Jad Abumrad

One of the sort of patented moves of the colonial authorities is to remove the study of history as a way to create the sense in the subjects that their experience, their culture has no value.

And so the long tail of that is still going.

I guess every artist has their sort of anthem, and for Fela, Zombie is that song.

It came out in 1976, and this was at a time when he was getting into repeated clashes with the authority.

A few years prior, the military dictatorship waged a war on indecency, and under that guise, they would raid his compound repeatedly.

And Zombie was really the thing that really escalated or caused the government to escalate, I should say.

This was a song that, first of all, musically, it's just propulsive.

It doesn't do the fella thing that a lot of his songs do where it builds slowly.

This song just comes out of the gate 100 miles an hour.

And when he sings, he sings about how the military and the army and the police are basically brainless zombies.

Yeah, this is one of the aspects of the history that we dug into that just is so fascinating.

He would have been about eight or nine at this point, and he's going to these organizing meetings with his mother.

And, you know, the Literacy Club, it begins more as a sort of –

kind of ladies who lunch type of situation, very quickly turns into a full-fledged union.

And that becomes thousands of women marching in the streets to protest the taxation policies of the British government.

And the king, the alake, as he was called, who was backed by the British,

And they essentially lay siege to his palace.

So if you can imagine 10,000 women from the markets basically encamped day and night at his palace and he's trapped inside and he can't leave.

And they sing, talk about music as a weapon, they sing these abuse songs to him.

And we found hundreds of these songs in Fumalhah Ransom Kuti's archives that she had handwritten.