5: Trickster Makes the World

Summary

Detailed Episode Summary

Podcast: Fela Kuti: Fear No Man
Host: Jad Abumrad
Episode 5: Trickster Makes the World
Release Date: October 29, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Fela Kuti’s persona and influence through the archetype of the “Trickster”—the irreverent, boundary-breaking figure present in cultures around the world. The episode examines how Fela adopted trickster tactics in his music and activism, provoking the status quo and creating new cultural paradigms. By intertwining tales of Fela’s life with myth, contemporary music industry woes, and interviews with global luminaries, the show investigates the transformative—and sometimes dangerous—power of art.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Trickster Archetype and Fela’s Inheritance

• Jad Abumrad & Ben Adair open by connecting Fela’s musical subversiveness to his mother’s influence—her defiance and humor as a model. [00:28–00:57]
  • Stephanie Shonekan’s scholarship is credited for illuminating how Fela channeled maternal influences into dazzling, mischievous resistance.
• Fela is contextualized as a Yoruba “trickster” (specifically, the deity Eshu), who exposes the multiple sides of reality.
  • Quote (Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate): “Eshu is a mischievous deity, but at the same time a deadly serious deity” [01:55]
  • Chief Nikkei Orkendai displays a two-faced Eshu statuette at her Lagos gallery, drawing a parallel to Fela’s many layered persona. [03:23]

2. Fela’s Humor & Defiant Wit

• Musician Saul Williams and other guests discuss Fela’s humor as both provocation and survival:
  • “We can’t talk about Fela without thinking about the provocation and the trickster gods that have trickster spirits.” – Saul Williams [04:24]
• The production team likens Fela’s constant cat-and-mouse escapades with the authorities to classic Looney Tunes—playful, but with lethal stakes. [04:55–05:05]
• The idea is offered that American cartoons perhaps unconsciously channel trickster deities like Eshu.

3. Anecdote #1: “Expensive Shit”—Turning Oppression into Absurdism

• The well-known story behind “Expensive Shit” is recounted with lively input from Questlove and Hanif Abdurraqib. [05:50–11:00]
  • In 1974’s oppressive climate, Fela is set up by police with a planted joint; he eats it to destroy evidence.
  • Police await a stool sample; through prisoners’ cooperation and his mother’s help he avoids incrimination.
  • He responds by recording “Expensive Shit,” satirizing both the literal event and the state’s absurdities.
  • Quote (Fela via John Collins): “I have death in my pouch. I can’t die, they can’t kill me.” [03:37]
• Hanif Abdurraqib summarizes: “He released that song with the threat of violence hanging right over his head.” [12:58]
• Saul Williams references Maya Angelou: “Anything an artist writes should be written with the urgency of what they would write if someone were holding a gun in their mouth.” [13:04]
• Discussion of how, in Fela’s case, this “urgency” was not metaphorical.

4. Anecdote #2: The “Shit Boys” and Corporate Confrontation

• Fela battles Decca Records over unpaid royalties by occupying their offices with his family. [15:03–16:52]
  • Chief Taiwo Lijiadu describes how Fela destroyed exploitative contracts and lived in solidarity with other artists.
• After being forcibly removed by thugs allegedly sent by Decca’s president, M.K.O. Abiola, Fela responds symbolically:
  • In the dead of night, Fela and companions dump buckets of human excrement at Abiola’s mansion, leaving a note: “From the Shit Boys. You give us shit, I give you shit.” [21:03]
  • Fela simultaneously releases a song, “Give Me Shit, I Give You Shit,” referencing the event.
• Fela is later jailed (spuriously, accused of car theft)—the pattern of provocation and reprisal repeats.
  • Quote (Femi Kuti): “There is an endurance that comes with doing what Fela did for as long as he did. And I think that endurance comes with the audacity of knowing that you have something that can’t be taken.” [23:43]

5. Confrontation as Creative Catalyst (“Infinity Loop”)

• Fela’s cycle: Raid → Song → More Raids → More Art. [24:02–24:11]
  • Not just cause and effect—his trickster creativity becomes a structural, generative process outlasting the regime.
• Hanif Abdurraqib reflects on how confrontation, when constructive, can be “a springboard to something greater.” [25:18]

6. The Creative Process Under Siege

• Fela’s children and wives describe his method: periods of trance-like withdrawal (marked by teeth clicking) followed by furious composition, often after an attack. [26:48–27:49]
• This act of world-building is likened to trickster myths (e.g., Raven stealing daylight)—the artist as creator of new realities out of chaos. [28:19]

7. Anecdote #3: Kalakuta Raid and the Power of Song

• After police tear-gas his compound in 1974, Fela is detained for three days. John Collins, present at the scene, describes the aftermath:
  • Fela’s triumphant return from jail is marked by a spontaneous mass march of thousands, a testament to his symbolic power. [31:01]
  • He turns the ordeal into the song “Kalakuta Show,” offering the public both catharsis and a new language for resistance.
  • Fela is described as having coined enduring terms: "Beasts of No Nation," "everything go scatter," "government magic," "army arrangement," "colonial mentality," etc., all still widely used in Nigeria as shorthand for social critique. [32:37–33:51]

