Becoming Fela Kuti

Summary

DISGRACELAND: "Becoming Fela Kuti"

Podcast: DISGRACELAND
Host: Double Elvis Productions
Episode Date: October 15, 2025
Episode Theme:
This episode traces the pivotal journey of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, zooming in on his personal and musical transformation from middle-class jazz enthusiast to revolutionary creator of Afrobeat—a sound and movement that challenged Nigeria’s military regime and gave voice to African resistance. Through deeply reported narrative and interviews with key figures, the episode explores questions of identity, diaspora, and how music becomes a political force.

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Overview

"Becoming Fela Kuti" is a multilayered narrative exploring how Fela’s encounters with the US Black Power movement, key mentors like Sandra Isidore, and the tumultuous swirl of Nigerian and global politics led him to birth Afrobeat—music as both personal liberation and political weapon. Interweaving oral history, archival music, and sharp analysis, the episode delves into the broader tensions of what it means to be “real” or “authentic” in the Black diaspora, and how Fela’s transformation changed the world of music and activism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who Was Fela Kuti? [02:55–04:47]

• Multiple voices attempt to convey Fela’s rebellious spirit:
  • “Fela is like Bob Marley and Mandela combined.” – Sandra Isidore [03:06]
  • “Definitely with some Ahmed Ali thrown in. And then with the protest element of Dylan. Don’t forget Malcolm X.” – Fela Kuti [03:12]
• Fela’s music and persona are described as "the hardest you’ve ever heard in your life.” – Louis Chudasoki [03:34]
• Fela’s resistance made him a target: “His music was so dangerous...they threw him in jail. Not once, not twice, but a hundred times.” – Interviewer/Narrator [04:23]

2. Fela’s Early Life and Education [06:24–12:00]

• Fela grew up in a middle-class Nigerian family, educated in missionary schools under British colonial rule.
• Attended Trinity College of Music in London, one of few Black students:
  • “It is the epitome of the white Western world...Fela would have been one of the few black students to attend.” – Interviewer/Narrator [07:32]
• Studied classical music but chased jazz outside school:
  • “Really I was not interested in classics. My aim was to play jazz...I was trying to listen to great men like Miles and Dizzy.” – Fela Kuti [09:53, 11:22]
• Fela returned to Nigeria in the early 1960s, initially playing jazz and highlife, but with little commercial success.

3. Searching for a Musical Identity [12:12–15:28]

• Fela’s early music encompassed jazz, Latin influences, highlife.
  • “He was a gentleman musician... singing love songs, funky songs, folklore. He was not drinking alcohol, was not taking marijuana. He was complete gentleman.” – Baba Ani [12:12]
• West African audiences preferred Latin music, and Fela’s blend was not resonating.

4. Influence of James Brown and U.S. Black Culture [15:50–18:13]

• James Brown’s music, and its message of Black pride, reshaped the tastes and cultural orientation of Nigeria’s youth:
  • “James Brown turned Africa upside down inside out.” – Fela Kuti [15:50]
  • “That music actually gave Africans a point of reference and cultural redefinition.” – Fela Kuti [16:08]
• Funk and soul eclipse highlife—setting the stage for Afrobeat’s emergence.

5. Meeting Sandra Isidore: The Queen of Afrobeat [18:54–32:26]

• Fela and band arrive on a US tour, end up stranded in LA.
• Sandra Isidore (“Queen of Afrobeat”) becomes pivotal mentor and collaborator.
  • “Our eyes locked. It was a magical moment. It was like we were connected from day one.” – Sandra Isidore [30:42]
• Sandra’s own awakening: raised shielded from racism in California, exposure comes via family, music (Nina Simone, Malcolm X, Hugh Masekela), and the Black liberation movement.
  • “My parents never taught me about racism in America...they kept secrets.” – Sandra Isidore [21:11]
  • “In order to know the real story, I’m gonna need to meet a real African.” – Sandra Isidore [26:00]
• Encounter with Fela both shatters and reshapes her perceptions of “authentic” African identity.

6. Cultural Gaps and Diasporic Yearnings [26:43–28:14]

• African Americans in the 1960s-80s seek “Africa” as a source; Africans coming to the U.S. find Black American culture to be the epitome of cool:
  • “For me...Black culture coming out of America felt real, it felt cool.” – Louis Chudasoki [27:02]
  • “African Americans look to Africa for a past. Folks in the diaspora look to the African Americans...for a vision of possibility.” – Louis Chudasoki [52:50]
• The conversation underscores the performative and shifting nature of Black identity.

