[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: It's Radiolab.

LATIF NASSER: I'm Latif Nasser.

LULU: And I'm Lulu Miller.

JAD ABUMRAD: And I am Jad Abumrad, here to hang out with Lulu and Latif.

LULU: Woo-hoo! Welcome back, old man.

JAD: Thanks, youngster. Happy to be here.

LATIF: Um, yeah, where—where have you been this whole time?

JAD: [laughs] I've been—I've just been here in Brooklyn, just, you know, being a dad, making stuff.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

JAD: So pretty much the first thing that happened when I handed you guys the show—proudly—is I became a professor.

LATIF: Ooh!

JAD: Kind of a fake professor at Vanderbilt. Been teaching all kinds of things relating to storytelling and interviewing.

LULU: Dr. Abumrad.

JAD: Well, you know, none of the other faculty are fooled.

LATIF: [laughs]

JAD: But also alongside that, I've been making all kinds of weird music and theater things. We just had a big thing in Brooklyn that launched in May. It's about the Brooklyn navy yard, America's war-making engine in a way. And I don't know, it was—felt like what if journalism were sung by 60 women?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, choir: 2,369,000 bones, bones, bones!]

JAD: And then somewhere along the way, early, I got into a conversation with Ben Adair, old friend who has been making audio stories as long as I have. He approached me and he was like, "Hey, do you wanna do a podcast about Fela Kuti?" Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician who invented a whole new genre of music, and started a political movement and toppled a government just with music. I was like, "Cool. That sounds interesting." And I said yes to it in the way that you say yes to things that you know are never gonna happen, you know?

LULU: [laughs] Totally.

JAD: You know. "This would be really fun."

LULU: "Yeah. That sounds amazing."

LATIF: "Sure, I'd love to have dinner at your house. That sounds great."

JAD: Well, I wasn't saying yes in a no—like, I don't really want to do it. I was just like, I don't know if I'm doing another podcast.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

JAD: But let me just—you know, let—let's just explore it. Because I knew a bit about Fela. I mean, he was sort of the record that came on at a party and everyone was like, "Oh!" And it was like the party got started.

LULU: Mmm.

JAD: So I knew him from that—that angle, but I didn't know his backstory at all. So I started making some phone calls, and I don't know, I just didn't stop.

JAD: In this series, we're gonna look at the life and the music of Fela Kuti.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Fela, Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti. Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti. Aníkú—I always get that—my tongue always trips over that. Aníkúlápó Kuti.]

JAD: The father of Afrobeat.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The Black president, the chief priest.]

LATIF: I had never heard of Fela until you got obsessed with him. And I was like, who is this guy? Like, and why is Jad spending, like, three years, like, obsessed with this guy?

JAD: I mean, yeah. One of the first things that you discover when you're trying to unravel who this man was is that all of these people that you love, love him.

JAD: Ayo Edebiri, actor, writer. Someone I really respect. She's in The Bear. Great show. On some red carpet somewhere, she was asked ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ayo Edebiri: Oh!]

JAD: ... this question.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ayo Edebiri: A musician I have a cult-like fascination with?]

JAD: Her answer?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ayo Edebiri: Fela Kuti, who is a, like, Nigerian legend. Is a very complicated man.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Questlove: Fela has to be the epicenter.]

JAD: And Questlove, one of the great musical minds of our time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Questlove: I mean, Fela is the one figure whose story resonates with modern American hip hop culture.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Jay-Z: The passion, the pain.]

JAD: Jay-Z.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jay-Z: The—the strength, the need to get that—the message out there.]

JAD: Beyoncé. I dunno, it just presents a question. You're like, okay, what are they hearing, you know?

LULU: Yeah.

JAD: And can I—can I hear it? Can I make other people hear it, you know?

LULU: Okay, so you—you dive in. You end up churning out this 12-part series called "Fela Kuti: Fear No Man."

JAD: Yeah.

LULU: Which people can go listen to right now anywhere, everywhere. And, you know—okay, people clearly love his music. But what drove you to make the series?

JAD: Yeah. He is the answer to a really important question for me personally which is like, right now if you're looking out in the world, none of it makes sense. It's all—it's all insanity. And if you love music as I do and you kind of look around and you're like, "What is the point? What's the point? What's the point of making music?"

LULU: Hmm.

JAD: What's it gonna do to make our world better? And then you look at, like, the streaming hellscape we all live in.

LATIF: Right.

