Sunday 05 April, 2026

Culture

He had already decided what kind of day it was. Then she got in.

He had been doing the maths since Shepherd's Bush.

Not complicated maths. The worst kind. The kind where you already know the answer and you keep running the numbers anyway hoping something will change. Petrol. The congestion charge. The app's cut. What was left after. Whether what was left after was worth what today had cost him.

It wasn't.

He knew it wasn't before he'd even started the shift. But you start anyway because what else do you do. You have people at home. You have people in Lagos. You have a brother whose school fees arrive in your WhatsApp as a voice note from your mother, always a voice note, never a message, because she knows you're less likely to ignore her voice. So you start the shift. You sit in the traffic on the Westway and you watch the meter and you think about what your life has become.

Not what you planned. Not what you told people back home when you were leaving. Something smaller. Something that requires more explaining than you have energy for.

In 2024, gig economy workers in the UK earned on average 23% less per hour than directly employed workers doing equivalent work.

He'd been in the car nine hours. Three more to go. The music was his, at least. Playlist from home. The driver's only real jurisdiction in the vehicle was the sound. So he had it low but he had it. Asake. Then Burna. Then something older drifting in from the shuffle.

Unknown Soldier.

He didn't skip it. He never skipped it.

His father named him Wole.

Not casually. His father did nothing casually where names were concerned. Wole Soyinka. Nobel laureate. Activist. The man who chose prison over silence when silence was the safer option. His father had explained this to him when he was old enough the thought behind his name. He sat him down with the seriousness of a man passing something valuable across a table and said you carry the name of someone who refused to be made invisible. Remember that.

Sunday afternoons in Surulere. The windows open. The smell of his mother's stew working its way through the whole house. His father in the good chair with the record player beside him, Unknown Soldier filling the room the way only that song can. Not loud. Just certain. The bass patient underneath everything, the horns arriving when they were ready, Fela's voice carrying the particular fury of a man who has decided he will not lower it for anyone.

His mother in the kitchen. Moving between the pots with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had learned which battles to pick. She didn't love the music. Wole understood this only later, as an adult, looking back at the specific quality of her silence. She never said so. You didn't say so. You accommodated. You kept your opinion folded neatly somewhere it wouldn't inconvenience anyone and you got on with the stew.

His father called him over one Sunday. Sat him down in front of the record player the way other fathers sat their sons down in front of scripture.

He was nine years old. The carpet was rough under his bare feet. He sat cross-legged the way his father showed him, hands on his knees, the bass from the speakers moving through the floor and up into him before he could hear it properly.

"You know why Fela called it Unknown Soldier?"

Wole shook his head.

"In 1977 soldiers attacked his compound. Burned it down. Beat his mother so badly she died. And when Fela asked the government who did it, who gave the order, who sent those men — you know what they said?"

He waited.

"They said it was an unknown soldier. Nobody did it. It just happened. The system looked him in the face after destroying everything he loved and said — we don't know who is responsible."

His father let that sit in the room for a moment.

"That," he said quietly, "is how power works when it doesn't want to be held accountable. It makes itself invisible. It harms you and then it becomes unknown. And your job — your whole job as a man with your eyes open — is to never accept that answer. To always know who did it. Even when they tell you nobody did."

Then he went back to his newspaper.

His mother said nothing. She kept moving between the pots. But Wole saw her pause for just a second, her back to both of them, before she continued.

He didn't understand what that pause meant until he was grown.

That was the room he grew up in. His father's conviction filling the air. His mother's accommodation underneath it. Both of them loving each other in the way that generation loved. Completely. Without always asking what the other person needed.

He thought about this now sometimes. On long shifts. In the particular silence of a car on a motorway at night. Which of them he had become.

Then the app pinged. Kensington. Five-star rating on the pickup.

She got in wearing all black.

Not office black. Heavy boots laced to the knee. A coat with too many buckles for the weather. Dark rings under her eyes that may have been makeup or may not have been. She looked like she had arrived from somewhere that had taken something from her.

He looked at the road. She looked at her phone. He had already decided who she was. What kind of energy was sitting in his back seat. What kind of day this was going to continue to be.

Unknown Soldier was still playing. Low, the way he always kept it.

