The Black President's Heir
- Taran
- Dec 17, 2025
- 11 min read
Paulie: Hey hotties, we’re back! This week I have the pleasure of revealing our next writer, Taran Will. Taran is a History graduate and music journalist based in London, who currently writes pieces for magazine When The Horn Blows, as well as writing for his own Substack, publishing album reviews that invariably aren’t really about reviewing albums. Needless to say, he’s an avid writer with a growing body of work on a wide range of topics and genres of music and we’re blessed to have him on the team.
Ok without further ado, let’s dive into Taran’s first piece: an exploration of Afrobeat through the lens of the Kuti dynasty and the intersection of music and protest in African politics!
Amid the media firestorm that surrounded Bob Vylan and Kneecap’s incendiary performances at Glastonbury over the summer, a clip of afrobeat musician Seun Kuti, youngest son of the legendary Fela Kuti and bandleader of Fela’s band Egypt 80 since his father’s death in 1997, began circulating online. Gaining digital traction, Seun’s address to the Croatian INmusic festival crowd was amplified by a cacophony of voices from across the globe, all struck by the stark revolutionism of his powerful words. On one Instagram post alone, the video amassed nearly 15 million views and over 940,000 likes, with floods of comments lauding the truths behind his vitriolic delivery. Onstage Seun stands in front of a projected pantheon of Black revolutionaries and Pan-African heroes that fought and died for an Africa not divided by colonialism, but united by solidarity, comprising of Fela, Fela’s mother Funmilayo Kuti (herself a pioneering voice for Nigerian women), Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Thomas Sankara, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X. Backlit physically and intellectually by these towering figures, Seun proclaimed:
“I have advice for young people in Europe. I know you want to free Palestine, you want to free Congo, you want to free Sudan. You want to free Iran. There’s a new one every week.
Free Europe! Free Europe from right-wing extremism. Free Europe from fascism. Free Europe from racism. Free Europe from imperiality. When you do this job - as soon as you do this job - Gaza will be free, Congo will be free, Sudan will be free, Iran… Forget about us! Free Europe.”
In a similar speech at the Dutch festival Best Kept Secret two weeks prior, he exclaimed “free Europe from Nazis”, and extended his verbal barrage to include freeing Europe from its elites, its love for war and its banks.
Undeniably provocative, that Seun’s words found such a ready audience of similarly radical thinkers online speaks to a global moment of protest against modern fascism, situated within a much longer history of anticolonial resistance through music in the global South, Nigeria, and within the illustrious Kuti family.
For anyone unfamiliar with the Kuti name, here’s a recap of how Seun’s father Fela Kuti etched his name into legend.
