Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine

Our original host Jad Abumrad returns to share a new podcast series he’s just released. It’s all about Fela Kuti, a Nigerian musician who created a genre, then a movement, then tried to use his hypnotic beats to topple a military dictatorship. Jad tells us about the series and why he made it, and we play the episode that, for us at least, gets to the heart of the matter: How exactly does his music work? What actually happens to the people who hear it and how does it move them to action? You can find Jad’s entire nine-part series, Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Jad AbumradRadiolab portions produced by - Sindhu Gnanasambandan Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Wait, you're listening?

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  Okay.

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  All right.

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  Okay.

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  All right.

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  You're listening to Radiolab.

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  Radiolab.

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  From...

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  WNYC. C.

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  See?

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  It's Radiolab.

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  I'm Latif Nasr.

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  And I'm Lulu Miller.

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  And I am Jad Abumrad, here to hang out with Lulu and Latif.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Woo-hoo! Welcome back, old man!

• 0:31Speaker 04

  Thanks, youngster. Happy to be here.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Where have you been this whole time?

• 0:40Speaker 04

  I've been... I've just been here in Brooklyn, just, you know, being a dad, making stuff. So, pretty much the first thing that happened when I handed you guys the show proudly is I became a professor, kind of a fake professor at Vanderbilt, been teaching all kinds of things relating to storytelling and interviewing.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Dr. Abumrad.

• 1:01Speaker 04

  Uh, well, you know, none of the other faculty are fooled.

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  But also alongside that, I've been making all kinds of weird music and theater things. We just had a big thing in Brooklyn that launched in May.

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  It's about the Brooklyn Navy Yard, America's war-making engine, in a way. And, I don't know, it felt like, what if journalism were sung by 60 women?

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  And then somewhere along the way, early, I got into a conversation with Benadere, old friend, who has been making audio stories as long as I have. He approached me and he was like, "Hey, do you want to do a podcast about Fela Kuti?" Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician who invented a whole new genre of music and started a political movement and toppled a government just with music. I was like, "Cool, that sounds interesting." And I said yes to it in the way that you say yes to things that you know are never going to happen.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  You know, I was like, this will be really fun.

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  Sure, I'd love to have dinner at your house. That sounds great.

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  Well, I wasn't saying yes in a note, like, I don't really want to do it. I was just like, I don't know if I'm doing another podcast. But let me just, you know, let's just explore it. Because I knew a bit about Fela. I mean, he was sort of the record that came on at a party and everyone was like, oh, and it was like, the party got started. So I knew him from that, that angle, but I didn't know his backstory at all. So I started making some phone calls.

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  And I don't know, I just didn't stop.

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  In this series, we're going to look at the life and the music of Fela Kuti.

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  Anikulapu, I always get that, my tongue always trips over that.

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  The father of Afrobeep.

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  The black president, the chief priest.

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  I had never heard of Fela until you got obsessed with him. And I was like, who is this guy? And why is Jad spending like, three years, like, obsessed with this guy?

• 3:20Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, one of the first things that you discover when you're trying to unravel who this man was, is that all of these people that you love, love him. Iyo Adebry, actor, writer, someone I really respect. She's in The Bear. Great show. On some red carpet somewhere, she was asked

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  this question.

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  A musician I have a cult-like fascination with.

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  Her answer?

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  Fela Kuti, who is a Nigerian legend, Bear is a very complicated man.

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  But Fela has to be the epicenter.

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  And Questlove, one of the great musical minds of our time.

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  I mean, Fela is the one figure whose story resonates with modern American hip hop culture. The passion, the pain.

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  Jay-Z.

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  The, the strength, the need to get that message out there.

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  Beyonce. I don't know, it just presents a question. You're like, okay, what are they hearing? You know? And can I hear it? Can I make other people hear it?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so you dive in, you end up churning out this 12-part series called Fela Kuti, Fear No Man, which people can go listen to right now, anywhere, everywhere. And, you know, okay, people clearly love his music, but what drove you to make the series?

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  Yeah.

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  He is the answer to a really important question for me personally, which is like, right now, you're looking out in the world, none of it makes sense. It's all insanity. And if you love music, as I do, and you kind of look around, you're like, what is the point? What's the point? What's the point of making music? Like, what's it gonna do to make our world better? And then you look at like, the streaming hellscape that we all live in. Right. And artists are now content creators and they just sell their content to Spotify for precisely 0.01 cents. And you're like, what's the point? What's the point? Like, why? And he answers the question for me. That the music itself, it wasn't just music.

