Introducing Fela Kuti: Fear No Man

24:00Hugh Masekela came out with the Americanization of Ooga Booga. The title was sort of a play on words. Ooga Booga was a racist slur used about Africa in the West, while Americanization nodded at Hugh Masekela trying to blend South African and American sounds together. This was actually an album that his record label thought was too African for American tastes. But it was my favorite, and I would play it over and over. Over and over. It was at that point I said to myself, In order to know the real story, I'm going to need to meet a real African. I have to meet a real African? Yep. Why? Because...

25:01At this point in our conversation, Sandra just broke into a big smile, sort of laughing at her younger self. Love it. A real African. A real African. Now, obviously, the sentiment that she was expressing was not just her thinking this. At this point in college campuses, there was a whole back to Africa movement that was asking questions about realness and authenticity. I ended up extending this conversation and bringing a few people in, including Louis Chudasoki, who is a professor of English at Boston University. I'm also the director of the African-American and Black Diaspora Studies Program.

25:32Wrote a fabulous memoir called Floating in a Most Peculiar Way that offers a whole different spin on this idea of African realness. Now, he is, on paper, a real African. But he says growing up in Nigeria, then Jamaica, nobody wanted to be that. No. Everyone telling me I was African, it was always an insult. For him, black culture coming out of America, that was what he was into. That felt real. It felt cool. So he was surprised when he actually got to America to find that it was all upside down, that the black people he met here were fascinated by him and treated him like he had some kind of secret knowledge.

26:06There was this moment in the 80s. We're skipping forward in time for just a second. When hip-hop becomes Afrocentric, I'm sure you remember, there was the African medallions, and everyone's like, All the way to Africa, aka the Motherland. Motherland, the Jungle Brothers, and Tribe Called Quest with the Multicolored. And for me, Jed, I'll be straight up. I was like, oh shit, I'm going to get laid now.

26:36You're like, opportunity. Okay, Africa is cool. I'm there. But you had to pretend to be that kind of Africa. It's not the Africa that's in my house. It's not my uncles or my aunts. Because my uncles and my aunts and the actual African community I was a part of wanted no part of that shit.

26:59So I started dancing with Swaba African dance troupe. Getting back to Sandra, she goes to college, joins the Black Student Union, starts dancing in a dance troupe. I thought I was really doing something on the African dance moves. One day, the guy who ran the dance troupe, whose name was Juno Lewis, he says to her, come with me to this party at the Hollywood Gardens. It's a fundraiser for the NAACP, and there's this new band that's in town from Lagos. It was a very hot day. I really didn't want to go. And it was Juno Lewis who insisted it's this ban from Africa. And I'm like, because at this point, I wanted to meet progressive Africans.

27:49And I had only met, I'll use a term today that I'm making up now, missionary boys. And what I mean by that, Jesus is the way, holier than thou, straight from very rural areas. They weren't impressive to me at all. Like her parents, who were deep in the church, it was the center of their lives. A lot of the African immigrants to the U.S. that Sandra met had grown up in Western churches and been educated in Christian schools because, you know, colonialism. That didn't meet her definition of real African. Sandra, you've got to meet him. You've got to meet him. And I'm like, here's another one, you know.

28:33So we go to the Ambassador Hotel. This is summer 1969. On that particular day, I had on a blue and green haltered bell-bottom jumpsuit with the back out. I walk in, and as I'm walking in with Juno... On stage is a guy singing.

29:05With this band behind him playing sort of bouncy, brassy dance music. She can't remember what he was wearing, probably a suit. Trouser, shirt, loafer. Because that was his outfit at the time. No socks. He was the first man I met that didn't wear socks. But what she really remembers is that as she walked in and glanced at the stage, he looked right down at her. And our eyes locked.

29:34And it was a very magical moment. It was like we were connected from day one. Hmm.

29:45I think what you wrote is something that you never experienced before and never did again. No, it was like a spiritual chord. It just seems like we were connected. Something that was destined to be. Sandra says later in the party, between sets, she went searching for her friend Juno. I look over to the bar and there's Fella standing next to him. So I go over to the bar and Juno makes the introduction. And the first thing that comes out of Fella's mouth in a very arrogant way. Do you have a car? Whoa. Yeah. Do you have a car? I said, yes, I do. Then you're going with me. And I started laughing.

