Pod Insights IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson Introducing Fela Kuti: Fear No Man About this episode Hey IMO listeners! We want to share an episode of a new podcast from Higher Ground and Audible that we think you will love. In Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, Jad Abumrad—creator of Radiolab, More Perfect, and Dolly Parton's America—tells the story of one of the great political awakenings in music: how a classically trained 'colonial boy' traveled to America, in search of Africa, only to return to Nigeria and transform his sound into a battering ram against the state—creating a new musical language of resistance called Afrobeat. In a world that’s on fire, what is the role of art? What can music actually…do? Can a song save a life? Change a law? Topple a president? Get you killed?
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Transcript 8,431 words · 22 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Hey, Higher Ground listeners. I'm Jad Abumrad. You may know me from Radiolab or Dolly Parton's America. I'm here to tell you about my new show, Higher Ground's latest music podcast, called Fela Kuti, Fear No Man. Fela is basically, you could think of him as the Nigerian James Brown, but with some Muhammad Ali thrown in and some Nelson Mandela. I think he's one of the most important musicians of the 20th century. And in the 1960s and 70s, he created an entirely new genre of music called Afrobeat. And then he turned that music into a weapon against the state. Like, if you have ever wondered, what is the point of art? Like, what can art do in this crazy moment we're living in? His life is a case study.
0:43 Speaker 00 Been working on this project for three years, talked to so many interesting people: Fela's family, Maade, Cheyoun, Femi Kuti, Yeni Kuti, historians, activists, luminaries like Iyo Adebory, Brian Eno, David Byrne, Santigold, and yes, President Barack Obama. All right, so I would love to share an episode with you right now. It's all about Fela, how he became the musician he is, created Afrobeat, this musical language of resistance. I hope you like it. And if you do, you can find the rest of the episodes on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for checking it out.
1:27 Speaker 00 How do you describe Fela to someone who doesn't know?
1:30 Speaker 01 I've played around, I've done it a million times. I don't know if any time has worked. Like, I'll go, Fela is like Bob Marley and Mandela combined. Well, he was kind of like Mick Jagger and James Brown. Definitely with some Muhammad Ali thrown in. And then with a protest element of Dylan. Don't forget Malcolm X. He wanted to be Malcolm X.
1:52 Speaker 02 Brothers and sisters.
1:55 Speaker 03 The secret of life is to have no fear. We all have to understand that.
2:06 Speaker 02 He was the hardest shit you've ever heard in your life.
2:11 Speaker 00 This is Fela Kuti, Fear No Man. I'm Jad Abumrad. Chapter two, Becoming Fela.
2:26 Speaker 00 Here's a question, how do you become that person?
2:32 Speaker 00 That Flea was just describing.
2:33 Speaker 02 You know, it's as hard as the hardest hip-hop track, the hardest jazz track, the hardest, deepest punk rock, or metal, or death metal, or whatever it is that you're into as a kid, whatever music you love and you think captures the, like, spirit of rebellion and of caring about, you know, a scary world that you can get lost in and hurt in. It's all there.
3:00 Speaker 00 For Flea, it's Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
3:03 Speaker 02 It's magical music.
3:05 Speaker 00 Fela is the epitome of a musician whose music matters. In fact, his music was so dangerous to the people in power in Nigeria that they threw him in jail, not once, not twice, but 100 times.
3:21 Speaker 04 They want to see the police beating. It's terrible. I'll show you. You must see it. Look at it.
3:26 Speaker 00 In this famous clip, Fela is dressed only in his bikini briefs. He turns and shows the camera his back, which is covered in wounds and gashes, almost a hash pattern.
3:37 Speaker 00 Over and over, the Nigerian police and army broke his arms, his legs, his face.
3:42 Speaker 02 You know, they threw his mother from the roof of her house and she died.
3:46 Speaker 04 Threw my mother out the window.
3:49 Speaker 02 He went and took his mother's coffin and put it on the doorstep of the government building, the Capitol Building.
3:55 Speaker 00 No matter what they did, he never backed down.
3:58 Speaker 04 If you think I'm going to change or compromise, they're making me stronger.
4:02 Speaker 02 I mean, he was wild. What a rebel.
4:05 Speaker 00 So that's the question, how did he become that guy? The story of Fela's transformation is a big one. It spans many continents, involves many forces that are way beyond him that have to come together in just the right way to form the Marxist musical coup plotter that he would become. And I'm quoting from a Nigerian newspaper there. But let's start simple. We know that he grew up in a middle-class household in a town north of Lagos in the 1950s. This is when the British were still in power. We know that he went to a school set up by British missionaries. But in terms of story-shaped objects, we don't really have much from his childhood. We don't have much detail. But we did find this one rare interview, where he does touch on a few things from his early years.
4:54 Speaker 00 Here he is in 1967, he's 29 at the time, talking to a guy named Shaun Kelly.
4:59 Speaker 05 We're speaking with Fela Ransomkuti, one of Nigeria's young contemporary jazz musicians. Fela, how did you get started as a musician?
5:09 Speaker 04 Oh, it was my mother, really, and my father made me play the piano.
5:15 Speaker 04 Very at that age of nine, learning to play the piano. It was my hometown, Abekuta. And then after my school, or in school, I was a leader of the school choir for about five years. And then after that, I went to England to study at the Trinity College of Music in London.
5:40 Speaker 06 Hello, hello. La, la, la, la. And we're recording.
5:45 Speaker 00 Interestingly, when Nigeria declared its independence from England in 1960,
5:50 Speaker 00 Fela wasn't even there. He was here, in London, studying classical music.
5:57 Speaker 06 So I'm recording now. Could I ask you to introduce yourselves?
6:00 Speaker 04 My name is Ola Aloua Kinebe. I'm a graduate of Trinity Lawvin. I'm Nigerian, clarinetist.
6:07 Speaker 07 I'm Alex Schramm, and I'm the director of music at Trinity Lawvin.
6:10 Speaker 00 Alex and Ola were nice enough to give our producer Ruby Walsh a tour of the grounds.
6:14 Speaker 07 Yeah, we've got a lot of places to see. I started my undergraduate in the old building, which is where Fela studied in the 1950s.