8. What Makes Fela’s Protest Music Different?

• Jad interrogates what sets Fela’s work apart from other political art.
• Barack Obama is interviewed: [35:07]
  • Quote (Obama): “There’s no protest song that can’t be packaged and commercialized... That’s one of the challenges for artists today, the capacity of the corporations that own the music industry to commodify even protest music.”
• Fela’s refusal to be commodified:
  • Songs are too long for radio. He declines to perform old hits live—“I don’t play sounds on record, okay? So don’t make noise, please. Okay?” [36:24]
  • He routes profit toward social change rather than personal gain.
  • Quote (Fela, 1988): “I didn’t want to participate in the madness of commercialism. I didn’t want to participate in the madness of gimmicks... I do not want African music to belong to the fashion where music comes and goes, because where African music goes, it stays.” [37:05]

9. Foreshadowing Moral Complexities

• The episode ends by signaling a shift in focus to less romantic chapters of Fela’s life, especially his relationships with women. [37:38–38:08]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Eshu is a mischievous deity, but at the same time a deadly serious deity.” – Wole Soyinka [01:55]
• “I have death in my pouch. I can’t die, they can’t kill me.” – Fela, recalled by John Collins [03:37]
• “He released that song with the threat of violence hanging right over his head.” – Hanif Abdurraqib [12:58]
• “Anything an artist writes should be written with the urgency of what they would write if someone were holding a gun in their mouth.” – Quoting Maya Angelou, referenced by Saul Williams [13:04]
• “From the Shit Boys. You give us shit, I give you shit.” – Note left for M.K.O. Abiola [21:03]
• “There is an endurance that comes with doing what Fela did for as long as he did. And I think that endurance comes with the audacity of knowing that you have something that can’t be taken.” – Femi Kuti [23:43]
• “It’s like an infinity loop. He creates under siege; the music reflects the frustrations with creating under siege... The government reacts to that by placing him under further siege.” – Discussion between Ben Adair & Chad Abumrad [24:11]
• “We have poets who write about—I've forgotten which poet—‘the center cannot hold.’ But Fela just says, ‘everything go scatter.’ Everybody knows what he means.” – John Collins [32:37]
• “There’s no protest song that can’t be packaged and commercialized... That’s one of the challenges for artists today.” – Barack Obama [35:24]
• “I didn’t want to participate in the madness of commercialism. I didn’t want to participate in the madness of gimmicks.” – Fela, 1988 [37:05]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:28–00:57: Fela’s mother’s influence and the roots of his tricksterism.
• 01:55: Wole Soyinka on Eshu, the Yoruba trickster god.
• 03:37: Iconic Fela quote: “I have death in my pouch.”
• 05:50–11:04: The “Expensive Shit” story—defiance, creativity, humor under duress.
• 13:04: Maya Angelou quote on artistic urgency.
• 15:03–21:13: Decca occupation, “Shit Boys” caper, and Fela’s pointed response in song and action.
• 23:43: Femi Kuti on the endurance and audacity of Fela’s activism.
• 24:10–24:29: The raid-song-infinity-loop and its political/cultural impact.
• 25:18: On confrontation as a springboard for change (Hanif Abdurraqib).
• 26:48–27:49: Family recollections of Fela’s creative trances post-crisis.
• 28:19: Trickster myth analogies—Fela as cultural world-builder.
• 31:01–32:59: Kalakuta raid, mass march, and Fela as a living symbol and lexicon creator.
• 35:24: Barack Obama on protest music and commodification.
• 37:05: Fela’s philosophy of “African music that stays.”
• 37:38–38:08: Preview of next episode’s focus on Fela’s complicated personal life.

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Tone & Language

• Wry, candid, and richly anecdotal, with a mix of reverence and irreverence—the episode mirrors Fela’s own spirit as much as it analyzes it.
• Frequent use of direct quotations, lively banter, and music to immerse listeners in Fela’s world.
• Serious political critique is delivered with wit and a sense of ongoing, necessary mischief.

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Conclusion

“Trickster Makes the World” elucidates how Fela Kuti wielded the power of the trickster archetype to subvert authority and reimagine social reality. Through stories of audacious humor, symbolic revenge, and creative resistance, Fela emerges not just as a revolutionary artist but as a mythic figure—teaching that the act of making art can, at its most fearless, change laws, inspire masses, and challenge the architecture of power itself.

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This summary captures all substantive content, skipping advertisements and production credits.

Transcript

[Chad Abumrad]

Brothers and sisters, the secret of life.

[Ben Adair]

Is to have no fear.

[Chad Abumrad]

We all have to understand that.

[Ben Adair]

This is Fela Kuti. Fear no man. I'm Jad Abumrad. So that last chapter about Fela's mother, I'll be honest. What tipped us off to that was a woman named Stephanie Shonekan.

[Chad Abumrad]

So my husband's father.

[Ben Adair]

She is a ethnomusicology professor and a dean at the University of Maryland. And she'd written an article that basically made the argument that there's no way.

[Chad Abumrad]

Fela wasn't influenced by the songs his mother and the women sang.

