Introducing Fela Kuti: Fear No Man

Speaker 1 Hey higher ground listeners, I'm Jad Abumraad. You may know me from Radiolab or Dolly Partens America.

Speaker 1 I'm here to tell you about my new show, Higher Ground's latest music podcast called Felakuti Fear No Man.

Speaker 1 Fela is basically, you can 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.

Speaker 1 And in the 1960s and 70s, he created a... an entirely new genre of music called Afro-B, and then he turned that music into a weapon against the state.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Been working on this project for three years, talked to so many interesting people, Fella's family, Made, Shayun, Femi Kuti, Yenni Kuti, historians, activists, luminaries like Io Adebari, Brian Eno, David Byrne, Santi Gold, NES President Barack Obama.

Speaker 1 All right, so I would love to share an episode with you right now. It's all about Fella, how he became the musician he is, created Afrobeat, this musical language of resistance.
I hope you like it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 How do you describe Fella to someone who doesn't know?

Speaker 2 I've played around, I've done it a million times. I don't know if any time it has worked.
Like, I'll go. Fela is like

Speaker 2 Bob Marley and Mandela combined.

Speaker 3 Well, he was kind of like Mick Jaggart and James Brown.

Speaker 2 Definitely with some Ahmed Ali thrown in.

Speaker 3 And then with a protest element of Dylan.

Speaker 4 Don't forget, Malcolm X. You wanted to be Malcolm X.

Speaker 5 Brothers and sisters.

Speaker 6 The secret of life is to have no fear.

Speaker 6 We all have to understand that.

Speaker 8 He was the hardest shit you've ever heard in your life.

Speaker 1 This is Phila Kuti, Fear No Man. I'm Jad Ab Umraad.
Chapter 2, Becoming Phila.

Speaker 1 Here's a question. How do you become that person

Speaker 1 That Flea was just describing.

Speaker 8 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, whatever it is that you're into as a kid, whatever music you love and you think captures this

Speaker 8 spirit of rebellion and of caring about,

Speaker 8 you know,

Speaker 8 a scary world that you can get lost in and heard in.

Speaker 5 It's all there.

Speaker 1 For Flea, it's Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Speaker 5 It's magical music.

Speaker 1 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 a hundred times.

Speaker 2 Look at it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Over and over,

Speaker 1 the Nigerian police and army broke his arms, his legs, his face.

Speaker 8 You know, they threw his mother from the roof of her house and she died.

Speaker 12 Threw my mother out the window.

Speaker 8 He went and took his mother's coffin and put it on the doorstep of the government building, the Capitol building.

Speaker 1 No matter what they did, he never backed down.

Speaker 13 If you think I'm going to change or or compromise, they make him stronger.

Speaker 5 I mean, he was wild. What a rebel.

Speaker 1 So that's the question. How did he become that guy?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 the Marxist musical coup plotter that he would become. And I'm quoting from a Nigerian newspaper there.
Let's start simple.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But we did find this one rare interview where he does touch on a few things from his early years.

Speaker 1 Here he is in 1967. He's 29 at the time, talking to a guy named Sean Kelly.

Speaker 16 We're speaking with Thailo Ransom Kooti, one of Nigeria's young contemporary jazz musicians. Thela, how did you get started as a musician?

Speaker 17 Oh, my mother really, and my father

Speaker 17 made me play the piano

Speaker 17 very adept at the age of nine,

Speaker 17 learning to play the piano.

Speaker 17 That's my hometown, Nabekuta.

Speaker 17 And then after my school, well,

Speaker 17 in school, I was a leader of the school choir for about five years.

Speaker 17 And then after that I went to England to study at the Trinity College of Music in London.

Speaker 5 Hello, hello.

Speaker 5 La la la la.

Speaker 5 And we're recording.

Speaker 1 Interestingly, when Nigeria declared its independence from England in 1960,

Speaker 1 Fellow wasn't even there.

Speaker 1 He was here in London

Speaker 1 studying classical music.

Speaker 19 So I'm recording now. Could I ask you to introduce yourselves?

Speaker 11 My name is Ola Loa Akilipe. I'm graduate of Trinity Laban.
I'm Nigerian, clarinetist.

Speaker 20 I'm Alex Schramm and I'm the director of music at Trinity Laban.

Speaker 1 Alex and Ola were nice enough to give our producer Ruby Walsh a tour of the grounds.

Speaker 5 Yeah we've got a lot of places to see.

Speaker 20 I started my undergraduate in the old building which is where Fella studied in the 1950s.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Fela would have been one of the few black students to attend, and we kept trying to imagine him walking the halls.

Speaker 20 Around the room, I think what I might show you is the harp room.

Speaker 21 Oh, wow. There's a forest of harps.

Speaker 21 Yes, this is an organ for playing brock.

Speaker 1 Alex, the director, demonstrated it.

Speaker 11 Yeah, yeah, for me, I'm trying to remember my first day walking in here.

Speaker 11 It was a bit surreal for me, actually.

Speaker 1 Olu Alua, our student guide, plays the clarinet, and he is about the same age that Fella was when he came to study the piano and the trumpet.

