Introducing Fela Kuti: Fear No Man

Hey, higher ground listeners, I'm Chad Abumrahad. You may know me from Radio Lab or Dolly Parton's America. I'm here to tell you about my new show, higher ground's latest music podcast, called Fella Kuti Fear No Man. Fella 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. Been working on this project for three years, talked to so many interesting people, Fella's family, Madde, Sheyoon, Femi Kuti, Yenny Kuti, historians, activists, luminaries like Io Adebarri, Brian Eno, David Byrne, Santi Gold, NDS President Barack Obama. 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. 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. ["Affrobeat"] ["Affrobeat"] ["Affrobeat"] How do you describe Fella to someone who doesn't know? No, I've played around. I've done it a million times. I don't know if any time has worked. Like, I'll go, Fella is like Bob Marley and Mandela combined. Well, he was kind of like Mick Jagger and James Brown. Definitely with Samamada Lee thrown in. And then with the protest element of Dylan. Don't forget Malcolm X. You want to be Malcolm X. Brothers and sisters, the secret of life is to have no fear. We all have to understand that. He was the hardest shit you've ever heard in your life. This is Phil, a kooty fear no man. I'm Jack Appelmarad, chapter two, becoming Fella. ["Affrobeat"] Here's a question. How do you become that person? ["Affrobeat"] That flea was just describing. You know, it's his hardest, 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 spirit of rebellion and of caring about a scary world that you can get lost in and hurt in. It's all there. For flea, it's flea of the red hot chili peppers. It's magical music. Fella 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. ["Affrobeat"] I want to see the police beating. It's terrible. I'll show you. Come on, see it. Look at it. In this famous clip, Fella 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. Over and over, the Nigerian police and army broke his arms, his legs, his face. You know, they threw his mother from the roof of her house, and she died. Throw my mother out the window. He went and took his mother's coffin and put it on the doorstep of the government building, the Capitol building. No matter what they did, he never backed down. If you think I'm going to change or compromise, you're making me stronger. I mean, he was wild. What a rebel. So that's the question. How did he become that guy? The story of Fella'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. Here he is in 1967. He's 29 at the time, talking to a guy named Sean Kelly. We're speaking with Fella Ransom-Cutie, one of Nigeria's young contemporary jazz musicians. Fella, how did you get started as a musician? Oh, it was my mother, Ray, and my father made me play the piano. Very at that age of nine, learning to play the piano. It was my hometown, Nabeh-Kuta. And then after my school, oh, again, 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. Hello, hello. And we're recording. Interestingly, when Nigeria declared its independence from England in 1960, Nigeria's great day. Fella wasn't even there. He was here, in London, studying classical music. So I'm recording now. Could I ask you to introduce yourselves? My name is Olalua Kinnepa, I'm a graduate of Trinity Laban, Nigerian, Clownetist. I'm Alex Shram, and I'm the director of music at Trinity Laban. Alex and Olalua were nice enough to give our producer, Ruby Walsh, a tour of the grounds. Yeah, we've got a lot of places to see. I started my undergraduate in the old building, which is where Fella studied in the 1950s. Trinity is a place that is obscenely beautiful. Architecturally, it is the epitome of the white Western world. Big Stone Archway's classical architecture, it's right on the water. Fella would have been one of the few black students to attend, and we kept trying to imagine him walking the halls. Around the room, I think what I might show you is the harp room. It's a forest of harps. It's an organ. Yes, this is an organ for playing brook. Alex, the director, demonstrated. Yeah, for me, I'm trying to remember my first day of walking in here. It was a bit surreal for me, actually. Olalua, 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. 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, Fella studied there, and then I'd go, What? You're going to study with Fella studied? You're going to come back so great. I don't know how good I am, yeah. But yeah, we're here in the reception now. And straight away, we have to point out, we have the plaque here for Fella Kuti. Oh, wow. Oh, it's right here. It's right here. Can I actually get one of you to read what's on the plaque? Yeah, it says, Fella Kuti, father of Afro-Brit, which elends colonial politics in Nigeria. Reading that plaque was interesting. Here is a man. American and England trying to brainwash Africans. You are the colonialists, you are the slave riders. 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. He was still walking around with colonial mentality. He hadn't become black. That's Sandra Isidore. She plays a huge part in what happens next. You want to check me? Because my voice carries. More from her in a second. 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 classics. My aim was to play jazz. So I studied classics in college and went out to listen to jazz. On my trumpet too, I was trying to play some jazz. I was listening to some great men like Miles and D.C. At Trinity after class, Fella would go to places like the Flamingo Room, a basement club that hosted all night jam sessions and he would sit in. This is at a time in London when all kinds of musicians are rolling through. Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald played some shows. Sarah Vaughn, Count Basie, Duke Ellington. 