The unsung pioneers of Afrobeat

The combination of funk, jazz, and soul that Fela Kuti pioneered in the 1960s introduced the complex rhythms of Afrobeat to audiences across the globe. But it was Kuti’s second cousins, the Lijadu Sisters, who were the unsung heroes of the genre, never reaching his level of global acclaim, but who always had a crucial hand in the West African pop scene.

As a chronically underappreciated duo, the musical partnership of Kehinde and Taiwo Lijadu came at a time when it was rare to find frontwomen in Nigeria’s pop arena. They were resigned to making music without much commercial recognition but produced four now celebrated albums of revelatory Afrobeat – soaked in disco, funk, and reggae.

Their open attitude to genre was thanks to their mother, who introduced them to Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and Ella Fitzgerald as children. They started singing together at age ten, absorbing all the Western jazz and R&B they could, transmuting it into their unique vocals. After a spell of working as session musicians, they released Iya Mi Jowo – having walked into the studio and demanded a session of their own.

Together, the sisters continuously needed to advocate for themselves, and that spirit lent itself to their songwriting. They used their albums as vehicles to touch on political issues affecting Nigeria in the late ‘70s, taking aim at the increasing street violence and political corruption with unabashed fearlessness.

“Music teaches us to reach out and do something about what is going on, socially, morally, financially, spiritually and politically,” the sisters told The Guardian before Kehinde’s passing. “We sang those songs because they were not listening. We needed schools, we needed roads, we needed clean water.”

The Lijadu Sisters performed alongside Ginger Baker’s band Salt at the 1972 World Music Festival, their prevailing memory of which was meeting popular western blues guitarists before a horrific terrorist attack took hold.

“Oh, it was so awesome performing there,” they wrote on their website. “We had met Eric Clapton in England through Ginger [Baker] and also Jimi Hendrix’s mother. She then came to visit us in the Olympic Village following our performance there. As we were walking together to see her off in the village, we suddenly heard ‘BOOM!’, and it was the bombs from the terrorist attack. We then just took off  from there, as fast as we could.”

Outside of European appearances, the sisters started to get some traction when they moved stateside, performing across various venues like Manhattan’s Wetlands and in Harlem with King Sunny Adé’s African Beats as their backing band. The tide started turning when they were featured in Jeremy Marre’s music documentary, Konkombé, as well as the PBS world music series Beats of the Heart in the late ’80s.

Their contributions to Afrobeat were consistently overlooked but always quietly admired. American rapper Nas sampled their track ‘Life’s Gone Down Low’ entirely uncredited and gave his version the exact same title as they did. Although the familiar pattern of being overlooked by their male counterparts was exhausting, their self-advocating spirit never wavered. “We had a lot of obstacles from men – they would tell us that we were not coming here to stay,” they once explained. “Now those people acknowledge that they were scared of us because we were very independent.”