30:36You know, he is so bold that he's telling me what I'm going to do in my car with him. OK. And you see how you're laughing? That's what I did. And then, you know, I looked at the way he was dressed and just him coming on to me like that. Let me know he was different. Yeah. And I said, hmm, interesting. He tweaked my interest. They go to a party together. They sit down on the couch next to each other. I'm all in it. Long story short, Sandra thinks, finally. I finally meet a black man, African. He's going to show me, he's going to teach me all about Africa. Cut.

31:24Scene. Okay. So Sandra gets to know Fela. They start to see each other every day. and at some point, Sandra goes and watches Fela and his band rehearse.

31:47She watches them play this one particular song that becomes kind of important. He did this song called Abe and I was able to really hear the band and I was impressed.

32:14I liked the sound. It was different. So when the rehearsal was over, I asked him to translate. Because the lyrics are in Yoruba. Right, right. Translate what he was saying. he was so proud to let me know it's about my soup what does that mean soup like it's a song about soup the whole song was about soup what you eat like actual soup not soup as a metaphor but actually no s-o-u-p soup and i started laughing and you know i was enhanced anyway i thought that was the funniest thing because how you gonna put all this energy and everything about some soup oh okay so it's like it's a celebration of soup well it's not so much a celebration of it but what he wants in his soup okay so i thought that is so wild to me because knowing where he is about to go yeah with your help yeah that that's where he started it's kind of crazy that's what started the whole thing.

33:27You've been doing all this and you're singing about some soup. At that point, I said, why would you do that when you can use your music to educate people, uplift people? I made the assumption that he was going to be my teacher because he was African. That's how naive I was. Because he was African, I made a lot of assumptions. Not knowing what colonialism did in Africa. Between colonialism and slavery, I'll take slavery. Those shackles are still on the minds. That's even worse. This moment, when I talked about it with some of our consulting producers, got a whole bunch of different reactions. It was surprising to me that she said that she would choose slavery over colonialism.

34:22This is Bolu Babalola, a Nigerian writer and consulting producer on this project. And she says that caught her ear because it's an argument she actually sometimes gets into with her black American friends. A lot of people don't recognize the atrocity of colonialism. The word almost sanitizes it. I think it hides a lot of the rape, the beatings, the violence, just the horror of it all. And I think slavery is such a visual word that you can imagine the horror that comes with it. Colonialism, just to devague that word a bit more, as she suggests, it's a period that stretches for about 400 years. So it's happening before, during and after the transatlantic slave trade in most cases where European countries just went on a berserker rampage throughout the entire world.

35:06Countries would come in like Britain came into what would become Nigeria and occupied the land and started extracting resources. You can find incredibly detailed accounting of this in these things called the Blue Books. This is the Lagos Blue Book from 1878. Where the British would list to the pound how much cocoa they were extracting. Cocoa, 116 ,431 pounds. How much rubber? 592 ,309 pounds. How much palm oil, ground nuts, how many prisoners they were maintaining. Number of persons summoned or apprehended 545. Punishments. Whipping. Executions. This is a rabbit hole I would just recommend you do not fall into because it just has no bottom.

35:54It just keeps going and going. Oh, there's a whole page called Lunatic Asylums. Book after book. And what you realize is that the way the British ruled was not subtle. This is Bolu's point. We're not talking about microaggressions here. The British set up prisons, labor camps. They brutally put down rebellions. They made people change their names. They enforced this code that basically said to the Native people, your culture, your language, your religion has no value, has no meaning. They basically said, if you really want to get somewhere, you need to take on white culture. It's colonization.

36:29I think it's just like, you know, white people marched in and changed their names. And that was it. But it's like the complete horror and destruction of it is completely erased. So that was Bolu's reaction to what Sandra said. Between colonialism and slavery, I'll take slavery. For Lewis, what's your reaction when you hear that? I love her voice. For him, it was less what she said than how she said it. Her voice is just fascinating for me because for Fela arriving, he has not heard people talk like that. Not really. Certainly not in England. I'm just thinking about Fela, what he's hearing. Is he hearing a kind of authenticity that he couldn't or didn't hear in his own?

