They are shooting us! They are shooting us! And when he sang his songs at the protest, it motivated us. It was like he was speaking for us. is to have no fear. We all have to understand that. This is Fela Kuti Fear No Man. I'm Jad Abumrad. Chapter 11, Endless Repeats. In this chapter, Fela himself won't really make an appearance because he is quite dead at this point, but also not. Because the story that you will hear, which I should mention contains some pretty intense moments of violence, he looms over it. Kind of like a ghost. Okay, so an idea that we keep coming up against in this series, all of us on this project, is... This idea of a spiral. A spiral. A spiral. And a circle. A circle. A circle. That idea of cycles. A circle. A spiral. Loops. A spiral. What I mean is you listen to these fella songs and you hear a groove that just repeats and repeats and repeats. First you're like, good groove. Then you're like, please change. And finally, you give in. You fall into a trance where you let go of the urge for what you're hearing to be anything other than it is and you just lose time. How long have I been listening to this? Five minutes? Five hours? That's one of the pleasures of Fela's music. That third phase where you are timeless. And yet there is something, even as you're sort of free-floating in a kind of temporal haze, there's something about the endless repeats of the music that seem to capture how time actually works, which is sort of the darker resonance here. What I mean is that we in the West, where we like our three-minute pop songs, we just kind of have this idea that progress is a line. Inherent in that word is the idea that we are progressing towards some end, maybe justice, maybe a better world, who knows. And yes, we will hit the speed bumps along the way. So maybe the line flutters a little bit or turns into kind of like a sinusoidal wave. but it is always nonetheless a line continuing towards something. This is just part of the American religion, that that is the shape of our journey through generational time. It is a lie, I would argue. You can disagree with me on that. But in Nigeria, it is so painfully clear that the shape time makes is actually a circle. The reminder of that is everywhere. For example, Nikkei Art Gallery. One of the most amazing places I have ever been in my life. Four floors of paintings, mostly paintings. And some of these paintings, the most eye-popping blues you've ever seen. And when you get up close to the paintings, you realize actually it's not paint. The blue is millions of microscopic beads that have been sewn directly onto the canvas. It's amazing. So I was there looking at one of these paintings up close, looking at the beads. When the power went out, as it often does, everything went dark. And the temperature started to go up as the heat rushed back into the room. But then the power came back on. I blinked, saw the room anew. And I noticed that next to this giant bead painting, there are a series of portraits of Nigeria's presidents arranged in a grid, Brady Bunch style, chronologically 1960 to the present. And it's a funny thing to see all the presidents lined up. What you notice is that the same names and faces keep appearing at different parts of the grid. 1979, there is a giant man named Alushogon Obasanjo, military uniform, military cap. 2007, there he is again, but this time he's wearing civilian clothes. 1983, there's a man named Mohamedou Buhari, mustache, military uniform. 2015, Buhari again, this time looking like, I don't know, it's like someone who does IT. The impression that you get looking at the grid is that these guys are trying to trick you, they're playing dress up, to convince you that this time is not like the last time. But of course it kind of is because this is in fact the same man, again and again, history stubbornly repeating, like that ostinato. But they are not the only things that repeat. There's also right alongside them the opposite energy, stubbornly repeating. Which brings us to Fela and the story that we're going to tell you. 27 years after Fela died, feeling betrayed that the youth of Lagos never rose up the way that he hoped, suddenly they did. And his music, the weapon of the future as he called it, was there, soundtracking the whole thing. So, B'Angelo, do you want to come this way? It's okay. It's okay? Yeah. Let's start as a way of sort of setting the table with a story that we heard from a woman named Obianujou Iloya. Yeah, it's okay. You can totally face that. It's a story about a brother. So my brother, Chijoke, a lot of people thought we were twins with the way we were always hanging out together. And it was fun. I mean, he's a boy and I'm a girl and everybody's like, boys and girls don't hang out. But Chijoke didn't send. And he was always with me, going out with me, hanging out with me. When he's going out with his friends, he says, I want my