He turned it down slightly. The old reflex. Making yourself smaller in the presence of someone who might not understand.

"Wait," she said.

He looked in the mirror.

"Can you turn that back up?"

He almost didn't.

There was something in him that had already closed for the day. A woman dressed like that asking him to turn up the African music felt like something he didn't have the energy to perform his way through. The gracious driver. The cultural ambassador. The Nigerian who explains himself so the passenger feels comfortable.

But he turned it up.

And then she started singing.

Not performing. Not doing it for him. She had gone back to her phone. She was singing the way you sing when you've forgotten you're in public. She knew the melody exactly. She knew the feeling of it. The controlled fury underneath the groove. The way the song refuses to be anything other than what it is.

Wole looked in the rear-view mirror.

She was somewhere else entirely. Whatever she had been carrying when she got in, the song had taken it somewhere it could wait for a while.

He watched the road and said nothing. But something in the car had changed.

They were on the Embankment when she put her phone down.

"Unknown Soldier," she said. Not a question.

"Yes," he said.

"My professor played this for us. First week of a module on postcolonial resistance." She paused. "Actually she played us Zombie. That was the assignment. Write about Zombie."

"What did you write?"

"About how Fela used military imagery to mock blind obedience. The soldier who follows orders without thinking. I was quite pleased with it." A small smile. "Got a first."

Wole nodded slowly.

"Zombie is the obvious song," he said. Not unkindly.

She looked at him in the mirror. "And this one?"

He was quiet for a moment. Choosing whether to go there. It had been a long day and this was a stranger and there were twelve minutes left to Canary Wharf.

But the song was still playing. And his father's voice was somewhere inside it.

"In 1977 the Nigerian military attacked Fela's compound," he said. "Burned everything down. Beat his mother so badly she died from her injuries. And when Fela stood up and demanded answers — who gave the order, who sent those men, who is responsible — the government said it was done by an unknown soldier."

She had stopped looking at her phone entirely.

"Nobody did it. It just happened. The system looked him in the face after destroying everything he loved and made itself invisible." He kept his eyes on the road. "The unknown soldier wasn't a person. It was an excuse. Power protecting itself by refusing to have a name."

She was very still in the back seat.

"So the song isn't about the soldier at all," she said slowly.

"The song is Fela saying — we know exactly who did this. We always know. They just count on us being too tired or too afraid to say it out loud."

She looked out the window at the Thames for a long moment.

"I wrote the wrong essay," she said quietly.

"You wrote about what they showed you," Wole said. "That's different."

She turned back to look at him in the mirror.

"That's not just Nigeria though, is it."

"No," he said. "It never is."

They talked for the rest of the journey.

He told her about his father explaining those lyrics on a Sunday afternoon when he was nine years old. About being named after Soyinka before he understood what the name was asking of him. About what it meant to grow up with that music underneath everything. The grief and the joy carried in the same song because the people who made it were always living both simultaneously.

He didn't tell her about his mother. Some things you don't translate for strangers. Some things you keep.

She listened the way people rarely listen. Like she was actually receiving it rather than waiting for her turn.

By the time they reached Canary Wharf he had been talking for twenty minutes and had forgotten entirely about the petrol, the congestion charge, the app's cut, the brother's school fees, the voice note he still hadn't answered, the maths that didn't add up.

She got out. Turned back at the door.

"Thank you," she said. "For the education."

He watched her walk away. The buckles on her coat catching the evening light. A woman dressed in her own kind of darkness, going back to whatever she was carrying before the song held it for a while.

He sat there for a moment before accepting the next ride.

Nothing changed.

He drove home and the money was still what it was. His mother still needed an answer. The life that had felt too small at 2pm was still the same size at 11pm.

But before he went inside he sat in the parked car outside his house.

Just him and the song. One more time.

His father's voice somewhere inside it. The nine year old boy in front of the record player being told how power makes itself invisible. Being told that his job, his whole job as a man with his eyes open, was to never accept the answer nobody did it.

He thought about that now. Sitting in a parked car in London after a shift that didn't pay enough. The app took its cut and didn't explain why. The congestion charge went somewhere he couldn't trace. The system that routed his journeys and priced his labour and decided what he was worth operated from somewhere he couldn't see, couldn't name, couldn't hold to account.