Speaker 11 I'll tell you this, yeah. When I was coming, because I'm Nigerian, obviously, I am,

Speaker 11 it was like, you're going to study music of all the things we do in England. Then I would go,

Speaker 11 Fella studied there. And then, what? You're going to study with Fella studied.

Speaker 5 You're going to come back so great.

Speaker 22 I don't know how great I am.

Speaker 20 Yeah. But yeah, so we're here in the reception now.

Speaker 20 And straight away, we have to point out we have the plaque here for Felakuti.

Speaker 19 Oh, wow.

Speaker 19 Oh, it's right here.

Speaker 5 It's right here.

Speaker 19 Can I actually get one of you to read what's on the plaque?

Speaker 23 Yeah, it says

Speaker 11 Felakuti, father of Afrobeat, who challenged colonial politics in Nigeria.

Speaker 1 Reading that plaque was interesting.

Speaker 1 Here is a man.

Speaker 5 American England trying to bring wash Africans.

Speaker 14 You are the colonialists.

Speaker 6 You are the slave riders.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 21 He was still walking around with colonial mentality.

Speaker 24 He hadn't become black.

Speaker 1 That's Sandra Isidore. She plays a huge part in what happens next.

Speaker 21 You want to check me?

Speaker 22 Because

Speaker 25 my voice carries.

Speaker 1 More from her in a second.

Speaker 17 I went to study at the Trinity College of Music in London. And

Speaker 17 there I did my

Speaker 17 college course,

Speaker 17 but really I was not interested in

Speaker 17 classics.

Speaker 17 My aim was to play jazz, so I studied classics in college and went out to listen to jazz.

Speaker 10 On my trumpet, too, I was trying to play

Speaker 10 some jazz.

Speaker 26 I was trying to listen to some great men like Miles and DZ.

Speaker 1 At Trinity after class, Fellow would go to places like the Flamingo Room, a basement club that hosted all-night jam sessions, and he would sit in.

Speaker 1 This is at a time in London when all kinds of musicians are rolling through. Dizzy Gillespie.

Speaker 1 Ella Fitzgerald played some shows.

Speaker 1 Sarah Vaughan.

Speaker 1 Count Basie, Duke Ellington. 1960, when Fellow is in his second year, Miles Davis comes to town, plays a few shows.
I like to imagine Fellow is in the audience.

Speaker 1 Because a few years later, Fellow would release this tune.

Speaker 1 That's him on trumpet.

Speaker 1 He called it Amichi's Blues, and it sounds a whole lot like Miles' Freddy Freeloader off Kind of Blue.

Speaker 1 They're almost the same tune.

Speaker 17 I was trying to listen to some great men like Miles and Dz, people like Clifford Brown, and things like that. And then I came out back here in Nigeria to play music.

Speaker 1 Fella arrived back in Nigeria from London in 1963.

Speaker 26 Has it been successful?

Speaker 17 Straight jazz, as it's played in the States,

Speaker 17 it's not working here. I found that out when I came back from England.
West African countries, I'll say

Speaker 17 they're not interested in jazz. What they like, that's Latin American music.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 he's looking for something, but he hasn't found it yet.

Speaker 3 He was a gentleman musician when we started the band. He was just a gentleman.

Speaker 1 This is one of Fella's early bandmates, Baba Ani.

Speaker 3 He was singing love songs, you know, funky age songs, folklores,

Speaker 3 and he wasn't drinking alcohol, he was not taking marijuana. He wasn't complete gentlemen.

Speaker 1 At that point,

Speaker 1 Vela was working a respectable job in Lagos at the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, and he had formed a band, a dance band, called Kula Lubitos.

Speaker 1 Which is just a made-up word meant to sound Latin because, as he said...

Speaker 17 What's Latin American music?

Speaker 13 Well, at the beginning, before he traveled to America, he was basically playing a jazzy form of high life.

Speaker 7 It's high life time!

Speaker 1 Come on in time! That's John Collins, musician, historian.

Speaker 15 How would you define high life?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 1 He says that high life was a little British, a little West African.

Speaker 1 When the British came in and colonized Nigeria, they had all these troops and they needed to entertain them.

Speaker 1 And there was this craze at the time for ballroom dancing, like European-style ballroom dancing with the foxtrot and all that.

Speaker 1 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 the fellow was playing.

Speaker 1 Two years before he came to LA and met Sandra.

Speaker 1 He's trying to figure out how to take this already hybrid form and layer jazz on top of it.

Speaker 9 For me, this musicality gave me a lot of joy.

Speaker 1 This is Benson Idonige, who managed Fela and Kululobitos at the time. Is there a song that you think of specifically that means it the most to you from that early period?

Speaker 6 Yeah, take Olo Loufe, for instance. Holo Lou Fair me.

Speaker 1 Do you have it here? We have it somewhere. I think my phone is somewhere.

Speaker 14 Yeah, this one.

Speaker 1 Can you translate in real time?

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 9 You are the one that I fancy. You are the one that I love.

Speaker 9 My lover.

Speaker 9 You are the one that I love.

Speaker 1 It's a vibe for sure. If you notice, compared to later Fela, it's very smooth.

Speaker 9 Come and rub your body on me.

Speaker 1 You can almost see him in his button-up shirt and loafers just crooning out this love song.

Speaker 1 And Benson says it wasn't really working.