7. Rejection, Struggle, and Transformation in Los Angeles [39:07–44:49]

• Fela’s struggles in LA reach a nadir—broke, nearly deported, briefly auditioned (unsuccessfully) for a Disneyland gig.
  • “Disney turned them down because their music wasn’t African enough.” – Sandra Isidore [40:07]
• Lived with Sandra's family, wrote songs on her mother’s old piano.
  • “He came and lived with my parents...stayed in a small guest shack at the back of her parents’ property.” – Interviewer/Narrator [40:28–40:53]
• A turning point: a confrontation about African and African American “stupidity” and suffering leads Sandra to educate Fela about slavery, the civil rights movement, and Black oppression in the US.
  • “I made sure he saw...what was recently happening in the South...blacks being hosed...” – Sandra Isidore [42:51]
• Sandra gives Fela The Autobiography of Malcolm X:
  • “This book, I couldn’t put it down. This man was talking about the history of Africa, talking about the white man...Everything fell into place.” – Fela Kuti [44:53]

8. Birth of Afrobeat [44:49–51:43]

• Fela rethinks his music, steered by Sandra and political awakening:
  • “Sandra taught me a lot about blackism, gave me books to read...I have to rethink and reanalyze myself. I started to write new music.” – Fela Kuti [44:53, 45:20]
• Changes band name and musical style, fusing highlife, jazz, funk, Yoruba rhythms—creates Afrobeat.
  • “The key...fella found a precise blend where everyone can hear what they want...Fela is like a magician trying to create a kind of Pan Africanist musical language.” – Fela Kuti/Bode Omoshola [51:51–52:22]
• Massive popular success with songs like “Jin Koku,” which cross generations and cultures in Lagos and abroad.

9. Diaspora, Authenticity, and Pan-African Future [52:22–56:23]

• Fela’s music as the “sound of a diaspora meeting itself—locking eyes.”
  • “Our eyes locked. It was like a spiritual chord. We were connected.” – Sandra Isidore [52:30]
• On the future and fluidity of Blackness:
  • “Blackness is up for grabs. In the same way that we know that whiteness is being transformed by immigration, so is blackness.” – Louis Chudasoki [55:49]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "If they think I’m going to change or compromise, they are making me stronger." – Fela Kuti [05:23]
• “Everything about Africa started coming back to me...Everything fell into place.” – Fela Kuti [44:53]
• “Between colonialism and slavery, I’ll take slavery. Those shackles are still on the mind. That’s even worse.” – Sandra Isidore [35:15]
• “You’re doing all this, and you’re singing about some soup?...Why would you do that when you can use your music to uplift people?” – Sandra Isidore [34:40]
• “Disney turned them down because their music wasn’t African enough.” – Sandra Isidore [40:07]
• “For me...Black culture coming out of America felt real, it felt cool. So I was surprised, coming to America, that the Black people here were fascinated by me.” – Louis Chudasoki [27:02]
• “African Americans look to Africa for a past; folks in the diaspora look to the African Americans...for a vision of possibility.” – Louis Chudasoki [53:02]
• "Miles Davis said Fela's Afrobeat was going to be the music of the future." – Fela Kuti [53:10]
• “The single statistic...more Africans have come to the US since 1990 than at the height of the slave trade...Blackness is up for grabs.” – Louis Chudasoki [55:36]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:55] – "How do you describe Fela?" and introduction to his mythic reputation
• [06:24] – Fela's origin story, early influences, school in Britain
• [11:22] – Early musical endeavors and return to Nigeria
• [15:50] – Influence of James Brown, transformation of African pop music
• [18:54] – Fela's arrival in America, meets Sandra Isidore
• [26:00] – Sandra’s search for authenticity, “I need to meet a real African”
• [27:02] – Contrasting diasporic yearnings for authenticity and coolness
• [40:07] – Disney’s rejection for “not African enough”
• [42:51] – Critical confrontation: Sandra schools Fela with images of US anti-Black violence and gives him Malcolm X’s autobiography
• [44:53] – Fela undergoes intellectual and musical epiphany
• [45:57] – Afrobeat is born, first hits composed in LA
• [47:05] – “My Lady’s Frustration” becomes Afrobeat’s first anthem
• [49:06] – “Jin Koku” explodes in popularity across Nigeria
• [52:22] – Fela’s music as a unifying space for the Black diaspora
• [55:36] – The future of Blackness, migration, and identity

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Tone & Style

The narration combines irreverence, deep curiosity, and a reverence for historical complexity—balancing musicology, political critique, and personal testimony. The dialogue oscillates between casual storytelling (“You’re doing all this and singing about some soup?”) and moments of gravitas (“Those shackles are still on the mind. That’s even worse.”). There's a palpable sense of discovery and transformation, with contemporary voices reflecting on the layers of identity, resistance, and art.

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Final Reflection

"Becoming Fela Kuti" dives deep into how music, politics, and diasporic longing interact to create both personal and collective revolution. Through the fusion of styles, histories, and identities, Fela Kuti’s remarkable journey becomes a lens on the complexities of Blackness—its pain, its creativity, and its never-ending reinvention. The episode ends on the threshold of Fela’s return to Nigeria, where the new Fela will soon set the country—and the world—on fire.

Transcript

[Fela Kuti]

Foreign.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

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[Interviewer / Narrator]

How do you describe Fela to someone who doesn't know?

[Fela Kuti]

I've played around. I've done it a million times. I don't know if any time has worked. Like, I'll go.

[Sandra Isidore]

Fela is like.

[Fela Kuti]

Bob Marley and Mandela combined.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Well, he was kind of like Mick.

[Fela Kuti]

Jaggert and James Brown, definitely with some Ahmed Ali thrown in. And then with the protest element of Dylan. Don't forget Malcolm X. You wanted to be Malcolm X. Brothers and sisters, the secret of life is to have no fear. We all have to understand that.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

He.