[Ben Adair]

That if you listen to Fela's music, he's, you know, he's calling people out. He's quote, unquote, verbally abusing people. Stephanie's argument is that he would spend the rest of his life channeling those women. So I want to give a nod to her for that idea and also pick up on one of the threads in there, which is that one of the links is that his music is also funny. Fella stands for a kind of humor that is subversive and mischievous and can undo things. It was something he learned from his mom clearly, and took into his world. Which brings us to chapter five, the Trickster. What follows is me trying to pull together a few threads. In almost every culture, you will find stories of tricksters. You know, like in Norse mythology, you've got the God Loki. In Native American traditions, you have tons of stories of raven tricksters and coyote tricksters. In Yoruba cosmology, you have the God Ishu.

[Chad Abumrad]

Eshu is a mischievous deity, but at the same time a deadly serious deity.

[Ben Adair]

Because Eshu queries reality, that is Nobel Prize winning author and fellow Kuti cousin, Wolisha. And what he means is Eshu is unpredictable and sly. He's the God who tests the other gods and reminds the humans even the gods can be played. In one story, Yishu steals yams from the garden of one of the big gods. Then he gets the big God's slippers and he walks around in the garden to create footprints. So that when the big God comes out and thinks, who stole my yams? He sees his own footprints, thinks, wait, did I, Did I do it?

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeshu exists to teach humanity that there's always more than one side to any issue, more than one face to any reality. This is Eshu, this one. You see the face here and you.

[Ben Adair]

See the other face. Okay, we are back in Lagos. One of the reasons I wanted to sort of think about Issu in this series is because you see Issu all over Lagos. That voice is chief Nikkei Orkendai, who runs an absolutely amazing art gallery in Lagos. As she was showing us around the top floor of her gallery, the she picked up a small statuette of Yishu lurking in the corner. A little two faced figure, one face in the front, one face in the back. Yes. And then see what is this down here?

[Chad Abumrad]

That is the trouble.

[Ben Adair]

She pointed to a little pouch on the statue's side. So he has a current trouble.

[Chad Abumrad]

This is where all the power is.

[Ben Adair]

Standing there, seeing the pouch full of trouble, I was immediately reminded of one of Fela's famous quotes.

[Chad Abumrad]

I have death in my pouch. I can't die, they can't kill me.

[Ben Adair]

Different kind of pouch. Of course, it was easy to make that connection in that moment because for every issue that you see in the galleries, you would see ten images of Fela. Oh yeah, there he is again. You have so many Felas. Giant paintings of him playing the sax, him raising his fists in power.

[Chad Abumrad]

In fact, this is Fela. Fela Anikulapo Kuti. This is our icon that can never be forgotten.

[Ben Adair]

At one point during our visit, she showed a group of 10 year olds a painting of Fellah where his face and his hair were made entirely of recycled plastic.

[Chad Abumrad]

So beautiful. This is beautiful.

[Ben Adair]

So cool, right?

[Chad Abumrad]

It's cool, yeah.

[Ben Adair]

Point is, there's an easy connection to make here. And many people have.

[Chad Abumrad]

We can't talk about Fela without thinking about the provocation and the trickster gods that have trickster spirits.

[Ben Adair]

That's Saul Williams, musician, actor, filmmaker.

[Chad Abumrad]

And Fela clearly, clearly operated in that zone.

[Ben Adair]

And here's another odd way that this popped up for us during team meetings. As we'd be talking about the many times that Fela would be chased by police and then give them the slip, we started shorthanding it with the phrase cat and mouse game. Cat and mouse game.

[Chad Abumrad]

Cat and mouse game.

[Ben Adair]

As in, it's like Tom and Jerry Looney Tunes. Or like Bugs Bunny.

[Chad Abumrad]

Now I gotcha you, you wabbit playing.

[Ben Adair]

Tricks on Elmer Fudd. Interestingly, a number of scholars have suggested that maybe Looney Tunes animators were subconsciously modeling those characters after gods like Eshu. I find it interesting to think of Fela in this way as a trickster God playing tricks on the power structure. Except in this case, where the violence is real, the stakes could not be higher. It's flesh and blood. The pain hurts. And where the tricks, they're not just funny, they build worlds. I'm going to make this argument, fella, as trickster God for you in three steps, three anecdotes.

[Chad Abumrad]

First up, I love expensive shit. I love the story behind expensive Shit. It's one of the best stories, I think, in music history. No, I mean, you really can't ignore expensive shit.

[Ben Adair]

That is Questlove, musician, writer, performer, and before him, Hanif Abdurraqib Sas, music critic, one of our advisors. I think that's one of the most.

[Chad Abumrad]

Clever songs about defecating in postmodern pop history. Expensive Shit. My name is Deli Shusemi, Afobe and personal. They were gonna fly him for possession of weed, which he didn't have.

[Ben Adair]

Tiny bit of context. 1974, there is a military dictatorship in Nigeria. The dictatorship declares a war on indecency. Free expression is curtailed. Smoking weed is very illegal.

[Chad Abumrad]

At that time, they looked at weed smoking as synonymous with heroin addiction.

[Ben Adair]

That's musician, author, Yale professor Michael Veal, also one of our advisors.

[Chad Abumrad]

They didn't make any distinction and people were getting thrown in jail for 10 years because of a half smoke joint.

[Ben Adair]

Meanwhile, you have Fela openly defying those rules. He declares his compound a sovereign state and there is a lot of pot smoking. Here he is in a video with French journalists rolling a joint.