1960, when Fella was in his second year, Miles Davis comes to town, plays a few shows. I like to imagine Fella was in the audience. Because a few years later, Fella would release this tune. That's him on trumpet. He called it Amici's Blues and it sounds a whole lot like Miles' Freddie Freeloader off a kind of blue. They're almost the same tune. I was trying to listen to some great men like Miles and D.C. People like Clifford Brown and things like that. Then I came out, my care, in Nigeria to play music. Fella arrived back in Nigeria from London in 1963. Has it been successful? Not quite. What would you say was the present jazz scene in West Africa? Strict jazz has its play. In the States, it's not working here. I found out when I came back from England, West African countries, I'll say they're not interested in jazz, what they like. There's Latin American music. 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 figured themselves out. This guy, this Fella, he's looking for something, but he hasn't found it yet. He was a gentleman musician. When we started the band, he was just a gentleman. This is one of Fella's early bandmates, Baba Ani. He was thinking love songs, funky songs, folk laws. And he wasn't drinking alcohol. He was not taking marigouanna. He wasn't completely gentle. At that point, Fella was working a respectable job in Lagos at the time of his death. Fella 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, What do you like? Latin American music? Well, at the beginning, before he traveled to America, he was basically playing a jazzy form of high life. High life time! A morning time! That's John Collins, musician, historian. How do you define high life? 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. 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 Ghanayan 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. He's trying to figure out how to take this already hybrid form and layer jazz on top of it. For me, this musicality gave me a lot of joy. This is Benson Idoneje, who managed Fela and Kulu Lobitos at the time. Is there a song that you think of specifically that means the most to you from that early period? Yeah, I take Olo Lufer, for instance. Olo Lufer, man. Do you have it here? We have it somewhere. I think my phone is somewhere. Yeah, this one. Can you translate in real time? Yeah. Olo Lufer, man, my love. You are the one that I fancy. You are the one that I love. My love girl. You are the one that I love. It's a vibe, for sure. If you notice, compared to later Fela, it's very smooth. Come and rub your body on me. You can almost see him in his button-up shirt and loafers, just crooning out this love song. And Benson says it wasn't really working. We are playing to art communities, schools, students and all that. We are not making money. Small crowds. 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. 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. You're kidding? That music turned Sub-Saharan Africa upside down. James Brown turned Africa upside down inside out. 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. He says it was around this moment when James Brown records just fell on West Africa. Between 64 and 69, Brown consciously tried to bring out the Africanist elements in his music. 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, was almost a kind of alchemical transmutation. He was taking in African rhythms from across the Atlantic and then sending it back to the continent in a new form. It's like hearing your own voice come back at you, but you recognize it as having been transformed in some profound ways. Whatever it was, now the Nigerian kids just did not want to hear High Life. All they wanted was funk and soul. Play soul, play soul. Benson says they would hear that over and over. It kicks. Play soul. Play some James Brown. Yeah, yeah. And Fela didn't want to. Fela was not ready to compromise his music. Frustrated and at a loss for direction, Fela apparently thought about giving up. 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? 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... Wait till they get the real thing. Listen to us. Americans like us. That's one of the reasons why we're troubled. Right after that article was published, Fela got an offer to take his band Kula Labitos on a two-month tour of America and expose the American public to their brand of high life. This is Fela Kuti, Fear No Man. May 1969, Kula Labitos sets off on a ten-month U.S. tour. They perform in Washington, D.C. Boom! Chicago. Boom! San Francisco. Boom! But by the time they get to L.A., they're broke and their visas have run out. Yeah, it wasn't easy for Fela here. And this brings us to Sandra Isidor, who is often called the Queen of Afrobeat. If Fela is the king, she's the queen. You want to check me? How do I sound to you right now? You sound okay to me. How do I sound to you? My voice carries. The day that I sat down with Sandra in L.A., 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. So I want to go into her story for a second. I'm a country girl that grew up in the city. 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. That's a happy little girl growing up, you know, in a perfect world. We lived in a beautiful neighborhood. We lived in a corner house. We had a nectarine tree, apricots, oranges, pomegranates, lemons. Wow, sounds idyllic. And you see my little white doll, don't you? Yeah. They didn't have black dolls back then. When she was six, Sandra and her family moved to Compton, which was then an all-white neighborhood. Then 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 is my eyes going to turn blue? My hair is going to be long and stringy. And I'm going to have white skin. When is that going to happen? How literally did you take that thought? I was thinking I was going to turn white. So that's how deep it was. I asked Sandra about her parents. Like, did they ever talk to her about any of this? My parents were what you would call from the secret society. 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. They grew up in the South. 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. They never sort of took you aside and said, this is our journey. This is how we got here. Absolutely nothing. 