[Louis Chudasoki]

Was the hardest you've ever heard in your life.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

This is fil. Fear no Man. Chapter two. Becoming Fila. Here's a question. How do you become that person that Flea was just describing?

[Fela Kuti]

You know, it's as hard as the.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Hardest hip hop track, the hardest jazz.

[Fela Kuti]

Track, the hardest, deepest punk rock or metal or death metal. Whatever it is that you're into as a kid, whatever music you love and you think captures the, like, spirit of.

[Louis Chudasoki]

Rebellion and of caring about, you know, a scary world that you can get.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Lost in and hurt in. It's all there for Flea. It's Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's magical music. Fela is the epitome of a musician whose music matters. In fact, his music was so dangerous to the people in power in Nigeria that they threw him in jail. Not once, not twice, but a hundred times.

[Fela Kuti]

I want to see the police beating. It's terrible. I'll show you. You must see it. Look at it.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

In this famous clip, Fellah is dressed only in his bikini briefs. He turns and shows the camera his back, which is covered in wounds and gashes, almost a hash pattern, over and over. The Nigerian police and army broke his arms, his legs, his face. You know, they threw his mother from the roof of her house and she died.

[Fela Kuti]

Threw my mother out the window. He went and took his mother's coffin and put it on the doorstep of.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

The government building, the Capitol building. No matter what they did, he never backed down.

[Fela Kuti]

If they think I'm going to change or compromise, they are making me stronger.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

I mean, he was wild.

[Sandra Isidore]

What a rebel.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

So that's the question. How did he become that guy? The story of fellas transformation is a big one. Spans many continents, involves many forces that are way beyond him, that have to come together in just the right way to form the Marxist musical coup plotter that he would become. And I'm quoting from a Nigerian newspaper there, but let's start simple. We Know that he grew up in a middle class household in a town north of lagos in the 1950s. This is when the British were still in power. We know that he went to a school set up by British missionaries. But in terms of story shaped objects, we don't really have much from his childhood. We don't have much detail. But we did find this one rare interview where he does touch on a few things from his early years. Here he is in 1967. He's 29 at the time, talking to a guy named Sean Kelly.

[Fela Kuti]

We're speaking with Fela Ransome Kuti, one of Nigeria's young contemporary jazz musicians. Fela, how did you get started as a musician? Oh, that My mother really and my father made me play the piano very early. At age of 9, learning to play the piano. It was my hometown, Abeokuta. And then after my school in school, I was leader of the school choir for about five years. And then after that I went to England to study at the Trinity College of Music in London.

[Sandra Isidore]

Hello, hello.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

La la la.

[Sandra Isidore]

And we're recording.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Interestingly, when Nigeria declared its independence From England in 1960, Nigeria's great day fellow wasn't even there. He was here in London studying classical music. So I'm recording now. Could I ask you to introduce yourselves?

[Fela Kuti]

My name is Olaulo Akinukwe, graduate of Trinity Laban. I'm Nigerian clarinetist.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

I'm Alex Schramm and I'm the director of music at Trinity Laban. Alex and Ola were nice enough to give our producer Ruby Walsh a tour of the grounds. Yeah, we've got a lot of places to see. I started my undergraduate in the old building, which is where Feller studied in the 1950s. Trinity is a place that is obscenely beautiful architecturally. It is the epitome of the white Western world. Big stone archways, classical architecture. It's right on the water. Fela would have been one of the few black students to attend. And we kept trying to imagine him walking the halls around the room. I think what I might show you is the harp room.

[Fela Kuti]

Oh wow.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

There's a forest of harps. What an organ. Yes, this is an organ for playing. Brock, Alex, the director demonstrated.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Yeah, yeah.

[Fela Kuti]

For me, I'm trying to remember my first day walking in here. It was, it was a bit surreal for me actually.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Olua Lua, our student guide, plays the clarinet and he is about the same age that Fela was when he came to study the piano and the trumpet.

[Fela Kuti]

I tell you this. Yeah, When I was coming because I'M Nigerian, obviously. It was like, you're going to study music. Of all the things to do in England, then I would go, Fela studied there. And then what? You're going to study where Fela studied. You're going to come back. So great. Don't know how great I am yet, but yeah.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

So we're here in the reception now and straight away we have to point out we have the plaque here for Fela Kuti. Oh, wow. Oh, it's right here.

[Fela Kuti]

It's right here.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Can I actually get one of you to read, Read what's on the plaque?

[Fela Kuti]

Yeah, it says Felakuti, father of Afrobeat, which lends colonial politics in Nigeria.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Reading that plaque was interesting. Here is a man, America and England.

[Fela Kuti]

Trying to brainwash Africans. You are the colonialists who are the slave riders.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Who would spend his life railing against the white world, who would become known as the soundtrack of African independence. Here he was studying the music of the colonizer. He.

[Sandra Isidore]

He was still walking around with colonial mentality. He hadn't become black.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

That's Sandra Isidore. She plays a huge part in what happens next.

[Sandra Isidore]

You want to check me because I.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

My voice carries more from her in a second.