JAD: And—and artists are now content creators, and they just sell their content to Spotify for precisely 0.01 cents. And you're like, "What's the point? What's the point? Like, why?"

LATIF: Hmm.

JAD: And he answers the question for me, that the music itself wasn't just music. It—it became the catalyst for, like, a political movement that had, you know, many, many tens of thousands of young people ready to march into the streets, and just with the music he almost toppled a dictatorship. He's like, "This is the point of making music. This is the point of making art—is to—is to try and make a new world, try and change the world in some way."

LULU: And the music itself though, like how it functions, how is that changing the world? Just what's the, almost, mechanism?

JAD: Sure. Okay. So here's a—so Lulu, I love that question because the political aspects of his music weren't just lyrical—although they were—it was baked into the very grammar of the music itself. It's, like, in the notes, it's below the notes, it's in the—it's in the structure of the music. It's in the—it's in the impact and the sequence of impacts that the music creates.

LULU: Like, which sounds so pretty but, like, what the F does that mean? What does that mean?

LATIF: Yeah, how?

JAD: This is—this episode that I think you're gonna play ...

LULU: Yeah. And okay, just for context, the first episode we met a bandmate of Fela's. We got the story through his eyes. Then in the second episode you traced his evolution into a revolutionary. And then in the third one, the one we're gonna play, this is the one where we really get into the music itself.

JAD: Yeah. It really tries to—to first give you the experience.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And then explain what the experience is.

LULU: Yeah. So it's called "The Shrine." Anything else before we walk in? Like ...

JAD: I should explain, The Shrine is—it's his club in Lagos, and it—it really was sort of the epicenter of his movement. And we interviewed—God, so many people who described what it was like to be there, people who were once asleep and are now awake.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marilyn Nance: My experience of being in The Shrine was like—like, the music was, like, inside of me. It was all around and just like, you know, being hypnotized. Like, you're all inside the music.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fela Kuti: Brothers and sisters, the secret of life is to have no fear. We all have to understand that.]

JAD: This is "Fela Kuti: Fear No Man." Chapter Three: Enter the Shrine. One of the ingredients of a movement, necessary ingredients, is to have a place where you can experience the promise of that movement right here, right now, in the present.

JAD: Can you—can you tell us about your first visit to the Shrine?

MICHAEL VEAL: Yes, of course.

JAD: What do you remember about that?

MICHAEL VEAL: It was very, very funky.

JAD: This is Michael Veal, musician, professor of music at Yale. He's also one of our advisors on the project.

MICHAEL VEAL: To hear that music in New York is one thing, okay? You know, you listen to that music in New York, you're like, "Oh, yeah. Whatever." Look, the first night I was in Lagos, you know, as you're walking up to The Shrine, you hear that [funky drumming]. Then you get closer, you start hearing [bassline]. So you started hearing—I remember that very clearly. And it was—it was at night, and there was no power—blackout. It's like going to Times Square, but there are people all in the street, like, thousands and thousands of people, jam-packed mob of people. It's total darkness, but thousands of these little sterno lamps illuminating the place. Because the power went out all the time in Lagos. But there are thousands of these sternos. So you imagine the scene, it's like—almost like Woodstock kind of thing. You know what I mean?

JAD: Yeah. Yeah.

MICHAEL VEAL: To hear that music in New York is one thing. You're like, "Oh, yeah. Whatever." But then if you ever get in a plane and go to Lagos ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Murtala Muhammad International Airport.]

MICHAEL VEAL: ... they open a hatch and it goes—boof!—with the humidity and the heat. You know, the minute they open the hatch it's like—blam! And then you walk out of the plane and you gotta go down the steps and you're like, "Oh, now I get it!"

JAD: Welcome to Nigeria.

MICHAEL VEAL: That's the way reality feels in this setting. You know what I'm saying?

JAD: That interview with Michael Veal was one of the many reasons why when we finally got to Lagos after a 13-hour flight ...

MICHAEL VEAL: How you doing?

JAD: I'm good! Just taking it all in.

JAD: ... the top item on our agenda was to go to The Shrine. Let me fill in a few gaps. 1969, after the whole Sandra Izsadore experience in LA, Fela comes back to Nigeria radicalized, steps off the plane and takes the country by storm. He becomes the massive star that we know him to be. And then between 1973 and 1979, he releases this firehose of music, something like, by my count, 27 records in six years-ish. One hit after another after another.

