Jad Abumrad

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.

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 –