6:21 Speaker 00 Trinity is a place that is obscenely beautiful. Architecturally, it is the epitome of the white Western world. Big stone archways, classical architecture, it's right on the water. Fela would have been one of the few black students to attend, and we kept trying to imagine him walking the halls.
6:39 Speaker 07 Around the room, I think what I might show you is the harp room.
6:43 Speaker 06 Oh, wow.
6:44 Speaker 07 It's a forest of harps.
6:45 Speaker 06 An organ, is that?
6:47 Speaker 07 Yes, this is an organ for playing brook.
6:50 Speaker 00 Alex, the director, demonstrated.
6:57 Speaker 08 Yeah, for me, I'm trying to remember my first day walking in here. It was, it was a bit surreal for me, actually.
7:03 Speaker 00 Olu Alua, our student guide, plays the clarinet. And he is about the same age that Fela was when he came to study the piano and the trumpet.
7:11 Speaker 08 I'll tell you this, yeah, when I was coming, because I'm Nigerian, obviously, and I was, it was like, you're going to study music of all the things to do in England? Then I would go, Fela studied there. And they'd go, what? You're going to study where Fela studied? You're gonna come back so great? I don't know how good I am yet.
7:28 Speaker 07 But yeah, so we're here in the reception now. And, and straight away, we have to point out, we have the plaque here for Fela Kuti.
7:35 Speaker 06 Oh, wow. Oh, it's right here.
7:37 Speaker 07 It's right here.
7:38 Speaker 06 Can I actually get one of you to read what's on the plaque?
7:40 Speaker 08 Yeah, it says, Fela Kuti, father of Africans who challenged colonial politics in Nigeria.
7:50 Speaker 00 Reading that plaque was interesting. Here is a man.
7:55 Speaker 04 America and England trying to brainwash Africans. You are the colonialists, you are the slave riders.
8:01 Speaker 00 Who would spend his life railing against the white world, who would become known as the soundtrack of African independence. Here he was studying the music of the colonizer.
8:11 Speaker 09 He, he was still walking around with colonial mentality. He hadn't become black.
8:19 Speaker 00 That's Sandra Isidore. She plays a huge part in what happens next.
8:23 Speaker 09 You wanna check me? Because I, my voice carries.
8:26 Speaker 00 More from her in a second.
8:27 Speaker 04 I went to study at the Trinity College of Music in London. And there, I did my college course. But really, I was not interested in, in classics. My mom was to play jazz. So I studied classics in college and went out to listen to jazz.
8:52 Speaker 04 On my trumpet, too, I was trying to play some jazz. I was trying to listen to some great men like Miles and Dizzy.
9:00 Speaker 00 At Trinity, after class, Fela would go to places like the Flamingo Room, a basement club that hosted all-night jam sessions, and he would sit in.
9:09 Speaker 00 This is at a time in London when all kinds of musicians are rolling through. Dizzy Gillespie.
9:16 Speaker 00 Ella Fitzgerald played some shows.
9:21 Speaker 00 Sarah Vaughan.
9:25 Speaker 00 Count Basie, Duke Ellington. 1960, when Fela was in his second year, Miles Davis comes to town, plays a few shows. I like to imagine Fela was in the audience. Because a few years later, Fela would release this tune.
9:40 Speaker 00 That's him on trumpet.
9:43 Speaker 00 He called it "Amichu's Blues", and it sounds a whole lot like Miles's Freddie Freeloader off "Kind of Blue".
9:55 Speaker 00 They're almost the same tune.
9:56 Speaker 04 I was trying to listen to some great men like Miles and Dizzy, people like Clifford Brown and things like that. And then I came out back here in Nigeria to play music.
10:08 Speaker 00 Fela arrived back in Nigeria from London in 1963.
10:12 Speaker 05 Has it been successful?
10:13 Speaker 04 Far quite.
10:14 Speaker 05 What would you say was the present jazz scene in West Africa?
10:20 Speaker 04 Straight jazz as it's played in the States is not working here. I found that out when I came back from England. West African countries, I would say, they're not interested in jazz. What they like, they like Latin American music.
10:34 Speaker 00 At that time in West Africa, Latin American music was all the rage. And this tape, I gotta say, I love it when you get to hear a person before they've figured themselves out. This guy, this fella? He's looking for something, but he hasn't found it yet.
10:47 Speaker 10 He was a gentleman musician when we started the band. He was just a gentleman.
10:53 Speaker 00 This is one of Fela's early bandmates, Baba Ani.
10:55 Speaker 10 He was singing love songs, you know, funky songs, folk laws. And he wasn't drinking alcohol. He was not taking marijuana. He was a complete gentleman.
11:10 Speaker 00 At that point...
11:13 Speaker 00 Fela was working a respectable job in Lagos at the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, and he had formed a band, a dance band, called Kula Lubitos, which is just a made-up word meant to sound Latin because, as he said-
11:26 Speaker 11 What, like Latin American music?
11:28 Speaker 12 Well, at the beginning, before he traveled to America, he was basically playing a jazzy form of high life.
11:34 Speaker 03 It's high life time!
11:38 Speaker 00 That's John Collins, musician, historian. How would you define high life?
11:42 Speaker 12 High life goes back to the 1880s. It's a very old type of music. Africans at that time, they were colonized, so they had to learn the white man's culture. But they had their own culture.
11:54 Speaker 00 He says that high life was a little British, a little West African. When the British came in and colonized Nigeria, they had all these troops, and they needed to entertain them. And there was this craze at the time for ballroom dancing, like European-style ballroom dancing with the foxtrot and all that. So Nigerian and Ghanaian musicians who were conscripted into the colonial forces learned to play that stuff, but also added their own flavors to it. This was the kind of music that Fela was playing, two years before he came to LA and met Sandra.
12:28 Speaker 00 He's trying to figure out how to take this already hybrid form and layer jazz on top of it.
12:32 Speaker 11 For me, this musicality gave me a lot of joy.
12:37 Speaker 00 This is Benson Idonije, who managed Fela and Kula Lubitos at the time. Is there a song that you think of specifically that means it the most to you from that early period?
12:46 Speaker 11 Yeah, take "Ololo Feh", for instance. "Ololo Feh me", do you have it here?
12:52 Speaker 00 We have it somewhere. I think my phone is somewhere.
12:56 Speaker 11 Yeah, this one.