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  It became the catalyst for like, a political movement.

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  That had, you know, many, many tens of thousands of young people, ready to march into the streets. And just with the music, he almost toppled a dictatorship. And he's like, this is the point of making music. This is the point of making art, is to, is to try and make a new world. Try and change the world in some way.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  And the music itself, though, like, how it functions? How is that changing the world? Just what's the almost mechanism?

• 5:52Speaker 04

  Sure. Okay, so here's, so Lula, I love that question because the political aspects of his music weren't just lyrical, although they were. It was baked into the very grammar of the music itself. It's like, in the notes. It's below the notes. It's in the, it's in the structure of the music. It's in the, it's in the impact and the sequence of impacts that the music creates.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Like, which sounds so pretty, but like, what the F does that mean?

• 6:19Speaker 04

  Well, okay, so, so, this is, this is, this, this episode that I think you're gonna play.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, okay, just for context, the first episode, we met a bandmate of Phela's. We got the story through his eyes. Then in the second episode, you traced his evolution into a revolutionary. And then in the third one, the one we're gonna play, this is the one where we really get into the music itself.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. It really tries to first give you the experience and then explain what the experience is.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's, it's called The Shrine. Anything else before we walk in to it, like?

• 6:54Speaker 04

  I should explain, The Shrine is, um... It's his club in Lagos. And it really was sort of the epicenter of his movement. And we interviewed, god, so many people who described what it was like to be there. People who were once asleep and are now awake.

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  My experience in being in the shrine was like, the music was like inside of me. It was all around and just like, you know, being hypnotized.

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  Like you're all inside the music.

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  Brothers and sisters. The secret of life is to have no fear. We all have to understand that.

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  This is Fela Kuti, Fear No Man. Chapter three, Enter the Shrine. One of the ingredients of a movement, necessary ingredients, is to have a place where you can experience the promise of that movement right here, right now, in the present. Can you tell us about your first visit to the shrine?

• 8:15Speaker 07

  Yes, of course.

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  What do you remember about that?

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  It was very, very funky.

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  This is Michael Veal, musician, professor of music at Yale. He's also one of our advisors on the project.

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  To hear that music in New York is one thing. You know, you listen to that music in New York, you're like, oh, yeah, whatever. Look, the first night I was in Lagos, you know, as you're walking up the shrine, you hear that.

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  Then you get closer, you start getting...

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  I remember that very clearly. But it was at night.

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  And there was no power. Blackout. It's like going to Times Square, but there are people all in the street, like thousands and thousands of people. Jam-packed mob of people. It's total darkness, but thousands of these little sternal lamps illuminating the place.

• 9:13Speaker 07

  Because the power went out all the time in Lagos, but there are thousands of these sternos. So you imagine the scene, it's like, almost like Woodstock kind of thing. You know what I mean? Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 07

  To hear that music in New York is one thing. You're like, oh yeah, whatever. But then if you ever get in a plane and go to Lagos...

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  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the International Airport.

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  They open a hatch and it goes...

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  With the humidity and the heat.

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  And the minute they open the hatch, it's like, bam! And then you walk out of the plane, you've got to go down the steps, and you're like, "Oh, now I get it." Welcome to Nigeria. That's the way reality feels in this setting.

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  You know what I'm saying?

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  That interview with Michael Veal was one of the many reasons why, when we finally got to Lagos, after a 13-hour flight...

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  I'm good, just taking it all in.

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  The top item on our agenda was to go to the shrine.

• 10:21Speaker 08

  This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?

• 10:26Speaker 09

  Let's not make a fetish out of impeachment. Let's not make a taboo out of impeachment. We understand it's not a panacea, but it is an essential tool in the constitutional toolbox that's always there.

• 10:37Speaker 08

  Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Let me fill in a few gaps. 1969, after the whole Sandra Isidore experience in L.A., Fela comes back to Nigeria, radicalized, steps off the plane, and takes the country by storm.

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  He becomes the massive star that we know him to be.