[Chad Abumrad]

This Kalakuta special. What is Kalakuta? Kalakuta is grass made from grass. I wouldn't say more because the police will be on my ass again, man.

[Ben Adair]

All of this was infuriating to the government. So in April of that year, the government starts to raid his house repeatedly.

[Chad Abumrad]

The hostilities between Fela and the Nigerian authorities never ceased. The army attacks Kalafuka again. In the blink of an eye. The army surrounds the house. Soldiers rush in, men capable of anything.

[Ben Adair]

So I'm sitting here with different piles of newspapers containing loads and loads of.

[Chad Abumrad]

Reports of Fela's arrest.

[Ben Adair]

That is our producer in Lagos, Fei Fei.

[Chad Abumrad]

May 11, 1974. For the second time in 11 days, Afrobeat king Fela Ransom Kuti, charged with.

[Ben Adair]

Unlawfully possessing Indian hemp. So the government kept raiding his house and. And on one of those rates, this is in April of 1974. Here is what happens. And here I am paraphrasing from an account Fela gave to his biographer, Carlos Moore. The police burst in the door looking for weed on this occasion. They search under the mattresses, under the couch, and they find nothing. Then apparently one of the policemen takes a joint out of his own pocket that he had brought and he drops it on the floor and he says, well, well, well, look what we have Here. Now, that one joint would have been enough to put Fela away for 10 years. So the policeman shows Fela the joint, says, look, we found this. Fela says, found what? Well, this. Then the policeman unrolls the joint and shows it to him. Fela's like, what do you mean? I can't see it. Policeman is like, what do you mean? It's right here in my hand. Fela says, I can't see it. You have to bring it closer. Policeman brings it right up to his face. And in the blink of an eye, Fela grabs the joint and swallows it.

[Chad Abumrad]

You've heard the story.

[Ben Adair]

Yeah.

[Chad Abumrad]

So he snatched it out of their heart. Because they tried to plant it, ate it, and then the process. Now a series of things happened. He got put in jail, waiting for him to shit. Police realizing that he ate it, were just waiting around for a stool sample.

[Ben Adair]

So they stuff him in with a bunch of other prisoners. And they wait. They wait a day, no shit. A second day, no shit. A third day. Fela sits there the entire time, defiantly not shitting.

[Chad Abumrad]

Then the final day. The final day, he was like, I want to shit. Pandemonium. After not shitting for three days, it says Fela has been led into the toilet by policemen who need needed his.

[Ben Adair]

Stool to prove a new hemp charge. He does the deed.

[Chad Abumrad]

Police have taken Fela's stool for analysis.

[Ben Adair]

By a government chemist. The chemist looks at it under a microscope and nothing. No hemp fibers anywhere.

[Chad Abumrad]

What happened is the other prisoners, who all loved him by the way, they switched the shit bucket. Every day he paid a fellow inmate to swap out. Swap out stool samples. So they never got the correct shit bucket.

[Ben Adair]

That's musician, author John Collins. We'll hear more from him in a bit.

[Chad Abumrad]

He was secretly shitting in the night. His mom was bringing loads of spinach still for him to eat.

[Ben Adair]

I hadn't heard the spinach part. That's interesting.

[Chad Abumrad]

Oh, the mom. His mom would come. I'm here to visit my son.

[Ben Adair]

Turns out, with the help of his mother, with the help of the other prisoners, he'd been shitting the entire time. A lot. So that by the time of the public shit, there was no hemp left in his system. The police had no choice but to let him go.

[Chad Abumrad]

So now he comes out. He now starts to write lyrically.

[Ben Adair]

He writes a song to commemorate the incident.

[Chad Abumrad]

Expensive shit, he says. A goat bent it. Yes.

[Ben Adair]

Lyrics in pidgin basically say, a goat comes, takes a dump. What does it do? It moves away from the dump. Why? Because it smells, doesn't want to be there. Same with a monkey. When it relieves itself, doesn't hang around, it moves away from the feces, doesn't want to be there. Same is true with most humans. A woman, a man, after they do their business, they don't hang out. Every creature on the earth is programmed to run away from its own excrement.

[Chad Abumrad]

But not some people who would like to reverse things in your life, destroy your life.

[Ben Adair]

It's a very clever way of pointing out the upside downness of it all. Everyone, everything, avoids its own excrement. Except our leaders who fetishize the stuff, study it. Doesn't that smell funny to you?

[Chad Abumrad]

It's funny. And it sums up the level of pressure he was under.

[Ben Adair]

Can't forget that part, says Hanif. He released that song with the threat of violence hanging right over his head.

[Chad Abumrad]

Makes me think of this Saul Williams again, Maya Angelou quote. Anything an artist writes should be written with the urgency of what they would write if someone were holding a gun in their mouth.

[Ben Adair]

I mean, that's literally true for him.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah, it's literally that. Wu Tang has a song called Triumph where one of the rappers in his verse says, that's amazing. Done in your mouth talk, you know? You know, and it's that Fela personifies that idea of gun in your mouth talk. Like, I may get killed for saying this. These may be my last words, but let it be said.

