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?”
He didn’t tell Seriki that. Instead, he typed: “The ancestors. And they want royalties.” Download Seriki Agbalumo Mi Instrumental Christmasxmass
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.
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. By noon, the instrumental leaked
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.”
He didn’t remember making it. But as he clicked play, the room shifted. A DJ in London mashed it up with “Last Christmas
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.”
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.”