[Fela Kuti]

I went to study at the Trinity College of Music in London, and there I did my college course. But really I was not interested in classics. My aim was to play jazz. So I studied classics in college and went out to listen to jazz on my trumpet too. I was trying to play some jazz. I was trying to listen to some great men like Miles and Dizzy at Trinity.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

After class, Fellow would go to places like the Flamingo Room, a basement club that hosted all night jam sessions. And he would sit in. This is at a time in London when all kinds of musicians are rolling through. Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald played some shows. Sarah Vaughan, Count basie, Duke Ellington. 1960, when Felau was in his second year. Miles Davis comes to town, plays a few shows. I like to imagine Fellow was in the audience because a few years later, Fellow would release this tune. That's him on trumpet. He called it Ameche's Blues. And it sounds a whole lot like Miles's Freddy Freeloader off A Kind of Blue. They're almost the same tune.

[Fela Kuti]

I was trying to listen to some great men like Miles and dz, people like Clifford Brown and things like that. And then I came out back here in Nigeria to play music.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Fella arrived back in Nigeria from London in 1963.

[Fela Kuti]

Has it been successful? Quite. What would you say was the present jazz scene in West Africa? Straight Jazz as it's played in the States, it's not working here. I found that out when I came back from England. West African countries, I'll say, they're not interested in jazz. What they like. There's Latin American music.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

At that time in West Africa, Latin American music was all the rage. And this tape, I gotta say, I love it when you get to hear a person before they've figured themselves out. This guy, this fella, he's looking for something, but he hasn't found it yet.

[Fela Kuti]

He was a gentleman musician when we started the band. He was just a gentleman.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

This is one of Fela's early bandmates, Baba Ani.

[Fela Kuti]

He was singing love songs, you know, funky songs, folklore. And he wasn't drinking alcohol, he was not taking marijuana. He was complete gentlemen.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

At that point, Fela was working a respectable job in Lagos at the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission. And he had formed a band, a dance band called Kula Lubitos, which is just a made up word meant to sound Latin.

[Fela Kuti]

Because as he said, what, like Latin American music? Well, at the beginning, before he traveled to America, he was basically playing high.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

A jazzy form of high life, high lifetime.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

That's John Collins, musician, historian. How would you define high life?

[Fela Kuti]

High life goes back to the 1880s. It's a very old type of music. Africans at that time, they were colonized. So they had to learn the white man's culture, but they had their own culture.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

He says that high life was a little British, a little West African. When the British came in and colonized Nigeria, they had all these troops and they needed to entertain them. And there was this craze at the time for ballroom dancing, like European style ballroom dancing with the foxtrot and all that. So Nigerian and Ghanaian musicians who were conscripted into the colonial forces learned to play that stuff, but also added their own flavors to it. This was the kind of music the fellow was playing two years before he came to LA and met Sandra. He's trying to figure out how to take this already hybrid form and layer jazz on top of it.

[Fela Kuti]

For me, this musicality gave me a lot of joy.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

This is Benson Idonage, who managed Fela and Kululobitos at the time. Is there a song that you think of specifically that means the most to you from that early period?

[Fela Kuti]

Yeah. Take Olofe, for instance. Oloufe Mi. Do you have it here?

[Interviewer / Narrator]

We have it somewhere. I think my phone is somewhere.

[Fela Kuti]

Yeah, this one.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Can you translate in real time?

[Fela Kuti]

Yeah. My lover, you are the one that I fancy you Are the one that I love My lover.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

You are the.

[Fela Kuti]

One that I, I.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

It's a vibe for sure. If you notice, compared to later Fela, it's very smooth.

[Fela Kuti]

Come on, rub your body on me.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

You can almost see him in his button up shirt and loafers just crooning out this love song. And Benson says it wasn't really working.

[Fela Kuti]

We are playing to art communities, schools, students and all that. We are not making money.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

It was not small crowds.

[Fela Kuti]

Yes, it's not working here. We started to play, people wouldn't listen. The music was exciting and all that, but we had nothing to show for it.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Making matters worse, in the late 60s, Fela loses his job, his radio job at the NBC. And it was right at this moment, according to musicologist Michael Veale, that a musical asteroid hit the continent.

[Fela Kuti]

Are you kidding? That music turned Sub Saharan Africa upside down. James Brown turned Africa upside down inside out. You start from the structure of his music. You know, that was a very powerful rhythmic construction and it was full of.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Black pride and black power.

[Fela Kuti]

That music actually gave Africans a point of reference and cultural redefinition.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

He says it was around this moment when James Brown records just fell on.

[Fela Kuti]

West Africa between 64 and 69.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Brown consciously trying to bring out the.

[Fela Kuti]

Africanist elements in his music.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

What he means is that shift in the mid-60s when James Brown went from gospel R and B to percussive rhythms, chicken scratch, guitar call and response. That's when he blew up in Africa. And as Michael puts it was almost a kind of alchemical transmutation. He was taking in African rhythms from across the Atlantic and then sending it back to the continent in a new form.

[Fela Kuti]

It's like hearing your own voice come back at you, but you recognize it as having been transformed in some profound ways.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Whatever it was now, the Nigerian kids just did not want to hear High Life. All they wanted was. Was funk and soul.

[Fela Kuti]

Play soul, play soul.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Benson says they would hear that over and over at gigs.

[Fela Kuti]

Play soul.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Play some James Brown.

[Fela Kuti]

Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

And Fela didn't want to.