[Ben Adair]

This is Fello Kuti. Fear no man. All right, second story. One of the roles of the trickster across the various traditions is to make you question things, the things in your world that seem unchangeable. Just to give you a contemporary example that will relate to our next story, music streaming. Think of the main music streamers. We all know the companies. It is wild to me that we have this system where you could be making really good music that everybody loves. And in exchange, you get 5 cents. Like, here, put your music on our thing so that we can sell ads against it. And in exchange we will give you a nickel. Some people have called this a form of digital sharecropping. And yet it can feel like the only way that any musician can survive is to play that dystopian game. Is that the only option? Honestly, maybe. Or. Or you could take matters into your own hands, as Fela did in 1978 with what was then essentially the West African version of said streaming companies, Decca.

[Chad Abumrad]

Records, Fela Kuti invaded the head office and barricaded himself in for several weeks. Together with his extensive family, he Claimed Deka had refused to pay him his royalties.

[Ben Adair]

He.

[Chad Abumrad]

Deca was a stupid, stupid, stupid Deca.

[Ben Adair]

That voice is Chief Taiwo Lijiadu, one half of the Lijiado sisters. They are sometimes referred to as the female fellas. And they were also assigned to Deca.

[Chad Abumrad]

Somebody should have decked them a long time ago.

[Ben Adair]

Wait, back up a little bit. Explain to me, what did he do?

[Chad Abumrad]

First of all, Dus, he went to live in Decca. He took over Decca offices.

[Ben Adair]

In the summer of 1978, Fela and Decca Records get into a dispute over royalties. Fela demands money. They won't pay it. There are public accusations flying back and forth in the paper. Things escalate until one day, Fela storms the building and takes it over.

[Chad Abumrad]

Fela and his wives moved in there on July 19th carrying mattresses and a generating plant. Two of his wives had children in the managing director's office.

[Ben Adair]

He had a baby in there.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah. But one thing that he did that was good, that I still love him for, is he looked at all the contracts that Decca made people sign. Sickening.

[Ben Adair]

She says her and her sister, even though they were really famous before they signed with Decca, ended up getting forced into a contract that had them tied to Decca for 10 years.

[Chad Abumrad]

Four albums. How much did they pay us? 17,000. 17,000 naira?

[Ben Adair]

No way. That's the equivalent of 10,000 US dollars for 10 years of work. That's nothing.

[Chad Abumrad]

So we didn't make money.

[Ben Adair]

Wow. So he, when he was in the offices, he destroyed all the contracts.

[Chad Abumrad]

He told them all, he said, this is. This is slavery. Well, they managed to get Fella out of the building first. They sent gangsters, thugs to beat Fela out of the building.

[Ben Adair]

That's Femi Kuti, Fela's oldest son. Afrobeat musical force in his own right. He says in late summer 1978, they sent thugs and gangsters to remove Fellah from the building. And by they, he means Decca's president, Mko Abiola. Now, Abiola is a man who would eventually run for president of Nigeria. Fascinating figure. Deserves a whole lot more time than we have here for our purposes. Think of him as Hector to Achilles or Lex Luthor to Superman. He became one of Fela's great nemesis, which started because he was the president of the label that Fela felt was screwing him over.

[Chad Abumrad]

So Fela got back home and Fela said, what can he do to this man that will be so painful?

[Ben Adair]

Few days later, I was sleeping dead of night.

[Chad Abumrad]

This guy walks into. You know how these cowboys cover their Bandits that they cover their face like this with hanky. Comes and just says, fella is calling you. And I'm looking, I wake up. Fella is calling you. Follow me. Follow you to where? Just come. Shh. Let's go. Where? Come.

[Ben Adair]

Before he knows it, he's in a basement surrounded by other guys with bandanas around their face.

[Chad Abumrad]

Everybody's whispering, you know, take your shoes off. They put this lilo, this paper they.

[Ben Adair]

Use for bread, like Saran Wrap. They wrap the shoes in it.

[Chad Abumrad]

With the shoes. We tied it, they put it on. You know, I'm still high from my sleep. They say, yeah, take your own gloves. Gloves. Then I see fella here. We can go. Go where? I got to throw sheets. Throw sheets? Yes. The fella jumps in the van. Everybody jump on the bus. Then we all jump on the bus. You know, I was still.

[Ben Adair]

In the bus. Femi discovers there were 10 buckets of human shit which had been procured by Duro Ikugenyo, one of Fela's lieutenants.

[Chad Abumrad]

So this is, this bridge is called the Echo Bridge.

[Ben Adair]

We spent a lot of time with Duro and one day we were with him crossing this bridge from Lakeless island to the mainland. And he points to this big industrial looking site that was on the water.

[Chad Abumrad]

You see where those ships are down the road there. So this is where I bought the sheet from. No, I'm telling you about 10 buckets. Will I give me money?

[Ben Adair]

Wait, you went to get it from the, the, like the public sewage system?

[Chad Abumrad]

I, I gave them money and I told them, get me 10 buckets full of.

[Ben Adair]

That's funny, I thought everyone just shit in buckets but you.

[Chad Abumrad]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We want to buy it. We bought it.

[Ben Adair]

Okay, back to story. They make it to Abiola's compound with their buckets.

[Chad Abumrad]

His house was lit up completely. Lights everywhere. You know, he was so rich.

[Ben Adair]

It's 2am they quietly pull up to the entrance of the house.

[Chad Abumrad]

So Fala says, okay, get ready, everybody get your buckets.

[Ben Adair]

Van door swings open.

