Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine

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is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. And I'm Lulu Miller. And I am Jad Abumrad, here to hang out with Lulu and Latif. Woohoo! Welcome back, old man! Thanks, youngster. Happy to be here. Yeah. Where have you been this whole time? I've just been here in Brooklyn, just, you know, being a dad, making stuff. So pretty much the first thing that happened when I handed you guys the show proudly is I became a professor, kind of a fake professor at Vanderbilt.

But teaching all kinds of things relating to storytelling and interviewing. Dr. Abumrad. Well, you know, none of the other faculty are fooled. 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 felt like, what if journalism were sung by 60 women? 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 want to do a podcast about Felakuti? 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 going to happen? Do you know? This would be really fun. Sure, I'd love to have dinner at your house. That sounds great. Well, I wasn't saying yes. In a note, like, I don't really want to do it. I was just like, I don't know if I'm doing another podcast. But let me just, you know, 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. So I knew him from that angle, but I didn't know his backstory at all. I started making some phone calls and I don't know, I just didn't stop. In this series, we're going to look at the life and the music of Fela Kuti.

I always get that. My tongue always trips over that. Ali Kulapo Kuti. The father of Afrobeat. The black president. The chief priest. I had never heard of Fela until you got obsessed with him. And I was like, who is this guy? And why is Jad spending like three years like obsessed with this guy? 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.

Ayo Adeburi, actor, writer, someone I really respect. She's in The Bear. Great show. On some red carpet somewhere, she was asked. Oh. This question. A musician I have a cult-like fascination with. Her answer. Fela Kuti, who is a Nigerian legend. Bear is a very complicated man. Fela has to be the epicenter. and Questlove, one of the great musical minds of our time. I mean, Fela is the one figure whose story resonates with modern American hip-hop culture.

The passion, the pain. Jay-Z. The strength, the need to get the message out there. Beyonce. I don't know. It just presents a question. You're like, okay, what are they hearing? Can I hear it? Can I make other people hear it? Okay, so you dive in, you end up churning out this 12-part series called Fela Kuti Fear No Man, 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. Yeah. He is the answer to a really important... question for me personally, which is like, right now, you're looking out in the world, none of it makes sense. It's all insanity. And if you love music, as I do, and you kind of look around, you're like, what is the point? What's the point? what's the point of making music? What's it going to do to make our world better?

And then you look at like the streaming hellscape that we all live in 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? And he answers the question for me, that the music itself wasn't just music. 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. And the music itself, though, like how it functions, how is that changing the world? Just what's the almost mechanism? Sure.

Okay, so here's, 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 structure of the music. It's in the impact and sequence of impacts that the music creates.

Which sounds so pretty, but like, what the F does that mean? What does that mean? How? This is this episode that I think you're going to play. Yeah. And OK, just for context, the first episode, we met a bandmate of Phela'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 going to play, this is the one where we really get into the music itself. Yeah, it really tries to...

First, give you the experience and then explain what the experience is. Yeah, so it's called The Shrine. Anything else before we walk in? I should explain. The Shrine is his club in Lagos. And 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.

My experience in 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. We all have to understand that. This is Phila Kuti, Fear No Man, Chapter 3, 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. Can you tell us about your first visit to the shrine? Yes, of course. What do you remember about that? It was very, very funky. This is Michael Veal, musician. professor of music at Yale. He's also one of our advisors on the project. To hear that music in New York is one thing. 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 the shrine, you hear that.

I remember that very clearly. 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. It's a jam-packed mob with 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 almost like Woodstock kind of thing, you know what I mean? Yeah. 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, they open a hatch and it goes 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've got to go down the steps, and you're like, oh, now I get it. Welcome to Nigeria. That's the way reality feels in this setting. You know what I'm saying? That interview with Michael Veal was one of the many reasons why, when we finally got to Lagos, after a 13-hour flight... How you doing? I'm good. Just taking it all in.

