Jad Abumrad

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

And that created – so many people I talked to in reporting this series talked about hearing 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 really, 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.

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.