Rumba guitars and clanging likembes: however chaotic political conditions in Congo may be, this is still where the heart of African Pop beats.
By JONATHAN FISCHER

Tropical downpours have transformed Kinshasa’s avenues into muddy dirt roads; rusting share-taxis with jagged holes for windows lurch and careen through potholes filled with water and the humid air is heavy with Diesel exhaust, the fumes rising from smoldering heaps of plastic waste, the smells of sizzling goat meat skewers. An onslaught of olfactory contrasts: only a moment ago you opened your nostrils wide with pleasure, now you turn up your nose in disgust. The cacophony that emerges from the wall- enclosed grounds of Club Plaisir makes a similar first impression. A bass drones alongside clanging noises like those made by garbage collection vehicles, and above it, a piercing insect-like chirping. Is some one on a mission to test the limits of their speaker system output? Did someone just pick up an Aphex Twin breakbeat or a Jimi Hendrix riff between those distorted drumbeat carpets? Are these likembe musicians making Congolese Punk?

Likembe: the iron lamellae of these finger pianos that give off a dull, raspy sound are often forged from old car suspension springs. Despite their village origins, these instruments came to dominate the penetrating bass lines and overtones in the African metropolis, when local musicians began connecting them to powerful speaker systems. Paradoxically, it’s not the wearers of batik shirts, but Western punk and electronica fans who celebrate Congo’s likembe orchestras as links between the cults of ethno and modernism. Tortoise admire them; Björk put them on her last album. And last October, more than a dozen Western pop stars and musicians – unfamiliar to local audiences – were lolling around on Club Plaisir’s plastic chairs. Among them were American hip hop trio De La Soul, The Roots’ DJ Scratch, Fela Kuti’s drummer and Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen, Malian guitarist Amadou, and Britpop star Damon Albarn. The Blur singer had initiated the expedition, to find new and unheard-of sounds far off the beaten paths of pop.

Traces of white makeup trickle down painted faces. In the tiled inner courtyard at Club Plaisir, Kasai Allstars unleash their irresistible steamroller rhythms; though the troupe in hula skirts in front is somehow reminiscent of another century, the nine musicians behind them leave no doubt: we are indeed in the year 2007. Bandleader Mi Amor holds his likembe in front of him the way an electro pro holds a computer keyboard – and, together with the larger bass version of the instrument, uses it to produce hard feedback loops, sometimes rasping, sometimes whistling. Behind him, two drummers beat the skins, bolstering the clanging sounds of the metal lamellae. The high art of noise: with the right collective timing, these chirping, rasping, droning white noises are transmuted into a musical trance. Grand xylophones mix their gonging sounds into the gyrating beat. Whistles pipe up, and a siren begins to howl. Hand-made techno. Urbanized necromancy. Thanks to the pickups and an intentionally overdriven sound system, likembe rock floats on its own feedback loops like the papaya shells on the puddles in the street outside.

Bands of kids in baseball caps press against Club Plaisir’s metal grates and seize every opportunity to storm the dance floor – until policemen drive the supposed troublemakers away. “Back in the day,” Mi Amor, the 65-year old bandleader of the Kasai Allstars remembers as yet another blackout plunges Kinshasa into darkness, “everyone in the village sat silent and attentive when the orchestra was playing. After all, you absolutely wanted to understand the singer’s message. But in the city you have to be as loud as possible to stand a chance against the roaring trucks. So I electrified my acoustic guitar and the likembes.” Mi Amor, who went by the name of Mputu Ebondomesomeso when Mobutu was still the dictator in an Africanized Zaire, uses his music to tell the story of the voiceless inhabitants of Kinshasa’s slums. As in most African cities, the centralization of the economy sucks the penniless rural populace into urban slums. Kinshasa has by now grown to more than eight million people, who live with sanitary and traffic facilities that are equipped to sustain no more than a tenth of that number. Where many are driven back to old musical traditions by the alienating battle for urban survival, bewildering bastard styles emerge – for instance, the Congotronic scene only recently discovered by Western media.