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  And then between 1973 and 1979, he releases this fire hose.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  Of music, something like, by my count, 27 records in six years-ish. One hit after another, after another. Now, the shrine. During that time, early on, he sets up a club that he calls the shrine. And it's important to understand where. Lagos, Lagos City, the most populous city in Africa. Lagos is on the coast, the Atlantic Ocean. And it consists of a giant landmass in mainland that curves around this bay. And in the bay are two major islands that connect back to the mainland with bridges. On the islands,

• 12:14Speaker 04

  this is the sound you hear. Peacocks, golf. It's very lush, very beautiful. On the mainland, very different sound. You will find places on the mainland where the sheer density of people is just breathtaking. For example, this audio that you're hearing is from a market that we visited in a neighborhood called Mushin.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  A poor working-class neighborhood where a million people are packed into seven square miles. In this neighborhood, not the island, this spot, is where he decided to put the shrine. To say basically, I am the voice of the people. The sufferheads, as he called them. When we visited the shrine, at night, it was more or less as Michael Veil described it.

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  People all in the street, like jam-packed mob with people.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  He was there in 92. We were there 2024. And the shrine has closed a few times and reopened and moved around a bit. But it was kind of the same. It was dark. You had about 50 food sellers lining the block, this very long block in front of the shrine. People smoked weed openly, which in Nigeria can carry a heavy prison sentence.

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  Our fixer in Lagos told us that even now, 28 years after Fela died, this is the one place where that can happen.

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  One of the sellers that was there explained it this way. Fela is like life after death. Evergreen, yes.

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  Do you feel like Fela still protects this street, this place?

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  Yes, exactly. His sense was the ghost of Fela is still there protecting this one block.

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  And as he said that, he nodded towards the end of the block where there were policemen waiting, standing almost like on the other side of an invisible line.

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  You've done your research. You know that the shrine and also Fela's compound, the Calacuta Republic, he had kind of declared independent of Nigeria.

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  That's Lisa Lindsay, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She specializes in the history of West Africa, and she brings up an important point.

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  Is it in 1970, when Fela got back to Nigeria, he declared his club, the shrine, and also his house nearby, which he called the Calacuta Republic?

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  He declared them a sovereign nation within Nigeria. Sort of like the Vatican is to Italy, that he was a country unto himself. Lisa Lindsay visited the shrine in the early 90s.

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  It was just all this craziness that we saw. Well, OK, so outside, there's a dictatorship that was shooting people.

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  At that time, and there are videos of this on YouTube, the government would hold public executions of criminals and dissidents on the beach.

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  There were soldiers in the streets. It wasn't safe to be out at night. You go in.

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  And it's just this alternate universe.

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  Describe what it looks like.

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  It was like a warehouse, sort of. Everybody's smoking like-

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  A lot of weed smoking?

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  Giant, giant joints, joints the size of police megaphones.

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  Keep in mind, at that time, people were getting thrown in jail for 10 years for a half-smoked joint.

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  There's just this massive cloud up at the top of the thing.

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  It's hot, it's humid, a lot of people in there.

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  People dancing and people stoned out of their minds. And it was such a contrast to how scared people were outside of the shrine.

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  The shrine was not far from his house, a couple of blocks.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  That's John Darden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote for The New York Times, worked as a foreign correspondent based in Lagos in the mid-'70s, wrote many, many articles about Fela, including this one where he watched Fela get ready right before he performed at the shrine. Would you mind reading this? This is you, you reading you.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Because Ruby and I have been trying to find as vivid descriptions as we can of the atmosphere, and this is actually one of the more vivid that we've ever read.

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  New York Times.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  That voice is Nina Darden, John's wife, also a longtime journalist.

• 17:01Speaker 12

  Fela's pre-game ritual. The show begins at 1 a.m. Inside the nearby Kalakuta Republic, Fela prepares for it laboriously. From a jar, he spoons up liberal doses glitter gooey substance nicknamed Fela Gold, distilled extract of marijuana. Full-length mirrors are brought before him and held by two young boys. He slowly slips into skintight sequined pants and a white shirt open to the waist, arranging his strings of beads as if he were smoothing a necktie.

• 17:41Speaker 12

  Six bodyguards draw near. "Let's go," Fela says. And the entourage moves outside, where there is a crowd of several hundred people. Some have been waiting for hours, clinging to the barbed wire to catch a glimpse of him. A chant, "Fela, Fela," rumbles out of the dark.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  That is really good, Josh.

