Babatunde Olatunji - Nigerian drummer and one of the first political activists in the US

"A political activist in the US civil rights movement - before it was even a movement" - biographer Robert Atkinson said about Babatunde Olatunji, Nigeria-born drummer who spent his life in the US playing drums, and staging anti-racism protests. BBC recollects how Olatunji, in 1952, three years before Rosa Parks helped spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama, staged his own protests on public buses in the south. His protest was brave and clever - he and a group of students boarded a racially segregated bus in Atlanta wearing traditional African clothes and were allowed to sit anywhere they wanted because they were not identified as African Americans, who had to sit at the back. Day after they boarded the same bus in their Western clothing and refused to sit in the back. Olatunji was, however, better known for his music - he became a pioneering drummer, releasing 17 studio albums, including his 1959 debut 'Drums of Passion', widely credited with helping to introduce the West to "world music".