Afrobeat musician and pan-African activist Seun Kuti visited the Maa Maat Centre in solidarity with the ongoing campaign to save an archive of over one million Black books, gathered painstakingly over five decades. Speaking at the centre, Seun said it was his deep love for Pan-African spaces that drew him to the cause, a natural extension of a life spent, much like his father Fela Kuti before him, pairing music with activism, from his years fronting protest anthems steeped in Pan-Africanist politics to his frontline participation in movements like #EndSARS and his revival of the Movement of the People, the political party his father founded in 1979.

Seun was described as a man of knowledge who reads voraciously, someone for whom a visit to an archive like this one is less an appearance than a homecoming. During the visit, Seun picked up one of the books and held it up, simply saying, “This is for our kids.” He went on to speak candidly about the steep cost of acquiring many of these texts, drawing a sharp line between two ways of valuing a book: “For us, it is necessary to have these books. For them, it is a business.”

The centre’s founder, Pepukayi, said he was elated to have Seun in the space. Selina Brown, who has spearheaded the Save 1 Million Black Books campaign through the Black British Book Festival platform, thanked Seun for blessing the space with his presence and used the moment to renew her call for continued public support. Brown built the BBBF from nothing in 2021 as a self-funded single mother with no industry backing, growing it into Europe’s largest celebration of Black literature — work that earned her the UK’s first-ever Queen’s Reading Room Medal from Queen Camilla earlier this year, naming her the UK’s inaugural National Reading Hero.

The campaign has since met, and exceeded, its initial goal of £75,000. Announcing his visit on Instagram, organizers wrote: “Thank you for showing up, Seun. And for your work in preserving our legacy, protecting our history, and making sure the knowledge our elders fought to collect stays in our hands.”

Those who’d like to support the campaign can still donate via the GoFundMe page.