• 18:05Speaker 12

  It is really good. And as he walked, and--

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Wait, he got on a donkey?

• 18:10Speaker 12

  Well, that was the second. He got on a donkey? What? Okay, wait, sorry. As he walked. He was a showman. You know, drivers would get out and raise a fist and yell, "Fela, Fela." Anyway, then he starts playing. And I have never seen, I think, a performer quite as dynamic as that. He was absolutely incredible.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Before we go back into the shrine, well, first, let me give you a picture. It is an open-air club. Fits about 500 people. There's a tin roof over the stage, but no roof over the dance floor. And to either side of the stage are four Studio 54-ish cages, where dancers dance. Also, to one side, there is an altar, where Fela had a picture of his mother, a picture of Malcolm X, and a picture of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. But I'll be honest. What's most interesting to me is not so much the shrine itself-- I mean, it was a club-- but rather what happened to people when they went inside of it. Because, do you know how people talk about psilocybin now? Right? Like, we all have one of those friends

• 19:17Speaker 04

  who did some mushrooms, and it changed their life, and they can't stop talking about it. And there's a way to explain those experiences. You can say neurochemistry, right? There's something about these drugs. They rewire your brain. Fine. We ran into so many people who described listening to Fela's music at the shrine in the same way, that it had the same effect on them, which is a little harder to explain, though I will try in a moment. But first, let's re-enter the shrine from their perspective.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  And as you're listening, see if you can let yourself notice, what are you paying attention to? How does that change over time? 1 a.m., Fela arrives on his donkey, takes the stage with 35 other musicians, and he begins a riff

• 20:09Speaker 04

  that will last most of the night.

• 20:10Speaker 05

  My experience of being in the shrine was like, like, the music was like inside of me. It was all around. It was just like, you know, being hypnotized. Like, you're all inside the music. A kind of hypnotic dancing.

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  Reacts to music. Dancing in this way.

• 20:29Speaker 13

  In this way.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  I remember being lost in music. All the people are smoking around me, and we are in a mist. So you're in a different world.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  This idea of spiral.

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  And circle.

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  It's another way to deal with time.

• 21:13Speaker 13

  Reacts to music. I would describe it as a swirl.

• 21:20Speaker 13

  You know, when you have a sad world, it starts off as this little thing that builds up. And it builds up. The more you allow it to segregate, it just starts to get bigger. Get bigger.

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  Get bigger. Get bigger.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Circle.

• 21:45Speaker 13

  Get bigger.

• 21:48Speaker 13

  Get bigger.

• 21:50Speaker 13

  Get bigger.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Circle.

• 21:55Speaker 13

  Get bigger. Get bigger.

• 22:00Speaker 13

  Get bigger. Get bigger.

• 22:05Speaker 14

  Fela starts his musical.

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  To enchant this repetitive pattern. The power of the musical ostinato. It's part of that enchanting strategy.

• 22:22Speaker 14

  You've been captured.

• 22:45Speaker 15

  I thought, this is really an amazing new form of music. It was, it was almost like a field of sound. That sits there for a long time and you explore it. You, you kind of enter it and live in it. This is a place, this isn't a song.

• 23:04Speaker 12

  And meanwhile, the rhythm section's keeping going, going, going, going, going.

• 23:21Speaker 15

  This is a place. And when you start listening to it, you're entering into that place.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  Like the music was like inside of me, was all around and just like, you know, being hypnotized.

• 23:41Speaker 07

  And so with Fela, you could tell that there was a, a different kind of intention behind this paradigm of groove. The music is, is so nasty.

• 23:54Speaker 07

  You have to dance. But that's just the ground level. Cause why would you play a song for thirty minutes or forty minutes? Unless you really have something to say.

• 24:41Speaker 12

  And then suddenly,

• 24:45Speaker 12

  after half an hour, forty minutes,

• 24:55Speaker 12

  he starts singing.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  When his voice came in, I was like, what the hell? There are words too?

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Hold up, what is this?

• 25:40Speaker 12

  He sings in a gravelly, low-pitched voice, and sings about things that no one else ever even mentioned. Any newspaper, any columnist.