In 2001, Belgian producer Vincent Kenis was the first to make the feedback loops of likembe orchestra Konono No 1 available around the world: “When I first heard this on the radio, in 1980, I thought I had found the African equivalent of punk music.” Twenty years later, he located the band at an open-air bar in Kinshasa and recorded them on the spot, using an Apple computer and a couple of microphones. Today, Kenis corrects his earlier view: “These musicians here probably share a ‘no future’ attitude with punk. But in contradistinction, they hold on to their traditions.” There is an essential African conflict between tradition and modernity, and groups like Konono No 1 solve it in their own way, the violent noise they blast through megaphones left behind decades ago by the Belgians perhaps more authentic than the Soukous and rumba singers who supply the “dark continent” with hit materials from Paris studios. “Superstars such as Zaiko Langa Langa, Papa Wemba, or Koffi Olomide have taken many of their chants from Konono No 1,” remembers Mr. Mingiedi, the band’s 70-year old founder and leader.

Sitting in a plastic chair in the shade of a mango tree, old Mingiedi supervises a few assistants who stow away the conical, colonial-era megaphones, called “lancevoix,” or “voice-throwers.” In two days, they will leave for a European tour. While the assistants hurry to the nearby marketplace with wheelbarrows and water salesmen, humming, balance their bags on their heads, Mingiedi’s young manager starts up his laptop in order to play a track from Björk’s most recent album. Yes, the noise storm of Konono No 1’s guest appearance is unmistakable. Has he ever listened to Jimi Hendrix? The old man’s deeply furrowed face remains motionless, and he shakes his head. “To each his own rhythm,” he dryly declares. But what about all the feedback? It was a question of means: unlike the stars of Soukous, they had no money to buy decent systems back in the day. Mingiedi was salvaging materials from old cars, patching up megaphones with wire – spending his taxi driver’s salary at the junkyard.

The electricity’s down once again in Kinshasa, although you would hardly notice in Mingiedi’s neighborhood, Ndjili – few people here have electric light at all. Instead, petroleum lamps illuminate the sides of the dirt road, the drums of local Pentecostal churches resound through backyards, and above them the guitars of Soukous jingle from battery-powered radios into the nocturnal sky. This is the sound of a mega-city that is as dynamic and optimistic as it is broken. In their music, Konono No 1 reproduces an unadulterated collective cry for survival – but without accusing any one. After all, no one here gets worked up anymore over blackouts, stinking waste heaps, or avenues reminiscent of BMW speedways – signs of everyday corruption and unaccountable authorities. They are a part of Kinshasa, just like the new soccer stadium, where the power has been cut off because the Ministry of Sport failed to pay the bills, or the television tower, whose gilded exterior shell the Congolese military is said to have looted under cover of darkness.

What leaves Mingiedi and his young manager Aharon stunned is the cluelessness of the Congolese state radio station: “Have you ever heard them play Konono No 1? The stars of Soukous, by contrast, never fade – as long as they praise the ministers and their sponsors in their songs.” Between individual titles, the emcee of the Radio Congo music show waxes poetic on “our best president, Monsieur Joseph Kabila,” and announces a concert by a group of up-and-coming musicians to be held that night in the entertainment district of Matonge. Many of the great stars of Soukous, such as Zaiko Langa Langa, Madilu System, Papa Noel, Kanda Bongo Man, and the veteran Tabu Ley Rochereau – reverently called le Grand Seigneur – have long preferred to work in Paris or Brussels. That is where the producers and hi-tech studios are, and the record companies that promise success on the world-beat market. Yet the music’s earthiness and handmade elegance is all too often lost in European exile.

“Musica” is what they call the open-air bars where nameless musicians set up their homemade guitars, drum sets, and banged-up amplifiers night after night. Musica is also the formula for survival in this city of millions on the Congo River, a city as packed as New York but with fewer paved roads, streetlights, landlines, and working flush toilets than the average small town in Lower Bavaria. A large majority of its inhabitants survive through black market economy, and even those with legitimate jobs have to earn extra spending money as soft-drink vendors or prepaid cell-phone minute salesmen, or by collecting dry branches of jacaranda and palm trees to sell on the street as firewood. The entire city is vibrant with this energy of hunger, of restlessness. And yet a conciliatory tune wafts along the trash-lined boulevards: Soukous blares its optimistic slogans from bars, taxicabs, and shanties, taking the edge off everyday life: if your stomach is painfully empty or your head hurts, crank up the volume on your radio as far as it will go.