[Chad Abumrad]

Everyone throws the poo poo on the floor. Six of us. I was six places. You know, I'm still like, what is going on here? Why? Just I was about to throw my own. They say, fela, go. Fela moves at the same time. So I fall, I flip out with the, with the poo poo and I just go landing the other poo poof.

[Ben Adair]

He says he face plants onto a big pile of human excrement.

[Chad Abumrad]

By this time, the security are shouting, it's Fella, Fella, stop him. I did. Everybody say, Femi has fallen out. It's not funny. I'm laughing now. I was scared.

[Ben Adair]

So what happened after that? Did you get away?

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah, we got off.

[Ben Adair]

Dura says they managed to get Femi back into the car and speed off just in time.

[Chad Abumrad]

We finished, so we now go back home. Fela is in awe. Fantastic. Mission accomplished. Fela now says, I don't want this word to go out. This is from the Shit Boys.

[Ben Adair]

In fact, before driving off, they had left a note on Abiola's porch.

[Chad Abumrad]

From the Shit boys. You give us shit, I give you shit. So that was the message from the Shit Boys.

[Ben Adair]

Did anyone find out that it was you?

[Chad Abumrad]

No, no, no. They didn't know.

[Ben Adair]

Abiola must have found out at some point, right?

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah, it was in the newspaper. Front page papers. She threw in Abiola's house. From the Sheet boys. Everybody knew it was Fela. The whole world. It was Fela. Fela. It was Fela. But nobody could say it was Fela. It was so strange.

[Ben Adair]

Strange, says Femi, because Fela religiously denied that he did it. He forbade anyone from saying that he did it. And yet at the very same moment, he releases a song called Give me.

[Chad Abumrad]

Shit, I give you shit.

[Ben Adair]

That is basically all about the incident.

[Chad Abumrad]

It became a very popular song. Give me shit, I give you sheets. I play piano on that. Plenty sheets. Like up your laughing. Go get full of sheets. Plenty, plenty.

[Ben Adair]

As you can hear, he mentions Abiola's name and the buckets in the song, all while denying that he had anything to do with it. Abiola would eventually get back at Fela. A few years later he would accuse Fela of stealing his car, which he almost certainly did not do because he was performing on television at the exact moment that the robbery supposedly occurred. But he was thrown in jail.

[Chad Abumrad]

And then they had beaten, ah, hell out of Fela. Blood dripping from his head to his toes. They handcuffed his hands to his legs. So Fela was like this, you know, the beating Fela got. So Fela, he did a lot of interviews then because they beat him and they threw him in the gutter. He. He said he felt his body, his spirit leave his body. So he felt no pain. He first felt his spirit ascend up. Then he was looking at himself. Then he now felt his spirit going back. He thinks it's his mother that sent him back. So when he now came back in his body, he said he has never felt pain like that in his life. He Said he was in so much pain. There's an endurance that comes with doing what Fela did for as long as he did. And I think that endurance comes with the audacity of knowing that you have something that can't be taken.

[Ben Adair]

It's also like, I mean, I don't want to romanticize those conditions at all. But there is a pattern, a very clear pattern. A raid happens. He makes a song about it.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Ben Adair]

That then creates another raid. A raid happens. He makes a song about it.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Ben Adair]

That then creates another raid.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Ben Adair]

And he makes a song about it.

[Chad Abumrad]

It's like an infinity loop. He creates Under Siege. The music reflects the frustrations with creating under siege. Those frustrations decry the government's actions. The government reacts to that by placing him under further siege.

[Ben Adair]

It's not just cause and effect. It's somehow like a structural pattern.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Ben Adair]

And I mean, in talking with writer Hanif Abdurraqib, we got onto what I think is one of the more interesting ideas behind Fela's tricksterism. It's that it was generative. He's able to take this violence that's being rained down on him and flip it into art that ends up outlasting the regime. I don't want to romanticize someone getting the hell beaten out of them, but there are different kinds of mischief, different kinds of confrontation, and this is a kind that we need more of right now.

[Chad Abumrad]

I'm worried now that confrontation is something that people are using simply as well. We shouldn't go down this way.

[Ben Adair]

No, go there.

[Chad Abumrad]

I think confrontation is mostly a vessel for cruelty right now, particularly because I think social media is just a container of cruelty, broadly because of the nature of it. But to think about confrontation as Fela would think about it. I came up in a world wherein confrontation was used as kind of a springboard to something greater. Not always, to be clear, but it could. You scaled the sheer cliff face, battling frostbite, running low, low on oxygen. The wind pierced your skin and every inch was agony. You reached heights no other human had before while getting nowhere at airport security. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best selling action titles on audible.

[Ben Adair]

This is Felikuti Fearnoman. Before we go to the third story, quick tangent. What Hanif said before the break.

[Chad Abumrad]

I came up in a world wherein confrontation was used as kind of a springboard to.

[Ben Adair]

How does one use confrontation as a springboard? Like, what does that look like? We were talking with Fela's oldest daughter, Yenni Kuti, and Fei Fei, our Field producer asked her. I'm curious though, were you ever in.

[Chad Abumrad]

The room when he composed music? This is how he composed. This is how you would know that he has a tune. All of you will be sitting in the room with him. Like we're all sitting here and he's just like this, staring into space. The only thing that is moving is his mouth and he will start cracking his teeth.

