The Courier

Kinshasa, Boulevard du 30 Juin.

© François Misser

Despite its deep-seated crisis, the Congo continues to flood Africa with the sound of rumba, long after artists like les Grand Kallé, Wendo and Franco took the continent by storm. As recently as January 2007, Papa Wemba and his band, ‘Viva la Musica’, had enormous success during their tour of Kenya. And the deep voice of Koffi Olomide, with backing reminiscent of religious music, has already become legendary. But the richness of Congolese music, which draws particularly on traditional native sounds, church choir music, as well as Afro-Cuban rhythms, does not end with rumba.

Quest for alternatives

A new generation is emerging, seeking meaning and aiming to express – both in form and substance – the preoccupations of a people worn down by poverty, war and bureaucracy. Among the representatives of this generation is Jean Goudal with his simple guitar strumming. Of casual appearance – in a baseball cap and West African hunter’s jacket – he alternates between bitterness and humour and sings like a young tropical Georges Brassens, about ‘shégués’, the street children and young adults on the capital’s streets. It’s all about vocal improvisation and jazz played with a melodious trumpet and reggae sound. Something new is afoot in Kinshasa, as spectators at the ‘Musiques croisées’ concert at the end of January at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Kinshasa discovered, featuring other followers of this alternative music including Jonas Lokas, a formal rumba musician of the ‘Choc Stars’. Alongside, there is an emerging Congolese jazz, including the band, ‘Ya Kongo’, which has revisited the traditional musical roots of several of the country’s regions, creating new harmonies and for the first time introducing the traverse flute to the music of Kinshasa.  According to Lokas, this quest for new musical forms responds to public demand, as alternatives are sought to the rumba “to let off steam” and old tunes are again being listened to in the city’s bars and clubs. There is a desire of artists to move into the spiritual world, but in a different way to evangelical singers like Marie Lisambo or Charles Mumbaya, whose sales are driven by the buyers’ belief that they are supporting God’s work. There is a very real paradox in all this richness for, apart from those involved in small-scale recording – only too happy to pirate anything – Congolese music usually uses the medium of CDs imported from Europe and South Africa. The local record industry, which was still flourishing in the 1980s, has now all but disappeared.

To re-ignite it, “We must become committed to the cultural industry. We don’t have a choice, and to do that, the State has to dip its hand it its pocket”, says Lokas.

Meeting with Picasso

The search for meaning and spirituality can also be found in painting, which was until recently dominated by the ‘naïve’ or ‘popular’ genre, a close cousin of the comic strip. These include works by Moké, Tshibumba and Chéri Samba, who painted the famous fresco in the Ixelles-Matonge district of Brussels. The main protagonist is Roger Botembe, also one of the most famous collectors of statues and masks in the Congo. He draws inspiration from these masks in his paintings, inevitably sparking comparisons with Picasso and his fellow cubists. But he goes beyond forms, towards the spiritual, always seeking inner beauty, rather than the plain aesthetic. A red, black and white trilogy reoccurs in his work: red, the colour of rejoicing, black, life on earth, and white, the colour of plenty, where, he says, “our ancestors are hiding”.

His quest took him to Haiti to rediscover voodoo rites such as ‘Fula’, which imbues people with the power of life and whose origins can be traced to the Congo, where it is known as ‘Fula Ngende’.

Another painter, Botende, aims to show the Congolese the way back to the source of their culture, as he says they are suffering from a loss of their identity which is partly due to the wars they have experienced. Their motives and desires are a strategic objective, because “there is no development without creative arts”, says Botembe, who has attracted a large number of artists to his studios since the collapse of the Fine Arts Academy in 1992. Like Lokas, Botembe calls on the country’s leaders to restore the nation’s culture and in signing his paintings backwards, he expresses a personal frustration in making this happen.

Breaking the mould of fatalism

In literature, in a complete departure from the work of the prince of the black novel, Achille Ngoye and established novelists like Yves Mudimbe and Hubert Kabasubabu, in his forward-looking novel, ‘Kinshasa: the final explosion will not take place’ (L’Harmattan, Paris 2006), aim to leave behind the fatalism of “the intellectualism of crisis”. Kabasubabu depicts a Congo, which by 2025 has exorcised the demons of defeatism, guided by Pentecostal Christian Social Democrats. He depicts an economy with a flourishing arms industry and export-oriented industrial-scale plantations, provoking ridicule from some quarters.

But according to Martin Ekwa, a Jesuit Priest and founder of the ‘Centre d’Action pour Dirigeants et Cadres d’Entreprise au Congo’ (the Action Centre for Company Executives in Congo – Cadidec), one of the country’s few think-tanks, Kabasubabu at least puts solutions forward. Father Ekwa believes that rather than being in a deep seated crisis, his country is feeling its way cautiously as it evolves. But he does go on to state that a turnaround is vital.

In his latest book, ‘L’école trahie’ (Editions Cadicec, Kinshasa 2004), Martin Ekwa reacts to criticisms of the weaknesses in the education system, which, it is claimed, underlie the ‘crisis’. In reality, he says, the origins of the problem are former President Mobutu’s destruction of the State education system, replacing professional management by those dependent on the political authorities and the indifference of politicians – or even civil society – to the abandoned and shattered education system. According to Ekwa, everything is connected with the fear that university educated citizens promote the overthrow of the government; but the country will need educated people.

He advocates a management college, while the Archbishop of Kisangani, Monseigneur Monsengwo, is seeking to rally support for his project to set up an administrative college to train the country’s leaders.

What is clear is that in every sphere of culture, the advent of a democratically elected government has created a climate of excitement, expectation, and a plethora of proposals for new initiatives. Perhaps these amount to the first tentative steps of a cultural renaissance in a country where culture and education have been underlined?