Jad Abumrad

And that can happen 15 minutes into a song.

Suddenly his voice drops on you like the voice of God.

And he's talking about politics.

He's singing about all the injustices of post-colonial Africa.

He's calling out dictators by name.

He's giving sort of broad history lessons in pidgin English.

And that created, you know, so many people I talked to in reporting the series talked about hearing that that his voice and it just woke them up, almost like woke them out of a slumber.

And if you imagine that happening a million times, it created a youth movement.

that was very, very dangerous to the government.

And as you say in your intro, he was beaten repeatedly, his house was burned down, his mother was thrown out of a window, because he was able to use music, just music, to fight back.

So yeah, and it's groovy, it's funky, it's blending in jazz influences.

He's got the sort of James Brown chicken scratch guitar influence.

It's all of these things fused together in what he would ultimately call African classical music, but which started out as being named Afrobeat.

Yeah, I mean, I think, Terry, it wasn't even until much later, 2025, that history was mandated to be taught in schools.

It was always seen as a sort of superfluous subject.

You know, our producer, Feifei Odudu, who we used, a field producer in Lagos, after a lot of the interviews would say, I had no idea because history isn't really taught.

And, you know, one of the sort of

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.