12:58 Speaker 00 Can you translate in real time?
13:00 Speaker 11 Yeah. "Ololo Feh me, my lover",
13:05 Speaker 11 "You are the one that I fancy, you are the one that I love",
13:10 Speaker 11 "My lover",
13:13 Speaker 11 "You are the one that I love".
13:24 Speaker 00 It's a vibe, for sure. If you notice, compared to later Fela, it's very smooth.
13:29 Speaker 11 "Come and rub your body on me".
13:33 Speaker 00 You can almost see him in his button-up shirt and loafers, just crooning out this love song.
13:42 Speaker 00 And Benson says it wasn't really working.
13:45 Speaker 11 We were playing to art communities, schools, students and all that. We were not making money.
13:53 Speaker 00 Small crowds.
13:54 Speaker 11 Yes. It's not working here. We started to play. People want to listen. The music was exciting and all that, but we had nothing to show for it.
14:03 Speaker 00 Making matters worse, in the late 60s, Fela loses his job, his radio job at the NBC, and it was right at this moment, according to musicologist Michael Veal, that a musical asteroid hit the continent.
14:24 Speaker 13 You're kidding? That music turned Sub-Saharan Africa upside down. James Brown turned Africa upside down, inside out.
14:33 Speaker 13 You start from the structure of his music. You know, that was a very powerful rhythmic construction, and it was full of black pride and black power. That music actually gave Africans a point of reference and cultural redefinition.
14:49 Speaker 00 He says it was around this moment when James Brown records just fell on West Africa.
14:54 Speaker 13 Between 64 and 69, Brown consciously trying to bring out the Africanist elements in his music.
15:01 Speaker 00 What he means is that shift in the mid 60s, when James Brown went from gospel R&B to percussive rhythms, chicken scratch guitar, call and response, that's when he blew up in Africa. And as Michael puts it, it was almost a kind of alchemical transmutation.
15:20 Speaker 00 He was taking in African rhythms from across the Atlantic and then sending it back to the continent in a new form.
15:27 Speaker 13 It's like hearing your own voice come back at you, but you recognize it as having been transformed in some profound ways.
15:35 Speaker 00 Whatever it was, now the Nigerian kids just did not want to hear "High Life." All they wanted was funk and soul.
15:41 Speaker 11 Play soul, play soul.
15:45 Speaker 00 Benson says they would hear that over and over at gigs.
15:48 Speaker 11 Play soul.
15:49 Speaker 00 Play some James Brown.
15:50 Speaker 11 Yeah, yeah.
15:50 Speaker 00 And Fela didn't want to.
15:51 Speaker 11 Fela was not ready to compromise his music.
15:54 Speaker 00 Frustrated and at a loss for direction, Fela apparently thought about giving up.
16:00 Speaker 00 He gives an interview to a Nigerian newspaper where he complains. He says he heard from a friend in America that James Brown was covering one of Fela's songs. And how is that fair?
16:11 Speaker 00 He sort of suggests that James Brown had stolen his music. It's a fascinating moment. James Brown hadn't been to Nigeria yet, probably hadn't heard Fela yet. But in just a few years, he would come to Nigeria. He would hear Fela play. His drummer, Clyde Stubblefield, would apparently sit in the corner at one of Fela's shows and notate the rhythms of Fela's drummer, Tony Allen. So there was something going on there. He had an intuition, but it was maybe out of time or something. In any case, he gives this interview, suggesting that if Americans want African-sounding music--
16:46 Speaker 11 Wait till they get the real thing. Listen to us. Americans like us. That's one of the reasons why we travel.
16:52 Speaker 00 Right after that article was published, Fela got an offer to take his band, Kula Levitos, on a two-month tour of America to expose the American public to their brand of high life.
17:11 Speaker 00 This is Fela Kuti, Fear No Man.
17:19 Speaker 00 May 1969, Kula Levitos sets off on a 10-month US tour. They perform in Washington DC. Boom. Chicago. Boom. San Francisco. Boom.
17:32 Speaker 00 But by the time they get to LA, they're broke and their visas have run out.
17:38 Speaker 09 Yeah, it wasn't easy for Fela here.
17:41 Speaker 00 And this brings us to Sandra Isidore, who is often called the queen of Afrobeat. If Fela is the king, she's the queen.
17:48 Speaker 09 You want to check me?
17:50 Speaker 00 How do I sound to you right now?
17:52 Speaker 09 You sound OK to me. How do I sound to you? My voice carries.
17:56 Speaker 00 The day that I sat down with Sandra in LA, her Afro was dyed bright sunny yellow. She wore deep blue lipstick, had massive galaxy earrings, and had a swirling constellation of tiny diamond stars affixed to her face, which caught the light as we talked. She is very striking, in other words. Sandra is a singer and a composer. Her meeting Fela would profoundly shape and change both of their lives, their politics, their music, their trajectories, and also, in the process, music history.
18:29 Speaker 00 So I want to go into her story for a second.
18:30 Speaker 09 I'm a country girl that grew up in the city.
18:33 Speaker 00 Sandra grew up in Watts, California. She was born in 1938, same year as Fela. She showed me a picture of her when she was six, standing in front of a mirror, holding a doll.
18:42 Speaker 09 That's, that's a happy little girl, growing up, you know, in, in a perfect world. Beautiful neighborhood. We lived on a corner house. We had a nectarine tree, apricots, oranges, pomegranates, lemons.
19:00 Speaker 00 Wow, that sounds idyllic.
19:01 Speaker 09 And you see my little white doll, don't you?
19:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:04 Speaker 09 They didn't have black dolls back then.
19:07 Speaker 00 When she was six, Sandra and her family moved to Compton, which was then an all-white neighborhood.
19:12 Speaker 09 Compton was beautiful then. Fields and pastures, horses. You know, we were the first black family to move into that area. And my friends then, all my friends were white. It made me start looking at myself in the mirror. And then I wanted to know, well, when, when is my eyes gonna turn blue? My hair is gonna be long and stringy and I'm gonna have white skin. When, when is that gonna happen?
19:44 Speaker 00 How literally did you take that thought?
19:46 Speaker 09 I was thinking I was gonna turn white. So that's how deep it was.
19:51 Speaker 00 I asked Sandra about her parents. Like, did they ever talk to her about any of this?