sister to come around. Obiyan Ujoo says she worshipped her brother. Jijoki was a couple years older than her, and she would wear his clothes. They would go swimming together, get in fights with the neighborhood kids together. He wasn't scared, so I wasn't scared. He was my superman. Fast forward a few years, it's 2012. She's 17, he's a few years older. He tells her he's going to go out to a party. Their parents were very strict. He wasn't allowed to go. So he's like, just cover for me, put clothes on my bed, act like I'm home, keep going to my room and coming, and nobody would check. So he leaves. She goes in and out of his room all night like he asked. But then at 9 o'clock, she gets a phone call. This person says, your brother has been arrested. Chijoke has been arrested. I could hear his voice. She says she could hear him yelling in the background. He said, telling me to tell daddy that he has been arrested. And to tell my dad that kind of thing is very hard. She thought something really must be up. Mom goes down to the local police station and is informed that Chijoki is being held by a special police unit called SARS. When my mom heard SARS, she knew that that was a problem. Just to explain, SARS is an acronym, which stands for The Special Anti-Robbery Squad. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad. SARS, S-A-R-S. This is a unit that was set up in 1985 to combat a wave of organized crime that was happening in Lagos. They were constructed as an elite unit, basically like the U.S. version of a SWAT team, and they were given a lot of weapons and intentionally very little oversight so they could move quickly. And by all accounts, robberies did go down. But then reports started to emerge that SARS agents, who were supposed to stop robberies, had become the robbers themselves. Too many friends. I can't, I can't, people begin to count their numbers. I mean, these guys will take you, SARS, I mean, will take you to the ATM machine, literally, until you to use up your limit for the day. That's activist Renu Odwalla and musician DJ Switch, both of whom figure largely in the story we're telling. They say it became just basically status quo for SARS agents to harass young people, take their laptops, take their phones. I mean, I think one of the most ridiculous cases we had was an extortion of about $60,000 by the police from a young Nigerian. To put this in context, it is well understood in Lagos that the police, in general, are sort of over-empowered and underpaid. So small-scale extortion is not unusual. It's honestly how a lot of the police make ends meet. In fact, while we were in Lagos, one of our producers got stopped by a policeman at a checkpoint, had to pay a few dollars. We actually caught the interaction on tape. It was very cordial. Good morning. Good morning. They rolled down their window. The policemen casually threatened them. She and her friend laughed, pretended to flirt, paid the money, and then went on their way. Is he speaking pigeon? Yes. Our field producer, Feifei, says that happens to her a couple times a week. But the reports that started to emerge about the SARS agents went way beyond this. We've documented, along with groups like Amnesty, violence, extortion, extraditional killings. This is Enieti Eweng. I'm a researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch. She says Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, began to hear about SARS abuses as far back as the 2010s. And in 2016, Amnesty released a report documenting at least 44 different cases of torture. They'd released a report a few years later, upping that number to over 80. These are the stories that Obianu Zhu and her family had heard. We knew the bad things that they did. We heard their stories. So when her brother Chijoki was taken, people in their community advised them to go to the main SARS agent and give him a bag full of 2 million naira, which is the equivalent of several thousand U.S. dollars. Just offer him money. We didn't have the money. My parents didn't have that kind of money. So they sold the land. That was the land where my sister was buried. That was the only land that my dad had then. So we sold it to try and get TJK back. So we sold it, took it to the man. In a bag, he said it was too small. They then wrote petitions, hired lawyers. Meanwhile, weeks went by, no signs of her brother. And she said her mother began to lose her grip on things. My dad, he would bring down the house with his screaming and his shouting. She became the de facto parent to her younger siblings. At one point, she says, about three months after Chijoke had disappeared. We heard that there were dead bodies in the river. Some people told them that there were about a dozen bodies floating in a river, not far from Asar's police station. One report we read put the number of bodies at 16. Another said it may have been as high as 50. So my dad was