If you ask someone for a light in a Musica, a kid will run to the next courtyard and return with a piece of glowing coal with which to light your cigarette. You’re well taken care of: young street vendors walk the aisles, balancing large straw baskets on their heads, full of cookies, peanuts, kola nuts, roots, cigarettes (and socks?), rattling off lists of their wares. The only thing they don’t offer, unfortunately, is an umbrella. When the first big drops begin to soak the dusty ground, the audience just shifts closer together, moving their plastic chairs toward the corrugated metal roof before the tropical downpour unleashes its own pattering drum solo, turning the court yard into a reddish pool of mud. Rivulets of rainwater splash through leaky spots onto the stage, threatening to wash away the tattered banknotes audience members had pasted to the musicians’ sweaty foreheads only moments before – signs of appreciation, and often the performers’ only salary. But the band doesn’t even think of quitting. Two guitarists in threadbare white shirts stoically repeat their downward scales, weaving them, like strings of beads, into a hypnotic gyre. An old man with bloodshot eyes keeps the beat with a spoon on an empty beer bottle. Three singers top it with melodic Lingala chants: “kaka ngai, kaka ngai …” And while you wonder how the depressing conditions under which people live in Congo jive with such light-hearted and intoxicating melodies, one of the band’s young dancers starts to make the rounds, shaking her pelvis rhythmically in front of a plastic chair, rubbing against someone else’s legs … moving on to the next patron after having collected a 500 Francs Congolese note.

The Republic of Congo may be one of the most corrupt, unstable, and dysfunctional nation-states in Africa, but its musicians are world famous. And if Soukous is the lubricant in Kinshasa’s tough everyday life, if its dulcet guitar scales embody a dream of romance, riches, and innocent fame, it probably also compensates for the evils inflicted on the country by current politics, the first and foremost of which is corruption. Refuse to participate in it and you won’t get far in Kinshasa. After all, the principle of self-service is sanctioned all the way up the ladder: many state servants receive no salary and have to make money in their own way. Tourists are really the only ones uninvolved. In the middle of a traffic jam, boys sell photocopied sheets of paper for 100 francs a piece: it is the list of Joseph Kabila’s newly appointed ministers. Like his despotic father, Laurent Kabila, and the all-powerful cleptocrat Mobutu before him, the young president has adopted the tradition of exchanging his cabinet every six months – so that he can promote more of his friends to the feeding troughs. It is not a secret in Congo that the ministries have to buy complete new sets of office equipment and staff cars after every cabinet reshuffle. And there seem to be only three products that turn real profits in Kinshasa: cell phone contracts, beer, and Mercedes limousines. At least, that is what the garish billboards around town suggest, lending luster to sometimes miserable surroundings.

The Mercedes limos in Kinshasa traffic are the legacy of the former dictator with the leopard skin toque. And they seem to make a mockery of his policies: when Joseph-Désiré Mobutu took control of the Belgian Congo in 1965, he chose a nationalist face for his regime, which was to last until 1997: authenticité. All names were re-Africanized, Congo became Zaire, and Mobutu hoped that he would go down in history as a great black leader. That’s why he brought the 1974 heavyweight boxing championship to Zaire. The media attention that accompanied the mega-event, where Muhammad Ali surprise-vanquished

George Foreman in the eighth round, put Kinshasa on the map. Today, the once-renovated May 20 Stadium, site of the “Rumble in the Jungle,” is desolate: tall grass sprouts between the terraces; only a few rusty bars of iron remain of what was once a scoreboard. And, like everywhere else, there’s no electricity. Three youths with a guitar crouch on the bleachers, singing their idols’ latest Rumba hits.