37:07He had to learn to perform a different kind of language. So I'm wondering what he's hearing when he hears an African-American person who is definitely inhabiting it. Whatever the case, the first half year of his stay in L.A. was rough for Phila. Sandra didn't realize it at the time, but the whole reason they played that garden party for the NAACP is that they had no other choice. They were scrambling for gigs. He was going to meetings and meetings and meetings. And when he said, Do you have a car? Maybe part of the reason is that his band had no way of getting around. I had this sports car, a two-seater sports car.

37:47And I remember nine people got into that car. In L.A., Kulalobitos went from one botched opportunity to another. At one point, right before a big gig, his bass player skips town because he's worried about getting deported. And after that? He was invited by Disneyland. Disneyland? They wanted him for Adventureland. Welcome aboard the Jungle Cruise. You know, at that time they had Adventureland where you go around with the little boat. Look out, look out, another hippo. The hippopotamus would come up out of the water and the alligators. Oh, mechanical. That scared him. The Jungle Cruise was wildly popular, not so subtly racist, and inspired by the movie The African Queen, which starred Humphrey Bogart and Kathleen Hepburn.

38:35We are now entering Headhunter Country. They wanted Fela to be the sort of house band for that? Yes. Oh, that's a whole different reality. Yep. They were going to sign him. He failed the audition. Disney turned them down because their music wasn't African enough. Wow. We attempted to confirm this with Disney, but they never got back to us. That was when. I was waiting for it very bad.

39:16This is Fela Kuti, Fear No Man. We rejoin the story with Fela getting rejected from Disneyland for not being, quote, African enough. I was waiting for it very bad.

39:33At this point, Fela was deeply broke. Sandra says he was stuffing newspapers into his loafers to fill the holes. When things got really bad, he came and lived with my parents. How long was he living there for? I would say a good six to eight months. Okay. Wow, so you spent every waking moment together. Oh, all the time. Fella stayed in a small guest shack at the back of her parents' property. Fortunately, my mom had an old upright piano. But anyway, it was that old upright piano that Fella wrote a lot of those songs. And he used to chart the music. And at night, once they've gone to bed, I would bring Fella up to my bedroom.

40:21And we would be talking. And in my bedroom at that time, I had posters all over the wall of, you know, the kings of Africa. I had Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Angela Davis. This one night, she says, they were talking. She forgets about what. Maybe Vela was telling her stories about Nigeria, which she really liked. Or maybe she was telling him stories about the time she got arrested and thrown in jail for kicking a policeman in a protest. Story he loved. His thing was, look at this woman. She's a fighter. Whatever it was, at some point, she says, she remembers him shaking his head and then getting real quiet.

41:01And then he made the comment about how Africans are so stupid. He said they're stupid. His basic sentiment was, why can't Africans on the continent be more like you, like African-Americans in the U.S.? And, I mean, for someone who was just coming into knowledge, self-knowledge, and learning about myself, and you're going to say that Africans are stupid? Oh, I must have been livid. In her memoir, she actually writes that he struck a chord so deep that a panther sprung out. And she sat him down and she said, look, let me tell you a few things about America. Can you read this and then just tell me a little bit more about it?

41:48You want me to read it out loud? Yeah, if you don't mind. I asked Sandra to read the passage in her memoir where she talks about that conversation with Fela. It was during this discussion I showed him news clippings and pictures of blacks being hung from trees, burned alive and wearing scars on their back. He saw the pictures of slaves in chains and shackles being sold on the auction block. I made sure he saw, too, what was recently happening in the South with blacks being hosed and attacked, bitten by dogs, whites attacking black, demonstrated marching for equal rights. So you're showing him pictures of the civil rights movement.

42:26You're showing him pictures of lynchings. Yes. Sit-ins. Like you're showing, you're giving him the... History of America. See, he didn't know our real story. What was his reaction? Shots. Sandra says at some point in her rant, she went to her bookshelf and pulled out the autobiography of Malcolm X. Chapter one. Nightmare. When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me a party of Clu Glutz Klan riders galloped to our home in Omaha, Nebraska one night. She told him, you need to read this. And over the next few days, he did. philosophically and culturally we Afro-Americans badly need to return to Africa each day I live as if I'm already dead I say it that way because from the things I know I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form I want you to just watch and see if I'm not right in what I say that the white man in his press is going to identify me with hate

43:32Fell out would eventually tell his biographer Carlos Moore This book, I couldn't put it down This man was talking about the history of Africa Talking about the white man I had never read a book like that before in my life Everything about Africa started coming back to me He would later tell the New York Times It was incredible how my head was turned Everything fell into place Everything fell into place Here he is himself Sandra taught me a lot about blackism, gave me books to read, my comics, and I saw so many. When I was reading these books, I found out in my analysis of myself, I had to sit down and think about myself, say, what am I doing?