JAD: Now The Shrine. During that time, early on, he sets up a club that he calls The Shrine. And it's important to understand where. Lagos, Lagos City, the most populous city in Africa, Lagos is on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, and it consists of a giant land mass and mainland that curves around this bay. And in the bay are two major islands that connect back to the mainland with bridges. On the islands, this is the sound you hear.

[bird calls]

JAD: Peacocks. Golf. It's very lush, very beautiful. On the mainland, very different sound.

[crowd noise]

JAD: You will find places on the mainland where the sheer density of people is just breathtaking. For example, this audio that you're hearing is from a market that we visited in a neighborhood called Mushin, a poor, working-class neighborhood where a million people are packed into seven square miles. In this neighborhood, not the island, this spot is where he decided to put The Shrine, to say, basically, "I am the voice of the people," the sufferheads, as he called them. When we visited The Shrine, at night it was more or less as Michael Veal described it.

MICHAEL VEAL: People all in the street, like, jam-packed mob with people.

JAD: He was there in '92, we were there 2024. And The Shrine has closed a few times and reopened, and moved around a bit. But it was kind of the same. It was dark. You had about 50 food sellers lining the block, this very long block in front of The Shrine. People smoked weed openly, which in Nigeria can carry a heavy prison sentence. Our fixer in Lagos told us that even now, 28 years after Fela died, this is the one place where that can happen. One of the sellers that was there explained it this way.

SELLER: Fela is like life after death. Evergreen. Yes, yes.

PRODUCER: What, do you feel like Fela still protects this street, this place?

SELLER: I'd say yes, exactly.

JAD: His sense was the ghost of Fela is still there protecting this one block. And as he said that, he nodded towards the end of the block where there were policemen waiting, standing almost like on the other side of an invisible line.

LISA LINDSAY: You've done your research. You know that The Shrine, and also Fela's compound The Kalakuta Republic, he had kind of declared independent of Nigeria.

JAD: That's Lisa Lindsay, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She specializes in the history of West Africa. And she brings up an important point, is that in 1970, when Fela got back to Nigeria, he declared his club, The Shrine, and also his house nearby, which he called the Kalakuta Republic, he declared them a sovereign nation within Nigeria, sort of like the Vatican is to Italy, that he was a country unto himself. Lisa Lindsay visited The Shrine in the early '90s.

LISA LINDSAY: It was just all this craziness that we saw. Well, okay, so outside there's a dictatorship that was shooting people.

JAD: At that time—and there are videos of this on YouTube—the government would hold public executions of criminals and dissidents on the beach.

LISA LINDSAY: There were soldiers in the streets. It wasn't safe to be out at night. You go in, and it's just this alternate universe.

JAD: Describe what it looks like.

LISA LINDSAY: It was like a warehouse, sort of. Everybody smoking, like ...

MICHAEL VEAL: A lot of weed smoking.

LISA LINDSAY: Giant, giant joints. Joints the size of police megaphones.

MICHAEL VEAL: Keep in mind at that time people were getting thrown in jail for 10 years for a half-smoked joint.

LISA LINDSAY: There's this massive cloud up at the top of the stage.

MICHAEL VEAL: It's hot, it's humid. There are a lot of people in there.

LISA LINDSAY: People dancing, and people stoned out of their minds. And it was such a contrast to how scared people were outside of The Shrine.

JOHN DARNTON: The Shrine was not far from his house, a couple of blocks.

JAD: That's John Darnton, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote for the New York Times and worked as a foreign correspondent based in Lagos in the mid-'70s. Wrote many, many articles about Fela, including this one where he watched Fela get ready right before he performed at The Shrine.

JAD: Would you mind reading this? This is you. You reading you, because we—Ruby and I have been trying to find as vivid descriptions as we can of the atmosphere. And this—this is actually one of the more vivid that we've ever read.

JOHN DARNTON: Sure. [laughs] New York Times.

NINA DARNTON: New York Times.

JAD: That voice is Nina Darnton, John's wife, also a longtime journalist.

JOHN DARNTON: "Fela's Pregame Ritual. The show begins at 1:00 am. Inside the nearby Kalakuta Republic, Fela prepares for it laboriously. From a jar, he spoons up liberal doses of glitter, gooey substance nicknamed 'Fela gold'—distilled extract of marijuana. Full-length mirrors are brought before him and held by two young boys. He slowly slips into skintight, sequined pants and a white shirt open to the waist, arranging his strings of beads as if he were smoothing a necktie. Six bodyguards draw near. 'Let's go,' Fela says, and the entourage moves outside where there is a crowd of several hundred people. Some have been waiting for hours, clinging to the barbed wire to catch a glimpse of him. A chant, 'Fela! Fela!' rumbles out of the dark."