19:55 Speaker 09 My parents were what you would call from the secret society.
20:01 Speaker 00 Huh.
20:01 Speaker 09 That generation, I'm a baby boomer, but before me, they kept secrets. Things they didn't want their children to know. My parents never taught me about racism in America. They never shared with me that people would hate me because of the color of my skin. They just never taught me anything. And I think one of the reasons why they came to California was fleeing the South.
20:29 Speaker 00 They grew up in the South?
20:30 Speaker 09 They grew up in the South. And it was a lot going on in the families that they didn't tell us about. Things happened, they kept it quiet.
20:39 Speaker 00 They never sort of took you aside and said, this is our journey, this is how we got here?
20:43 Speaker 09 Absolutely nothing.
20:47 Speaker 00 I have to say, I was really struck by this. The way that Sandra talked about it. This entire generation that wasn't given context, really, because their parents tried to protect them with silence. In some ways, this was also true in my family. For many years, my folks didn't talk about where we came from because it was too painful.
21:09 Speaker 09 Well, your parents then are part of that secret society.
21:12 Speaker 00 For Sandra, despite the firewall, she says some things did slip through, which made her uneasy.
21:18 Speaker 09 I would see my parents, you know, they would whisper and they were talking. And the things that they were whispering about was Martin Luther King. They didn't want me to know about the dogs and all of that. I learned that later.
21:33 Speaker 00 You can only hold information at bay for so long. And for Sandra, things started to leak through when she was a teenager. Do you recall what awoke you to the, to the reality?
21:44 Speaker 09 I think it was the civil disturbance in Los Angeles.
21:51 Speaker 00 You're talking about the Watts riots?
21:52 Speaker 09 Yeah.
21:53 Speaker 14 White people driving through the riot area were considered fair game. Their cars were battered, the drivers stoned.
22:00 Speaker 09 When I saw the fires, even at a young age, I was questioning.
22:03 Speaker 14 I threw the firebomb right in the front window.
22:06 Speaker 09 Why are you burning up your own neighborhood?
22:08 Speaker 14 The cry in the streets was, "Burn, baby, burn."
22:11 Speaker 09 You start asking questions. And it was around that time that my cousin Aubrey, who had just been released from prison, he did five years because he had a joint. He came to stay with us. And he always had a black leather jacket and he wore a black beret. And he was friends with Bunchy.
22:35 Speaker 00 Bunchy?
22:35 Speaker 09 Bunchy Carter, from the Panther Party.
22:37 Speaker 00 Oh. She says her cousin Aubrey was the first person to really break through the firewall. He started answering her questions. Why are they burning their neighborhood? Because they're tired of being beaten and harassed by the police.
22:47 Speaker 09 You know, he was always talking his black liberation and everything.
22:51 Speaker 00 More importantly, he started to play her.
22:53 Speaker 09 Music.
22:55 Speaker 09 Uh, Nina Simone. Alabama's got me so upset. Um.
23:03 Speaker 09 Ray Charles.
23:07 Speaker 09 Miles Davis.
23:11 Speaker 09 Oh.
23:13 Speaker 09 Billie Holiday.
23:19 Speaker 09 Big Mama Thornton. So I'm getting all this old music. And it was in their lyrical content.
23:29 Speaker 09 Especially Oscar Brown Jr. That, you know, it started me thinking.
23:37 Speaker 00 Eventually.
23:41 Speaker 00 Her cousin turned her on to Malcolm X.
23:49 Speaker 09 It was like my eyes started opening. And around that time, getting back to the music.
24:00 Speaker 09 Hugh Masakela came out with the Americanization of Ooga Booga.
24:10 Speaker 00 The title was sort of a play on words. Ooga Booga was a racist slur used about Africa in the West, while Americanization nodded at Hugh Masakela trying to blend South African and American sounds together. This was actually an album that his record label thought was too African for American tastes.
24:32 Speaker 09 But it was my favorite, and I would play it over and over.
24:39 Speaker 09 Over and over.
24:44 Speaker 09 It was at that point I said to myself, in order to know the real story, I'm gonna need to meet a real African.
24:53 Speaker 00 I have to meet a real African?
24:54 Speaker 09 Yep.
24:55 Speaker 00 Why?
24:57 Speaker 09 Because.
25:01 Speaker 00 At this point in our conversation, Sandra just broke into a big smile, sort of laughing at her younger self.
25:06 Speaker 15 Love it. A real African. A real African.
25:10 Speaker 00 Now, obviously, the sentiment that she was expressing was not just her thinking this. At this point in college campuses, there was a whole Back to Africa movement that was asking questions about realness and authenticity. I ended up extending this conversation, bringing a few people in, including Louis Tudisoki, who is a professor of English at Boston University.
25:28 Speaker 15 Also the director of the African American and Black Diaspora Studies Program.
25:32 Speaker 00 Wrote a fabulous memoir called Floating in a Most Peculiar Way that offers a whole different spin on this idea of African realness. Now, he is, on paper, a real African, but he says, growing up in Nigeria, then Jamaica, nobody wanted to be that.
25:46 Speaker 15 No. Everyone telling me I was African, it was always an insult.
25:50 Speaker 00 For him, black culture coming out of America, that was what he was into. That felt real, it felt cool. So he was surprised, when he actually got to America, to find that it was all upside down, that the black people he met here were fascinated by him and treated him like he had some kind of secret knowledge.
26:06 Speaker 15 There was this moment in the 80s.
26:09 Speaker 00 We're skipping forward in time for just a second.
26:11 Speaker 15 When hip-hop becomes Afrocentric. I'm sure you remember, there was the Africa medallions, and everyone's like...
26:23 Speaker 15 Motherland, the Jungle Brothers, and Tribe Called Quest with the Multicolored. And for me, Jada, I'll be straight up. I was like, oh shit, I'm gonna get laid now.
26:36 Speaker 00 You're like, opportunity.
26:38 Speaker 15 Okay, Africa is cool, I'm there. But you had to pretend to be that kind of Africa. It's not the Africa that's in my house. It's not my uncles or my aunts. Because my uncles and my aunts and the actual African community I was a part of wanted no part of that shit.
26:59 Speaker 09 So I started dancing with swaba, African dance troupe.