44:12Am I already playing African music? That noisy interview, done by a student at Lagos University while the band was rehearsing in the background, that is the only audio clip we have of Fela talking about this moment himself. Then I said, I have to start to rethink

44:30Shortly after that conversation in Sandra's bedroom, Phelan made some changes. He changed the name of his band from Kululubitos, this made-up word, to Nigeria 70, and he changed his sound.

44:50He started writing differently here.

45:02Sandra got him a gig at a club called Citadel de Haiti. And one of the first songs that he played at that gig, which he'd written in her house, was called My Lady's Frustration. My Lady's Frustration. The song was apparently written for Sandra. This was the first song, the first African music song. Benson calls this song, Very Beginning. of Fela's new genre, Afrobeat.

46:10According to Sandra, the first time he played that song at the Citadel, the crowd... They went crazy. Oh my goodness. And within a few weeks... He was packing that club, and it was like we was balling. the citadel de Haiti became the spot where the black who's who of Hollywood they were all going to Bernie Hamilton's club and they were listening to Fella

46:43in March of 1970 Fella and the band returned to Lagos with a plan that Sander would follow him a few months later he renames the band again to Africa 70. And in 1971, he releases what might be the best fella song, at least according to me. It is called Jinkoku.

47:12And it blew up.

47:32See you next week.

47:55So good. Do you remember the Junkoku moment yourself? Oh yeah, I was in. What do you remember? Early college. We hear it on the radio. Everywhere. This is Olabode Omojola. He grew up in Nigeria, was a young man when Junkoku came out. He's now a professor of music at Mount Holyoke College. By that point, even my father was beginning to, maybe there's something sensible in this rascal music. you know i think i was in uh i was in high school and it was all over the radio it was everybody was playing and then he was

48:54One of the crazy things was that at this point, Lagos was still a pretty small town of about a million people. And apparently, I mean, we have no way of checking these numbers, but these are the numbers you see quoted. Apparently, this record sold 200 ,000 copies. If that is true, that's one fifth of the whole population. Which is wild to think about. Everybody, everybody. I asked Bode about what Fela's manager, Benson Idonisye, had said. This is the first African music song. Why? Why isn't everything he makes an African song? Because he is African, so anything he makes should be African. What is it specifically about these songs?

49:31I'm curious what, so I hear James Brown in there. What do you hear? I want to hear all the things. Yeah, kind of James Brown, a little bit element of funk, a little bit element of Big Bang. He says you got the James Brown, the jazz, the high-life horns, although interestingly not high-life chords, which is why the music sounds less jaunty and Western. And on top of that... The groove. This is Yoruba drumming. Is it really? Yeah. Is it that pattern? Let it play.

50:22My mother would just be dancing like that. Yeah. So it's so Yoruba-ish. Huh. Then the melody. Call and response. Call and response.

50:47response. So there's call and response that is going on there. The key, says Bode, is that Fela found a precise blend where everyone can hear what they want. So you could bring my mother, who has never been to the U.S., who's, you know, familiar with the Yoruba culture, and bring an African-American person who has never been to Nigeria, and the two of them can actually interface. Because this music brings them together. So Fela is like a magician trying to create a kind of pan-Africanist musical language. He described it almost as the sound of a diaspora meeting itself. Locking eyes. Our eyes locked.

51:37It was like a spiritual cord. It just seems like we were connected. When I talked about this with writer and scholar Louis Dudasoki, he had a really interesting way of interpreting that gaze. This dynamic you're describing for me is because African Americans look to Africa for a past. Folks in the diaspora look to the African-Americans in the diaspora for a vision of possibility. Ah. So we look to them for the past, they look to us for the future. I've never heard it said that way. That's how I see it, right? As a matter of fact, just like Miles Davis said, when he hired Fella in 1988, he did say that Fella's Afrobeat was going to be the music of the future.