• 25:51Speaker 16

  He talks about the United Nations. He talks about Thatcher. He talks about Reagan. Like, it's really, it's really everything. It's like a history lesson.

• 26:00Speaker 12

  You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air, floating from the stage like thought balloons, and then sinking into somebody's skull.

• 26:13Speaker 16

  I just felt, where has my mind been, you know, all my life?

• 26:22Speaker 16

  Complete surprise, like-

• 26:24Speaker 17

  I was immediately captivated.

• 26:26Speaker 16

  Why did we not know this? Why aren't we thinking about this stuff?

• 26:29Speaker 17

  When Fela sang into the microphone,

• 26:33Speaker 17

  I saw the lights.

• 26:36Speaker 16

  I was just like, you know, like-

• 26:38Speaker 17

  He sucks you in and then he has that light bulb effect on you. You come into yourself and, you know, it's a moment of introspection too, because you realize that you haven't been as attuned as you probably should have.

• 26:53Speaker 16

  All this stuff he was singing was just new to me. You know, I was just learning so much about Nigerian history through Fela that I had not learned in school.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Before we go on, the voices you just heard, in addition to Michael Veal and John Darden, were Stephanie Shonikane and Boide Omujola, both professors of ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland in Mount Holyoke, respectively. Afrobeat musicians Dele Shashimi, Enduro Ikujenu, activist filmmaker musician, Saul Williams musician and producer Brian Eno, artist Lemmy Gariaku, photographer Marilyn Nance, designer Lorraine Ann Amoson, and our advisor Moses Ochunu, who's a professor of history and my colleague at Vanderbilt University. He was one of the last voices you heard, and I asked him. He said the music made you feel like you needed to tune in to things you hadn't been tuning into. Like what?

• 27:52Speaker 17

  You know,

• 27:54Speaker 17

  when I was growing up in Nigeria, you know, we would hear about corruption, about thousands of naira being embezzled by some politician or government official. And we would open our mouths in shock because our brains couldn't compute how one person would make off with thousands of naira. How would the person carry this money? What would they put it in? In some boxes, in some cars? You know, physically, how would they move this money? You know, we just couldn't fathom it. And then, over time- We started hearing about millions, not thousands anymore. Then billions.

• 28:34Speaker 17

  And now, as we speak, the corruption numbers have entered the trillions. To that, over time, has had a numbing effect, a dulling effect. The shock value, the kind of shock that I felt as a child growing up in Nigeria, the moral outrage that I felt, that's gone, that's long gone.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  And that is what would come back when you heard his songs.

• 28:54Speaker 17

  Right, exactly.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  Moses said that Phelaz's music would remind him of the insanity that he had been sane-washed into believing was normal. And I think that there's something really interesting about how the music can move him to that thought. Music is all about structure, right? Structuring the relationship between notes and chords and melodies. But here you have structure on an entirely different level, almost like a phenomenological structure. For the first 15 minutes, it's just loops. Ostinato is going round and round.

• 29:39Speaker 18

  The power of the musical ostinato.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  Ostinato, in Italian, by the way, means basically stubborn. The loops stubbornly repeat. And at first, it's not so bad. It's kind of grounding, actually. But then, the natural response is then to want some change. Like, can we go to the next section now, please? Please? No? This is what the Buddhists call our monkey mind. Our monkey mind wants distraction. It wants anything to keep us from having to live with our own thoughts. But the music doesn't give us that. It doesn't change. It only builds. Layers get added, piece by piece, instrument by instrument. And at some point, a few minutes in, you arrive at this mysterious moment where you stop wanting it to change. This is phase two.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Now, that part of you that wants novelty starts to notice things. Like, whoa, listen to all the interlocking parts of this groove.

• 30:35Speaker 18

  Whoa, the ostinatos, they're like machine gears. They don't grind. The gears are timed in between each other so they just subtly fit into the little gaps and holes like that.

• 30:47Speaker 04

  The way that the conga plays off the shaker, call and response. The way that the three guitar lines spin around endlessly like gears. And a higher level clock. My god, this groove is a whole world. This is the trance state. Usually, when we talk about trance, we mean a kind of dulling of our senses. But actually, it's the opposite. It's a state of hyper-focus. You are noticing things. You're hearing things you've never heard before because your neurons are rewired. You are open. And it is at this very moment that Fela begins to sing.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  I was like, what the hell? There are words too?