27:07 Speaker 00 Getting back to Sandra, she goes to college, joins the Black Student Union, starts dancing in a dance troupe.
27:12 Speaker 09 I thought I was really doing something on the African dance moves.
27:18 Speaker 00 And one day, the guy who ran the dance troupe, whose name was Juno Lewis, he says to her, "Come with me to this party at the Hollywood Gardens. It's a fundraiser for the NAACP. And there's this new band that's in town from Lagos."
27:31 Speaker 09 It was a very hot day. I really didn't want to go. And it was Juno Lewis who insisted. It's this band from Africa. And I'm like, ah, because at this point, I wanted to meet progressive Africans. And I had only met, I'll use a term today that I'm making up now, missionary boys. And what I mean by that, Jesus is the way, holier than thou, straight from very rural areas. They weren't impressive to me at all.
28:09 Speaker 00 Like her parents, who were deep in the church. It was the center of their lives. A lot of the African immigrants to the US that Sandra met had grown up in Western churches and been educated in Christian schools. Because, you know, colonialism. That didn't meet her definition of real African.
28:28 Speaker 09 Sandra, you gotta meet him. You gotta meet him. And I'm like, uh, here's another one, you know. So we go to the Ambassador Hotel.
28:38 Speaker 00 This is summer 1969.
28:40 Speaker 09 On that particular day, I had on a blue and green halter bell-bottom jumpsuit with the back out. I walk in. And as I'm walking in with Juno.
28:55 Speaker 00 On stage is a guy singing.
29:06 Speaker 00 With this band behind him, playing sort of bouncy, brassy dance music. She can't remember what he was wearing. Probably a suit.
29:13 Speaker 09 Trousers, shirt, loafer.
29:15 Speaker 00 Because that was his outfit at the time.
29:17 Speaker 09 No socks. He was the first man I met that didn't wear socks.
29:20 Speaker 00 But what she really remembers is that as she walked in and glanced at the stage, he looked right down at her.
29:27 Speaker 09 And our eyes locked.
29:33 Speaker 09 And it was a very magical moment. It was like we were connected from day one.
29:45 Speaker 00 I think what you wrote, is it something that you never experienced before and never did again?
29:52 Speaker 09 No, it was like a spiritual chord. It just seems like we were connected, something that was destined to be.
30:02 Speaker 00 Sandra says later in the party, between sets, she went searching for her friend Juno.
30:07 Speaker 09 I look over to the bar and there's Fela standing next to him. So I go over to the bar and Juno makes the introduction. And the first thing that comes out of Fela's mouth, in a very arrogant way, "Do you have a car?"
30:28 Speaker 00 Whoa.
30:29 Speaker 09 Yeah, "Do you have a car?" I said, "Yes, I do." "Then you're going with me." And I started laughing. You know, he is so bold that he's telling me what I'm going to do in my car with him. Okay? And you see how you're laughing? That's what I did. And then, you know, I looked at the way he was dressed and just him coming on to me like that let me know he was different.
30:56 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:57 Speaker 09 And I said, "Hmm, interesting." He tweaked my interest.
31:01 Speaker 00 They go to a party together. They sit down on the couch next to each other.
31:05 Speaker 09 I'm all in it.
31:07 Speaker 00 Long story short, Sandra thinks, "Finally."
31:10 Speaker 09 I finally meet a black man, African. He's gonna show me, he's gonna teach me all about Africa.
31:18 Speaker 00 Hmm.
31:19 Speaker 09 Cut.
31:20 Speaker 00 Scene.
31:25 Speaker 09 Okay.
31:29 Speaker 00 So Sandra gets to know Fela. They start to see each other every day. And at some point, Sandra goes and watches Fela and his band rehearse.
31:47 Speaker 00 She watches them play this one particular song that becomes kind of important.
31:52 Speaker 09 He did this song called "Abey," and I was able to really hear the band, and I was impressed.
32:15 Speaker 09 I liked the sound, it was different.
32:19 Speaker 09 So, when the rehearsal was over, I asked him to translate.
32:26 Speaker 00 Because the lyrics are in.
32:27 Speaker 09 In Yoruba.
32:28 Speaker 00 Right, right.
32:29 Speaker 09 Translate what he was saying. He was so proud to let me know, "It's about my soup."
32:37 Speaker 00 What does that mean?
32:38 Speaker 09 Soup.
32:40 Speaker 00 Like it's a song about soup?
32:42 Speaker 09 The whole song was about soup. What you eat.
32:45 Speaker 00 Like actual soup, not soup as a metaphor, but actually about soup.
32:48 Speaker 09 No, S-O-U-P, soup.
32:52 Speaker 09 And I started laughing. And you know, I was enhanced anyway. I thought that was the funniest thing because how you gonna put all this energy and everything about some soup?
33:03 Speaker 00 Oh, okay. So it's like, it's a celebration of soup?
33:07 Speaker 09 Well, it's not so much a celebration of it, but what he wants in his soup. Okay?
33:16 Speaker 09 So I thought that was.
33:16 Speaker 00 That is so wild to me because knowing where he is about to go.
33:20 Speaker 09 Yeah.
33:21 Speaker 00 With your help.
33:21 Speaker 09 Yeah.
33:22 Speaker 00 That that's where he started is kind of crazy.
33:25 Speaker 09 That's what started the whole thing. You've been doing all this and you singing about some soup? At that point, I said, "Why would you do that? When you can use your music to educate people, uplift people?" I made the assumption that he was going to be my teacher. Because he was African, that's how naive I was. Because he was African, I made a lot of assumptions. Not knowing what colonialism did in Africa.
33:59 Speaker 00 Yeah.
33:59 Speaker 09 Between colonialism and slavery, I'll take slavery. Those shackles are still on the mines, that's even worse.
34:09 Speaker 00 This moment, when I talked about it with some of our consulting producers. Yes, oh, yes.
34:14 Speaker 16 Oh, yeah.
34:14 Speaker 00 Got a whole bunch of different reactions.
34:16 Speaker 16 It was surprising to me that she said that she would choose slavery over colonialism.
34:22 Speaker 00 This is Bolu Babalola, a Nigerian writer and consulting producer on this project. And she says that caught her ear because it's an argument she actually sometimes gets into with her black American friends.