like, OK, so let's go see if we can find Chiduke's body. So we can at least have closure. So he went there and he had to swim in the river, you know, turning the bodies. And they were already getting bloated. Chiduke had a mark. on his chest. That was what my dad was looking out for because they were all bloated, their face, you know, you can't actually recognize a lot of them. So he was just looking out for that mark so we can just take him. And he turned all of them. We were all waiting at the bridge, thinking that he would just call us and say, yes, shouts that he has found it. But we were like, nothing. So we had to go home and host him down. how are you handling this I think that everybody broke down my mom was really down She had to start seeing a psychologist So I needed to be strong for everybody I had to also make sure that they keep on looking because I felt like one day Chidoki will be back and everything will be fine. And he would hold me and maybe I can cry. So I kept on ensuring that they keep looking. So that was 2012. For the next eight years, Obi-Nu-Ju would be stuck in this limbo of looking for and not finding her brother. Meanwhile, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch would continue to release reports about abuses from the SARS police force. Fast forward to 2020. Fela-bration, the annual celebration of Fela, had just ended in Lagos. And a few days after, 23-year-old Renu Adwala is hanging out at home. Renu leads a program called Connect Hub NG, which offers legal assistance and counseling to young people in Nigeria. She is very digitally savvy. Actually, her nickname sometimes is Savvy Renu. But at that point, she was just a student hanging out with her grandma, sitting on the couch. I was at home, not because I wanted to be home. Remember you said I am a student, right? I was at home because then the association of the university unions in Nigeria had gone on strike. and so students had to be at home. And then it was right in the middle of the pandemic as well. So I was at home. I was going through my phone and I saw that video. A viral video showing an alleged killing of a young man in Delta State by the special anti-robbery squad. What we saw in the video were police officers who were driving off in a young man's car. They had seized the car and then they were driving off. The video is shaky, handheld. You see a car race off in the distance, which is allegedly the SARS agents, and then two other guys get in their car and chase after them. But the truth is, there were several videos circulating at this moment. One where you see a policeman all in black dragging a guy out of a hotel. Shooting in point blank. So shocking. And so this video went online. And for young Nigerians, this became one time too many. I felt an obligation to do something. This is Fela Kuti, Fear No Man. On October 7th, 2020, on a day when in the States 51 people had been arrested for protesting the murder of George Floyd, Renu and others begin a similar movement in Nigeria. I organized a protest with my friends, some of my friends. And they marched to the police headquarters in Lagos. We said we're not going to go there and protest and just go back home. We're going to be there for three days, sleeping, you know, in the streets, on the streets, in the cold, and not going back home. In videos, you see Renu standing on her friend's shoulders making a speech. You see her arguing with police officers. You see her and the other protesters on the ground sleeping in sleeping bags. And you see them dancing to music. I asked her what her family thought of her organizing this protest. And she told me... So I didn't tell them that I was going to protest the ground. They didn't know about it. I never told them because I knew that they would never let me. Our parents are not strangers to police brutality. They are not strangers to military violence. They don't want it happening. And that's part of what has led to some of our mental change, especially as a young Nigerian, because your parents constantly told you not to speak up, not to fight. She says that generational conversation kind of landed on her in a totally new way. The first day on the three-day protest, they put on a Fela song. Suffering and smiling. Suffering and smiling. You Africans, please listen to me as Africans. And you non-Africans, listen to me with open mind. That was a song that I can't even forget, not even in my dreams. Suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer, suffer for a world. Now your fault be that. Me I say, now your fault be that. Fela sang this song 40 years ago, 50 years ago. In that song, Pella said that every day, every day in the bus, every day at work, my people are always suffering and smiling. Packing themselves in a bus that is supposed to contain like 50 people, could contain like 100 people. And they don't speak up. They are suffering and