• 31:26Speaker 04

  In comes his voice, booming like the voice of God. This is phase three. And because you are open, you really hear what he is saying.

• 31:33Speaker 12

  You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air, floating from the stage like thought balloons and then sinking into somebody's skull.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  And in that way, as the final piece of this progression, he gives you a new conception of what your life can be. I saw the light. That you can now dance to.

• 32:21Speaker 19

  My music, my main, my main preoccupation right now, music is a small part of it.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  This is a clip from an interview Fela gave in 1988 where he describes his musical form almost as this vehicle designed to move people step by step by step so that they can hear what he has to say.

• 32:44Speaker 12

  Is your music kind of a tool?

• 32:46Speaker 19

  It's a weapon. It's a weapon to say. So I can talk when I have the chance to. I consider music to be effective, like a weapon to inform people. My music is like an attraction to inform people. It's the information side of the music that is important.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  In that same interview, he suggests that there's something else going on here too that has to do with time itself.

• 33:18Speaker 19

  If anybody tells me 20 years is a long time, I would tell him, no. Time is meaningless unless you want to understand what time is about. There is time for everything.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  Coming up, that idea of cycles is going to become not just about the music, but so much more. Cycles of history, of violence, of resistance. We're going to follow all of the interlocking ostinatos of Fela's groove. Cross time and space. Into the deep past, to an incredible story of a rebellion that deposed a king, that created a sound that continues to echo to this day on the streets of Lagos and the world. That's next.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Um, okay, so Jad, thank you. The series is incredible.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  It is a magnum.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  It is so special.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  It is so good.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  It is, it is. And yet there'll be another magnum because you know he'll keep going despite trying to leave, but it is so special. It's amazing.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  This might be the last one. We'll see.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Where else is the series going and where can people find it? What's it called?

• 34:36Speaker 04

  So the series is going to go all kinds of places. It's called Fela Kuti Fear No Man. The next one is my fave. It's a story about Fela's mom.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. That was so good.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  Who is so extraordinary that you're, that immediately made me be like, wait, why are we talking about him?

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Right. It felt like you could, you could flip it. You could do the 12-episode series about her and then one episode about him.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Exactly. Because what she accomplished is so bananas.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  And again, just with music. So yeah, that episode is next.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Wait, and can you share the title of that episode?

• 35:13Speaker 04

  It's called Vengeance of the Vagina Head. And it was, it's not, it's not a title we made up. It was what the newspapers called the revolt that she led at the time. They called it vengeance of the vagina head. Just let that be a tease.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  This has been a Higher Ground on Audible, original, produced by Audible, Higher Ground Audio, Western Sound, and Talkhouse. This series was created and executive produced by me, Chad Abumrad, Benadere, and Ian Wheeler, written and hosted by yours truly. Higher Ground executive producers were Nick White, Mukta Mohan, and Dan Fierman. Jenna Levin was creative executive, and Corinne Gillyard Fisher was executive producer. Executive producers for Audible were Anne Hepperman, Glenn Pogue, and Nick D'Angelo.

• 36:15Speaker 04

  Our senior producer was Gofan Utubwele. Ruby Heron Walsh was lead producer and researcher. Our producers were Feifei Odudu and Oluwakemi Aladiosui. Benadere was our editor, with editing help from Carla Murthy. Consulting producers were Bolu Babalola, Dotun Ayubade, Nih Abdurraqeez, Michael Veal, Moses Ochunu, and Judith Byfield. Our fact checker was Jameela Wilkinson. Alex McInnis was the mix engineer. Also, special thanks to Knitting Factory Records and BMG, to the Kuti family, Melissa O'Donnell, to Inside Projects Maggie Taylor, and big thanks to Carla Murthy, Leah Friedman, and Shashana Scholar.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  The head of creative development at Audible is Kate Navin, chief content officer Rachel Piazza. Copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Sound recording copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio LLC.

• 37:17Speaker 20

  Hi, I'm Shivansh Amuri, and I'm from Mumbai, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director.

• 37:36Speaker 20

  Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niyana Sambandhan, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgawkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Anisa Vidza, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand.

• 38:15Speaker 20

  Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol Mazini, and Natalie Middleton.

• 38:26Speaker 21

  Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.