Nigeria, May 3 -- Fela Anikulapo Kuti's Coffin for Head of State was not merely a song. It was a funeral procession disguised as music, an indictment carried on saxophone, anger, memory, and ancestral stubbornness. Released in 1981, it emerged from the wound of the 1977 military attack on Kalakuta Republic and the later death of his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Fela's response was political theatre at its most unforgiving: he and his people carried a coffin to Dodan Barracks, the symbolic doorstep of state power.

But before the coffin arrives in the song, Fela walks through Nigeria's spiritual geography. He sees a country where religion is not simply faith, but access. In his criticism, where Muslim power reigns, the useful friend of...