Chapter 2 Approaches

The tension produced in utilizing Cuban music to create a Congolese national musical expression can be explored by separating the notions of nation and culture. Benedict Anderson²⁷ and Christopher Waterman²⁸ have demonstrated how nation can be seen as a political strategy, while James Clifford²⁹ and Gilroy³⁰ have shown culture to be spatially unstable, always travelling. Congolese music is a case in point. An examination of its early history involves the navigation of circuitous routes. The image of a giant back-stitch, forever crossing the Atlantic to connect Cuba and the Congo, illustrates the threads of the fabric from which Congolese popular music was cut. Like hip-hop in the U.S.A., its inherent hybridity did not stop it from becoming a sign of cultural authenticity. Instead, this hybridity increased its strength as a national signifier: The more diverse a music’s composition, the more people it will be able to draw into the fold.

A foundational model for this study is Gilroy’s conceptualizing of the “Black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity.” The hybridity inherent in Rumba Lingala demands an approach that decouples nation from state, and culture from nationality. The history of Equatorial Africa involves the inclusion of numerous distinct nations into superimposed states. This metissage created a culture that transgressed borders of nationality. A theory privileging creolization is needed to explain the growth of Rumba Lingala and its power as a hybrid music to construct national identity. Such a theory shifts focus away from origins onto the process and modes of re-creation that effect the cross-breeding. Not only does it question the patterns of cultural flow, it also interrogates the tools with which those flows are examined. Ideas of political, social and economic structures as cultural repositories are stretched to circumscribe geographical areas coterminous with no internationally recognized units such as nation-states. Moreover, biology as a factor in cultural production is discredited when infinitely diverse creole populations are the producers.

Gilroy’s metaphor is the slave ship criss-crossing the Atlantic, drawing the populations of Africa, Europe, South and North Americas together. "Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records and choirs."³¹ This image of the ship is appropriate for the songs of Rumba Lingala, for the creation of this genre was exactly the kind of purposeful project to redeem a homeland. Moreover, this genre was made possible by the circulation of song. Like ships the songs, too, were "living, micro-cultural, micro-political system[s] in motion," shifting spaces of contact between points of the triangular trade, where new identities were forged, new modes of expression attempted, and various better futures envisioned.³² The notion of location as inscriber of identity remains intact, but the interstices between fixed (yet imaginary) points of nation, culture and essence become important. I see these ships as representing the sites of contact between individuals or communities, the loci of hybridization. The crossing of the slave ships is, therefore, both a literal and figurative image for the cultural hybridization that Rumba Lingala evinces.