NINA DARNTON: That is really good, John.

JAD: It is really good.

JOHN DARNTON: And as he walked and ...

NINA DARNTON: He sat on a donkey.

JOHN DARNTON: Well, that was his second ...

JAD: Got on a donkey? What? Okay, wait. Sorry. As he walked ...

JOHN DARNTON: He was a showman. You know, drivers would get out and raise a fist and yell, "Fela! Fela!" Anyway, then he starts playing. And I have never seen, I think, a performer quite as dynamic as that. He was absolutely incredible.

JAD: Before we go back into The Shrine, well, first let me give you a picture. It is an open-air club, fits about 500 people. There's this tin roof over the stage, but no roof over the dance floor. And to either side of the stage are four Studio 54-ish cages where dancers dance. Also, to one side there is an altar where Fela had a picture of his mother, a picture of Malcolm X and a picture of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. But I'll be honest, what's most interesting to me is not so much The Shrine itself—I mean, it was a club—but rather, what happened to people when they went inside of it. Because do you know how people talk about psilocybin now, right? Like, we all have one of those friends who did some mushrooms and it changed their life and they can't stop talking about it. And there's a way to explain those experiences. You can say neurochemistry, right? There's something about these drugs, they rewire your brain. Fine. We ran into so many people who described listening to Fela's music at The Shrine in the same way, that it had the same effect on them. Which is a little harder to explain, though I will try in a moment. But first, let's re-enter The Shrine from their perspective.

[crowd cheering]

JAD: And as you're listening, see if you can let yourself notice what are you paying attention to? How does that change over time? 1:00 am, Fela arrives on his donkey, takes the stage with 35 other musicians, and he begins a riff that will last most of the night.

MARILYN NANCE: My experience of being in the Shrine was like—like, the music was, like, inside of me, it was all around, and it was just like, you know, being hypnotized. Like, you're all inside the music.

NINA DARNTON: A kind of hypnotic dancing.

DURO IKUJENYO: React to music. Dancing and listening. And listening.

LORRAINE ANIMOSIN: I remember being lost in music. All the people are smoking around me in a mist. So you're in a different world.

[music rises]

ROSA CUOTO: This idea of the spiral—spiral—spiral. And circle—circle—circle. It's another way to deal with time.

DELE SOSIMI: I would describe it as a—a swirl. You know, when—when you have a cycle, it starts off as a little thing that builds up, and it builds up. The more you allow it to circulate, it just starts to get bigger—get bigger—get bigger—get bigger.

ROSA CUOTO: Cycles.

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger—get bigger—get bigger.

ROSA CUOTO: Cycles.

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger—get bigger—get bigger—get bigger.

BODE OMOJOLA: Fela starts his music to enchant, this repetitive pattern. The power of the musical ostinato is part of that enchanting strategy. You've been captured.

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger—get bigger.

BRIAN ENO: Good. I thought, this is really an amazing new form of music. It was almost like a field of sound that sits there for a long time. And you explore it, you kind of enter it and live in it. This is a place, this isn't a song.

JOHN DARNTON: And meanwhile the rhythm section's keeping going, going, going, going, going, going—going—going—going.

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger.

JOHN DARNTON: Going.

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger.

JOHN DARNTON: Going.

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger.

BRIAN ENO: This is a place. And when you start listening to it, you are entering into that place.

MARILYN NANCE: Like, the music was, like, inside of me. It was all around. It was just like you're being hypnotized.

NINA DARNTON: Kind of hypnotic dancing.

MICHAEL VEAL: And so with Fela, you could tell that there was a different kind of intention behind this paradigm of groove. The music is so nasty, you have to dance. But that's just the ground level, because why would you play a song for 30 minutes or 40 minutes unless you really have something to say?

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger—get bigger.

JOHN DARNTON: The rhythm section's going.

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger.

JOHN DARNTON: Going.

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger.

JOHN DARNTON: Going.

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger.

JOHN DARNTON: The rhythm section's going—going—going.

DELE SOSIMI: Get bigger.

JOHN DARNTON: And then suddenly, after half an hour, 40 minutes, he starts singing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fela Kuti: [singing] Whether you like or you no like, after you hear this little talk. Whether you like or you no like, after you hear this little talk. If you like it, good, if you no like, you hang, if you like it, good. If you no like, you hang. If you hang, you go die. You go die for nothing. We go carry your body. Go police station. You die wrongfully.]