smiling. There's no water because the government has abandoned their responsibility of providing welfare to the citizens. There's no electricity. In the 21st century, the most populous black nation on earth cannot boast of constant electricity. The police will slap them, beat them. But my people are still suffering and smiling. She says it just hit her. He was sending them a warning. that if we just suffer and smile and retreat into hopelessness or distraction or religion, things are just going to go round and round and never change. You know, it's like telling people, wake up. Because this is not what you deserve. Within three days of that first protest, the End SARS movement, as it came to be known, had exploded. People kept coming. People kept coming. It was growing by the thousands. DJ Switch again. Protests against police brutality and government corruption are intensifying in Nigeria after days. I mean, across the country. On the mainland, in River State, in Portakas, in Abuja. Anieti Iwang again from Human Rights Watch. Just about every major city in the country. You had all these protests happening all across Nigeria. And what you see, or rather hear, when you look at the footage, is that Fela was everywhere. Like when Yeni, Fela's daughter, in an earlier episode said, He's the reference point. When government is going bad, he's the reference point. Anytime they protest, it's his music they play. When she said that, she was undoubtedly thinking about these protests, where an entirely new generation of young people brought Fela into the present. Or maybe he was always there. just waiting for them. I remember playing at one of the protests. You know, it was every socially conscious song from our, you know, our legend. Now, DJ Switch, just prior to the Ansar's protest movement kicking up, her career had been exploding. Oh, yeah. It was good. You know, it was good. She had just released a single. She'd been on tour. As a matter of fact, I had just flown in from a show in Dubai. Literally, when the plane had touched the ground, I remember putting out a tweet saying, where is the nearest protest? She ended up DJing at that protest and many others. And she says as she played music for the crowd, she thought back to her dad. Remember, my dad would have on his record, you know, either lady, if you call her an African woman, expensive shit, most notably. Zombie for me, something that was probably released in 1976, so relevant that day. So I remember hearing Beasts of No Nation just thinking, wow. That's Tammy McKinde. I'm the managing editor at The Native Magazine. And she says what hit her when she heard Fela's Beasts of No Nations at the protest is that he wrote the song in 1986. And in it, he calls out by name the head of state, Mohamedou Buhari. This is 1986. In 2020, when the protests were happening, Buhari was back in power. And even knowing that the dictator that he was even talking about in that music is the person who's actually oppressed it, it's kind of scary to think that. That's another thing that dawned on all of us a sideway. Exactly what he was saying how many years ago is what we're still... So we were hearing like every single complaint, almost like from one generation to the next generation. When we sang his songs at the protest... That's Obianujou again? It motivated us. It was like he was speaking for us, advising us, supporting us, chanting with us. Obianujou told us that, and I found this interesting, that Nigeria, two-thirds of the population is under the age of 25. And she says everybody that she knew that was over the age of 25 was saying to the protesters, don't do this. It's not going to end well. And she says it felt like Fela was the only one who was standing with them. We are young people, so it felt good to have this older person speaking for us, understanding how we feel and expressing it in ways that we cannot. It just kind of felt surreal because it was the first ever demonstration a lot of us had ever been in before. And it did feel like, wow, maybe there is going to be a change. Maybe they're going to hear our voices for the first time. October 20th, 2020. The protests enter their 13th day. In Lagos, Earlier in the day, protesters had barricaded the Nekito Gate. Protesters had shut down the largest toll gate in Lagos, which about 80,000 cars passed through a day. Eight, ten lanes of traffic in both directions ground to a halt. This is where DJ Switch would end up and inadvertently become the face of the movement. She was there that night, October 20th, DJing for thousands of people. I remember some young guy came and tapped me and said he wants to show me something. I said, OK. So I gave the mic to someone else and I jumped down. And he showed me a picture he had just taken. And he said, you see that man going, look at what he just did. And so I looked at the picture. The man was uninstalling the CCTVs at that