MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5, at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Later in the broadcast, we pay tribute to film and theater critic Joe Barber who died on Monday. But first, he's a cult figure in his native Nigeria, a man who insisted on speaking truth to power. He played music for more than four decades using his lyrics and his music as a bayonet.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIHe was beaten, jailed and framed by repressive government officials multiple times. Despite that, he created his own political party, ran for president twice and toured the world. Most experts agree the name Fela Kuti should be quite familiar to American audiences. But, until recently, most in America had never heard of him.

MR. KOJO NNAMDISure, The New York Times has been writing about him for years. And The Nation magazine calls him a shaman, politician, ombudsman, activist and musical genius. But it may take a Broadway musical to really get Americans paying attention to Fela Kuti. Joining us in studio is Sarh Ngaujah. He is an actor, writer and poet who has been playing the lead role in FELA!, well, since he began work-shopping it with director Bill T. Jones back in the year 2006. Sarh Ngaujah, thank you so much for joining us.

MR. SARH NGAUJAHYeah, cheers. How are you doing, Kojo?

NNAMDIGlad to have you in studio.

NGAUJAHThank you.

NNAMDIJoining us from studios at the Columbia School of Journalism in New York is Howard French. He's a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. He's former African bureau chief for The New York Times. He's the author of several books, including, "A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa." Howard French, good to hear from you.

PROF. HOWARD FRENCHHello. Good to be here.

NNAMDIGlad you could join us. I want to start out with how I first heard about Fela in those days, Ransome Kuti back in the mid-1970s or so. I was listening to the radio one day on, of all things, a Caribbean program on a station here in Washington, and I heard this.

NNAMDIIf you'd like to share with us when you first heard Fela, you can call us at 800-433-8850, or if you have seen the performance here in town or maybe in New York on Broadway, 800-433-8850. You can send us a tweet, @kojoshow, email to kojo@wamu.org. Or go to our website, kojoshow.org, and join the conversation there.

NNAMDISarh Ngaujah, from what I've read about you, you were growing up in Indiana, the child of a father from Sierra Leone and a mother from California. How and when did you first hear of Fela? And do you remember it?

NGAUJAHWell, I was born in Indiana, but I actually grew up in Atlanta. Yeah, I moved to Atlanta when I was around 7 years old. And, yeah, I first met Fela through my father. He was in Atlanta at the time. He was -- well, this was in the '80s. He was studying law by day and DJing by night. He was playing for a lot of African parties for, you know, the diaspora, Africans from all over -- Ethiopians, Ghanaians, Nigerians.

NNAMDIYeah, he belonged to everybody.

NGAUJAHYeah, so -- exactly. And, well, this is how I came across Fela, you know, hanging out with him, being at his house. The music, yeah, it grabbed me. Every time I heard it, it would grab me immediately. Sometimes, it was the horns that would get me, or, sometimes, it was just the rhythm, you know, the cadence. Other times, it was the sound of the backing vocals. And the first song that struck me really hard was I.T.T.

NNAMDIYeah.

NGAUJAHAnd, you know, I thought they were talking about a girl, you know, because in Sierra Leone, we call a girl T.T.

NNAMDIUh-huh.

NGAUJAHSo they say international T.T.

NGAUJAHI thought they were talking about some girl, you know? Then when my father brought the song down for me, I mean, it really blew my mind, you know, this layering of meaning, you know, using acronym and multiple ways that has a meaning in Western context and in African context. Yeah, it...

NNAMDIThe scandals around I.T.T. at that time in the United States and around the world, a lot of people who are seeing the performance now may not know about them. But, Howard French, how did you first know Fela?

FRENCHMy family moved to West Africa when I was just beginning college. And so I spent summers and vacations in the Ivory Coast, where they lived during those years. And I found myself hanging out in parts of town where a lot of Ghanaian -- other West African migrants lived, particularly Ghanaians, but also Nigerians.

FRENCHAnd there was a very lively street scene in terms of restaurants and cafes and nightclubs and the like in this area of Abidjan, which is called Treichville. And I began making friends with lots of these Ghanaians and some Nigerians. And Fela was in the air everywhere you went in that era. You know, being out in the city at night with these open-air bars and nightclubs and the like, you heard Fela everywhere. So that was my initiation to Fela.