Speaker 5 We have linked to

Speaker 9 art communities,

Speaker 15 schools, students and all that.

Speaker 9 We are not making money.

Speaker 15 It was not small crowds. Yes.
It's not working here.

Speaker 17 We started to play. People wouldn't listen.

Speaker 9 The music was exciting and all that, but we had nothing to show for it.

Speaker 1 Making matters worse, in the late 60s, Fella loses his job, his radio job at the NBC.

Speaker 1 And it was right at this moment, according to musicologist Michael Veal, that a musical asteroid hit the continent.

Speaker 22 Are you kidding?

Speaker 5 That music turned sub-Saharan Africa upside down.

Speaker 4 James Brown turned Africa upside down inside out.

Speaker 8 You start from the structure of his music.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 1 He says it was around this moment when James Brown Records just fell on West Africa.

Speaker 4 Between 64 and 69, Brown consciously trying to bring out the Africanist elements in his music.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And as Michael puts it, it was almost a kind of alchemical transmutation.

Speaker 1 He was taking in African rhythms from across the Atlantic and then sending it back to the continent in a new form.

Speaker 4 It's like hearing your own voice come back at you, but you recognize it as having been transformed in some profound ways.

Speaker 1 Whatever it was, now the Nigerian kids just did not want to hear high life. All they wanted was funk and soul.

Speaker 1 Benson says they would hear that over and over. It gigs.

Speaker 1 Play some James Brown.

Speaker 1 And Fela didn't want to.

Speaker 1 Frustrated and at a loss for direction, Fela apparently thought about giving up.

Speaker 1 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 Fella's songs.
And how is that fair?

Speaker 1 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...

Speaker 1 Fella yet, but in just a few years, he would come to Nigeria. He would hear Fela play.

Speaker 1 His drummer, Clyde Stubblefield, would apparently sit in the corner at one of Fella's shows and notate the rhythms of Fella's drummer, Tony Allen. So there was something going on there.

Speaker 1 He had an intuition, but it was maybe out of time or something.

Speaker 1 In any case, he gives this interview, suggesting that if Americans want African-sounding music, wait till they get the real thing.

Speaker 5 Listen to us.

Speaker 6 Americans like us.

Speaker 15 That's one of the reasons why we travel.

Speaker 1 Right after that article was published, Fella got an offer to take his band Kula Libitus on a two-month tour of America to expose the American public to their brand of high life.

Speaker 1 This is Velakuti, Fear No Man.

Speaker 1 May 1969, Kula Lobitos sets off on a 10-month U.S. tour.
They perform in Washington, D.C., boom.

Speaker 1 Chicago, boom. San Francisco, boom.

Speaker 1 But by the time they get to L.A.,

Speaker 1 they're broke and their visas have run out.

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 21 it wasn't easy for Fella here.

Speaker 1 And this brings us to Sandra Isidore, who is often called the queen of Afrobeat. If Fella is the king, she's the queen.

Speaker 21 You want to check me?

Speaker 1 How do I sound to you right now?

Speaker 25 You sound okay to me. How do I sound to you? My voice carries.

Speaker 5 You sound.

Speaker 1 The day that I sat down with Sandra in LA, her Afro was dyed bright, sunny yellow.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 their trajectories, and also in the process, music history. So I want to go into her story story for a second.

Speaker 29 I'm a country girl that grew up in the city.

Speaker 1 Sandra grew up in Watts, California. She was born in 1938, same year as Phila.
She showed me a picture of her when she was six, standing in front of a mirror holding a doll.

Speaker 30 That's a happy little girl growing up, you know, and in a perfect world.

Speaker 5 Beautiful neighborhood.

Speaker 24 We lived on the corner house.

Speaker 21 We had a nectarine tree, apricots, oranges, pomegranates, lemons.

Speaker 5 Wow, sounds idyllic.

Speaker 30 And you see my little white doll, don't you?

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 30 They didn't have black dolls back then.

Speaker 1 When she was six, Sandra and her family moved to Compton, which was then an all-white neighborhood.

Speaker 21 Compton was beautiful then.

Speaker 5 Fields and pastures, horses.

Speaker 21 You know, we were the first black family to move into that area.

Speaker 32 And my friends then, all my friends were white.

Speaker 23 It made me start looking at myself in the mirror.

Speaker 36 And then I wanted to know, well, when is my eyes going to turn blue?

Speaker 32 My hair is going to be long and stringy, and I'm going to have white skin.

Speaker 36 When is that going to happen?

Speaker 1 How literally did you take that thought?

Speaker 21 I was thinking I was going to turn white. So that's how deep it was.

Speaker 1 I asked Sandra about her parents. Like, did they ever talk to her about any of this?

Speaker 39 My parents were what you would call from the secret society.

Speaker 30 That generation, I'm a baby boomer, but before me, they kept secrets, things they didn't want their children to know.

Speaker 30 My parents never taught me about racism in America.

Speaker 30 They never shared with me that

Speaker 30 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. They grew up in the South.

Speaker 30 They grew up in the South.

Speaker 21 And there was a lot going on in the families that they didn't tell us about. Things happened.
They kept it quiet.

Speaker 1 They never sort of took you aside and said, this is our journey.