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. Well, your parents then are part of that secret society. For Sandra, despite the firewall, she says some things did slip through, which made her uneasy. I would see my parents, you know, they would whisper and they would talk. 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. 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 reality? I think it was the civil disturbance in Los Angeles. Get the water! You talking about the Watts riots? White people driving through the riot area were considered fair game. Their cars were battered, the drivers stoned. When I saw the fires, even at a young age, I was questioning. I threw the fire bomb right in the front window. Why are you burning up your own neighborhood? The cry in the streets was burn, baby, burn. 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. He was friends with Bunchy. Bunchy? Bunchy Carter from the Panther Party. 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. You know, he was always talking about his black liberation and everything. More importantly, he started to play her. Music. Uh, Nina Simone. Alabama's got me so upset. Um, Ray Charles. Miles Davis. Oh, Billy Holiday. Big Mama Thornton. So I'm getting all this old music and it was in their lyrical content. Especially Oscar Brown Jr. That, you know, it started me thinking. Eventually, her cousin turned her on to Malcolm X. Who taught you to heat the color of your skin to such extent that you bleach to get like the white man? It was like my eyes started opening and around that time, getting back to the music. Whoa. Hugh Masekela came out with the Americanization of Uga Buga. Music. The title was sort of a play on words. Uga Buga was a racist slur used about Africa in the West. While Americanization nodded at Hugh Masekela 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. But it was my favorite and I would play it over and over. Over and over. Because at that point I said to myself, in order to know the real story, I'm going to need to meet a real African. I have to meet a real African. Yep. Why? Because... At this point in our conversation, Sandra just broke into a big smile, sort of laughing at her younger self. Love it. A real African. A real African. 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 and bringing a few people in, including Louis Chudisoki, who is a professor of English at Boston University. Also the director of the African American and Black Diaspora Studies program. 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. No. Everyone telling me I was African, it was always an insult. 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. There was this moment in the 80s. We're skipping forward in time for just a second. When hip hop becomes Afrocentric, I'm sure you remember there was the African medallions and everyone's like Motherland, the Jungle Brothers and Tribe Called Quest with the Multicolored. And for me, Jad Abbey straight up, I was like, oh shit, I'm gonna get laid now. You're like, opportunity. 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. So I started dancing with Swabba, 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. 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. It was a very hot day. I really didn't want to go and it was Juno Lewis who insisted 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. 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. 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. Sandra, you gotta meet them, you gotta meet them. And I'm like, ah, here's another one, you know. So we go to the Ambassador Hotel. This is summer, 1969. On that particular day I had on a blue and green haltered bell-bottom jumpsuit with the back out. I walk in and as I'm walking in with Juno... On stage is a guy singing. With this band behind him playing sort of bouncy, brassy dance music. She can't remember what he was wearing, probably a suit. Trouser, shirt, loafer. Because that was his outfit at the time. No socks. He was the first man I met that didn't wear socks. But what she really remembers is that as she walked in and glanced at the stage, he looked right down at her. And our eyes locked. And it was a very magical moment. It was like we were connected from day one. I think what you wrote is something that you never experienced before and never did again. No, it was like a spiritual chord. It just seems like we were connected. Something that was destined to be. Sandra says later in the party, between sets, she went searching for her friend Juno. I look over to the bar and there's Fella standing next to him. So I go over to the bar and Juno makes the introduction. And the first thing that comes out of Fella's mouth in a very arrogant way, do you have a car? Whoa. 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 bowed 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. Yeah. And I said, hmm, interesting. He tweaked my interest. They go to a party together. They sit down on the couch next to each other. I'm all in it. Long story short, Sandra thinks, finally. I finally meet a black man, African. He's going to show me, he's going to teach me all about Africa. Cut. Scene. Okay. So Sandra gets to know Fella. They start to see each other every day. And at some point, Sandra goes and watches Fella and his band rehearse. She watches them play this one particular song that becomes kind of important. He did this song called Ape and I was able to really hear the band and I was impressed. I like the sound. It was different. So when the rehearsal was over, I asked him to translate. Because the lyrics are in Europe. Right. Translate what he was saying. He was so proud to let me know it's about my soup. What does that mean? Soup. Like it's a song about soup? The whole song was about soup. What do you eat? Like actual soup. Not soup as a metaphor, but it actually about soup. No, S-O-U-P soup. And I started laughing and you know, I was enhanced anyway. I thought that was the funniest thing because how are you going to put all this energy and everything about some soup? Oh, okay. So it's like, it's a celebration of soup. Well, it's not so much a celebration of it, but what he wants in his soup. Okay? So I thought that was so wild to me because knowing where he is about to go with your help, that's where he started. Soup. That's what started the whole thing. You've been doing all this and you're 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. Between colonialism and slavery, how to take slavery? Those shackles are still on the minds. That's even worse. This moment when I talked about it with some of our consulting producers. Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. We got a whole bunch of different reactions. It was surprising to me that she said that she would choose slavery over colonialism. This is Bolu Babalola, a Nigerian writer and consulting producer on this project. She says that caught her ear because it's an argument she actually sometimes gets into with her black American friends. 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 of violence, the horror of it all. I think slavery is such a visual word that you can imagine the horror that comes with it. Colonialism, just to de-vague 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 LEGOs 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. How much palm oil, ground nuts, how many prisoners they were maintaining? Number of persons summoned or apprehended, 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. There's a whole page called Lunatic Asylum. Book after book. 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. There's a colonization, I think, it's just like, you know, white people marched in and changed your names, and that was it, where it's like the complete horror and destruction of it is completely erased. So that was Bolu's reaction to what Sandra said. Queen colonialism and slavery, I'll take slavery. For Lewis, what's your reaction when you hear that? I love her voice. For him, it was less what she said than how she said it. 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... In the clothing. Hearing, like... I see it in the clothing. Is he hearing a kind of authenticity that he couldn't or didn't hear in his own? 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. 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. He was going to meetings and meetings and meetings. And when he said, do you have a car? Maybe part of the reason is that his band had no way of getting around. I had this sports car, a two-seater sports car, and I remember nine people got into that car. In LA, Kula Lobitoz 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. And after that? He was invited by Disneyland. Disneyland? They wanted him for adventure land. Welcome aboard the Jungle Crew. You know, at that time they had adventure land where you go around with a little boat. Look out, look out, another hippo. The hippopotamus would come up out of the water and the alligators. Oh, mechanical. That scared him. The Jungle Crews was wildly popular, not so subtly racist, and inspired by the movie The African Queen, which starred Humphrey Bargarde and Kathleen Hepburn. We are now entering head hunter country. They wanted Fela to be the sort of house band for that? Yes. Oh, that's a whole different reality. Yep. They were going to sign him. He failed the audition. Disney turned them down because their music wasn't African enough. Wow. We attempted to confirm this with Disney, but they never got back to us. That was when I was very fat, very bad. This is Fela Kutifir, no man. We rejoined the story, with Fela getting rejected from Disneyland for not being quote African enough. I was very fat, very bad. At this point, Fela was deeply broke. Sandra says he was stuffing newspapers into his loafers to fill the holes. When things got really bad, he came and lived with my parents. How long was he living there for? I would say a good six to eight months. Okay. Wow, so you spent every waking moment together. Oh, all the time. Fela stayed in a small guest shack at the back of her parents' property. Fortunately, my mom had an old upright piano. But anyway, it was that old upright piano that Fela wrote a lot of those songs. He used to chart the music. At night, once they've gone to bed, I would bring Fela up to my bedroom. We would be talking. In my bedroom at that time, I had posters all over the wall of the kings of Africa. I had Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Angela Davis. 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. His thing was, look at this woman. She's a fighter. Whatever it was, at some point, she says she remembers him shaking his head and then getting real quiet. And then he made the comment about how Africans are so stupid. He said they're stupid. His basic sentiment was, why can't Africans on the continent be more like you, like African-Americans in the US? And I mean, for someone who was just coming into knowledge, self-knowledge and learning about myself, and you're going to say that Africans are stupid. Oh, I must have been livid. 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. You want me to read it out loud? Yeah, if you don't mind. I asked Sandra to read the passage in her memoir where she talks about that conversation with Fela. It was during this discussion I showed him news clippings in pictures of blacks being hung from trees, burned alive and wearing scars on their back. He saw the pictures of slaves and 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 black, demonstrated marching for equal rights. So you're showing him pictures of the civil rights movement. You're showing him pictures of lynchings. Yes. Citizens, like you're showing, you're giving him the history of America. See, he did know our real story. What was his reaction? Shocked. Sandra says at some point in her rant, she went to her bookshelf and pulled out the autobiography of Malcolm X. Chapter one. Nightmare. When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me a party of Klu Klutz Clan riders galloped to our home in Omaha, Nebraska one night. She told him, you need to read this. And over the next few days, he did. 