The top item on our agenda was to go to the shrine. Radiolab is supported by Bilt. Nobody wants to pay rent. But if you have to, Bilt works to make it more worthwhile.

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Let me fill in a few gaps. 1969. After the whole Sandra Isidore experience in L.A., 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 fire hose. Of music. Something like, by my count, 27 records in six years-ish. One hit after another after another. 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. the Atlantic Ocean. And it consists of a giant landmass, a 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. Peacocks. Golf. It's very lush, very beautiful.

on the mainland. Very different sound. 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 Muxin. 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 Michaelville described it. People all in the street, like jam-packed mob with people. He was there in 92. We were there in 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. Fela is like life after death.

Evergreen, yes. Do you feel like Fela still protects this street, this place? Yes, exactly. 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. You've done your research. You know that the... the shrine and also Fela's compound, the Kalakuta Republic, he had kind of declared independent of Nigeria.

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 it 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. It was just all this craziness that we saw. Well, okay, so outside there's a dictatorship that was shooting people. At that time... and there are videos of this on YouTube, the government would hold public executions of criminals and dissidents on the beach. 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. Describe what it looks like. It was like a warehouse, sort of. Everybody smoking. A lot of weed smoking? Giant, giant joints. Joints the size of... Police megaphones. Keep in mind, at that time, people were getting thrown in jail for 10 years for a half-smoked joint. There's just this massive cloud up at the top of the thing. It's hot, it's humid.

A lot of people in there. People dancing and people stoned out of their minds. And it was such a contrast to how scared people were outside of the shrine. The shrine was not far from his house, a couple of blocks. That's John Darton, old surprise-winning journalist who wrote for the New York Times, worked as a foreign correspondent based in Lagos in the mid-'70s, wrote many, many articles about Fet Law.

Including this one where he watched Phila get ready right before he performed at the shrine. 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 is actually one of the more vivid that we've ever read. New York Times. That voice is Nina Darton, John's wife, also a longtime journalist. Fellas... Pre-game ritual. The show begins at 1 a.m.

Inside the nearby Kalakuta Republic, Fela prepares for it laboriously. From a jar, he spoons up liberal doses, 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 skin-tight sequined pants and a white shirt open to the waist, arranging his strings of beads as if he were smooth.

smoothing a necktie. Six bodyguards draw near. Let's go, fella 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. It is really good. And as he walked... Wait, he got on a donkey. Well, that was the second time. He got on a donkey? What? Okay, wait, sorry. As he walked. He was a showman.

Drivers would get out and raise a fist and yell, Phila! Phila! Anyway, then he starts playing, and I have never seen... I think, a performer quite as dynamic as that. He was absolutely incredible. Before we go back into the shrine, well, first, let me give you a picture. It is a open-air club. Fits about 500 people. There's a 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 Fellah'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. 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 a.m., Fela arrives on his donkey, takes the stage with 35 other musicians, and he begins a riff that will last most of the night. My experience of being in the shrine was like... Like the music was like inside of me. It was all around. It was just like, you know, being hypnotized. Like you're all inside the music. A kind of hypnotic dancing. React to music. Dancing and listening.

I remember being lost in music. All the people are smoking around me and we are in a mist, so you're in a different world. This idea of a spiral... It's another way to deal with time. I would describe it as a swirl. You know, when you have a cycle, it starts off as this little thing that builds up. And it builds up the more... you allow it to circulate it just starts to get bigger Fela starts his music. To enchant this repetitive pattern, the power of the musical ostinato, is part of that.

a chanting strategy. You've been captured. 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. And meanwhile, the rhythm section's keeping going. Going. Going. Going. Going. Going. This is a place. And when you start listening to it, you're entering into that place. I think the music was like inside of me, was all around it, just like...

You know, being hypnotized. Kind of hypnotic dancing. And so with Fela, you could tell that there was a different kind of intention. behind this paradigm of groove the music is 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. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. And then suddenly...