[Fela Kuti]

Fela was not ready to compromise his music.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Frustrated and at a loss for direction, Fela apparently thought about giving up. He gives an interview to a Nigerian newspaper where he complains. He says he heard from a friend in America that James Brown was covering one of Fela's songs. And how is that fair? He sort of suggests that James Brown had stolen his music. It's a fascinating moment. James Brown hadn't been to Nigeria yet, probably hadn't heard Fela yet. But in Just a few years, he would come to Nigeria, he would hear Fela play. His drummer Clyde Stubblefield would apparently sit in the corner at one of Fela's shows and notate the rhythms of Fela's drummer Tony Allen. So there was something going on there. He had an intuition, but it was maybe out of time or something. In any case, he gives this interview suggesting that if Americans want African sounding music, wait till they get the real thing.

[Fela Kuti]

Listen to us. Americans like us. That's one of the reasons why we travel.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Right after that article was published, Fela got an offer to take his band Kula Lobitus on a two month tour of America. To expose the American public to their brand of high life. May 1969. Pula Lobitos sets off on a 10 month US tour. They perform in Washington DC.

[Fela Kuti]

Boom.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Chicago, boom. San Francisco, boom. But by the time they get to la, they're broke and their visas have run out.

[Sandra Isidore]

Yeah, it wasn't easy for fella here.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

And this brings us to Sandra Isidore, who is often called the Queen of Afrobeat. If Fela is the king, she's the queen.

[Sandra Isidore]

You wanna check me?

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Put her at number four. How do I sound to you right now?

[Sandra Isidore]

You sound okay to me. How do I sound to you? My voice carries.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

The day that I sat down with Sandra in la, her Afro was dyed bright sunny yellow. She wore deep blue lipstick, had massive galaxy earrings. And had a swirling constellation of tiny diamond stars affixed to her face which caught the light as we talked. She is very striking. In other words, Sandra is a singer and a composer. Her meeting Fela would profoundly shape and change both of their lives. Their politics, their music, their trajectories, and also in the process, music history. So I want to go into her story for a second.

[Sandra Isidore]

I'm a country girl that grew up in the city.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Sandra grew up in Watts, California. She was born in 1938, same year as Fela. She showed me a picture of her when she was 6, standing in front of a mirror, holding a doll.

[Sandra Isidore]

That's. That's a happy little girl growing up, you know, and in a perfect world, beautiful neighborhood. We lived in a corner house. We had a nectarine tree, apricots, oranges, pomegranates, lemons.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Wow, it sounds idyllic.

[Sandra Isidore]

And you see my little white doll, don't you? Yeah, they didn't have black dolls back then.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

When she was 6, Sandra and her family moved to Compton, which was then an all white neighborhood.

[Sandra Isidore]

Compton was beautiful then. Fields and pastures, horses, you know. We were the first black family to move into that area. And my friends then, all my friends were white. It made me start looking at myself in the mirror. And then I wanted to know, well, when is my eyes gonna turn blue? My hair is gonna be long and stringy, and I'm gonna have white skin. When is that gonna happen?

[Interviewer / Narrator]

How literally did you take that thought?

[Sandra Isidore]

I was thinking I was gonna turn white, so that's how deep it was.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

I asked Sandra about her parents. Like, did they ever talk to her about any of this?

[Sandra Isidore]

My parents were what you would call from the secret society. That generation. I'm a baby boomer, but before me, they kept secrets, things they didn't want their children to know. My parents never taught me about racism in America. They never shared with me that people would hate me because of the color of my skin. They just never taught me anything. And I think one of the reasons why they came to California was fleeing the South.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

They grew up in the South.

[Sandra Isidore]

They grew up in the South. And it was a lot going on in the families that they didn't tell us about. Things happened. They kept it quiet.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

They never sort of took you aside and said, this is our journey. This is how we got here.

[Sandra Isidore]

Absolutely nothing.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

I have to say, I was really struck by this. The way that Sandra talked about it. This entire generation, that wasn't given context, really, because their parents tried to protect them with silence. In some ways, this was also true in my family for many years. My folks didn't talk about where we came from because it was too painful.

[Sandra Isidore]

Well, your parents, then, are part of that secret society.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

For Sandra, despite the firewall, she says some things did slip through, which made her.

[Sandra Isidore]

I would see my parents. You know, they would whisper, and they were talking, and the things that they were whispering about was Martin Luther King. They didn't want me to know about the dogs and all of that. I learned that later you can only.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Hold information at bay for so long. And for Sandra, things started to leak through when she was a teenager. Do you recall what awoke you to the. To the reality?

[Sandra Isidore]

I think it was the civil disturbance in Los Angeles.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

You talking about the Watts riots?

[Sandra Isidore]

Yeah.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

White people driving through the riot area were considered fair game.

[Fela Kuti]

Their cars were battered, the drivers stoned.

[Sandra Isidore]

When I saw the fires, even at a young age, I was questioning.

[Fela Kuti]

I threw the firebomb right in the front window.

[Sandra Isidore]

Why are you burning up your own neighborhood?

[Fela Kuti]

The cry in the streets was, burn, baby, burn.

