Tunde smiled, bit into an agbalọmu, and spat the seed into the dust. The rhythm had always been there. He just happened to be the one who finally pressed download.
It was the week before Christmas in Lagos, and Tunde’s small recording studio, Iroko Beats , hummed with the heat of amplifiers and the scent of fried plantains from the mama put downstairs. He had three days to finish the most peculiar brief of his career.
The download counter on the file had crossed a million. But no one had paid. No one could. The link was broken, the file untraceable—except it lived on every phone, every Bluetooth speaker, every memory card in the city.
But Seriki was serious. “The people are tired of ‘Jingle Bells’ and frozen reindeer. We are not winter people. We are harmattan people. Give us dust, drums, and desire. Give me Agbalọmu Mi .” Download Seriki Agbalumo Mi Instrumental Christmasxmass
He didn’t remember making it. But as he clicked play, the room shifted.
Tunde stared at the metadata. Creator: Unknown. Date: Christmas Day, 1978. A decade before he was born.
Tunde had laughed. “Sleigh bells and star apples? Seriki, you want to confuse the ancestors and Santa Claus at the same time?” Tunde smiled, bit into an agbalọmu, and spat
He didn’t tell Seriki that. Instead, he typed: “The ancestors. And they want royalties.”
A talking drum began, not like a call, but like a confession. Then a soft, highlife guitar arpeggio, wet with reverb. Then—unmistakably—the sound of agbalọmu seeds being spat out, recorded and sampled into a percussive loop. Chk-chk-pfft. Chk-chk-pfft. Underneath, a choir of neighborhood children humming “We Three Kings” in Yoruba, their voices layered like honey and harmattan dust.
Then he saw it. A forgotten folder on his external drive: “Abandoned Edits – 2019.” Inside, a single file: “Seriki_Agbalumo_Mi_Instrumental_ChristmasXmass_v1.wav.” It was the week before Christmas in Lagos,
A rising Afrobeats star, Seriki, had called him at 2 AM. “Tunde, I need a miracle. I’m dropping ‘Agbalọmu Mi’—the Christmas remix. But the instrumental must feel like sunrise on a harmattan morning. Like agbalọmu—that sweet, sticky African star apple—melting on the tongue, but with sleigh bells.”
On Christmas Eve, Tunde walked to the junction to buy pure water. A toddler was singing the hook: “Agbalọmu mi, give me your sweet, even in December’s heat.”
By noon, the instrumental leaked. Not from Seriki, but from Tunde’s own malfunctioning cloud drive. Within hours, street hawkers were humming it. A DJ in London mashed it up with “Last Christmas.” A grandmother in Ibadan recorded herself dancing to it, the agbalọmu stains on her fingers glistening like communion wine.
Tunde’s phone buzzed. Seriki: “I feel it. The file. It’s downloading on my end. But Tunde… I didn’t send you anything. Who made this?”
Now, hunched over his laptop at 4 AM, Tunde scrolled through sample packs. None worked. The European sleigh bells were too crisp. The American 808s too cold. He needed the glug-glug of a fresh palm wine, the whisper of wrapper against skin at a December Owambe party.