toll gate. The CCTV system was the closed circuit security cameras that were monitoring the whole area. My response to the guy was like, oh, maybe they think we might destroy it. Right. I'm not knowing that that was just the beginning of our problem. A few moments later, the massive lights that keep Lekhi Tolge illuminated. Think of the very, very tall, blinding white lights that you see at football stadiums. They're like those. At 7 p.m., those lights. For the first time since I've ever lived in Lekhi, I've lived in Lekhi for 25 years of my life. Those lights went off. And just chaos. You scaled the sheer cliff face, battling frostbite, running low on oxygen. The wind pierced your skin and every inch was agony. You reached heights no other human had before, while getting nowhere at airport security. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best action titles on Audible This is Fela Kuti Fear No Man October 20th 2020 7pm The mass of white lights over Lekitoge go dark And just chaos. I just heard like gunfire. It just rang from the back. And then I turned around and I see people running. I saw, you know, I could see their boots, you know, Nigerian army. I was almost certain I'm going to die here today. This is the end. Let me just document this. And I just pulled out my phone and just read live streams. On DJ Switch's live stream, which many people recorded from many different computers, the video is pitch black. You can't see anything except the occasional flashes of light from the gunfire. Comments stream in from people watching, urging the protesters to run. One person says, kneel, kneel, sing the national anthem. And so we started screaming, you know, raise your Nigerian flag. I hear this tape, and it's impossible for me not to think of those women in 1947 who sang to create a force field around them. Because we've always believed that once we have our Nigerian flags and we raise it and wave it, they know that they're citizens, right? And they're not going to harm us. It didn't matter. They just made open fire on all of us. you know, Adanda pressing was shot. That was literally lying on my back. I'm never going to forget that. I don't know who it is. Tell me about that. What happened? You know, when we laid on the floor, the boy, when he laid on my body, right, he was literally screaming, cover her, cover her. I don't know if he was talking to me, but I was, I tried to even get him off my back because he was heavy. You know? These guys come, they're screaming, they're shooting. And then this boy, I turn and this boy literally got shot on his lower back and was like lying on my body. You know, I don't know the boy. I'm sorry, I'm just... You don't have to answer any of these questions, but I feel like I have to ask, what do you remember about him? That's it. That he was shot. Was he a young guy? You know, I don't know. I don't know. If I have... I don't even know how to feel. Like, if I have any regrets in my life, it's not even that I went to the protest. yes it changed my life like it scattered my life my life just got messed up after that but I don't even regret that I regret that I don't know that boy I don't know who he I don't know who he is you know I don't know his name but I remember just trying to get him off at some point he wasn't really moving and he's bleeding I'm looking at myself you know around that moment I I got up and I'm one of the soldiers that looked like he had authority. I mean, I walked up to him. I'm like, I said, I said, why are you doing this? We're protesting. And this is, this is our right. I'm warning you for the last time. You have to go home. This white life, white life ammunition. You have to go home. White life ammunition. That's all I want to ask. You have to go home. Some people have been shot. They're coming close to me. White life ammunition. They're trying to meet my brother. My brother. Coming close to me. White life ammunition. Because they're trying to meet my brother. I said, why are you doing this? Why are you using live rounds? Why are you shooting us? I was asking him. I didn't even know how to feel. I didn't know how to feel. I'm looking at the boy. Another one was shot. I actually have, you know, I have these clips here. Another one was shot. And we were trying to, we were trying to, we literally were trying to do an operation on this boy. This is, if you can see this one. Get his sex shot. What's the demon? I put my blood pressure on, blood pressure. Please. So I was asking, I was asking if at this point, at this point, we didn't really care anymore. You know, you want to kill us fine. People were bleeding out. We just have to help. If anybody can assist us, if you live close to Laki Gates, please, if you can help, please be your brother's keeper. They need to remove this bullet from this boy's leg. The video that DJ Switch showed us. I mean, it's chaotic. We could see blood, we could