Speaker 15 This is how we got here.

Speaker 34 Absolutely nothing.

Speaker 1 I have to say, I was really struck by this,

Speaker 1 the way that Sandra talked about it. This entire generation.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 For many years, my folks didn't talk about where we came from because it was too painful.

Speaker 36 Well, your parents then are part of that secret society.

Speaker 1 For Sandra, despite the firewall, she says some things did slip through, which made her uneasy.

Speaker 31 I would see my parents, you know, they would whisper and they were talking.

Speaker 21 And the things that they were whispering about was Martin Luther King.

Speaker 30 They didn't want me to know about the dogs dogs and all of that. I learned that later.

Speaker 1 You can only hold information at bay for so long. And for Sandra, things started to leak through when she was a teenager.

Speaker 15 Do you recall what awoke you to

Speaker 1 the reality?

Speaker 31 I think it was the civil disturbance in Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 You talking about the Watts riots?

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 40 White people driving through the riot area were considered fair gay. Their cars were battered, the drivers stoned.

Speaker 19 When I saw the fires, even at a young age, I was questioning.

Speaker 41 I threw the firebomb right in the front window.

Speaker 5 Why are you burning up your own neighborhood?

Speaker 41 The cry in the streets was, burn, baby, burn.

Speaker 21 You start asking questions.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 32 He came to stay with us.

Speaker 21 And he always had a black leather jacket and he he wore a black beret.

Speaker 35 And he was friends with Bunchy.

Speaker 19 Bunchy? Bunchy Carter from the Panther Party.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Because they're tired of being beaten and harassed by the police.

Speaker 31 You know, he was always talking this black liberation and everything.

Speaker 1 More importantly, he started to play her music.

Speaker 30 Uh, Nina Simone, Alabama's got me some upset.

Speaker 24 Um George.

Speaker 27 Ray Charles

Speaker 21 Miles Davis

Speaker 33 Billie Holiday.

Speaker 10 Very strange true.

Speaker 21 Big Mama Thornton.

Speaker 22 So I'm getting all this old music.

Speaker 33 And it was in their lyrical content.

Speaker 30 especially Oscar Brown Jr.,

Speaker 36 that you know,

Speaker 21 it started me thinking

Speaker 1 eventually,

Speaker 1 her cousin turned her on to Malcolm X.

Speaker 45 Who taught you to hate the color of your skin to such an extent that you bleach

Speaker 45 to get like the white man?

Speaker 19 It was like my eyes started opening, and around that time, getting back to the music,

Speaker 33 Hugh Masaquela

Speaker 43 came out with the Americanization of Oogabuga.

Speaker 1 The title was sort of a play on words.

Speaker 1 Ugabuga was a racist slur used about Africa in the West, while Americanization nodded at Hugh Masaquela trying to blend South African and American sounds together.

Speaker 1 This was actually an album that his record label thought was too African for American tastes.

Speaker 10 But it was my favorite and I would play it over and over.

Speaker 10 Over

Speaker 10 and over.

Speaker 30 It was at that point I said to myself, in order to know the real story, I'm going to need to meet a real African.

Speaker 1 I have to meet a real African.

Speaker 30 Yep.

Speaker 10 Why?

Speaker 32 Because

Speaker 1 at this point in our conversation, Sandra just broke into a big smile, sort of laughing at her younger self.

Speaker 46 Love it. A real African.
A real African.

Speaker 1 Now, obviously, the sentiment that she was expressing was not just her thinking this.

Speaker 1 At this point on college campuses, there was a whole Back to Africa movement that was asking questions about realness and authenticity.

Speaker 1 I ended up extending this conversation and bringing a few people in, including Louis Chudasoki, who is a professor of English at Boston University.

Speaker 46 I'm also the director of the African-American and Black Diaspora Studies Program.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But he says, growing up in Nigeria, then Jamaica, nobody wanted to be that.

Speaker 46 No, everyone telling me I was African, it was always an insult.

Speaker 1 For him, black culture coming out of America, that... was what he was into.
That felt real.

Speaker 15 It felt cool.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 46 There was this moment in the 80s.

Speaker 46 When hip-hop becomes Afrocentric. I'm sure you remember there was the Africa medallions

Speaker 14 and everyone's like, all the way to Africa, aka the motherland.

Speaker 46 Motherland, the Jungle Brothers, and tribe called Quest with the Multicolored. And for me, Jad, I'll be straight up.
I was like, oh shit, I'm going to get laid now.

Speaker 1 Opportunity.

Speaker 5 Okay, Africa is cool.

Speaker 46 I'm there. But you had to pretend to be that kind of Africa.
It's not the Africa that's in my house.

Speaker 46 It's not my uncles or my aunts, or because my uncles and my aunts and the actual African community I was a part of wanted no part of that shit.

Speaker 10 So

Speaker 21 i started um

Speaker 30 dancing with sawaba african dance troupe getting back to sandra she goes to college joins the black student union starts dancing in a dance troupe i thought i was really doing something on the african dance moves

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And there's this new band band that's in town from Lagos.

Speaker 21 It was a very hot day.

Speaker 31 I really didn't want to go.

Speaker 37 And it was Juno Lewis who insisted

Speaker 23 this band from Africa.