If you’re looking for a little bit of Havana in Kinshasa, go to Chez Sébastien on a Sunday night. This open-air club on the southern outskirts of the city, marked from the outside only by a row of parked cars, is easy to miss. Give the porter 2,000 francs (four dollars) and you’re admitted to the glorious past of Rumba Congolaise. On the stage stands Simaro Lutumba, the former Franco guitarist who contributed decisively to the popularization of Congolese Soukous throughout Africa back in the ’60s. Today, he presides over the band, Nana OK (successor of the legendary OK Jazz founded in 1956), and lets dancing singers, a young bassist, a trumpeter, and a drummer run the show while shooting off occasional guitar scales from the background. A few hundred old couples crowd around the plastic tables and chairs; despite the humidity and heat, many of the men wear suits and ties. Distorted vocals sound from the towering speaker systems, and the first thing the rays from the single floodlight hit is a cloud of mosquitoes. No matter – as soon as the first chords of a new piece emerge, the gentlemen lead their sweethearts to the dancefloor, and the couples move slowly in a circle, their hips gently rocking. Everyone sings along with the refrains and for a few moments, Kabila and corruption are far away – that is, until yet another blackout plunges the club into darkness. “Every few hours, they have to shut another neighborhood down because someone embezzled the funds for the renovation of the electricity network,” the club’s manager laments.

A few hours later, the lights are back on in the interior court yard at Hotel Phoenix, and the crowd is mesmerized by the band’s rotating makeovers: every few minutes roughly half of the twenty or so musicians on stage disappear, only to come running back to the microphones moments later, newly dressed from head to toe. The singer wears a fur coat with his Armani jeans, and you can see streams of sweat trickling from beneath his Jean Paul Gaultier flat cap into his face. But style is mandatory, and here the right fashion obviously counts much as a sense of rhythm and the perfect choreography. After all, this is the band of Papa Wemba; the Congolese superstar and pope of the sapeurs.

Sapeurs: that’s what the extravagantly dressed young Congolese in the audience call themselves, conspicuous in their extra-wide Zoot Suits, purple sashes, and gold-patterned glasses. And for more than two decades now, the sapeurs have been indulging in an eccentric counter-reality, far removed from all misery: the world of haute couture. The pop cult combines extreme brand consciousness with elaborate rules of conduct. While a few young men dance the “Kwassa Kwassa” or the “Moto” with hips rocking and arms flailing, they turn the inside linings of their expensive coats outward, making sure to expose the posh label. Some wear their designer sunglasses at night. Some getups are even sharper than that of the patron saint himself, Papa Wemba, whose appearance is contrived down to the last minutiae, as he takes to the microphone and sends his sticky-sweet falsetto into the night sky over Kinshasa.

And fans still scale the concrete steps to the stage to paste a five- or ten-dollar note to the singer’s soaking wet forehead. That is, if they haven’t already bequeathed him their life’s savings in the hopes of having their names woven into one of his songs, a business in which Papa Wemba has had different fans bid against one another to increase his expendable income. In exchange, they gain greater reputation within the sapeurs community. Wemba initiated the “Société des Ambiançeurs et Personnes Élégantes” fashion movement, abbreviated to la sape, in the early ’80s. It’s a philosophy that was never satisfied with pop alone, but that sought to create the perfect human being to go along with it: noble, artificially beautiful, and directed by a set of laws dictating everything from hairstyle down to a particular gait.

In Paris, Papa Wemba stuffed his suitcases with expensive designer wear from tailors’ workshops along the Seine. At home, in Kinshasa, he wore them in daring combinations: for TV appearances, the chubby-faced singer slicked back his hair and held the labels of his Armani suits demonstratively into the camera. A risky maneuver if you keep in mind that President Mobutu had just initiated a violent re-Africanization of his country as part of the authenticité campaign. Christian first names became taboo, as did Western apparel such as ties and bras. Yet authenticité did little to disguise Mobutu’s systematic exploitation of the country. Little wonder, then, that the youth of Kinshasa reacted euphorically to a poseur provocateur like Papa Wemba. At a time when Western music was prohibited on Zaire’s radio and TV stations, and in its bars, the country had its own rock rebel. Papa Wemba’s concerts at home drew such huge crowds that there were casualties. The correct walk and way of holding yourself became an ersatz religion; the labels of Armani, Cerruti, Valentino and the like served as the new Ten Commandments. And this profession of faith is surrounded by an aura of subversion: if man, according to the sapeurs, is a self-designed work of art, their affinity with Western pop-phenomena such as the dress cult of England’s mods is obvious; Bryan Ferry and David Bowie are also among the sapeurs’ avowed heroes.

