Fela Kuti: Fear No Man
In a world that’s on fire, what is the role of art? What can music actually…do?
Can a song save a life? Change a law? Topple a president? Get you killed?
In Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, Jad Abumrad—creator of Radiolab, More Perfect, and Dolly Parton’s America—tells the story of one of the great political awakenings in music: how a classically trained 'colonial boy’ traveled to America, in search of Africa, only to return to Nigeria and transform his sound into a battering ram against the state—creating a new musical language of resistance called Afrobeat.
For years, the world’s biggest stars made pilgrimages to Nigeria to experience Fela’s Shrine, the epicenter of his musical revolution. But when the mix of art and activism got too hot, the state pulled out its guns, and literally opened fire.
Fela Kuti: Fear No Man is an uncategorizable mix of oral history, musicology, deep dive journalism, and cutting edge sound design that takes listeners deep inside Fela’s life, music, and legacy.
Drawing from over 200 interviews with Fela Kuti’s family, friends, as well as scholars, activists, and luminaries like Burna Boy, Paul McCartney, Questlove, Santigold, and former President Barack Obama (just to name a few), Fela Kuti: Fear No Man journeys deep into the soul of Afrobeat to explore the transformative power of art and the role artists can play in this current moment of global unrest.
An Audible Original presented by Audible and Higher Ground. Produced by Western Sound and Talkhouse.
©2025 Higher Ground, LLC (P)2025 Audible Originals, LLC.
© 2025 Higher Ground, LLC (P)2025 Audible Originals, LLC. · more info
Artwork and data is from the podcast’s open RSS feed; we link directly to audio · Read our DMCA procedure
This podcast may use tracking and attribution and dynamic content insertion
Stats: Statistics are produced by ART19 and Magellan AI to help Fela Kuti: Fear No Man to understand how many downloads it is getting, or how many people are listening. Your device’s IP address and user agent is used to help calculate this figure. ART19 is IAB v2 certified. Here is more detail about podcast statistics.
Tracking and attribution: ART19 or its partners may connect the fact you listened to this podcast to an action elsewhere on the internet. For example - it may spot a device that downloaded an episode of Fela Kuti: Fear No Man later visited the website of an advertiser; or it may track that a device that listened to Fela Kuti: Fear No Man also listened to a different show. This form of attribution is used to measure advertising effectiveness.
Dynamic content insertion: ART19 may use limited data that they know about you - the device you’re using, the approximate location you’re in, or other data that can be derived from this, like the current weather forecast for your area - to change parts of the audio. Fela Kuti: Fear No Man may do this for advertising or for other forms of content, like news stories.
Fela Kuti: Fear No Man is able to use the above tools since its podcast host or measurement company offers this service. It doesn’t mean that this individual podcast uses them, or has access to this functionality. We use open data.
Listen and follow
Information for podcasters
- Podcast GUID:
089a985c-cce1-53ff-965c-7949c31c6c05 - This podcast appears to be missing from Truefans, iVoox, and Luminary. We list all the podcast directories to be in.
- Validate this podcast’s RSS feed with Livewire, Truefans or CastFeedValidator