Speaker 31 And I'm like, ah, because at this point,

Speaker 18 I wanted to meet progressive Africans.

Speaker 5 And I had only met,

Speaker 21 I'll use a term today that I'm making up now, missionary boys.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 1 Like her parents, who were deep in the church, it was the center of their lives. A lot of the African immigrants to the U.S.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 35 Sandra, you gotta meet him.

Speaker 34 You gotta meet him. And I'm like, uh,

Speaker 31 here's another one, you know.

Speaker 32 So we go to the Ambassador Hotel.

Speaker 1 This is summer 1969.

Speaker 21 On that particular day, I had on a blue and green haltered bell-bottom jumpsuit with the back out.

Speaker 36 I walk in,

Speaker 33 and as I'm walking in with Juno,

Speaker 1 on stage is a guy singing.

Speaker 1 With this band behind him playing sort of bouncy, brassy dance music. She can't remember what he was wearing.
Probably a suit.

Speaker 18 Trouser, shirt, loafer.

Speaker 1 Because that was his outfit at the time.

Speaker 5 No socks.

Speaker 21 He was the first man I met that didn't wear socks.

Speaker 1 But what she really remembers is that as she walked in and glanced at the stage, he looked right down at her.

Speaker 5 And our eyes locked.

Speaker 34 and

Speaker 31 it was a very magical moment it was like we were connected from day one

Speaker 1 i think what you wrote is it something that you never experienced before and never did again no it was like a spiritual

Speaker 30 cord it just seems like we were connected

Speaker 30 Something that was destined to be.

Speaker 1 Sandra says later in the party, between sets, she went searching for her friend Juno.

Speaker 21 I look over to the bar and there's Fella standing next to him. So I go over to the bar and

Speaker 33 Juno makes the introduction

Speaker 33 and the first thing that comes out of Fella's mouth in a very arrogant way,

Speaker 29 do you have a car?

Speaker 5 Whoa.

Speaker 31 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

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And I said, hmm, interesting.

Speaker 21 He tweaked my interest.

Speaker 1 They go to a party together. They sit down on the couch next to each other.

Speaker 5 I'm all in it. Long story short, Sandra thinks, finally.

Speaker 23 I finally meet a black man, African.

Speaker 31 He's going to show me, he's going to teach me all about Africa.

Speaker 5 Cut.

Speaker 5 See.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 1 So Sandra gets to know Fela. They start to see each other every day.

Speaker 1 And at some point,

Speaker 1 Sandra goes and watches Fella and his band rehearse.

Speaker 1 She watches them play this one particular song that becomes kind of important.

Speaker 33 He did this song called Abe and I was able to really hear the band and I was impressed.

Speaker 43 I liked the sound, it was different.

Speaker 10 So

Speaker 31 when the rehearsal was over,

Speaker 24 I asked him to

Speaker 5 translate

Speaker 5 in Yoruba.

Speaker 18 Right, right.

Speaker 31 Translate what he was saying.

Speaker 21 He was so proud to let me know, it's about my soup.

Speaker 18 What does that mean?

Speaker 5 Soup.

Speaker 1 Like it's a song about soup?

Speaker 5 The whole song was about soup.

Speaker 29 What you eat.

Speaker 1 Like actual soup, not soup as a metaphor, but actually about soup.

Speaker 32 S-O-U-P, soup.

Speaker 22 And I started laughing.

Speaker 34 And, you know, I was enhanced anyway.

Speaker 38 I thought that was the funniest thing because how you going to put all this energy and everything about some soup?

Speaker 5 Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 So it's like it's a celebration of soup.

Speaker 32 Well, it's not so much a celebration of it, but what he wants in his soup.

Speaker 5 Okay?

Speaker 32 So I thought that.

Speaker 1 That is so wild to me because knowing where he is about to go

Speaker 5 with your help. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's where he started.

Speaker 5 It's kind of crazy.

Speaker 5 That's what started the whole thing. You've been doing all this and you singing about some soup?

Speaker 32 At that point, I said, why would you do that when you can use your music to educate people,

Speaker 5 uplift people?

Speaker 21 I made the assumption that he was going to be my teacher.

Speaker 44 Because he was African, that's how naive I was.

Speaker 24 Because he was African, I made a lot of assumptions,

Speaker 21 not knowing what colonialism did in Africa.

Speaker 31 Between colonialism and slavery, I'll take slavery.

Speaker 32 Those shackles are still on the minds.

Speaker 44 That's even worse.

Speaker 1 This moment, when I talked about it with some of our consulting producers,

Speaker 1 got a whole bunch of different reactions.

Speaker 47 It was surprising to me that she

Speaker 47 said that she would choose slavery over colonialism.

Speaker 1 This is Bolu Babalola, a Nigerian writer and consulting producer on this project.

Speaker 1 And she says that caught her ear because it's an argument she actually sometimes gets into with her black American friends.

Speaker 47 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,

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 1 Colonialism, just to de-vague that word a bit more, as she suggests, It's a period that stretches for about 400 years.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Countries would come in, like Britain, came into what would become Nigeria

Speaker 1 and occupied the land and started extracting resources. You can find incredibly detailed accounting of this in these things called the Blue Books.

Speaker 1 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? 592,309 pounds.