see a body part. They were trying to stop the bleeding and they were saying, stay with us, stay with us. Anieti from Human Rights Watch was also watching it live. She would later travel to Lagos and interview hundreds of people who were at the scene, protesters, witnesses, doctors at nearby hospitals who treated the injured, to try and piece together what happened. Because the counts varied wildly. From zero people were shot and killed, the whole thing was made up, to hundreds. We had testimonies of the military after shooting people, taking bodies away or taking lifeless bodies away. The military took away 11 lifeless bodies, but it still wasn't enough to tell us how many people actually died at the scene. We were able to identify the fact that the army came first to the scene and that's what was the most documented abuse, shooting, killing people and shooting. They eventually left. And then the police came as well. The police from a police station not too far away from the Lekito gate came to the scene and also shot at protesters and took away two lifeless bodies. I will never understand how men and women with children from the same place, you know you're stealing from us. You know that. The children, the children of your fellow countryman or woman, you send the army to kill them. that's why I keep referring back to that song I don't care what the order was how can you walk up to young people and you end somebody's life look I don't know I don't and I will never understand it and since that day that 20th I didn't step foot into my home my own house I lost everything I have, everything. Everything I have worked for in my life, I lost it. DJ Switch said that just a few days after that live stream, she was contacted by Amnesty International with some information about possible threats to her life. And they smuggled me out of the country. They had to put me in a safe house. I was there for 11 months alone. Meanwhile, government officials began to claim that DJ Switch's footage was not real. on possibly doctored social media duties. The government said that everything I did, everything I was showing them was on a green screen. A green screen. Anybody with half a brain knows that when you go live on Instagram, it's live right now. It's happening right now. And you say it's a green screen. You say, no, it's forged. Because they don't even know how to lie. A convincing lie. Oh, my God. My brain is fried. I'm sorry. We checked in with DJ Switch a few times over the last couple of years. She's still basically in hiding, living out of the country, not sure she can ever go back, and she doesn't really feel like she can make music anymore. Things are now different for me. Now it's different. I tried to do some recording with a friend who just happened to come to where I'm at. And I realized that everything I was doing was taking me back there. I don't honestly know if I'm ready. And she says the movement that they started, the Fela soundtracked, has gone quiet. And now she's just stuck in this room that isn't hers. I don't know if this will make any sense to you. I don't feel like I've been left behind, but I feel like I've been left behind. It's not anybody's fault. Of course the world should move on. At the same time, you know, I sit sometimes, nothing to do, and I just feel, oh, crap. You know, like something as powerful as that, it's almost like it didn't get the response it deserves. You know what I mean? The last time that we checked in with DJ Switch, which was two years after our first conversation, I asked her. If you could do this all over and know that the result is going to be the same, would you do it? Honestly, there are days that I say yes and there are days that I say no. That's just the truth. days I say yes, you know, it's when I have that, although I don't want to use the term, but I don't know what other term to use. It's when I have that hope, you know, no matter how small I have that hope. And I'm like, yeah, I'd be there. and the days I say no I blew up my career so in days like that I go like you blew up your own career you blew up everything you've ever worked for that's just the honest truth I have the yes days I have the no days but more recently I think I'd say yes I'd do it again more recently For Obianu Ju, who started our story, something did change, something important. She told us about a candlelight vigil that she attended just hours before the massacre. The pictures from this evening, the candlelight vigil held for those who have lost their lives. Thousands of people holding candles. Footage that you see online looks like a starry night The candle lights The candle lights that they had it was like the one opportunity that was given to us as people who were survivors of SARS to actually mourn our loved ones. And that was one time that I talked about Chijoke. Like, talk about him, who he is, what he is to me and all. I