FRENCHAnd I really like the word that Sarh used a moment ago, which was -- he said immediate. But what really grabbed me about Fela's music back then and still now, including in the little clip you just played, is the immediacy of it. There's just something really, you know -- I mean, the pulsating, not just rhythmically, but with electricity and energy that, you know, if you're a sentient creature, it's just going to grab you. There's no way getting past it.

NNAMDIWell, Sarh Ngaujah, how did this role come to you? Or how did you come to this role?

NGAUJAHWell, I ended up in New York at the request of a friend of mine who had written a show that was going to be produced off-Broadway. He asked me to come and audition for it. We'd worked before. We worked previously in the Netherlands.

NNAMDII was about to say, by then, you'd lived in the Netherlands. You'd lived in other parts of the world.

NGAUJAHMm hmm. Yeah, yeah. And I'd worked with this guy. His name is Will Power. We'd worked together in Rotterdam, yeah. And so I came to New York. I did this audition, and Bill T. Jones was the choreographer for this piece. Joe Barney was the director. And I didn't get the part. This piece was called "The Seven," you know, derived from the story of "The Seven Against Thebes." And anyway, in that audition, me and Bill, we exchanged info.

NGAUJAHHe asked for my details. I gave it to him. I went back to Amsterdam. And, yeah, a few months later, I got a call, saying Bill would like for you to read something for him. And I wasn't able to come to New York at that time. I was mounting a show of my own in Amsterdam. So a few months later, I was in the States. I came to New York. I read for Bill. He asked me to work with him in the development of the piece. And, yeah, six years later, here we are.

NNAMDIWell, he's talking about reading for the piece. For those of you have seen the piece, you will know that Sarh Ngaujah is not only superb, but that it is an extremely physical role. You do as much moving as you do talking. So I can understand you getting the role reading for the piece. But how did you manage to prepare yourself for that physicality in that piece, all of the stuff that you have to do?

NGAUJAHWell, you know, because it was -- you know, we had a quite a few years of development. And so every time we would come together to work on new ideas -- you know, I mean, essentially what we were doing, like, we were taking ideas about Fela's life. We were taking bits of text. We were taking bits of music and finding how they could come together, how -- we were fashioning the show step by step.

NGAUJAHAnd so every time we would convene for a workshop in process, from whatever information I was getting from Bill, from the information I got from my own research about Fela, then I would try to apply that in a way that could -- will be interesting on one, but then also to, you know, give me the maximum sort of challenge that I could manage.

NGAUJAHAnd between me and Bill pushing and pulling and also working with A.J. and Jordan from Antibalas, you know, it was really -- for me, it was really about pushing my own limits. And, yeah, I took every advantage during the developmental process.

NNAMDIAnd, of course, Antibalas is the band that plays on stage with you. I figured you'd spent a lot of time in the gym. You spent a lot of time running marathons.

NNAMDIYou spent a lot of time preparing...

NGAUJAHI do.

NNAMDI...in a wide variety of ways. Howard French, was seeing Howard (sic) in person that same kind of energy?

FRENCHSeeing Fela in person, you mean?

NNAMDISeeing Fela in person, that same kind of energy?

FRENCHYes. I first saw Fela in the 1990s when I was working, years after my first exposure to West Africa. I was sent there by The New York Times as a correspondent, and -- at a period of deep political crisis in Nigeria. The dictator, Sani Abacha, was in power, and he was an extraordinarily stern figure and ruled the country with an iron fist and broke little dissent at all.

FRENCHAnd Fela was one of the rare voices who sort of mustered the courage to continue to speak out against Abacha after a while. You know, Abacha was famous for just simply arresting people, executing anyone who defied him. And I made my way to the Shrine one night when I learned that Fela was giving a performance -- he was not performing much in those days -- and had an extraordinary experience there.

FRENCHI actually went to Fela's house where he was living on the day of the performance and interviewed him. I walked in. He was taking a nap. You know, Fela famously had many wives, and I knocked on the -- and somehow make my way into his house. There's no guard or locked door, anything like that, and sort of -- people point upstairs.