Speaker 1 How much palm oil, ground nuts, how many prisoners they were maintaining. Number of persons summoned or apprehended, 545.
Punishments, whipping, executions.

Speaker 1 This is a rabbit hole I would just recommend you do not fall into because it just keeps it has no bottom. It just keeps going and going.
Oh, there's a whole page called Lunatic Asylums.

Speaker 1 Book after book.

Speaker 1 And what you realize is that the way the British ruled was not subtle. This is Bolu's point.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They enforced this code that basically said to the native people, your culture, your language, your religion has no value, has no meaning.

Speaker 1 They basically said, if you really want to get somewhere, you need to take on white culture.

Speaker 47 With colonization, I think it's just like, you

Speaker 1 So that was Bolu's reaction to what Sandra said.

Speaker 38 Between colonialism and slavery, I'll take slavery.

Speaker 1 For Lewis, what's your reaction when you hear that?

Speaker 29 I love her voice.

Speaker 1 For him, it was less what she said than how she said it.

Speaker 46 Her voice is just fascinating for me because for Fela arriving, he has not heard people talk like that.

Speaker 46 Not really. Certainly not in England.
I'm just thinking about Fela, what he's

Speaker 5 hearing.

Speaker 46 I see it in the clothing. Is he hearing a kind of authenticity that he couldn't or didn't hear in his own?

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 1 Whatever the case,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They were scrambling for gigs.

Speaker 31 He was going to meetings and meetings and meetings.

Speaker 1 And when he said, do you have a car? Maybe part of the reason is that his band had no way of getting around.

Speaker 21 I had this sports car, a two-seater sports car.

Speaker 31 And I remember nine people got into that car.

Speaker 1 In LA, Kulilobitos 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.

Speaker 9 And after that, he was invited by Disneyland.

Speaker 31 Disneyland?

Speaker 21 They wanted him for Adventureland.

Speaker 26 Welcome aboard the Jungle Cruise.

Speaker 21 You know, at that time they had Adventureland where you go around with the little boat.

Speaker 10 Look out, look out, another hippo!

Speaker 39 The

Speaker 21 hippopotamus would come up out of the water and the alligators.

Speaker 5 All mechanical.

Speaker 26 Well, that scared him.

Speaker 1 The Jungle Cruise was wildly popular, not so subtly racist, and inspired by the movie The African Queen, which starred Humphrey Barvard and Kathleen Hepburn.

Speaker 18 We are now entering Headhunter Country.

Speaker 1 They wanted Felia to be the sort of house band for that?

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's a whole different reality.

Speaker 15 Yep.

Speaker 21 They were going to sign him.

Speaker 9 He failed the audition.

Speaker 24 Disney turned them down.

Speaker 21 Because their music wasn't African enough.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 1 We attempted to to confirm this with Disney, but they never got back to us.

Speaker 6 That was when Azma Wedding felt very bad.

Speaker 1 This is Felakuti, Fear No Man. We rejoin the story with Fela getting rejected from Disneyland for not being, quote, African enough.

Speaker 6 As Mawedim felt very bad

Speaker 1 At this point, Fela was deeply broke.

Speaker 1 Sandra says he was stuffing newspapers into his loafers to fill the holes.

Speaker 21 When things got really bad, he came and lived with my parents.

Speaker 1 How long was he living there for?

Speaker 22 Oof.

Speaker 43 I would say a good

Speaker 31 six to eight months.

Speaker 22 Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Wow, so you spent every waking moment together.

Speaker 5 Oh, all the time.

Speaker 1 Fela stayed in a small guest shack at the back of her parents' property.

Speaker 22 Fortunately, my mom had an old upright piano.

Speaker 32 But anyway, it was that old upright piano.

Speaker 21 That fella wrote a lot of those songs and he used to chart the music. And at night, once they've gone to bed,

Speaker 39 I would bring Philla up to my bedroom

Speaker 31 and we would be talking.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 1 This one night she says they were talking. She forgets about what.
Maybe Fellow is telling her stories about Nigeria, which she really liked.

Speaker 1 Or maybe she was telling him stories about the time she got arrested and thrown in jail for kicking a policeman in a protest.

Speaker 1 Story he loved.

Speaker 37 His thing was, look at this woman, she's a fighter.

Speaker 1 Whatever it was, at some point she says, she remembers him shaking his head and then getting real quiet.

Speaker 23 And then he made the comment

Speaker 5 about

Speaker 21 how Africans are so stupid.

Speaker 39 He said they're stupid.

Speaker 1 His basic sentiment was why can't Africans on the continent be more like you, like African Americans in the U.S.

Speaker 34 And

Speaker 21 I mean for someone who is just coming into knowledge, self-knowledge, and learning about myself, and you're going to say that Africans are stupid?

Speaker 42 Oh, I must have been livid.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 look, let me tell you a few things about America. Can you read this? And then just tell me a little bit more about America.

Speaker 30 You want me to read it out loud or just if you don't mind.

Speaker 1 I asked Sandra to read the passage in her memoir where she talks about that conversation with Fela.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 30 He saw the pictures of slaves in chains and shackles being sold on the auction block.

Speaker 30 I made sure he saw too what was recently happening in the South with blacks being hosed and attacked, bitten by dogs, whites attacking black demonstrated marching for equal rights.