La sape has been declared dead by local radio emcees many times over; because suppliers of cheap pirated copies from the sweatshops in Matonge couldn’t keep up with demand; because Mobutu’s secret police persecuted and clubbed the sapeurs as politically suspect, driving many of them into exile. And because Papa Wemba served three years in French prisons for human trafficking, and was released to his home district of Matonge in a jubilant triumph only in 2001. His imprisonment obviously made him a more merciful man: whereas he used to berate anyone, including his followers, for their bad accoutrements – he now lets even average citizens join the king of the sapeurs onstage for a photo-op. “A sapeur will go hungry rather than be badly dressed,” Papa Wemba had declared twenty years ago. But today, hunger seems to have too greatly diminished his own ranks.

You still see them, though, the young people who haunt the nightclubs of Kinshasa dressed in black dustcoats, ties, and bowler hats, like Dick Tracy movie extras strutting their stuff between trash-strewn gutters as if they’re taking stock of a kingdom inalienably theirs. Those who are not members of la sape, who do not dress carefully enough, are called taureaux, “bulls,” aesthetic primitives who seek to mortify the sapeurs with their mere appearance. Yet what does it say about a country when the generation that might embody something like a hope for the future is more interested in the color of its socks than in political reform? Sociologists have interpreted the phenomenon of the sapeur as a sort of secularized rite of initiation, a ceremonial induction into urban society. Disillusioned by the corruption in politics and the police, they create their own laws. “Here, we can’t simply take to the streets and shout slogans,” says Colonel Jagger, the manager of Papa Wemba’s band, Viva la Musica, and one of Kinshasa’s most famous sapeurs. “We suffocate because there is no space to breathe. And so sartorial creativity is the only weapon left to us.”

The will to stage the self through fashion goes hand in hand with a musical inventiveness that is only in small part accessible to Western ears. The interlocking guitar scales are too complex to be intelligible; the vocals transport their own kind of soul; the lyrics stick strictly to the singers’ native Lingala. “If you want to create a hit in Congo, what matters are the lyrics,” the singer Bopol explains. “Everyone has to get them right away. The problem is that the fans outside of our own country don’t understand our Lingala. So they imitate only those parts of our music that work for parties.” He is alluding here not only to the drum machines and synthesizers that dominate so many of the export productions made in Europe, but also the fact that most local bands refuse to sing in French – which is why imitators from Cameroon, Senegal, or Guinea are often more successful on international markets than Congo’s own orchestras. The country simply lacks the necessary structures; Congolese music manager Samy Lubaki concurs: “Soukous producers work in a sort of ghetto. It is time for the big Western record companies to discover our music.”

That hope is not entirely unrealistic. For while Björk and Tortoise are more interested in the clanging likembes, indierockers in the UK and the States are incorporating Soukous guitars into their music. Is it, then, only a matter of time before the rest of the West takes an interest in the ringing scales from the heart of Africa? No doubt: irrespective of its blackouts, corruption, and poverty, Kinshasa is home to a musical potential that bears comparison to Havana or Rio de Janeiro. As a teenage drummer and rapper explains in broken English in front of the Hotel Phoenix, hardly anyone here believes in la musique américaine. The native tradition has enough to offer – not to mention that it doesn’t require as much technology. In the dark, unlit street, he gestures toward the endless stream of dilapidated cars lurching down the capital’s unpaved, potholed roads in front of the roadside bar, laughing, “Don’t you want to buy our country? You’ll get our music, but in turn you’ll have to repair our streets.”