Jad Abumrad

And yet she just gets reduced to being the mother of this famous consequential but pop star.

And one of the saddest moments in our reporting was we were very anxious to find her grave.

And we found it on the backside of an Anglican church.

And she's buried with her husband, Israel Ransom Cootey.

But there's no mention of her.

There's simply a long kind of litany of his accomplishments.

And there's no mention of what she did.

And it was kind of wild to see the ways in which this incredible, incredible movement was kind of erased in a way.

I mean, he is a case study encouraged like no other.

So I think part of it was just the chutzpah that he brought to the cause.

I also think part of it was this is a moment after a brutal civil war that ended right about 1970, 1969, 70.

where the Nigerian government basically starved an insurgent movement to try and secede from the Biafran Republic.

It was a horribly brutal war of starvation.

And in the wake of that, I think there was a lot of disillusionment on the part of young people.

There was kind of, as it was put to me,

an eerie calm and into that walks this guy, you know, as, as you have millions of young people looking for a new way, a new direction in walks this guy with other worldly confidence, making music that is just funky and danceable and trance inducing and amazing.

And he becomes this instant magnet for lost souls and creates a compound and, and,

Almost overnight, hundreds of young people flocked to him.

And it's really hard to know how he got away with it because to declare your compound a sovereign republic a year after a civil war when a whole republic tried to secede and that was met with brutal force, it's kind of mind-bogglingly insane and courageous to do it.

But it's really hard to know how he got away with it.