Jad Abumrad
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Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And many people that we spoke to point to that moment as a turning point, not just for Fela Kuti, but for Nigeria as a country.
The short version is that a few days after the festival closed, one of Fela's boys, one of the area boys as they were called, gets into a minor traffic conflict with a policeman.
He flees to Fela's compound.
The policeman chases him.
This leads to a standoff.
Fast forward, there are hundreds and then a thousand soldiers surrounding the compound.
Apparently, Fela gets on top of the roof
and he plays zombie down at the police on his saxophone.
And they fly into a rage.
They pour gasoline over everything, and they basically burn the house to the ground.
And they storm the compound while it's burning, and some pretty awful things happen because a lot of Fela's wives were inside the compound at that point.
There was...
some very upsetting sexual violence that occurs.
And that really was kind of the end of a certain era of Fela's career.
Yeah, thank you so much, Terry, for having me on.
And today's story started when we bumped into an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.