34:33 Speaker 16 A lot of people don't recognize the atrocity of colonialism. The word almost sanitizes it. I think it hides a lot of the rape, the beatings, the violence, the just the horror of it all. And I think slavery is such a visual word that you can imagine the horror that comes with it.
34:50 Speaker 00 Colonialism, just to divague that word a bit more, as she suggests, it's a period that stretches for about 400 years. So it's happening before, during, and after the transatlantic slave trade, in most cases, where European countries just went on a berserker rampage throughout the entire world. Countries would come in, like Britain, came into what would become Nigeria, and occupied the land and started extracting resources. You can find incredibly detailed accounting of this in these things called the Blue Books. This is the Lagos Blue Book from 1878. Where the British would list to the pound how much cocoa they were extracting. Cocoa, 116,431 pounds. How much rubber?
35:34 Speaker 00 592,309 pounds. How much palm oil, ground nuts, how many prisoners they were maintaining? Number of persons summoned, underapprehended, 545. Punishments? Whipping, executions. This is a rabbit hole I would just recommend you do not fall into because it just has no bottom. It just keeps going and going. Oh, there's a whole page called lunatic asylums. Book after book.
36:01 Speaker 00 And what you realize is that the way the British ruled was not subtle. This is Bolu's point. We're not talking about microaggressions here. The British set up prisons, labor camps. They brutally put down rebellions. They made people change their names. They enforced this code that basically said to the native people, "Your culture, your language, your religion has no value, has no meaning." They basically said, "If you really want to get somewhere, you need to take on white culture."
36:28 Speaker 16 With colonization, I think it's just like, you know, white people marched in and changed their names and that was it. Where it's like, the complete horror and destruction of it is completely erased.
36:37 Speaker 00 So that was Bolu's reaction to what Sandra said.
36:39 Speaker 09 Between colonialism and slavery, I'll take slavery.
36:42 Speaker 00 For Louis, what's your reaction when you hear that?
36:44 Speaker 15 I love her voice.
36:46 Speaker 00 For him, it was less what she said than how she said it.
36:49 Speaker 15 Her voice is just fascinating for me because for Fela arriving, he has not heard people talk like that. Not really, certainly not in England. I'm just thinking about Fela, what he's-
36:59 Speaker 09 In the clothing.
37:00 Speaker 15 Hearing, like-
37:01 Speaker 09 I see it in the clothing.
37:01 Speaker 15 Is he hearing a kind of authenticity that he couldn't or didn't hear in his own?
37:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
37:08 Speaker 15 He had to learn to perform a different kind of language. So I'm wondering what he's hearing when he hears an African-American person who is definitely inhabiting it.
37:20 Speaker 00 Whatever the case, the first half year of his stay in LA was rough for Fela. Sandra didn't realize it at the time, but the whole reason they played that garden party for the NAACP is that they had no other choice. They were scrambling for gigs.
37:36 Speaker 09 He was going to meetings and meetings and meetings.
37:38 Speaker 00 And what he said?
37:39 Speaker 09 "Do you have a car?"
37:40 Speaker 00 Maybe part of the reason is that his band had no way of getting around.
37:43 Speaker 09 I had this sports car, a two-seater sports car. And I remember nine people got into that car.
37:51 Speaker 00 In LA, Cula Libitos went from one botched opportunity to another. At one point, right before a big gig, his bass player skips town because he's worried about getting deported.
38:00 Speaker 09 And after that?
38:02 Speaker 00 He was invited by Disneyland. Disneyland?
38:06 Speaker 09 They wanted him for Adventureland.
38:09 Speaker 17 Welcome aboard the Jungle Crew.
38:11 Speaker 09 You know, at that time, they had Adventureland, where you go around with a little boat.
38:16 Speaker 03 Look out, look out, another hippo!
38:19 Speaker 09 The hippopotamus would come up out of the water and the alligators.
38:24 Speaker 00 Oh, no.
38:25 Speaker 09 All mechanical.
38:26 Speaker 17 That scared him.
38:27 Speaker 00 The Jungle Cruise was wildly popular, not so subtly racist, and inspired by the movie The African Queen, which starred Humphrey Bogart and Kathleen Hepburn.
38:36 Speaker 17 We are now entering headhunter country.
38:39 Speaker 00 They wanted Fela to be the sort of house band for that?
38:42 Speaker 09 Yes.
38:43 Speaker 00 Oh, that's a whole different reality.
38:45 Speaker 09 Yep. They were gonna sign him.
38:49 Speaker 11 He failed. He failed the audition.
38:51 Speaker 09 Disney turned them down because their music wasn't African enough.
38:58 Speaker 00 Wow. We attempted to confirm this with Disney, but they never got back to us.
39:02 Speaker 11 That was when, that was when he felt very bad.
39:16 Speaker 00 This is Fela Kuti, Fear No Man. We rejoin the story with Fela getting rejected from Disneyland for not being, quote, "African enough."
39:25 Speaker 11 That was when he felt very bad.
39:33 Speaker 00 At this point, Fela was deeply broke. Sandra says he was stuffing newspapers into his loafers to fill the holes.
39:40 Speaker 09 When things got really bad, he came and lived with my parents.
39:45 Speaker 00 Now, how long was he living there for?
39:47 Speaker 09 Ooh, I would, I would say a good six to eight months.
39:53 Speaker 00 Okay.
39:53 Speaker 09 Yeah.
39:54 Speaker 00 Wow, so you spent every waking moment together?
39:56 Speaker 09 Oh, all the time.
39:58 Speaker 00 Fela stayed in a small guest shack at the back of her parents' property.
40:01 Speaker 09 Fortunately, my mom had an old upright piano. But anyway, it was that old upright piano that Fela wrote a lot of those songs. And he used to chart the music. And at night, once they've gone to bed, I would bring Fela up to my bedroom.
40:22 Speaker 09 And we would be talking. And in my bedroom at that time, I had posters all over the wall of, you know, the kings of Africa. I had Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Angela Davis.
40:36 Speaker 00 This one night, she says, they were talking. She forgets about what. Maybe Fela was telling her stories about Nigeria, which she really liked. Or maybe she was telling him stories about the time she got arrested and thrown in jail for kicking a policeman in a protest. Story he loved.