Speaker 1 So you're showing him pictures of the civil rights movement. You're showing him pictures of lynchings.

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 5 Sit-ins.

Speaker 1 Like you're showing it, you're giving him the history of America.

Speaker 18 See, he didn't know our real story.

Speaker 15 What was his reaction?

Speaker 5 Shocked.

Speaker 1 Sandra says, at some point in her rant, she went to her bookshelf and pulled out the autobiography of Malcolm X.

Speaker 28 Chapter 1.

Speaker 28 Nightmare. When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me a party of Ku Klutz Klan riders galloped to our home in Omaha, Nebraska one night.

Speaker 1 She told him, you need to read this. And over the next few days, he did.

Speaker 28 Philosophically and culturally, we Afro-Americans badly need to return to Africa. Each day, I live as if I'm already dead.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 28 That the white man in his press is going to identify me with hate.

Speaker 1 Felal 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.

Speaker 1 I had never read a book like that before in my life. Everything about Africa started coming back to me.

Speaker 1 He would later tell the New York Times, It was incredible how my head was turned. Everything fell into place.

Speaker 31 Everything fell into place.

Speaker 1 Here he is himself.

Speaker 12 Sandra

Speaker 12 taught me a lot about blackism, gave me books to read, Mark Come X. I saw so many.

Speaker 12 When I was reading these books, I found out in my analysis of myself. I have to sit down and think about myself, say, what am I doing? Am I already playing African music?

Speaker 1 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 Fella talking about this moment himself.

Speaker 12 And I said, I have to start to rethink and reanalyze myself. I start to write new music.

Speaker 1 Shortly after that conversation in Sandra's bedroom, Phila made some changes. He changed the name of his band from Kula Lubitos, this made-up word, to Nigeria 70,

Speaker 1 and he changed his sound.

Speaker 33 He started writing differently here.

Speaker 1 Sandra got him a gig at a club called Citadel de Haiti.

Speaker 1 And one of the first songs that he played at that gig, which he'd written in her house, was called My Lady's Frustration.

Speaker 9 My Lady's Frustration.

Speaker 1 The song was apparently written for Sandra.

Speaker 9 This was the first song, the first African music song.

Speaker 1 Benson calls this song very beginning of Fela's new genre,

Speaker 1 Afrobeat.

Speaker 1 One more time.

Speaker 1 According to Sandra, the first time he played that song at the Citadel, the crowd,

Speaker 33 they went crazy.

Speaker 5 Oh my goodness.

Speaker 43 And within a few weeks, he was packing that club and it was like we was balling.

Speaker 31 The Citadel de Haiti

Speaker 21 became the spot

Speaker 19 the black who's who of Hollywood, they were all going to Bernie Hamilton's club

Speaker 31 and they were listening to Fella.

Speaker 1 In March of 1970, Fella and the band returned to Lagos with the plan that Sander would follow him a few months later. He renames the band again to Africa 70, and in 1971,

Speaker 1 he releases what might be

Speaker 1 the best fella song, at least according to me.

Speaker 1 It is called Jin Koku.

Speaker 26 And it blew up.

Speaker 1 So good. Do you remember the Junku moment yourself? Yeah, oh, yeah.
I was there. What do you remember? El Elliot Colleague.

Speaker 15 We hear it on the radio.

Speaker 5 Everywhere.

Speaker 1 This is Olabode Omojola. He grew up in Nigeria, was a young man when Junkoku came out.
He's now a professor of music at Mount Holyoke College.

Speaker 14 By that point, even my father was beginning to okay, maybe there's something sensible in this

Speaker 48 Rascal music.

Speaker 9 You know, I think

Speaker 14 I was in high school and it was all over the radio. It was all everybody was playing Yung Koku.

Speaker 5 And then he was in,

Speaker 1 One of the crazy things was that at this point, Lagos was still a pretty small town of about a million people.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If that is true, that's one-fifth of the whole population. Which is wild.

Speaker 15 Everybody, everybody, you know.

Speaker 1 I asked Bodet about what Fella's manager Benson Idonigi had said.

Speaker 6 This is the first, the first Afrikaan music song.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 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? Curious, what so? I hear James Brown in there.

Speaker 1 What do you hear?

Speaker 1 I want to hear all the things.

Speaker 48 Yeah, kind of James Brown, a little bit element of funk, a little bit element of big band.

Speaker 1 You see, as 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, the groove.

Speaker 14 This is Eurobat drumming.

Speaker 5 Is it really? Yeah. Is it a tuck, ticket,

Speaker 1 is is it that pattern?

Speaker 11 Let it play.

Speaker 14 My my mother will just be

Speaker 15 dancing like that.

Speaker 43 Yeah.

Speaker 32 So it's it's it's it's it's so it's so Yoruba-ish.

Speaker 20 Then the melody, Oni Pisi Eba Mi Le Lo, call and response.

Speaker 1 Call and response.

Speaker 1 So there's call and response that is going on there. The key, says Bode, is that Fella found a precise blend where everyone can hear what they want.
So you could bring my mother

Speaker 48 who has never been to the US, is familiar with Yoruba culture, and bring an African-American person

Speaker 48 who has never been to

Speaker 48 Nigeria and the two of them can actually

Speaker 48 interface because this music brings them together.