[Sandra Isidore]

You start asking questions. And it was around that time that my cousin Aubrey, who had Just been released from prison. He did five years because he had a joint. He came to stay with us, and he always had a black leather jacket and he wore a black beret. And he was friends with Bunchy.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Bunchy?

[Sandra Isidore]

Bunchy Carter from the Panther Party.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Oh. She says her cousin Aubrey was the first person to really break through the firewall. He started answering her questions. Why are they burning their neighborhood? Because they're tired of being beaten and harassed by the police.

[Sandra Isidore]

You know, he was always talking this black liberation and everything.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

More importantly, he started to play her music.

[Sandra Isidore]

Uh, Nina Simone.

[Fela Kuti]

Alabama's got me so upset.

[Sandra Isidore]

Ray Charles, Miles Davis. Oh, Billie Holiday, Big Mama Thornton. So I'm getting all this old music. And it was in their lyrical content, especially Oscar Brown Jr. That, you know, it started me thinking, eventually you to.

[Fela Kuti]

Hate the texture of your hair.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Her cousin turned her on to Malcolm.

[Fela Kuti]

X, who taught you to heat the color of your skin to such extent that you bleach to get like the white man.

[Sandra Isidore]

It was like my eyes started opening. And around that time, getting back to the music, Hugh Masakela came out with the Americanization of Ooga Booga.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

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 Masakela, 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.

[Sandra Isidore]

But it was my favorite, and I would play it over and over.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Over.

[Fela Kuti]

And over.

[Sandra Isidore]

It was at that point I said to myself, in order to know the real story, I'm gonna need to meet a real African.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

I have to meet a real African.

[Sandra Isidore]

Yep.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Why?

[Sandra Isidore]

Because.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

At this point in our conversation, Sandra just broke into a big smile, sort of laughing at her younger self.

[Louis Chudasoki]

Love it. A real African. A real African.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

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, bringing a few people in, including Louis Chudasoki, who is a professor of English at Boston University.

[Louis Chudasoki]

I'm also the director of the African American and Black Diaspora Studies program.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Wrote 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.

[Louis Chudasoki]

No, Everyone telling me I was African.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

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.

[Louis Chudasoki]

There was this moment in the 80s.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

We'Re skipping forward in time for just.

[Louis Chudasoki]

A second when hip hop becomes Afrocentric. I'm sure you remember there was the Africa Medallions and everyone's like, all the.

[Sandra Isidore]

Way to Africa, AKA the Motherland.

[Louis Chudasoki]

Motherland, the Jungle Brothers and Tribe Called Quest with the multicolored. And for me, Jad Hobby straight up. I was like, oh, shit, I'm gonna get laid now.

[Sandra Isidore]

You're like, opportunity, okay, Africa is cool.

[Louis Chudasoki]

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 or. Because my uncles and my aunts and the actual African community I was a part of wanted no part of that shit.

[Sandra Isidore]

So I started dancing with Sawaba African dance troupe.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Getting back to Sandra. She goes to college, joins the Black Student Union, starts dancing in a dance troupe.

[Sandra Isidore]

I thought I was really doing something on the African dance moves.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

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.

[Sandra Isidore]

It was a very hot day. I really didn't want to go. And it was Juno Lewis who insisted. It's this band from Africa. And I'm like, ugh. Because at this point I wanted to meet progressive Africans and 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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Like her parents, who were deep in the church, it was the center of their lives. A lot of the African immigrants to the US that Sandra met had grown up in Western churches and been educated in Christian schools. Cause you know, colonialism that didn't meet her definition of real African.

[Sandra Isidore]

Sandra, you gotta meet him. You gotta meet him. And I'm like, uh, here's another one, you know. So we go to the Ambassador Hotel.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

This was summer 1969.

[Sandra Isidore]

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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

In with Juno on stage is a guy singing with 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.

[Sandra Isidore]

No socks. He was the first man I met that didn't wear socks.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

But what she really remembers is that as she walked in and glanced at the stage, he looked right down at her.

[Sandra Isidore]

And our eyes locked. And it was a very magical moment. It was like we were connected from day one.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

I think what you wrote, is it something that you never experienced before and never did again?

[Sandra Isidore]

No, it was like a spiritual chord. It just seems like we were connected. Something that was destined to be.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Sandra says later in the party, between sets, she went searching for her friend Juno.

[Sandra Isidore]

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?

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Whoa.

[Sandra Isidore]

Yeah. Do you have a car? I said, yes, I do. Then you're going with me. And I started laughing. You know, he is so bold that he's telling me what I'm going to do in my car with him. Okay. 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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Yeah.

[Sandra Isidore]

And I said, interesting. He tweaked my interests.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

They go to a party together. They sit down on the couch next to each other.

[Louis Chudasoki]

I'm.

[Sandra Isidore]

I'm all in it.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Long story short, Sandra thinks, finally, I.

[Sandra Isidore]

Finally meet a black man. African. He's gonna show me. He's gonna teach me all about Africa. Cut. Okay.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

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. She watches them play this one particular song that becomes kind of important.

[Sandra Isidore]

He did this song called Abe. And I was able to really hear the band. And I was impressed. I like the sound. It was different. So when the rehearsal was over, I asked him to translate because the lyrics are in there, in Yoruba.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Right? Right.

[Sandra Isidore]

Translate what he was saying. He was so proud to let me know. It's about my soup.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

What does that mean?