40:52 Speaker 09 His thing was, look at this woman. She's a fighter.
40:56 Speaker 00 Whatever it was, at some point, she says, she remembers him shaking his head and then getting real quiet.
41:01 Speaker 09 And then he made the comment about how Africans are so stupid.
41:10 Speaker 00 Hmm.
41:11 Speaker 09 He said, they're stupid.
41:13 Speaker 00 His basic sentiment was, why can't Africans on the continent be more like you? Like African Americans in the US?
41:20 Speaker 09 And, I mean, for someone who was just coming into knowledge, self-knowledge, and learning about myself, and you're gonna say that Africans are stupid? Oh, I must have been livid.
41:35 Speaker 00 In her memoir, she actually writes that he struck a chord so deep that a panther sprung out. And she sat him down and she said, "Look, let me tell you a few things about America." Can you read this? And then just tell me a little bit more about...
41:48 Speaker 09 You want me to read it out loud?
41:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, if you don't mind. I asked Sandra to read the passage in her memoir where she talks about that conversation with Fela.
41:56 Speaker 09 It was during this discussion, I showed him news clippings and pictures of blacks being hung from trees, burned alive, and wearing scars on their back. He saw the pictures of slaves in chains and shackles being sold on the auction block. I made sure he saw too. What was recently happening in the South with blacks being hosed and attacked, bitten by dogs, whites attacking, blacks demonstrating, marching for equal rights?
42:24 Speaker 00 So you're showing him pictures of the civil rights movement? You're showing him pictures of lynchings?
42:29 Speaker 09 Yes.
42:30 Speaker 00 Sit-ins? Like, you're showing, you're giving him the...
42:32 Speaker 09 History of America. See, he didn't know our real story.
42:38 Speaker 00 What was his reaction?
42:40 Speaker 09 Shocked.
42:43 Speaker 00 Sandra says at some point in her rant, she went to her bookshelf and pulled out the autobiography of Malcolm X.
42:49 Speaker 18 Chapter 1. Nightmare. When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me a party of Ku Klux Klan riders galloped to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.
43:00 Speaker 00 She told him, "You need to read this." And over the next few days, he did.
43:04 Speaker 18 Philosophically and culturally, we Afro-Americans badly need to return to Africa. Each day, I live as if I'm already dead. I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form. I want you to just watch and see if I'm not right in what I say, that the white man in his press is going to identify me with hate.
43:32 Speaker 00 Fela would eventually tell his biographer Carlos Moore, "This book, I couldn't put it down. This man was talking about the history of Africa, talking about the white man. I had never read a book like that before in my life. Everything about Africa started coming back to me." He would later tell The New York Times, "It was incredible how my head was turned. Everything fell into place."
43:54 Speaker 09 Everything fell into place?
43:57 Speaker 00 Here he is himself.
43:58 Speaker 19 Sandra taught me a lot about Blackism, gave me books to read, Malcolm X, and so many. When I was reading these books, I found out in my analysis of myself, I had to sit down and think about myself, say, "What am I doing? I'm already playing African music."
44:14 Speaker 00 That noisy interview, done by a student at Lagos University, while the band was rehearsing in the background. That is the only audio clip we have of Fela talking about this moment himself.
44:24 Speaker 19 Then I started after, I have to start to rethink and reanalyze myself. I started to write new music.
44:30 Speaker 00 Shortly after that conversation in Sandra's bedroom, Fela made some changes. He changed the name of his band from Kula Lubitos, this made-up word, to Nigeria 70, and he changed his sound.
44:51 Speaker 09 He started writing differently here.
45:02 Speaker 00 Sandra got him a gig at a club called Citadel de Haiti.
45:07 Speaker 00 And one of the first songs that he played at that gig, which he'd written in her house, was called
45:12 Speaker 09 My Lady's Frustration.
45:14 Speaker 11 My Lady Frustration.
45:16 Speaker 00 The song was apparently written for Sandra.
45:19 Speaker 11 This was, this is the first song, the first African music song.
45:23 Speaker 00 Benson calls this song, "Very Beginning", of Fela's new genre, Afrobeats.
46:11 Speaker 00 According to Sandra, the first time he played that song at the Citadel, the crowd
46:15 Speaker 09 They, they went crazy. Oh my goodness.
46:19 Speaker 00 And within a few weeks
46:20 Speaker 09 He was packing that club and it was like we was balling. The Citadel de Haiti became the spot where the black who's who of Hollywood, they were all going to Bernie Hamilton's club. And they were listening to Fela.
46:44 Speaker 00 In March of 1970, Fela and the band returned to Lagos, with the plan that Sandra would follow him a few months later. He renames the band again to Africa 70, and in 1971, he releases what might be the best Fela song, at least according to me. It is called "Jin Koku".
47:12 Speaker 00 And it blew up.
47:55 Speaker 00 So good. Do you remember the Junko Kuku moment yourself?
47:57 Speaker 20 Oh, yeah. I was in...
47:59 Speaker 00 What do you remember?
48:00 Speaker 20 Early college. We heard it on the radio, everywhere.
48:04 Speaker 00 This is Olabode Omojola. He grew up in Nigeria, was a young man when Junko Kuku came out. He's now a professor of music at Mount Holyoke College.
48:11 Speaker 20 But at that point, even my father was beginning to, hmm, okay, maybe there's something sensible in this, in this rasca, rasca music, you know? I think I was in, I was in high school, and it was all over the radio. It was all, everybody was playing Junko Kuku, and then the way it's...
48:54 Speaker 00 One of the crazy things was that, at this point, Lagos was still a pretty small town of about a million people, and apparently, I mean, we have no way of checking these numbers, but these are the numbers you see quoted, apparently this record sold 200,000 copies. If that is true, that's one-fifth of the whole population.
49:11 Speaker 20 Which is wild to think about. Yeah, everybody, everybody, you know.
49:14 Speaker 00 I asked Bode about what Fela's manager Benson Idoninje had said.
49:18 Speaker 20 This was, this is the first, first African music song.
49:22 Speaker 00 Why? Why isn't everything he makes an African song? Because he is African, so anything he makes should be African. What is it specifically about these songs? I'm curious what, so I hear James Brown in there. What do you hear? I want to, I want to hear all the things.