FRENCHI make my way upstairs, and I stumble upon a room where Fela's basically taking a nap in a room with three or four other people, all women. And I knocked on the door. The door was opened. And he sort of rouses himself. And he agreed to speak to me right there on the spot. We went into another room, and we talked for a while. And he told me to come to the Shrine that evening. And so I showed up at the Shrine.

FRENCHAnd the performances start very late. And Sarh's physicality in his performances are an accurate reflection of what Fela's own act is like, that, you know, I mean, here's a guy who starts a show around 11 o'clock at night, sometimes later. And you can go till 4 or 5 in the morning, and it's just constant, constant motion and music and performance the whole time. So that was my introduction to Fela in person.

NNAMDIAnd, Sarh, I suspect some people heard Howard say the Shrine. And they're wondering the Shrine? What was the Shrine? What is the Shrine?

NGAUJAHThis was Fela's club, you know, very famous, you know, in an area of Legos called Ikeja. Yeah, many people -- they don't like to travel to Ikeja. It could be kind of rough there, you know, during Fela's time, in particular. But, yeah, it was a club, and -- however, you know, you would find all types of people from all walks of life. And Howard can probably attest, too. He was there.

NGAUJAHI wish I could have had the opportunity to visit Fela's Shrine. There's now the new Afrika Shrine in Ikeja that's run by Fela's children. That place, it's built in commemoration of the Shrine, very big venue, you know? During Felabration, they are putting over 3,000 people inside of that place.

NNAMDIAnd for the members of our audience who have not seen it, the performance at the Shakespeare Sidney Harmon Theater in Washington and in Broadway, of course, is set at the Shrine where Fela is having his last performance at the Shrine. If you have seen the play and you would like to comment on it, call us at 800-433-8850. If you're just hearing about Fela and would like to know some more, you can also call or you can go to our website, kojoshow.org.

NNAMDIYou can send us a tweet, @kojoshow, or email to kojo@wamu.org. For a lot of people who actually saw this performance, they may not know that, for a while, after Fela fell in love with music, it looked like he would be a good, old-fashioned crooner. When I heard this, it surprised me.

NNAMDISahr Ngaujah, you had to study all of this in order to understand the whole fellow. Did that surprise you as much as it surprised me?

FRENCHYeah, the first time I heard "Highlife Time." Yeah, also.

NNAMDIIs that the same guy?

NGAUJAHYeah, yeah, I grew up listening to "Zombie" and, you know (unintelligible) when I first heard "Highlight Time," man -- and I didn't come across that until, you know, well within the research, you know, during, you know, for this piece a few years back, you know. This one, you know, I mean, there was one song he made, actually. He divorced himself from the song completely many years later, you know.

NGAUJAHBut this was during (word?). You know, they -- he ended up making this song for the regime. It was still around the same time that he was doing this as Fela Ransome Kuti, about, you know, everyone, we should just make peace, you know? Let us not fight each other. You know, he played a song. Then he's giving this whole...

NNAMDII heard that, too.

NNAMDI...spiel about -- yeah, man. So, yes, Fela, he had a very interesting development as a musician between what he studied in London, then coming back to Nigeria and trying to find a place, you know, in the musical kind of tapestry of Nigeria at that time, you know, West Africa, for that matter, you know?

NGAUJAHI mean, it really wasn't until he went to the States, you know, and was confronted, you know, with the American style of black consciousness, you know what I mean, that really, you know, triggered him to, you know, push his sound and his ideas.

NNAMDIBefore I get Howard French to comment on that, we will hear the transformation, if you listen to a clip from Fela's piece called "I No Be Gentleman."

NNAMDII be African man original. Howard French, what accounts for the transformation?

FRENCHWell, you know, what has to be said about Fela is that he was a truly protean figure. Here's a guy whose life was lived in just what can be looked at as distinct stages. And there was really remarkable growth in each of these stages. He -- people often comment about, and rightfully, about his -- the effect that the United States had on him. But Fela went to Ghana earlier, prior to going to the United States.

FRENCHAnd Ghana -- there was a reason why Fela would have gone to Ghana. Ghana was the center of sort of the birthplace of African independence and the center of a Pan-African kind of thinking, and also a musical center for -- especially for West Africa, but for Africa in general at that time. And so the idiom that was prevalent at the time was highlife. And so Ghana -- Fela goes to Ghana, and he absorbs that.