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. Philo 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. Everything fell into place. Here he is himself. Sandra, taught me a lot about blackism, give me books to read, Malcolm X, and I saw so many men. I've written these books and found out in my analysis of myself, I have to sit down and think about myself. I say, what am I doing? I'm already playing a written music. That noisy interview done by a student at Lagos University while the band was rehearsing the background. That is the only audio clip we have of Philo talking about this moment himself. Then I have to start to rethink and reanalyze myself and start to write new music. Shortly after that conversation in Sandra's bedroom, Philo 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. Music He started writing differently here. Music Sandra got him a gig at a club called Citadel de Haiti. 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. My Lady's Frustration. The song was apparently written for Sandra. This was the first song, the first African music song. Benson calls this song, very beginning, of Phela's new genre, Afrobeat. Music One more time. Music Music According to Sandra, the first time he played that song at the Citadel, the crowd. They went crazy. Oh my goodness. And within a few weeks, he was packing that club. It was like we was balling. The Citadel de Haiti became the spot where the black hooves, who of Hollywood, they were all going to Bernie Hamilton's club. And they were listening to Phela. Music In March of 1970, Phela and the band returned to Lagos with a 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 Phela song, at least according to me. It is called Zin Cocu. Music And it blew up. Music Music Music Music So good. Do you remember the Zin Cocu moment yourself? Yeah, I was in. What do you remember? Early colleague. We heard it on the radio. Everywhere. This is Olavode Omojola. He grew up in Nigeria. As a young man, when Zin Cocu came out, he's now a professor of music at Mount Holyoke College. But at that point, even my father was beginning to think, okay, maybe there's something sensible in this rascal music. I think I was in high school and it was all over the radio. Everybody was playing Zin Cocu and then he was like, oh, oh, oh, oh. Music 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. Everybody, everybody. I asked Bode about what Phela's manager Benson Edoninsche had said. This was the first African music song. 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 hear James Brown in there. What are you here? I want to hear all the things. Yeah, kind of James Brown, a little bit of funk, a little bit of big band. You see this, you've 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. This is Eurobad drumming. Is it really? Yeah. Is it that... is it that pattern? Let it play. My mother would just be dancing like that. So it's so Eurobad. Then the melody, you can see, call and response. So there's call and response that is going on there. The key, says Bode, is that Fela found a precise blend where everyone can hear what they want. So you could bring my mother, who has never been to the US, is familiar with the Eurobad 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. He described it almost as the sound of a diaspora meeting itself, locking eyes. Our eyes locked. It was like a spiritual chord. It just seems like we were connected. When I talked about this with writer and scholar Louis Chudisoki, he had a really interesting way of interpreting that gaze. 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. So we look to them for the past, and they look to us for the future. I've never heard it said that way. That's how I see it, right? As a matter of fact, just like Miles Davis said, when he heard Fela in 1988, he did say that Fela's Afro beat was going to be the music of the future. Miles Davis said that? Yes. Miles Davis said it. Wow. In 1970, as the Zyun Koku asteroid was about to hit, as planned, Sandra arrives in Lagos and steps off the plane. 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. Out of the people in Lagos react to you. I was headlines. Really? Yeah, because, I mean, an American niggress, that's what they call me, a niggress. 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 fall. Music 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 Chudisoki 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. 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. The real 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. Shut up. Look it up. Wow. 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. In the same way that we know that whiteness is being transformed by immigration, so is blackness. 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. This has been a higher ground in Audible, original produced by Audible, higher ground audio, western sound and talk house. The series was created and executive produced by me, Jad Abumrah, Bannadar and Ian Wheeler, written and hosted by yours truly. Higher ground executive producers were Nick White, Mukta Mohan and Dan Firman. Gen 11 was creative executive and Corinne Gillier Fisher was executive producer. Executive producers for Audible were Anne Heperman, Glenn Pogue and Nick D'Angelo. Our senior producer was Gofan Utwele, Ruby Haran Walsh was lead producer and researcher. Our producers were Fefe Odudu and Bolo Akemi Aladiusui. Bannadar was our editor with editing help Carla Murphy. Consulting producers were Bolo Babalola, Dottun Ayubade, Nif Abdurahid, Michael Veal, Moses Occhunu and Judith Baifil. Our fact checker was Jamila Wilkinson, Alex McKinnis was the mixed 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 Murphy, 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 Isidore. You can find her memoir Fela and Me and her music. Run, run, run, run, run Run, run, run, run, run You can find that at SandraIsidore.com. That's I-Z-S-A-D-O-R-E.com The color mentality The head of creative development at Audible is Kate Nevin, chief content officer Rachel Ghiazza. Copyright 2025 by Hireground Audio LLC. Sound recording Copyright 2025 by Hireground Audio LLC.