SAUL WILLIAMS: When his voice came in, I was like, "What the hell? There are words, too?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fela Kuti: [singing] All of them Kirikiri. Ten to fifteen years in jail.

After one year inside jail.]

SAUL WILLIAMS: Hold up. What is this?

JOHN DARNTON: He sings in a gravelly, low-pitched voice, and sings about things that no one else ever even mentioned, any newspaper, any columnist.

LISA LINDSAY: He talks about the United Nations, he talks about Thatcher, he talks about Reagan. It's—it's really—it's really everything. It's like a—a history lesson.

JOHN DARNTON: You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air, floating from the stage like thought balloons and then sinking into somebody's skull.

STEPHANIE SHONEKAN: I just felt, where has my mind been, you know, all—all my life? Complete surprise. Like ...

MOSES OCHONU: I was immediately captivated.

STEPHANIE SHONEKAN: Why did we not know this? Why aren't we thinking about this stuff?

LEMI GHARIOKWU: When Fela sang into a microphone, I saw the—the light.

STEPHANIE SHONEKAN: I was just like—you know, it's like ...

MOSES OCHONU: He sucks you in, and then he has that light bulb effect on you. You come into yourself and, you know, it's a moment of introspection, too, because you realize that you haven't been as attuned as you probably should have.

STEPHANIE SHONEKAN: All the stuff he was singing was just new to me. You know, I was just learning so much about Nigerian history through Fela that I had not learned in school.

JAD: Before we go on, the voices you just heard in addition to Michael Veal and John Darnton were Stephanie Shonekan and Bode Omojola, both professors of ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland and Mount Holyoke, respectively. Afrobeat musicians Dele Sosimi and Duro Ikujenyo; activist, filmmaker and musician Saul Williams, musician and producer Brian Eno, artist Lemi Ghariokwu, photographer Marilyn Nance, designer Lorraine Animosin, and our advisor, Moses Ochunu, who's a professor of history and my colleague at Vanderbilt University. He was one of the last voices you heard. And I asked him ...

JAD: You said the music made you feel like you needed to tune into things you hadn't been tuning into. Like what?

MOSES OCHONU: You know, when I was growing up in Nigeria, you know, we would hear about corruption, about thousands of naira being embezzled by some politician or government official. And we would open our mouths in shock because our brains couldn't compute how one person would make off with thousands of naira. How would the person carry this money? What would they put it in? In some boxes? In some cars? You know, physically, how would they move this money? You know, we just couldn't fathom it. And then over time, we started hearing about millions—not thousands anymore. Then billions. And now as we speak, the corruption numbers have entered the trillions. That over time has had a numbing effect, a dulling effect. The shock value, the kind of shock that I felt as a child growing up in Nigeria, the moral outrage that I felt, that's gone. That's long gone.

JAD: And that is what would come back when you heard his songs.

MOSES OCHONU: Right. Exactly.

JAD: Moses said that Fela's music would remind him of the insanity that he had been sanewashed into believing was normal. And I think that there's something really interesting about how the music can move him to that thought. Music is all about structure, right? Structuring the relationship between notes and chords and melodies. But here you have structure on an entirely different level, almost like a phenomenological structure. For the first 15 minutes, it's just loops, ostinatos going round and round.

BODE OMOJOLA: The power of the musical ostinato.

JAD: "Ostinato" in Italian, by the way, means basically stubborn. The loops stubbornly repeat. And at first, it's not so bad. It's kind of grounding, actually. But then the natural response is then to want some change. Like, can we go to the next section now, please? Please? No? This is what the Buddhists call our "monkey mind." Our monkey mind wants distraction. It wants anything to keep us from having to live with our own thoughts. But the music doesn't give us that. It doesn't change, it only builds. Layers get added, piece by piece, instrument by instrument. And at some point, a few minutes in, you arrive at this mysterious moment where you stop wanting it to change. This is phase two. Now that part of you that wants novelty starts to notice things like, whoa, listen to all the interlocking parts of this groove.

DELE SOSIMI: Ooh! The ostinatos, they're like machine gears. They don't grind. The gears are timed in between each other so they just subtly fit into the little gaps and holes like that!

JAD: The way that the conga plays off the shaker, call and response. The way that the three guitar lines spin around endlessly like gears, in a higher-level clock. My God, this groove is a whole world! This is the trance state. Usually when we talk about trance, we mean a kind of dulling of our senses, but actually, it's the opposite. It's a state of hyper focus. You are noticing things. You're hearing things you've never heard before because your neurons are rewired. You are open. And it is at this very moment that Fela begins to sing.