[Louis Chudasoki]

Soup?

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Like, it's a song about soup.

[Sandra Isidore]

The whole song was about soup. What you eat.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Like, actual soup. Not soup as a metaphor.

[Sandra Isidore]

But it 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?

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Oh, okay. So it's like it's a celebration of soup.

[Sandra Isidore]

Well, it's not so much a celebration of it, but what he wants is in his soup. Okay. So I thought that that is so.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Wild to me because knowing where he is about to go. Yeah, with your help. Yeah, that. That's where he started is kind of crazy.

[Sandra Isidore]

Soup. That's what started the whole thing. You've been doing all this and you 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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Yeah.

[Sandra Isidore]

Between colonialism and slavery. I'll take slavery. Those shackles are still on the mines. That's even worse.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

This moment, when I talked about it with some of our consulting producers.

[Fela Kuti]

Yes. Oh, yes.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Oh, yeah. Got a whole bunch of different reactions.

[Sandra Isidore]

It was surprising to me that she said that she would choose slavery over colonialism.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

This 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.

[Sandra Isidore]

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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

And I think slavery is such a.

[Sandra Isidore]

Visual word that you can imagine the.

[Fela Kuti]

Horror that comes with it.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Colonialism, just to de veg 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, countries 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. How much rubber? £592,309. How much palm oil, ground nuts? How Many prisoners, they were maintaining number of persons, some under 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. It just keeps going and going. Oh, there's a whole page called lunatic asylum book after book. And what you realize is that the way the British ruled was not subtle. This is Beau Liu'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, colonization.

[Sandra Isidore]

I think it's just like, you know.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

White people marched in and changed their.

[Sandra Isidore]

Names and that was it. Where it's like the complete horror and destruction of it is completely erased.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

So that was Bolu's reaction to what Sandra said.

[Sandra Isidore]

Between colonialism and slavery. I'll take slavery for Lewis.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

What's your reaction when you hear that?

[Louis Chudasoki]

I love her voice.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

For him, it was less what she said than how she said it.

[Louis Chudasoki]

Her voice is just fascinating for me because for Feyella arriving, he has not heard people talk like that. Not really. Certainly not in England. I'm just thinking about Fela, what he's.

[Sandra Isidore]

In the clothing hearing.

[Louis Chudasoki]

Like, is he hearing a kind of authenticity that he couldn't or didn't hear in his own? He 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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Whatever the case, the first half year of his stay in LA was rough for Fela. 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.

[Sandra Isidore]

He was going to meetings and meetings and meetings.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

And when he said, do you have a car? Maybe part of the reason is that his band had no way of getting around.

[Sandra Isidore]

I had this sports car, a two seater sports car. And I remember nine people got into that car.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

In la, Kula Lobitos 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.

[Fela Kuti]

And after that, he was invited by Disneyland.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Disneyland.

[Sandra Isidore]

They wanted him for Adventureland.

[Fela Kuti]

Welcome aboard the Jungle Cruise.

[Sandra Isidore]

You know, at that time they had Adventureland, where you go around with the.

[Fela Kuti]

Little boat, look out, look out. Another hippo.

[Sandra Isidore]

The hippopotamus would come up out of the water and the alligators, all mechanical. That scared him.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

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.

[Fela Kuti]

We are now entering Headhunter country.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

They wanted Fela to be the sort of house band for that.

[Sandra Isidore]

Yes.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Oh, that's a whole different reality.

[Sandra Isidore]

Yep. They were going to sign him.

[Fela Kuti]

He failed. He failed the audition.

[Sandra Isidore]

Disney turned them down because their music wasn't African enough.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Wow. We attempted to confirm this with Disney, but they never got back to us.

[Fela Kuti]

That was when. That was when he felt very bad.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

At this point, Fela was deeply broke. She says he was stuffing newspapers into his loafers to fill the holes.

[Sandra Isidore]

When things got really bad, he came and lived with my parents.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

How long was he living there for? Ooh.

[Sandra Isidore]

I would. I would say a good six to eight months.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Okay.

[Sandra Isidore]

Yeah.

[Fela Kuti]

Wow.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

So you spent every waking moment together?

[Sandra Isidore]

Oh, all the time.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Fellas stayed in a small guest shack at the back of her parents property.

[Sandra Isidore]

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 and 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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

This one night, she says they were talking. She forgets about what. Maybe Fela 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.

[Sandra Isidore]

His thing was, look at this woman, she's a fighter.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Whatever it was, at some point she says she remembers him shaking his head and then getting real quiet.

[Sandra Isidore]

And then he made the comment about how Africans are so stupid. He said they're stupid.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

His basic sentiment was, why can't Africans on the continent be more like you? Like African Americans in the U.S. and.

[Sandra Isidore]

I mean, for someone who was just coming into knowledge, self knowledge and learning about myself, and you're gonna say that Africans are stupid? Oh, I must have been livid.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

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.

[Sandra Isidore]

You want me to read it out loud?

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Yeah, if you don't mind. I asked Sandra to read the passage in her memoir where she talks about that conversation with Fela.

[Sandra Isidore]

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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

So you're showing him pictures of the civil Rights movement. You're showing him pictures of lynchings?

