The Recording Academy has announced Fela Anikulapo-Kuti as a recipient of its 2026 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, positioning the late Afrobeat pioneer as the first African artist to be selected for the prestigious Special Merit honour.
The award will be formally presented at the Grammy Special Merit Awards Ceremony during Grammy Week 2026 in Los Angeles. The Lifetime Achievement Award recognises performers whose creative contributions have had a lasting and transformative impact on recorded music, beyond the scope of competitive Grammy categories.
Fela Kuti, who passed away in 1997, is widely regarded as the architect of Afrobeat, a revolutionary genre that merged jazz, funk, highlife, traditional African rhythms, and politically charged lyricism. His music functioned as both sonic innovation and social critique, confronting authoritarianism, state violence, and post-colonial power structures in Nigeria and across the Global South.
Though Fela never received a Grammy during his lifetime, the announcement represents a long-overdue institutional acknowledgement of African music’s foundational role in shaping global sound. His selection signals a broader reassessment of how musical innovation from Africa has historically been categorised, marginalised, or overlooked within Western award systems.
The Recording Academy’s decision arrives amid a sustained global surge in African music, particularly Afrobeats, whose contemporary success draws directly from the cultural and sonic groundwork laid by pioneers like Fela. In this context, the Lifetime Achievement Award serves not only as a tribute to an individual legacy but as a symbolic recalibration of African music’s place in the global canon.
Fela Kuti’s forthcoming honour underscores a truth long evident to audiences worldwide: Afrobeat was not a peripheral movement, but a central force in modern music history, one whose influence continues to reverberate across generations and geographies.