[Ben Adair]

And this is Chinyeri, one of Bela's wives.

[Chad Abumrad]

And notice that tells you that number.

[Ben Adair]

We heard this from a lot of people we interviewed that in the wake of a government attack, Fela would be sitting around with people talking and then suddenly he would retreat into his own mind and then his teeth would start to click.

[Chad Abumrad]

Ah, you can say anything, throw a bomb. He will not move from that position. Only his mouth will be moving. That's something just says hey.

[Ben Adair]

According to Delay, he would then snap out of the trance, call for a rehearsal, scribble down everyone's parts.

[Chad Abumrad]

Tenor sax, alto sax, baritone sax, trumpets, everything.

[Ben Adair]

According to one trickster myth, Native American myth, there was a time when the world was in darkness and no one was happy about this. But apparently the gods had a little box of daylight that they kept in a room. Raven, the trickster, decides to disguise himself as a leaf and use the wind to blow him into the room which held the box. And then he quickly steals the daylight out of the box and flies back down to earth. This story is meant to explain why we have daylight. It's because of the Raven's prank. A lot of the trickster myths go like this. The prank is the thing that creates our world. Similarly, you see this act of world building with Fellah and not just with music, and not just for him, but for others. Which brings us to our final story. We're going to circle back to 1974 after all of the drug squad raids earlier in the year. Fellah erects a 10 foot high barbed wire fen. But on November 23, 1974, the government sends dozens of police, heavily armed, to attack the compound.

[Chad Abumrad]

The Ghanaians, I mean, there were about 20 of us. We woke up vomiting.

[Ben Adair]

That's musician John Collins. At the time, he was playing in a High Life band with a bunch of Ghanaian musicians. They'd come to play with Fela and they were staying right near his house.

[Chad Abumrad]

It's just across the road. We thought we'd eaten some bad food or something and then we opened the windows and tear gas wafted in because his house across the road was being tear gassed.

[Ben Adair]

As he would later write. In his diary.

[Chad Abumrad]

Let me read it. Scores of riot police in blue shirts, tin hats and wicker basket shields were attacking fellas. Heavy concrete and barbed wire fence with axes.

[Ben Adair]

He says Fela and his people were on the roof throwing things down at the police.

[Chad Abumrad]

None of us Ghanaians had been tear gas before. And this was literally our second day. It freaked us out a bit.

[Ben Adair]

Fela would get thrown in jail for three days, released, and then he would immediately turn the event into a song called Kalakuta show, which is almost a word for word journalistic accounting of the raid.

[Chad Abumrad]

One day, one day.

[Ben Adair]

5Am One day, November. But what's more interesting is what happened after the raid when he was released from jail.

[Chad Abumrad]

He came back after three days with enormous crowds. He came back with an enormous crowd through mush in this working class district of Lagos.

[Ben Adair]

John says as he was walking back from jail, people started walking with him spontaneously.

[Chad Abumrad]

These were not just music fans. They were just everybody and anybody at all coming back to see their hero.

[Ben Adair]

He watched the whole thing unfold from the roof of the hotel.

[Chad Abumrad]

I took photographs as the crowd was coming. Took about 10 photographs. And you see, you know, a few in the distance. They're coming, he's leading them. And then they get closer and closer. And finally they get right outside the hotel.

[Ben Adair]

These pictures are amazing. There's like 10,000 people in this picture.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yes. His arm was in a bandage and he had a sort of hat. No, not a hat, actually. He had a bandage on his head because they'd beaten him on the head. So he said it was a pope's hat. It looked like the pope's hat.

[Ben Adair]

In one really striking picture, you see Fela standing on the hood of a car, a sea of heads all around him. And he's there preaching to them. John was too far away to hear what he was saying, but if you ask the question, why were they there? Gather around him? He makes the argument that Fellah's music really was like. Like daylight when he would lock horns with the state and turn that into song. Inside those songs, he invented a whole new language that helped people understand their world. And what they were up against.

[Chad Abumrad]

Feller has done is he's coined words, okay, Beasts of no Nation is basically the multinationals. What a wonderful name for the multinationals. A beast of no nation or everything goes scatter. We have poets who write about. I've forgotten which poet is the center cannot hold. But Feller just says everything goes scatter. Everybody knows what he means. There's no center.

[Ben Adair]

He coined terms like government Magic, which people say, referring to the way that government rewrites history, like, oh, that's just government magic. Opposite people, colonial mentality, yellow fever, oyimbo. All kinds of words that you hear everywhere in Lagos. My favorite sort of shorthand is army arrangement, a term he used to refer to cycles of corruption. Not just the way that one corruption regime hands off to the next, but those truth and reconciliation panels in the middle that are supposed to be all about change, but really it's just like a mobster going to confessional. It's all part of the same choreography. Just like an army marching this way and then that and then this way and then that. These are all words that describe the true insanity of a world that they try to convince you is normal. And they're all words that people in Nigeria use today all the time.

[Chad Abumrad]

No, Feller, I don't know even how to describe Fellows. The only thing I would say is that we've ended up or the Nigerians have ended up with a sort of a bit like what happened in China. You had Mao Zedong's red book.

