of Harlem. Yet, the more I sit with both traditions, the more clearly I hear a shared language: a language of scale, of storytelling, of social urgency, and of communal belonging. They feel, at times, like twins living on either side of the ocean. One was born in the heat and confrontation of Lagos. The other continues to grow in the layered memory and resilience of Harlem. Different languages, different costumes, the same fundamental ambition: to make the grand stage answer to the people.
Consider one of Fela’s most piercing stage statements: the performances of “Zombie.” On those nights at the Afrika Shrine and on international stages, the song was never merely a tune. It was a theatrical indictment. Fela used the extended form, the relentless groove, the dancers, and the chorus to mock the blind obedience of soldiers who followed orders without conscience. The performance held up a mirror to military power and public complicity. It was satire, mourning, and mobilization at once. The audience was invited not only to dance but to recognize itself inside the critique. The stage became a place where social violence was named in real time and where dignity was insisted upon through rhythm and collective voice.
Across the ocean, Harlem’s opera initiatives have carried a parallel responsibility. Harlem Opera Theater and the Harlem Collective Opera have long centered spirituals by African American composers such as Harry T. Burleigh, Hall Johnson, and Margaret Bonds, alongside works by Black classical composers, including Florence Price. These are not neutral repertoire choices. Spirituals themselves are documents of social suffering and resistance: coded languages of survival, longing for freedom, and communal endurance under oppression. When these works are presented in Harlem with care and excellence, the stage becomes a site of historical recovery and present-tense affirmation. The Black Composer Project and similar programs do more than fill a program. They refuse erasure. They insist that the grand narrative form of opera can and must hold Black histories, Black genius, and Black community life.
Here, the kinship becomes tangible. Both Fela’s “Zombie” nights and Harlem’s presentations of spirituals and Black-composed works use the elevated stage to speak directly to systems of power and to the people living under them. Both refuse the idea that large-scale artistic form belongs only to the comfortable or the historically privileged. Both understand performance as a public act of truth-telling. One twin stands in the Lagos heat, using Afrobeat’s long, layered architecture to confront military and political violence. The other stands in Harlem, using the operatic and choral tradition to recover suppressed histories and to affirm the full humanity of a community that has too often been written out of the classical story. They face each other across the water, speaking different dialects of the same insistence: art must serve the people who need it.
The roots of Fela’s theatrical power run deep into Yoruba performance traditions. The griot and the festival dramatist have long understood that story is not private property. It belongs to the people who gather to hear it, to answer it, and to carry it forward. Call-and-response is not a stylistic flourish; it is a social contract. Fela took this ancient understanding, fused it with the harmonic and improvisational freedom he absorbed from jazz and the propulsive energy of funk, and created something fiercely modern and unapologetically African.
Fela observed with profound clarity: “Art is information from higher forces, by those who are talented. I’m not jiving.”
Harlem has always recognized this kind of power. The neighborhood’s musical history is filled with forms that refuse to stay inside polite boundaries—jazz that improvises its way past oppression, gospel that turns personal testimony into collective strength, and later hip-hop that claims the street corner as stage and archive. Resistance here has rarely been quiet. It has been rhythmic, communal, and public. In that sense, Fela’s Kalakuta Republic and Harlem’s historical stages are not strangers. They are family.
This is where the work of the Harlem Collective Opera becomes especially resonant. By insisting that opera belong to the community rather than remain locked behind cultural gates, the collective is performing a quiet but radical act of restoration. Opera does not have to be an exclusive inheritance of European courts. It can be a living form of communal storytelling, one that awakens history, elevates ordinary voices, and creates space for recognition and pride. When opera is made accessible and rooted in the life of the neighborhood, it begins to recover something of its original public force. It begins to look more like its twin across the ocean.
The parallel is not about forcing two traditions into the same costume. It is about recognizing a shared ambition: to make large-scale artistic expression serve the people who need it most. Fela used the long form to expose corruption, to mourn the abused, and to insist on dignity. Harlem’s opera initiatives open the grand narrative form so that new histories, new voices, and new possibilities can enter it. Both projects understand that culture is not merely decoration. It is one of the ways a people remembers who they are and decides who they will become.
In 2026, these connections feel newly urgent. Harlem continues to navigate questions of legacy, gentrification, cultural ownership, and belonging. Nigeria and its diaspora continue to wrestle with the unfinished business of political accountability and cultural confidence. Across the Atlantic, artists keep finding ways to speak to one another through rhythm, story, and staged presence. The conversation is not always explicit, but it is audible if one listens carefully.
I am especially drawn to the possibility that opera, in the hands of a community-minded collective, can become a site of intercultural awakening—not by simply inserting African stories into European forms, but by recognizing that the impulse toward grand, communal, morally charged storytelling has always existed in African and African diasporic traditions. Fela’s stage was one powerful expression of that impulse. The griot’s courtyard was another. The festival grounds of Yorubaland were another still. Harlem’s churches, jazz clubs, and community theaters have carried versions of the same fire.
To awaken the history and personalities of opera, then, is not only to recover European scores. It is also to remember that the desire to gather people around large, meaningful stories is older and wider than any single tradition. When that desire is honored, when the stage is opened, when the community is invited in, when the narrative is allowed to speak to real lives, something lasting is curated: a mood of recognition, a sense of pride, a feeling of connection across time and geography.
This is the work that fascinates me most as a correspondent moving between Lagos and Harlem. It is the work of noticing where the old stories still breathe inside new forms and where new forms can still carry the moral weight of the old stories. Fela showed one powerful way to do it on his side of the ocean. Harlem Collective Opera is exploring another on this side. Between them lies a rich and unfinished conversation about what it means for art to belong to the people who need it.
The stage, whether in Kalakuta or in Harlem, remains a place of possibility. The twins are still speaking. The question is whether we will continue to listen—and whether we will keep filling those stages with stories large enough, honest enough, and communal enough to hold us.
I believe we can. And I believe the music—and the opera—are already pointing the way.
By Minkail G. Olaitan
Managing Editor Nigeria, Mood Magazine / Harlem Collective Opera
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