Speaker 14 So it fella is like a magician.

Speaker 48 trying to create a kind of pan-Africanist musical language.

Speaker 1 He described it almost as the sound of a diaspora meeting itself,

Speaker 1 locking eyes.

Speaker 5 Our eyes locked.

Speaker 43 It was like a spiritual

Speaker 23 chord. It just seems like we were connected.

Speaker 1 When I talked about this with writer and scholar Louis Judasoki,

Speaker 1 he had a really interesting way of interpreting that gaze.

Speaker 46 This dynamic you're describing for me is because African Americans look to to Africa for a past. Folks in the diaspora look to the African Americans in the diaspora for a vision of possibility.

Speaker 15 Ah.

Speaker 46 So we look to them for the past. They look to us for the future.

Speaker 1 I've never heard it said that way.

Speaker 46 That's how I see it, right?

Speaker 9 As a matter of fact, just like Miles Davis said when he had Fella in 1988,

Speaker 9 he did say that

Speaker 6 Fella's Apple beat was going to be the music of the future.

Speaker 1 Miles Davis said that? Yes.

Speaker 9 Miles Davis said it.

Speaker 7 Wow.

Speaker 1 In 1970, as the Junkuku asteroid was about to hit, as planned, Sandra arrives in Lagos and steps off the plane.

Speaker 36 You know what?

Speaker 33 I hope I can find that picture.

Speaker 24 You can see from the expression on my face.

Speaker 5 That, oh my God, I was, oh,

Speaker 24 coming off that plane.

Speaker 21 I mean, it was like I had arrived, okay?

Speaker 42 And I was just happy to be there, you know, in the motherland.

Speaker 21 How did the people in Lagos react to you?

Speaker 5 I was headlines.

Speaker 31 Really?

Speaker 29 Yeah, because I mean, an American Negress-that's what they call me, a Negress.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 1 Few notes before we close.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 As a final final note, I want to end with a clip from Louis Chudosoki that I cannot get out of my mind. We were talking about that idea of realness, right?

Speaker 1 Like 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,

Speaker 1 well, there's no such thing. It's always a performance, which may not reflect the reality, but still doesn't make it any less real,

Speaker 1 as long as you believe it.

Speaker 15 And then he threw out this stat.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 5 Shut up.

Speaker 46 Look it up.

Speaker 46 Wow. That shook me to the core.
And I'm looking around.

Speaker 5 I'm like, y'all hear this?

Speaker 46 All of that is a way of wrestling with the fact that blackness is up for grabs.

Speaker 46 In the same way that we know that whiteness is being transformed by immigration, so is blackness.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 This has been a higher ground and audible original, produced by Audible, Higher Ground Audio, Western Sound, and Talk House.

Speaker 1 The series was created and executive produced by me, Jad Abunrod, Ben Adair, and Ian Wheeler, written and hosted by Yours Truly.

Speaker 1 Higher ground executive producers were Nick White, Mukta Mohan, and Dan Fearman. Jenna Levin was creative executive, and Corinne Gilliard Fisher was executive producer.

Speaker 1 Executive producers for Audible were Anne Hepperman, Glynn Pogue, and Nick DiAngelo.

Speaker 1 Our senior producer was Goffen Utubele. Ruby Heron Walsh was lead producer and researcher.
Our producers were Feifei Odudu and Oluakemi Aleusui.

Speaker 1 Ben Adair was our editor with editing help Carla Murthy. Consulting producers were Bolu Babalola, Dotun Ayubade, Hanif Abdurrak, Michael Veal, Moses Ochunu, and Judith Byfield.

Speaker 1 Our fact-checker was Jamila Wilkinson. Alex McInnes was the mix engineer.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And big thanks to Carla Murthy, Leah Friedman, and Shoshana Scholar. We couldn't have done any of this without their support.

Speaker 1 Oh, and a very big thank you to Sandra Isidore. You can find her memoir, Fela and Me, and her music.

Speaker 1 You can find that at sandraisidore.com. That's I-Z-S-A-D-O-R-E dot com.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 49 Hey, IMO listeners. This is Adam Grant, host of the Rethinking Podcast.
On my show, I have lively debates that challenge us to think differently.

Speaker 49 Michelle and Craig, what do you see many people get wrong when they choose careers?

Speaker 27 I think it's important for people to build careers careers around things that they enjoy, not just making money.

Speaker 27 That's not to say that making money isn't important, but a career is a lifetime commitment.

Speaker 1 I'm gonna have to agree with you because your hot take is the exact advice you gave me when I was leaving corporate America.

Speaker 1 And you said to me, if you could do something that you love doing, go ahead because we grew up not having money and we ended up just fine.

Speaker 49 Following your passion is sometimes a luxury, but following your values is a necessity.

Speaker 49 When you're considering new work opportunities, it's worth asking: do I want to become more like the people here? Do they share my values?

Speaker 49 I'm Adam Grant, and you can hear more hot takes like these from guests like Lynn-Manuel Miranda, Dolly Parton, Trevor Noah, Rhys Witherspoon, Brene Brown, and more on my podcast, Rethinking, wherever you listen.