[Ben Adair]

The red book was a series of quotes from Chairman Mao about class struggle, war, revolution, creativity, however you feel about it politically, it's one of the most printed books in human history.

[Chad Abumrad]

You know, these socialistic leaders often have a book of their proverbs or their sayings to keep everybody on the street narrow. Well, Nigeria's got it in the form of fellows music because he was warning the Nigerians about what's going to happen, and it's happened.

[Ben Adair]

A trickster side question that keeps buzzing around my brain is like, there's a lot of political music out there. What makes Fela's music different? Because I do think it's different. Like what. What makes music truly political and not just cosmetically political, if you know what I mean. I had the opportunity to speak with President Barack Obama and this question came up.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yes.

[Ben Adair]

Could you imagine something? Okay, so one of the songs that we're going to be focusing on is Zombie, where it was such a. An affront to the power structure at that point that they burned his house down. Can you imagine a work of art provoking that reaction now? Like, what would that song have to be?

[Chad Abumrad]

Well, I think that's one of the interesting things. One of the challenges that we've got in our culture today is there's no protest song that can't be packaged and commercialized and make billions of dollars for somebody. And it's hard to imagine anything that would shock the sensibilities enough that somebody wouldn't make a buck off it. And I think that is one of the challenges for artists today, the capacity of the corporations that own the music industry to commodify even protest music.

[Ben Adair]

Sitting in that interview, it occurred to me this might be one of Fela's most enduring tricks. He engineered his protest music so that it was very hard for it to be commodified by anyone else but him. His songs were 30 minutes long. They wouldn't work on the radio, and he generally refused to make a radio edit after he put out a record. He would never play that song live. People in the audience would yell, play that song.

[Chad Abumrad]

And he'd say, please, for information, I don't play sounds on record. Okay? I don't play sounds on record, okay? So don't make noise, please. Okay?

[Ben Adair]

This drove the record labels crazy because the way that you make money is to go on tour and play the hits. He opted out in a very real way. Because the truth is, it's not simply that corporations commodify artists. The artists have to agree to it. And almost all artists agree. He didn't. He made a conscious decision to take all of his riches and funnel it towards social change. That is just not something that artists in America do at all.

[Chad Abumrad]

I didn't want to participate in the madness of commercialism. I didn't want to participate in the madness of gimmicks.

[Ben Adair]

This is him in 1988.

[Chad Abumrad]

I do not want African music to belong to the fashion where music comes and goes, because where African music goes, it stays.

[Ben Adair]

In the next chapter, we get into some stuff about Fela that's a lot harder to romanticize.

[Chad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Ben Adair]

I'm not even sure what in the.

[Chad Abumrad]

In the. I don't know.

[Ben Adair]

It's a bit like you are like, well, what am I supposed to do, though, with this information? That's actor, writer, Fela, Superficial fan. IO Deb. How does.

[Chad Abumrad]

Like, what am I supposed to do?

[Ben Adair]

I can't. Can't talk to him. And what are you. What. What are you thinking of when you say that?

[Chad Abumrad]

Him and women.

[Ben Adair]

I was thinking of. Of. Of him and.

[Chad Abumrad]

And. And women. Yeah.

[Ben Adair]

Which. Which is complicated. That's next. This has been a higher ground and audible original produced by Audible Higher Ground Audio, Western sound and Talkhouse 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. Jen 11 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, but Ruby Heron Walsh was lead producer and researcher. Our producers were Fefe Odudu and Oluakemi Aleliusui. Ben Adair was our editor with editing help Carla Murthy. Consulting producers were Bolu Babalola, Dotun Ayubade, Neef, Abdur Rahib, Michael Veal, Moses Achunu and Judith Byfield. I want to give a very special thanks to Guad Law, Chica Hirim Moore and Esther E from Archive ng. That's a R C H I V I ng they created an archive of Nigerian newspapers going all the way back to the mid-1960s. It is an absolute treasure. Thank you to Duro Ikugenu in his band Age of Aquarius. Search up Duro and the Age of Aquarius to hear his new record which is out now to ID for all his help with research and connections. 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, Yenny, Femi Shayun and Ma Day to Melissa o' Donnell to Inside Projects, Maggie Taylor. And big thanks to Karla Murthy, Leah Friedman and Shane. The head 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. This is Tanya Mosley, co host of Fresh Air. You'll see your favorite actors, directors and comedians on late night TV shows or YouTube, but what you get with Fresh Air is a deep dive.

[Chad Abumrad]

Spend some quality time with people like.

[Ben Adair]

Billie Eilish Questlove, Ariana Grande, Stephen Colbert and so many more. We ask questions you won't hear asked anywhere else. Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYYY. I'm Dallas Taylor, host of 20,000HZ, a lovingly crafted podcast about the amazing world of sound. From music and video games to science and history, the world of sound is full of great stories. The TIE Fighter was made with a car passing by a microphone on wet pavement. And then layered on top of that are these elephant growls.

[Chad Abumrad]

You can choose between snares. You can start chopping up the amenbreak.

[Ben Adair]

And rearranging the individual pieces.

[Chad Abumrad]

Beats into other configurations.

[Ben Adair]

And this barely scratches the surface. We've also revealed the hidden stories behind the most iconic sounds to ever be created to unlock your sonic world. Follow 20,000HZ right here in your podcast player.