SAUL WILLIAMS: I was like, "What the hell? There are words, too?"

JAD: In comes his voice, booming like the voice of God. This is phase three. And because you are open, you really hear what he is saying.

JOHN DARNTON: You see it sinking in. You could see ideas in the air floating from the stage like thought balloons, and then sinking into somebody's skull.

JAD: And in that way, as the final piece of this progression, he gives you a new conception of what your life can be.

LEMI GHARIOKWU: I saw the—the light.

JAD: That you can now dance to.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fela Kuti: My music. My main—my main preoccupation right now, music is a small part of it.]

JAD: This is a clip from an interview Fela gave in 1988, where he describes his musical form almost as this vehicle designed to move people step by step by step, so that they can hear what he has to say.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Is your music kind of a tool?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fela Kuti: It's a weapon. It's a weapon to say, so I can talk when I have the chance to. I consider music to be effective like a weapon to inform people. My music is like an attraction, to inform people. It is the information side of the music that is important.]

JAD: In that same interview, he suggests that there's something else going on here, too. It has to do with time itself.

ROSA CUOTO: Cycles.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fela Kuti: If anybody tells me 20 years is a long time, I would tell him, no. Time is meaningless, unless you want to understand what time is about. There is time for everything.]

JAD: Coming up, that idea of cycles, it's gonna become not just about the music, but so much more: cycles of history, of violence, of resistance. We're gonna follow all of the interlocking ostinatos of Fela's groove across time and space, into the deep past, to an incredible story of a rebellion that deposed a king, that created a sound, that continues to echo to this day on the streets of Lagos and the world. That's next.

LULU: Okay. So Jad, thank you. The series is ...

LATIF: It is a magnum opus. It is so good.

LULU: It is. It is. And yet, there'll be another magnum because you know he'll keep going despite trying to leave. But it is so special, it's amazing.

JAD: I don't know. This might be—this might be the last one.

LATIF: Yeah.

JAD: We'll see.

LULU: Where else is the series going, and where can people find it? What's it called?

JAD: So the series is gonna go all kinds of places. It's called "Fela Kuti: Fear No Man." The next one is my fave. It's a story about Fela's mom.

LATIF: Oh, yeah. That's so good!

JAD: Who—who is so extraordinary that it immediately made me be like, "Wait, why are we talking about him?"

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: Right. It felt like you could—you could flip it. You could do the 12-episode series about her and then one episode about him.

JAD: Exactly. Because what she accomplished is so bananas.

LULU: Yeah.

JAD: And again, just with music. So yeah, that episode is next.

LULU: Wait. And can you share the title of that episode?

JAD: It's called "Vengeance of the Vagina Head."

LULU: Whoo!

JAD: And it was—it's not—it's not a title we made up. It was what the newspapers called the revolt that she led at the time. They called it "Vengeance of the Vagina Head." Just let that be a tease.

JAD: This has been a Higher Ground and Audible original, produced by Audible, Higher Ground Audio, Western Sound and Talkhouse. The series was created and executive produced by me, Jad Abumrad, Ben Adair and Ian Wheeler, written and hosted by yours truly. Higher Ground executive producers were Nick White, Mukta Mohan and Dan Fierman. Jenna Levin was creative executive, and Corinne Gilliard Fisher was executive producer. Executive producers for Audible for Ann Hepperman, Glynn Pogue and Nick D'Angelo. Our senior producer was Ngofeen Mputubwele. Ruby Harron Walsh was lead producer and researcher. Our producers were Fay Fay Odudu and Oluwakemi Aladesuyi. Ben Adair was our editor, with editing help from Karla Murthy. Consulting producers were Bolu Babaola, Dotun Ayobade, Hanif Abdurraqib, Michael Veal, Moses Ochonu, and Judith Byfield. Our fact-checker was Jamila Wilkinson. Alex MacIness was the mix engineer. Also, special thanks to Knitting Factory Records and BMG, to the Kuti family, Melissa O'Donnell, Inside Projects and Maggie Taylor. And big thanks to Karla Murthy, Mia Freedman and Shoshanna Scholar. The head of creative development at Audible is Kate Navin, chief content officer Rachel Ghiazza. Copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio LLC.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Shavar Jamuti, and I'm from Mumbai. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

 

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