49:36 Speaker 20 Yeah, kind of James Brown, a little bit element of funk, a little bit element of Big Band.
49:43 Speaker 00 He says you got the James Brown, the jazz, the high-life horns, although interestingly, not high-life chords, which is why the music sounds less jaunty and Western. And on top of that?
49:53 Speaker 20 The groove. This is Yoruba drumming.
49:56 Speaker 00 Is it really?
49:56 Speaker 20 Yeah.
49:57 Speaker 00 Is it that? Is it that pattern?
50:00 Speaker 20 Let, let it play.
50:22 Speaker 20 My, my mother would just be dancing like that.
50:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
50:26 Speaker 20 So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's so, it's so Yoruba-ish.
50:30 Speaker 00 Huh.
50:31 Speaker 20 Then the melody. Only you can see, eh ba mi le lo. Call and response.
50:36 Speaker 00 Call and response.
50:49 Speaker 20 So there's call and response that is going on there.
50:51 Speaker 00 The key, says Bode, is that Fela found a precise blend where everyone can hear what they want.
50:56 Speaker 20 So you could bring my mother, who has never been to the US, is, you know, familiar with the Yoruba culture, and bring an African-American person who has never been to Nigeria. And the two of them can actually interface, because this music brings them together. So Fela is like a magician, trying to create a kind of Pan-Africanist musical language.
51:27 Speaker 00 He described it almost as the sound of a diaspora meeting itself. Locking eyes.
51:35 Speaker 09 Our eyes locked. It was like a spiritual chord. It just seems like we were connected.
51:46 Speaker 00 When I talked about this with writer and scholar Louis Judd Soki,
51:51 Speaker 00 he had a really interesting way of interpreting that gaze.
51:55 Speaker 15 This dynamic you're describing for me is because African Americans look to Africa for a past. Folks in the diaspora look to the African Americans in the diaspora for a vision of possibility.
52:09 Speaker 15 So we look to them for the past, they look to us for the future.
52:13 Speaker 00 I've never heard it said that way.
52:14 Speaker 15 That's how I see it, right?
52:16 Speaker 11 As a matter of fact, just like Miles Davis said when he had Fela in 1988,
52:21 Speaker 11 he did say that Fela's Afrobeat was going to be the music of the future.
52:28 Speaker 00 Miles Davis said this?
52:29 Speaker 11 Yes. Miles Davis said it.
52:33 Speaker 00 Wow.
52:35 Speaker 00 In 1970, as the Jun Koku asteroid was about to hit, as planned, Sandra arrives in Lagos and steps off the plane.
52:44 Speaker 09 I, you know what, I hope I can find that picture. You can see from the expression on my face that, oh my God, I was, oh. Coming off that plane, I mean, it was like I had arrived, okay? And I was just happy to be there, you know, in the motherland.
53:06 Speaker 00 How did the people in Lagos react to you?
53:09 Speaker 09 I was headlines.
53:11 Speaker 00 Really?
53:11 Speaker 09 Yeah, because, I mean, an American nigris, that's what they call me, a nigris. I had never heard that terminology. But I felt special from day one. I felt nothing but love from my ancestors and it gave back in the full.
53:49 Speaker 00 Few notes before we close. In Lagos, Fela would immediately let go of his buttoned up trousers and pants style and he'd embrace polyester jumpsuits and fur coats, or just hanging out in his undies, his bikini briefs. And Fela and Sandra did not become the love affair that either of them expected for a lot of reasons that we'll get into in some of the next chapters. As a final, final note, I want to end with a clip from Louis Tudisoki that I cannot get out of my mind. We were talking about that idea of realness, right? In the cross-Atlantic diasporic game of telephone, how do you find the real you amidst all of the projections and the echoes of echoes? And he said, "Well, there's no such thing.
54:32 Speaker 00 It's always a performance, which may not reflect the reality, but still doesn't make it any less real, as long as you believe it." And then he threw out this stat.
54:41 Speaker 15 The single statistic that's changed my whole life was discovering in The New York Times in 1990 or so that more Africans have come to the United States since 1990 than at the height of the slave trade.
54:54 Speaker 00 Shut up.
54:55 Speaker 15 Look it up.
54:57 Speaker 00 Wow.
54:58 Speaker 15 That shook me to the core, and I'm looking around, I'm like, "Y'all hear this?" All of that is a way of wrestling with the fact that blackness is up for grabs.
55:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
55:10 Speaker 15 In the same way that we know that whiteness is being transformed by immigration, so is blackness.
55:28 Speaker 00 Coming up, Fela is about to light Nigeria on fire, and we fly to Lagos to visit the shrine, his club slash temple, where it all went down.
55:47 Speaker 00 This has been a Higher Ground on Audible, original, produced by Audible, Higher Ground Audio, Western Sound and Talk House. The series was created and executive produced by me, Jad Abumrad, Benadere and Ian Wheeler, written and hosted by yours truly. Higher Ground executive producers were Nick White, Mukta Mohan and Dan Fearman. Jenna Levin was creative executive and Corinne Gillett Fisher was executive producer. Executive producers for Audible were Anne Hepperman, Glenn Pogue and Nick D'Angelo. Our senior producer was Govan Utubwele. Ruby Heron Walsh was lead producer and researcher. Our producers were Feifei Odudu and Oluwakemi Aladiusui. Benadere was our editor with editing help Carla Murthy. Consulting producers were Bolu Babalola, Dotun Ayubade, Nik Abdurraqib, Michael Veal,
56:32 Speaker 00 Moses Ochunu and Judith Byfield. Our fact checker was Jamila Wilkinson. Alex McInnis was the mix engineer. Also, special thanks to Knitting Factory Records and BMG, to the Kuti family, to Melissa O'Donnell, to Inside Projects and Maggie Taylor for marketing support, and big thanks to Carla Murthy, Leah Friedman and Shashana Scholar. We couldn't have done any of this without their support. Oh, and a very big thank you to Sandra Izadore. You can find her memoir, Fela and Me, and her music...
57:17 Speaker 00 You can find that at sandrazisadore.com. That's I-Z-S-A-D-O-R-E dot com.
57:29 Speaker 00 Head of Creative Development at Audible is Kate Navin. Chief Content Officer, Rachel Giatza. Copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Sound recording copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio LLC.
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