Kinshasa minus the music: Portrait of a nation reborn

But, though regarded as Africa’s foremost exporter of music and composers, DRC is not all about the drum beat and the wail of the guitar string.

In fact, when you visit the country, your heart and mind racing for an intimate interaction with the rhythm of the nation, you soon realise that the image you have had of the country and its people may have been a bit out of sync with the reality on the ground.
It gets even worse when, on the streets of the capital Kinshasa, you come face to face with people who have absolutely no idea who the big names you keep mentioning are.

Across Africa, and especially in East Africa, where the influence of Congolese music reigned supreme in the 1970s and ’80s, many still adore the creations of such titans as Cyran Mbenza, Arlus Mabele, Allain Kuonkou, Ballou Canta, Mbuta Likasu, Diblo Dibala, and Dally Kimoko, but on the dusty, pot-holed streets of Kinshasa, such names draw blank stares from the average resident.

Enumerating their compositions does not help either.
It will, thus, not take you long to realise that music in DRC is like athletics in Kenya—or football in Nigeria—so much talent that leads to too stiff a competition that many feel disadvantaged by the abundance.

Thus, for many here, to have any prospects for a meaningful breakthrough, emigration becomes the best bet. Some end up setting their bases abroad, with only occasional visits home, and not necessarily for musical performances.

“There are many Congolese musicians and so much ‘Congolese music’ that I only discover when I travel to East Africa,” says Kinshasa resident Jean Louis Bolemba, his sentiments corroborated by compatriot Vital Kasanga, who adds that some are also better known in Europe than back home.

Most DRC musicians have, over the years, produced their music in Western capitals, especially Brussels and Paris, for the obvious reasons of superior studios.

By doing that, they have helped a great deal in exporting Lingala, one of the national languages and the lingua franca of the great Congolese musicians, to the world.

The tongue belongs to a small group called the Makanja from Equateur Province in the northwest and rose to prominence when the Belgian colonialists made it the medium of instruction in the military.
Thus the language, despite having little numerical advantage, became an indicator of authority and a force of urbanisation before eventually being adopted as the medium of communication across The Congo’s vast linguistic divide.

There have, however, been some musical greats who have gone against the linguistic grain but still managed to sink deep roots on the stage. For instance, songstress Tshala Muana, the Queen of Mutwash, mostly sings in Chiluba, even though she is equally adept at artistic works in both Lingala and Kiswahili, having launched her colourful career as a dancer and singer in the Tsheke Tsheke Love band in 1977 before rising to stardom as the singer and prolific, if not seductive, dancer that she is today.

Kiswahili, widely spoken in east, central and southern Africa, and which the African Union has adopted as one of its official languages, is hardly used in Kinshasa and the western parts of the country. Here, French and Lingala reign supreme, with Chibula being the other preferred language.

Indeed, in Kinshasa and western DRC, some residents frown at Kiswahili, associating it with the gun through which Kabila Senior rose to power at the expense of the Lingala-speaking Mobutu. Kiswahili is, however, the dominant language in the eastern DRC region bordering Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania.

Mining is the country’s economic mainstay, having overtaken agriculture decades ago. In the Katanga region, thousands wake up every day and head to the hundreds of mines scattered around there in search of copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese, uranium, cassiterite, coal, gold, and silver.

The country is also rich in diamonds (around the Kasai region), while explorers have discovered huge deposits of crude oil offshore near where the Congo River empties its contents into the Atlantic Ocean.
Because of these natural riches, the nation has remained attractive to foreign firms despite its political instability. Little wonder, then, that financial transactions here are done freely in US dollars alongside the local currency, the DRC French Franc. So easy is the fiscal relationship that you purchase an item in US dollars and are given your balance in a mixture of dollars and the local currency.

This carefree handling of the American currency contrasts sharply with the reverence with which the dollar is treated in other African nations. Nobody bothers much about those fake-currency-detecting infra-red machines that are all the rage in Nairobi forex bureaus, for instance.

Economic frenzy
As vendors mix their dollars and francs, hawkers join them in the economic cacophonic frenzy that defines central Kinshasa. Hawking is such a big business here that it must be ranked among the leading contributors to the capital’s economy. Sunglasses, vehicle spare parts, mobile telephones and accessories, kitchenware, fruits, dried fish, shoes, clothing... whatever you need, you will get.

On every street corner stand men, women and children who have mastered the art of delicately balancing on their heads merchandise the size of a hill. You settle down in a pub for a drink or an eatery for a bite, and within no time an equivalent of a supermarket comes beckoning.

Since most of these public places are open-air, you can rest assured of never being let to enjoy your drink or meal in peace.

The hawking industry is no doubt one of the by-products of the many years of civil strife that has heightened unemployment in DRC. Though extremely resource-rich, the country of about 75 million ranks among the lowest on the United Nations Development Index scale.

Norway, Australia and the Netherlands led the world in the 2011 Human Development Index (HDI), while the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger and Burundi sat at the bottom of the annual rankings of national achievement in health, education and income by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Some of the reasons advanced for the country’s poor showing in the global human development sphere include its many civil wars, political instability and bad relations with its neighbours.

For instance, despite their proximity, common demographic background and the same colonial heritage, DR Congo and the Republic of Congo have never been the best of friends. At best, their relations have remained lukewarm.

In the post-independence period, for instance, whereas Brazzaville aligned itself with the communist East, DRC’s Mobutu was one of the Western world’s most trusted client leaders. His taste for Western consumerism was legendary, and he is believed to have diverted a great deal of state resources to the capitalist-leaning cities the world over.

President Joseph Kabila, however, has reportedly been warming up to the Republic of Congo’s Denis Sassou Nguesso, who, many believe, he looks up to as a father figure. The veteran leader is also believed to see the youthful Kabila as a son.

President Nguesso is poised to replace Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni as the rotating chairman of the International Conference on Security in the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), which is presiding over the search for reconciliation between President Kabila and the eastern DRC M23 rebels, and the former hopes Francophone Brazzaville is likely to be a better arbiter.

This is because Uganda, just like Rwanda, has often been accused of having a hand in the rebellion in eastern DRC. Both Kampala and Kigali, however, vehemently deny the accusations.
Despite its challenges, however, the Democratic Republic of Congo remains a bustling economy that requires little to take off.

Mubutu mess

Amnesty International has identified the long, tyrannical rule of Mobutu as a contributing factor to the mess in which the country finds itself today.

After independence in 1960, the AI says, the long presidency of Mobutu Sese Seko made the newly named Zaire notorious for cronyism and corruption. When President Mobutu came into office in 1965, a sustained period of institutionalised corruption and misappropriation of state resources began.

Large proportions of the revenues from state-owned companies went, not to the state Treasury, but straight into the pockets of President Mobutu and his closest allies.

Mobutu is no more, but the mess he created persists. To the man and woman on the streets of the capital, however, hope springs eternal.

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