[Sandra Isidore]

Yes.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Sit ins like you're showing.

[Sandra Isidore]

You're giving him the history of America. See, he didn't know our real story.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

What was his reaction?

[Sandra Isidore]

Shocked.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Sandra says at some point in her rant, she went to her bookshelf and pulled out the Autobiography of Malcolm X, chapter one, Nightmare.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me a party of Klu.

[Fela Kuti]

Klux Klan riders galloped to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

She told him, you need to read this. And over the next few days, he did.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Philosophically and culturally, we Afro Americans badly.

[Fela Kuti]

Need to return to Africa. Each day I live as if I'm already dead.

[Sandra Isidore]

I say it that way because from.

[Fela Kuti]

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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Felal 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.

[Sandra Isidore]

Everything fell into place.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Here he is himself.

[Fela Kuti]

Sandra taught me a lot about blackism, gave me books to read Malcolm X. And I saw so many. When I was reading these books, I found out in my analysis of myself, I have to sit down and think about myself. Say, what am I doing? Am I already playing African music?

[Interviewer / Narrator]

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 Tortoise talking about this moment himself.

[Fela Kuti]

I have to start to rethink and reanalyze myself. I started to write new music.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Shortly after that conversation in Sandra's bedroom, Filon made some changes. He changed the name of his band from Kule Lubitos, this made up word, to Nigeria 70. And he changed his sound.

[Sandra Isidore]

He started writing differently here.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Sandra 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 Frustration, the song was apparently written for Sandra.

[Fela Kuti]

This was. This is the first song, the first.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

African music song Benson calls this song. Very beginning of Fela's new genre, Afrobeat.

[Fela Kuti]

One more time.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Got it.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

According to Sandra, the first time he played that song at the Citadel, the crowd, they.

[Sandra Isidore]

They went crazy. Oh, my goodness.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

And within a few weeks, he was.

[Sandra Isidore]

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 Vela.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

In March of 1970, Fela 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 Jin Koku. And it blew up Sam. So good. Do you remember the Junkoku moment, you're saying?

[Fela Kuti]

Yeah, oh, yeah. I was there.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

What do you remember?

[Fela Kuti]

Early colleague. We hear it on the radio everywhere.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

This is Olabode Omoshola. He grew up in Nigeria, was a young man when Junkoku came out. He's now a professor of music at Mount Holyoke College.

[Fela Kuti]

By that point, even my father was beginning to. Okay, maybe there's something sensible in this. In this rascal, rascal music, you know, I think I was in. I was in high school and it was all over the radio. It was. Everybody was playing. And then the way.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

One 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.

[Fela Kuti]

Everybody, everybody.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

I asked Bode about what Fela's manager, Benson Idonice, had said.

[Fela Kuti]

This was. This is the first. The first African music song.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

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. Curious. What. So I hear James Brown in there. What do you hear? I want to. I want to hear all the things.

[Fela Kuti]

Yeah. Kind of James Brown. A little bit element of funk, a little bit element of big band.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

You see, as 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.

[Fela Kuti]

This is Yoruba drumming.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Is it really?

[Fela Kuti]

Yeah.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Is it. Is it that pattern?

[Fela Kuti]

Let it play. My mother will just be dancing like that. Yeah. So it's.

[Sandra Isidore]

It's, it's, it's, it's so.

[Fela Kuti]

It's so Yoruba Ish. Then the melody. Call and response.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Call and response.

[Fela Kuti]

So there's call and response that is going on there.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

The key says Bode, is that fella found a precise blend where everyone can hear what they want.

[Fela Kuti]

So you could bring. My mother, who has never been to the US is, you know, familiar with 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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

He described it almost as the sound of a diaspora meeting itself. Locking eyes.

[Sandra Isidore]

Our eyes locked. It was like a spiritual cord. It just seems like we were connected.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

When I talked about this with writer and scholar Louis Tudosoki, he had a really interesting way of interpreting that gaze.

[Louis Chudasoki]

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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Ah.

[Louis Chudasoki]

So we look to them for the past, they look to us for the future.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

I've never heard it said that way.

[Louis Chudasoki]

That's how I see it. Right.

[Fela Kuti]

As a matter of fact, just like Miles Davis said when he had fella in 1988, he did say that Fela's Afrobeat was going to be the music of the future.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Miles Davis said this?

[Fela Kuti]

Yes, Miles Davis said it.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Wow. In 1970, as the Junkoku asteroid was about to hit as planned, Sandra arrives in Lagos and steps off the plane.

[Sandra Isidore]

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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

How did the people in Lagos react to you?

[Sandra Isidore]

I was. Headlines.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Really?

[Sandra Isidore]

Yeah. Because, I mean, an American Negress. That's what they call me. A negress. I had never heard that terminology, but I felt special from day one. I felt nothing but love from my ancestors. And it gave back in full.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

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 Fellah and Sandra did not become the love affair that either of them become 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 Chudaski that I cannot get out of my mind. We were talking about that idea of realness, right? Like 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? And 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.

[Louis Chudasoki]

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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Shut up.

[Louis Chudasoki]

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.

[Interviewer / Narrator]

Coming up, Fela is about to light Nigeria on fire. And we fly to Lagos to visit the Shrine, his club temple, where it all went down.