52:28Miles Davis said that? Yes. But as David said it. Wow. In 1970, as the Junkoku asteroid was about to hit, as planned, Sandra arrives in Lagos and steps off the plane. You know what? I hope I can find that picture. You can see from the expression on my face that, oh, my God, I was, oh. Coming off that plane, I mean, it was like I had arrived, okay? And I was just happy to be there, you know, in the motherland. How did the people in Lagos react to you? I was headlines. Really? Yeah, because, I mean, an American negris, that's what they call me, a negris. I had never heard that terminology. But I felt special from day one.

53:23I felt nothing but love from my ancestors, and it gave back in full.

53:48A few notes before we close. In Lagos, Fela would immediately let go of his buttoned-up trousers and pants style, and he'd embrace polyester jumpsuits and fur coats. Or just hanging out in his undies, his bikini briefs. And Phila and Sandra did not become the love affair that either of them expected, for a lot of reasons that we'll get into in some of the next chapters. As a final, final note, I want to end with a clip from Louis Chudasoki that I cannot get out of my mind. We were talking about that idea of realness, right? In the cross-Atlantic, diasporic game of telephone, how do you find the real you amidst all of the projections and the echoes of echoes?

54:28and he said, well, there's no such thing. It's always a performance, which may not reflect the reality, but still doesn't make it any less real, as long as you believe it. And then he threw out this stat. The single statistic that's changed my whole life was discovering in the New York Times in 1990 or so that more Africans have come to the United States since 1990 than at the height of the slave trade. Shut up. Look it up. Wow. That shook me to the core, and I'm looking around, I'm like, y 'all hear this? All of that is a way of wrestling with the fact that blackness is up for grabs. In the same way that we know that whiteness is being transformed by immigration, so is blackness.

55:28Coming up, Fela is about to light Nigeria on fire, and we fly to Lagos to visit the shrine, his club slash temple, where it all went down.

55:47This has been a Higher Ground and Audible original produced by Audible, Higher Ground Audio, Western Sound, and Talk House. 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 Fearman. Jenna Levin was creative executive, and Corinne Gilliard-Fisher was executive producer. Executive producers for Audible were Anne Hepperman, Glenn Pogue, and Nick D 'Angelo.

56:14Our senior producer was Gofan Utwuele. Ruby Heron-Walsh was lead producer and researcher. Our producers were Fefe Odudu and Boluakemi Aladiosui. Ben Adair was our editor with editing help from Carla Murphy. Consulting producers were Bolu Babalola, Dotun Ayubade, Neef Abdurakhib, Michael Veal, Moses Ochunu, and Judith Byfield. Our fact checker was Jamila Wilkinson. Alex McInnes was the mixed engineer. Also, special thanks to Knitting Factory Records and BMG. To the Kuti family, to Melissa O'Donnell, to Inside Projects and Maggie Taylor for marketing support. And big thanks to Carla Murphy, Leah Friedman, and Shoshana Scholar.

56:51We couldn't have done any of this without their support.

56:59Oh, and a very big thank you to Sandra Isidore. You can find her memoir, Fela and Me, and her music.

57:17You can find that at sandraisadore.com. That's I-Z-S-A-D-O-R-E.com.

57:29Head of Creative Development at Audible is Kate Navin, Chief Content Officer, Rachel Giazza. Copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.

57:45Hey, IMO listeners. This is Adam Grant, host of The Rethinking Podcast. On my show, I have lively debates that challenge us to think differently. Michelle and Craig, what do you see many people get wrong when they choose careers? I think it's important for people to build careers around things that they enjoy, not just making money. That's not to say that making money isn't important, but a career is a lifetime commitment. I'm going to have to agree with you because your hot take is the exact advice you gave me when I was leaving corporate America. And you said to me, if you can do something that you love doing, go ahead, because we grew up not having money and we ended up just fine.

58:23Following your passion is sometimes a luxury, but following your values is a necessity. When you're considering new work opportunities, it's worth asking, do I want to become more like the people here? Do they share my values? I'm Adam Grant, and you can hear more hot takes like these from guests like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Dolly Parton, Trevor Noah, Reese Witherspoon, Brene Brown, and more on my podcast, Rethinking. wherever you listen.