Unknown soldiers. Everywhere. In different uniforms.

His father had tried to prepare him for this. Had sat him down in front of that record player and passed something across the table. Not money. Not property. A way of seeing. The understanding that when the system harms you and looks innocent, that innocence is the lie. That you must always know who did it even when they tell you nobody did.

He had carried that his whole life. Through Lagos. Through the visa queue. Through nine hours on the road today. It was in him the same way the music was in him. So deep it sometimes felt like his own thought rather than something he was given.

The windows of his house were lit up. His wife moving somewhere in the warmth of it. His children in there, growing up in this city, carrying a name he gave the eldest that his wife had questions about and went along with. Because that's what you do. Because love sometimes looks like accommodation and you don't always stop to ask what it costs.

His mother's pause in front of the stove. Still with him after all these years.

The money was still the money. Nothing had been solved.

But he understood, sitting there, that his father hadn't given him a weapon. He'd given him something quieter than that. The refusal to be confused about what was happening to him. The clarity to see the system for what it was without letting that clarity become despair.

You keep going. Not because you don't know who did it. Because you do.

He sat with that for a few minutes.

Then he went inside.

He had been trying for years to explain to people what his father had actually given him.

Not the music. Not the name. Not the Sunday afternoons in Surulere or the smell of the stew or the record player in the good chair. Something harder to carry and harder to lose than any of those things.

He'd filled in enough forms in this country to know there was no box for it. Qualifications. Work history. Right to work. The form didn't ask what your father pressed into your hands before you understood what it was. It didn't ask what it had cost you to carry it across an ocean, or what it had produced in you that nothing else could have.

He'd sat in enough interviews to know the thirty seconds that mattered weren't the ones where he answered the question. They were the ones before — the accent assessed, the name already processed, the version of him already decided before he'd said a word about what he actually knew or what he could actually do.

Nobody did it. It just happened.

His father had told him this was coming. Not this specifically. The pattern. The way power makes itself invisible so you spend your energy looking for the responsible party instead of understanding the mechanism.

The engine ticked in the cooling quiet.

He thought about the girl in the back seat. The essay she'd written. How she'd taken the obvious song and done the obvious reading and gotten a first for it. How he'd offered her the other reading — the one underneath — and watched her go still in the back seat. The thing she said before she got out.

I wrote the wrong essay.

He hadn't told her she was wrong exactly. He'd told her she wrote about what they showed her. That was different.

Then he thought, and this was the part that sat uncomfortably, that maybe he'd been doing the same thing. Not with the essay. With the shift. With every shift. Running the numbers, naming the unfairness, understanding exactly who did it and what it cost him and why the maths never worked out. His father's gift, used precisely as his father intended.

But Fela didn't just name the unknown soldier. He went back into the studio.

Wole sat with that.

But he understood now, sitting here, that this was also what the system did. It showed you the obvious song. Zombie. Military imagery. Blind obedience. Analysable. Categorisable. Fit for assessment. And while you were busy writing that essay, Unknown Soldier was playing underneath — the one about how power refuses to have a name, the one his father had made him sit down for, the one that didn't fit any module but was the real education.

He'd been living inside both songs simultaneously his entire life. The one they could assess and the one they couldn't. The version of him with the CV and the version of him with the inheritance.

And the version of him with the inheritance was doing more of the actual work.

He knew this. He'd always known this. He just hadn't had words for it until now, sitting in a parked car at the end of a shift that didn't pay enough, watching the light move in the window of his house.

Not everyone got the same transmission. He understood that too. Some people grew up in houses where the music played but nobody sat them down in front of it. Some grew up in houses where the instruction was to keep your head down, fit in, not ask the question why. Those were also inheritances. Also working inside someone right now — shaping how they read a rejection, whether they accepted nobody did it or whether something in them pushed back.

He didn't know which was harder. He only knew what he had been given.

And what he had been given was this: the refusal to be confused about what was happening to him.

Not comfort. Not protection. Not a system that suddenly saw him clearly.

Just the clarity to see it for what it was — and keep going anyway.

Not because he didn't know who did it.

Because he did.

This story is based on real events. Names and places have been changed to protect identities.