FRENCHAnd that's how you end up with the music that you heard in the prior clip. But here's a guy who has, you know, picked up and grown -- or grown, having picked up influences and inspiration at every stop along the way. From London, as an early young man, he goes to medical school and then drops out of medical school, and then decides, you know, he wants to study music. And then he goes to Ghana, comes back to Nigeria.

FRENCHThen he goes to Ghana. Then he goes to the United States. And in addition to the obvious political influences in the Black Power movement, et cetera, that he picked up in the United States, I think people like James Brown were a big influence on him. James -- this would have been corresponded with a sort of high point in James Brown's popularity and impact in the popular music scene in the United States.

FRENCHAnd you can see things in the rhythm section. You can see things in the use of horns in James Brown's bands that clearly have parallels in Fela's music. So, you know, I like to think of him as this guy who never stopped growing. And he comes back to Nigeria, initially, with this propulsive, very energetic music that is beginning to become highly political.

FRENCHAnd you can see, throughout the 1970s, this constant evolution in terms of radicalism and engagement, politically, and opposition to authoritarianism and dictatorship and military rule and corruption and the like. It's just truly a remarkable life not just a as musician, but as a human being.

NNAMDIGot to take a short break. When we come back, we will continue this conversation on Fela, currently playing at the -- at Washington Shakespeare Sidney Harman Theater. And we're talking with the star playing Fela. He is Sahr Ngaujah, actor, writer and poet, and Howard French who is a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism and former Africa bureau chief for The New York Times. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back. We're talking about the Broadway musical, "FELA!," now at the Washington Shakespeare Theatre Company, Sidney Harman Hall with Sahr Ngaujah. He is an actor, writer and poet who has been playing the lead role in "FELA!" since he began workshopping it with Bill T. Jones in 2006. Howard French joins us from New York.

NNAMDIHe's a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, former Africa bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of several books, including, "A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa." Sahr, you started doing this in 2006. That was five years ago.

NGAUJAHYeah.

NNAMDIWhen you started on this project, did you expect it to be engaging you for this long?

NGAUJAHNo. I really -- I didn't really have any kind of projection at all about what was going to -- you know, what was going to take place. You know, and when we started, it was -- you know, the idea was, hey, let's make a piece here. I was excited to make something dealing with Fela and to work with Bill T. Jones. And, for me, that was pretty much the deal. Okay, great, you know, develop something with Bill T. Jones about Fela Kuti's life.

NGAUJAHAnd I must say that I'm really a process-oriented artist. For me, I really -- it's about process. What happens after the -- if we have a dynamic process, we can find something great at the end of it. So that's really what was going on. But, you know, by the time we got to off-Broadway with something in our hands, then I thought, oh, wow. This thing, it is bigger than all of us, man.

NGAUJAHYou know, and then, you know, it really started to -- it became clear, I think, for quite a few of us involved that, you know, we're onto something that can turn into anything. But now, when it started, I didn't project this kind of development.

NNAMDIWell, I did. Howard French, I don't know if you, like me, for many, many years, were thinking, when are we going to see Fela's life on stage or in film? And then it finally happened. Is that a thought you ever had, Howard, before it all happened?

FRENCHIt is a thought I had. And it reminds me of something you said at the very outset of the program about how, you know, we are very much overdue for a familiarity in our popular culture here in the United States of an artist this grand and this important in terms of post-colonial African experience. And it reminds me of one of my very earliest experiences traveling to West Africa.

FRENCHAs I told you, I went as a student, and I would come back spellbound after summers in Ivory Coast and traveling throughout West Africa as a college student. And I would, you know, get back to campus in the fall, and I would try to turn on many of my fellow students, all -- you know, we're all similar age, in our late teens, early 20s.

FRENCHAnd I would come back with suitcases laden with African art and with African music and with African clothing and with African food and African this and African that. And I remember playing Fela for friends. One of -- at the end of one of these summers, I had just returned and, you know, really sort of -- I want to use the word high here, not in the narcotic sense -- on this music.

FRENCHAnd having, you know, a lot of the people that I exposed to -- this music to sort of wrinkle their brows and say, you know, what's that all about? You know, like, they couldn't get it right away, which stunned me because it seemed so -- as I -- I've used the word immediate in this conversation. It seems like you can't not get Fela, but better late than never, I guess. I mean, Sahr's performance is extraordinary.

