Carrying the Flame: Felabration and the New Pan-African Sound of Cape Town

Article by Nicole Shamira

Images courtesy of The Remedy

Every October, the drumbeat returns. Across the continent and the diaspora, Felabration is more than an event, it’s a calling. Founded in Lagos to honour the life and legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, it’s a gathering that transcends geography, uniting artists and audiences through the pulse of Afrobeat and the politics of liberation. This year, that pulse lands in Cape Town.

The 2025 Felabration South Africa edition, hosted by The Remedy and licensed by Fela’s daughter Yeni Anikulapo-Kuti and the official Felabration Organising Committee, takes place on the 25th of October. It’s a celebration of rhythm and resistance, featuring headliners Kujenga, Operation Khataza, and a Fela Tribute Band, artists whose work embodies the evolving relationship between West and South Africa’s musical lineages.

What makes Felabration special is that it never feels nostalgic. Fela’s music, fierce and spiritual, was never meant to be frozen in time. It was, and still is, a living vocabulary of protest and joy. His sound bridged jazz, funk, and Yoruba traditional rhythms into a sonic movement that gave a generation permission to speak back to power. And decades later, that language still resonates across the continent, from Lagos to Langa, from Kalakuta to Khayelitsha.

In Cape Town, Felabration finds fertile ground. The city’s current wave of musicians has been steadily redefining what African jazz and fusion can sound like- fluid, genreless, and rooted in collaboration. Kujenga, who we’ve featured before, are a perfect example: a collective born of South African jazz but unafraid of the spiritual, the improvisational, and the electronic. Their live sets feel like conversations, where rhythm becomes memory, and each note gestures toward something larger than itself.

Operation Khataza, another act we’ve interviewed, brings a harder, streetwise edge to the stage. Their sound - part hip-hop, part Afro-futurist jazz experiment - carries a pulse that feels both ancient and immediate. Together, they represent the new guard of musicians carrying Fela’s torch, not through imitation, but through innovation. This is the real legacy of Afrobeat: not replication, but continuation.

To love Fela is to understand that music can be both a weapon and balm. His was a voice for the people -for truth, for the raw, rhythmic insistence that freedom must be felt in the body before it can exist in the world. That spirit lives on in these young artists who are learning, not from his melodies, but from his conviction: that art is not passive, that rhythm is protest, that sound is survival.

This Saturday’s Felabration in Cape Town will not just echo Fela’s message, it will localise it. It will translate Afrobeat’s defiant pulse into the Cape’s own languages of groove, jazz, soul, and experimentation. More importantly, it will remind us that Africa’s story has always been polyphonic - carried not by one region or rhythm, but by a chorus of collaborations.

Image sourced from Instagram // @felakutioffical

As we gather beneath Table Mountain to dance, remember, and create, Felabration becomes something more than homage. It’s a reunion of the continent’s creative spirit, one that looks forward, not back. A promise that as long as there are drums in Africa, the conversation Fela began will never end.

Tickets are available at this link - get yours and come be a part of the conversation