After half an hour, 40 minutes, he starts singing. After you hear this, it will talk. Whether you like or you no like. After you hear this, it will talk. If you like it good. If you no like, you hang. If you like it good. If you know like you hank If you hank you go die You go die for nothing We go carry your body Go police station You die wrongfully When his voice came in, I was like, what the hell? There are words too? Hold up, what is this?

sings in a gravelly, low-pitched voice, and sings about things that no one else ever even mentioned. Any newspaper, any columnist. He talks about the United Nations. He talks about Thatcher. He talks about Reagan. It's really everything. It's like a history lesson. 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. I just felt, where has my mind been all my life?

Complete surprise. I was immediately captivated. Why did we not know this? Why aren't we thinking about this stuff? When Fela sang into the microphone, I saw the light. I was just like... 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. 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.

Before we go on, the voices you just heard, in addition to Michael Veal and John Darton, were Stephanie Shonakan and Boere Omujola, both professors of ethnomusicology. At the University of Maryland and Mount Holyoke, respectively. Afrobeat musicians Dele Shoshimi and Duro Ikugenio. Activist, filmmaker, musician, Saul Williams. Musician and producer Brian Eno. Artist Lemmy Gerialku.

photographer Marilyn Nance, designer Lorraine Anamosin, and our advisor Moses Uchunu, 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. He said the music made you...

feel like you needed to tune in to things you hadn't been tuning into? Like what? 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. So 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. And that is what would come back when you heard his songs. Right, exactly. Moses said that Fela's music would remind him of the insanity that he had been sane-washed 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. Ostinato is going round and round. The power of the musical ostinato. 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. Whoa, the ostinados. They're like machine gears. They don't grind.

The way that the conga plays off the shaker, call and response. The way that the three guitar lines spin around endlessly like gears and 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. I was like... What the hell? There are words too? 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. 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. And in that way, as the final piece of this progression... He gives you a new conception of what your life can be. I saw the light that you can now dance to.

My music, my main preoccupation right now, music is a small part of it. 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. Is your music kind of a tool? It's a weapon. It's a weapon to say so that 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...

In that same interview, he suggested there's something else going on here too. It has to do with time itself. If anybody tells me 20 years is a long time, I would tell them no. Time. It's meaningless unless you want to understand what time is about. There is time for everything. That idea of cycles, it's going to become not just about the music, but so much more. Cycles of history, of violence, of resistance. We're going to 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. Okay, so, Jad, thank you. The series is... It is a magnum opus. It is so special. It is so good. 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. This might be the last one. We'll see. Where else is the series going and where can people find it? What's it called? So the series is going to go all kinds of places. It's called Felakuti Fear No Man. The next one is my fave.

It's a story about Fela's mom. Oh, yeah. That was so good. Who is so extraordinary. that you're that immediately made me be like wait why are we talking about him 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 exactly because what she accomplished is so

bananas. Yeah. And again, just with music. So yeah, that episode is next. Wait, and can you share the title of that episode? It's called Vengeance of the Vagina Head. And it was... 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.

This 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, Chad 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. Our senior producer was Gofan Utbuele. Ruby Heron-Walsh was lead producer and researcher. Our producers were Fefe Odudu and Oluakemi Aladiusui. Ben Adair was our editor with editing help Carla Murthy.

Consulting producers were Our fact checker was Jamila Wilkinson. Alex McInnes was the mix engineer. Also, special thanks to Knitting Factory Records and BMG, to the Kuti family, Melissa O'Donnell, to Inside Projects and Maggie Taylor, and big thanks to Carla Murphy, Leah Friedman, and Shoshana Scholar.

The head of creative development at Audible is Kate Navin, chief content officer, Rachel Piazza. Copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Sound recording copyright 2025 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Hi, I'm Srivansha Moori and I'm from Mumbai and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Sorin Wheeler is our executive editor. Sara Sandback 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 Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nianasambandhan, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgaukar, Annie McEwan, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Anissa Veetza, Ariane Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazzini and Natalie Middleton.

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