FRENCHI saw it on Broadway, and I think it is a powerful rendition of this life that is a wonderful vehicle for introducing people to (word?).

NNAMDII, too, saw it on Broadway, and I saw it here. And, I guess, when hip-hop artists started sampling Fela in the 1990s, a lot more people became familiar. Here on the phone is Yepsir. (sp?) Yepsir, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

YEPSIRHi, Kojo. Yeah, I went to check out the show last day, actually, I think, of playing, the night I was there. And I was thoroughly pleased. I grew up in Ethiopia. I grew up listening to Fela, and I remember trying to practice "Zombie," like writing down each step so I can dance it with the music. And to actually see that on stage being performed was amazing.

YEPSIRAnd, I guess, I -- my only question is, how did you pick out the songs for the show? Like, what made you decide to use those songs?

NGAUJAHRight. Yeah, that was a very painstaking process, actually. We -- in dealing with the music -- I mean, for one, you know, Bill was very -- Bill T. Jones, our director, he was very adamant about having the music tell more of the story than what we were actually saying.

NGAUJAHAnd, of course, you know, at a certain point, we had to -- you know, once we decided what is the story that we're actually telling, which, you know, became the story about Fela, the last night at the Shrine. Is he going to go? Is he going to stay? Then it was, okay, what songs can help us paint this picture for the audience of a night like this in the Shrine?

NGAUJAHBut then also, what songs can help, you know, the audience, you know from -- and, you know, an audience from anywhere to get a sense of Fela's sound, you know? So -- well, this is also why we get into, you know, like, you know, little bit of the, you know, some of the early, earlier types of things that Fela was exploring. So -- but, yeah, you know, that's how we kind of made our decisions.

NGAUJAHAnd, of course, then it's, you know, how do we take a 30-minute song and turn it into a two-minute bite, you know? Yes.

NNAMDIExactly what we're trying to do here today, as a matter of fact. Yepsir, thank you very much for your call. Bill T. Jones, of course, a Kennedy Center honoree, a MacArthur Genius grant awardee and the director of this performance. Want to get back to the political for a second, Howard French.

NNAMDIAnd in order to do that, I'd like to play a song, "Sorrow, Tears and Blood," and have you talk about what was the political backdrop to all of this. Here it is.

NNAMDIHoward French, they leave sorrow, tears and blood, their regular trademark. What is he talking about?

FRENCHWell, you know, I guess, the general background to what he's talking about is repression by the military in Nigeria, that the soldiers were sent out to crush any dissent or protest often, in the 1970s. And so that would be the sort of general -- the first -- the sort of broad statement that one needs to make. But with many of his songs where he gets into this subject, he's speaking from personal experience.

FRENCHAnd, you know, the Shrine was attacked. The Shrine, being his nightclub, again, was attacked many times and closed down numerous times. In the most famous attack, of course, soldiers invaded the place. They hauled off -- beat and hauled off dozens and dozens of people. And his mother was thrown from the window and subsequently died from her injuries.

FRENCHAnd so this becomes a motif in numerous Fela songs that he returns to over and over and over again, which allows him to do a number of things -- denounce authoritarianism, denounce political violence, denounce repression -- but also get into some of his own background and sort of the early history of the country, in which his family played an important part.

FRENCHHe often calls his mother the mother of our nation, the mother of our independence because she was a very distinguished person who was involved in feminist politics and in independence politics early in -- well, late in the colonial period and early in the independence era.

NNAMDIAnd, Sahr Ngaujah, in the performance of "FELA!," the death of his mother is, in a way, transformative in the play for Fela and for the audience. The entire mood of everything changes at that point. Tell us your own feelings participating in that part of the performance.

NGAUJAHThat's -- well, yeah, so, yeah, when Fela faces the death of his mother in the piece, you know, we -- you know, he goes through this kind of moment. Well, in the Shrine, you know, Fela, in the club, the Shrine, Fela also had a shrine, you know. And there he would pay homage to ancestral spirits and to the gods that you find in Yoruba, in Yoruba culture, also in South America.

