In this episode of My African Bookshelf, we place Expensive Shit, the 1975 album by Fela Anikulapo Kuti & Africa ’70, on the shelf and slow down with it—not simply as music, but as political text, cultural archive, and historical evidence.

The episode begins with the now-famous incident that inspired the album: a police raid, an accusation of cannabis possession, and the state’s obsessive attempt to use Fela’s own body as evidence against him. What follows is not merely a retelling of a scandal, but an examination of how power operates—through surveillance, humiliation, and control of the body—and how Fela responds by turning that moment into sound, rhythm, and public laughter.

We move through the album’s two long tracks, “Expensive Shit” and “Water No Get Enemy,” paying attention to how Afrobeat’s extended grooves, call-and-response structure, and repetition function as more than musical choices. They become tools of political education—ways of drawing listeners into a shared rhythm before delivering critique. Humor, proverb, and storytelling emerge not as distractions from resistance, but as central strategies within it.

From there, the episode looks beneath the surface. We explore how the album reframes state power by exposing its pettiness and desperation, how laughter becomes a weapon, and how time itself—stretching a song over ten or twelve minutes—creates space for reflection, absorption, and collective understanding. “Water No Get Enemy,” grounded in Yoruba philosophy, offers a quieter counterpoint: a meditation on forces that cannot be owned, defeated, or permanently controlled.

Finally, the episode places Expensive Shit in conversation with African folktales, modern protest art, and contemporary struggles around surveillance, authority, and freedom. The album is treated as part of a longer lineage—from trickster stories to today’s musicians, filmmakers, and storytellers—who continue to name what is happening and refuse silence.

This is not a conventional album review. It is an invitation to listen closely, to hear music as evidence, and to ask what it means when rhythm, humor, and pain sit side by side.

As always, the episode ends not with answers, but with questions—about power, resistance, and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.

My African Bookshelf is an ANSRd Labs podcast.

In this episode of My African Bookshelf, we examine the rise of artificial intelligence through an African lens, using Karen Hao’s Empire of AI as our guide. The conversation unpacks the hidden labor behind today’s AI systems, the global inequalities embedded in their development, and the quiet ways African workers, resources, and environments are woven into the AI economy.

Moving between the lived experiences of data annotators in the Global South and the narratives promoted by Silicon Valley, the episode draws clear parallels between the current AI boom and earlier periods of resource extraction in Africa. It asks difficult questions about power, visibility, ethics, and who ultimately benefits from technological progress.

More than a review, this episode positions storytelling as a form of resistance and inquiry—an essential tool for understanding how technology shapes societies, and how Africa can move from the margins of innovation narratives to a position of agency and authorship.

In this opening episode of My African Bookshelf, Jii ;a former librarian, invites you into a different kind of library: a living shelf of African stories across books, albums, films, and oral traditions. This is not a podcast about reading or watching for leisure alone, but a thinking space for memory, meaning, and method. We talk about why stories matter, how they freeze a moment in culture, and what they reveal about power, identity, and how Africans are seen—by themselves and by the world. You will also hear about the first work on the shelf, Empire of AI by Karen Hao, and why a book about artificial intelligence belongs in a conversation about African futures.