cried that night, and I still cry whenever I remember it, but, like, I felt good. What changed in that moment? I got more on TJK. In my house, you don't speak of TJK in past tense. It's always in present tense. But at that point, it was an opportunity for me to accept that, yeah, he may never come back. For me to cry for losing my friend. In my parents' hearts, they know that Chijoki may never come back. But we just had to keep up the charade, right? So at that point, I had to let down my masks and just be queen. The girl that lost her friend, her best friend. Yeah. our minds out of those garden places back into this musical contraction right opposite you. Now we are back here. After the Leckie massacre, Mohamedou Buhari, who was then Nigeria's president, disbanded SARS, and the National Executive Council directed state governments to investigate police abuse. And there was a judicial panel that released a white paper that promised reforms. But several years on, human rights groups report that police brutality is still rampant. In 2023, at least 15 Ansars protesters were still in jail awaiting trial. Several reported being tortured while in detention. And in 2024, there was a fresh wave of protests against police brutality in Nigeria. Amnesty reports that Nigerian officers fired live ammunition again, that this time left 24 people dead. Meanwhile, Vela continues to hover over Nigeria and the world, but particularly Nigeria, as an idea, as much as anything. An idea of how to resist, how to fight back. And so he is claimed by an entire new generation of Afrobeats musicians. That's Afrobeats with an S. It's a musical genre that really sounds nothing like Vela's Afrobeat. but is named explicitly by them to create a lineage with him. Because he is the reference point. As his daughter Yanni says, he is an idea that hovers over everything. But a lot gets skipped over when you flatten a person into a symbol. A lot of messy stuff. In the next chapter, we're going to explore how Fela hovers over his family and his kids, who now have to move forward, trying to figure out what of him to take with them and what to leave behind. Everybody run, run, run. Everybody scatter, scatter. Some people lost some bread. Someone nearly died. Someone just died. Police they come, they come. Confusion everywhere. This has been a Higher Ground and Audible original produced by Audible, Higher Ground Audio, Western Sound and Talkhouse. Series was created and executive produced by me, Jad Abumrad, Ben Adair and Ian Wheeler, written and hosted by yours truly. Higher Ground executive producers were Nick White, Mukta Mohan and Dan Fehrman. Jenna Levin was creative executive and Corinne Gilliard-Fisher was executive producer. Executive producers for Audible were Anne Hepperman, Glenn Pogue and Nick D'Angelo. Our senior producer was Gofan Mutubuele. Ruby Heron-Walsh was lead producer and researcher. Our producers were Fefe Odudu and Oluakemi Aladiusui. Ben Adair was our editor with editing help Carla Murphy. Consulting producers were Bolu Babalola, Dotun Ayubade, Nif Abdurraqib, Michael Veal, Moses Ochunu, and Judith Byfield. Our fact checker was Jamila Wilkinson. Alex McInnes was the mix engineer. Also special thanks to Knitting Factory Records and BMG To the Kuti family, Yeni, Femi, Shayun, and Made To Melissa O'Donnell, to Inside Projects and Maggie Taylor And big thanks to Carla Murphy, Leah Friedman, and Shoshana Scholar The head of creative development at Audible is Kate Navin Chief content officer, Rachel Kiazza Copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC Sound recording copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC And one more thing In this episode, we had original music from artist Emeka Ogbe. He's someone I discovered while working on the series, really fell in love with his sound worlds. I reached out and he had actually been thinking about making a sound installation based on the events of the Ansars movement. So we decided to collaborate and he created this piece of music for us called The Beasts in Us. I used a bit of it for scoring earlier in the episode, but I thought I'd play the full piece here. The beginning was trending in Nigeria. Despite video and pictorial evidence, the Nigerian army has denied opening fire and killing peaceful and such protesters at the Lekhi Torquate in the nation's commercial capital, Vegas. In a series of tweets, the army posted various articles reporting the shooting that the world wanted to escape they claimed soldiers who were not to have the sea. Aha, I'm Johan King's show security personnel shooting at geekby RSK No, no, no! No, no! No, no, no! Oh, my God! Transcription by CastingWords I'm shooting. I'm on your own. Stay destroyed. I don't like that. 12 one Thank you. Thank you. Still working we got another V-2C. Againiren. Thank you. Thank you. October 2022, the day that we live in your family. Thank you.