NGAUJAHAnd, you know, there -- often, in Fela's performances, you will see him putting on these paints, you know, on his face that is also used in the type of rituals involved in these sort of ceremonies. And so we wanted, you know, we wanted to kind of make a way, you know, to, you know, bring those worlds together in real time for the audience and show the relationship that that had to Fela's life and his music.

NGAUJAHAnd, for me, well, it's really -- it's a special moment in the piece to me because I also feel...

NNAMDIIt's the only time you actually slow down in the piece actually.

NGAUJAHYeah, that's true. I don't talk as much, yeah. I can take a breath. But, you know, there's also, you know, the idea of archetypes, you know, that humans have had with them, you know, for, you know, thousands of years and, you know, the archetype of the mother and the son is one that's very familiar in many cultures, you know, under many different names.

NGAUJAHAnd, for me, I think, you know, that's also a moment where there is something very simple, very basic, very primal about how humans kind of relate to images, you know, and the ideas of different types of beings. And, yeah, so anyway, that moment is very special for me there because it connects to a very, very old, old story.

NNAMDIHoward French, we're running out of time very quickly. But it seems to me that there is one significant irony here and that is one of the army military dictators against whom Fela Anikulapo Kuti was reeling was Olusegun Obasanjo, who would later go into exile for a while and return to Nigeria as a Democrat and be elected president of Nigeria, serving two terms, trying to extend that beyond two terms, as a matter of fact.

NNAMDIAnd I can only think of myself saying, at the time, Fela must be turning in his grave. Howard French.

FRENCHAbsolutely. Obasanjo is a very ambiguous character who has been very self-serving at times and has -- but has -- at moments in his career, has taken what would seem, at least on the surface, to be a principled stance. And so he did that once with regard to -- well, he did that a couple times with regards to ending military rule in Nigeria.

FRENCHAnd so he's -- but this became his vehicle for becoming a civilian president and becoming a civilian president whose tenure was notably corrupt and for amassing personal fortune for himself. But I think something else needs to be said. There's another irony here, which hasn't come up, and that is I.T.T., the person who is referred to in the song that we spoke of earlier.

FRENCHObasanjo himself, Fela, all of these people come from a city in western -- Southwestern Nigeria called Abeokuta, which is a center of traditional Yoruba culture and which has been the fount of an extraordinary number of extraordinary Nigerians. I mean, extraordinary is putting it too weakly almost.

FRENCHJust to think about Fela's own family, Fela is the cousin of Wole Soyinka, who is a Nobel Prize winner for -- a novelist and poet and playwright. But Fela's mother -- we've spoken about -- she was an important figure in feminism and in independence -- fighting the anti-colonial struggle. His father was an important preacher who was head of the Nigerian Union of Teachers.

FRENCHHis brothers were important early people in public health as medical doctors in Nigeria. So this is a guy who we talked about him coming back from the United States charged up with politics, but I think it's important to know this isn't -- you know, Fela has this rough exterior. You see him performing. He's singing in English, and if you don't -- I'm sorry, he's singing in pidgin.

FRENCHAnd if you don't know anything about him, you could think, well, he's this common -- almost common kind of rebel character. In fact, he comes from an extraordinary background.

FRENCHAnd he's using what he's learned through these various stages of his life and sort of translating it into a kind of speech with an immediacy of language in pidgin and immediacy of rhythm to vehiculate (sic) these extraordinary political messages that could be absorbed at the greatest common -- at the -- sort of what the greatest common denominator of the general public.

NNAMDII'm afraid that's all the time we have, Howard. Howard French is a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism. He's former Africa bureau chief for The New York Times. He's the author of several books, including, "A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa." Howard, thank you so much for joining us.

FRENCHThank you, Kojo.

NNAMDIAnd Sahr Ngaujah is an actor, writer and poet who has been playing the lead role in "FELA!" since, basically, 2006, currently appearing at The Shakespeare Theatre Company, Sidney Harman Hall. Sahr, thank you so much for joining us.

NGAUJAHYeah, cheers, Kojo.

NNAMDIAs we go out, we're going to play a song that is really reflective of both the power and the energy of Fela's music and also, of course, his politics. This is how he characterizes the forces of dictators not only in Nigeria but throughout Africa, "Zombie."