Chapter 3 "Ah, Mokili!" -- a Brief History44
The general region I am concerned with in this study is the present-day countries of the DRC and RC. The nexus of my thesis, however, is the area of Kinshasa (ex-Léopoldville) and Brazzaville, including their hinterlands, the Malebo Pool (ex-Stanley Pool), and the Bas-Congo, or Lower Congo region (DRC), which includes the cities Matadi and Boma. These are the sites of Rumba Lingala's most vibrant activity during the period I have researched in greatest depth, the 1940s and 1950s. The music scene of Lubumbashi (ex-Elisabethville) in the Shaba (ex-Katanga) province of the DRC also contributed to the configuration of the new nation, but the style of music was different from and quickly overwhelmed by Rumba Lingala. Its impact will not be explored, therefore.
The history of urban Congolese music begins with the growth of urban centers. Many factors led to the establishment of what have been called “detribalized centers” and “centres extra-coutumiers."45 I have identified two of the more salient forces behind the population increase of these centers, namely commerce and industry. A brief historical look at how these forces impacted the pre-colonial ethnoscape will situate the urban musical mis-en-scène for the discussion that follows in chapters four and five.
Commerce
Trading centers in the regions of Léopoldville, Kisangani, Kananga, and Lubumbashi were seasonal markets that had been bringing various people together long before the arrival of Europeans. In 1881 Henry Morton Stanley visited a market and wrote,
The natives of Ntambo still hesitate to welcome white men among them, for the Bazombo and Bakongo traders were jealous and threatened to never come back to buy ivory in these neighbourhoods, if whites were to settle here.46
Around the same time John H. Weeks reported the existence of five great markets held in conjunction with local ones:
These are named Nkenge Nkila, which is held in French Congo, just north of the main river; Konzo Makwekwe, held in Ngombe Lutete district; Konzo Kikandikila, held about three days south of Wathen mission station; Konzo Kinsuka, near the border of the Portuguese and Belgian Congos; and a Nkenge Elembelo, not far from San Salvador. There is thus a long line of these great markets, the gathering-places of large crowds of people from very wide areas, held every eighth day . . . and it is very possible that they run south to Angola, and well north into Landana, i.e. that they are only limited by the boundaries of the old Kingdom of Kongo, which formerly included both those places; and it may be that they also run east and west.47
Weeks' observation is particularly informative, for it describes an area that attracted diverse crowds and became the early center of urban musical invention.
The survival of forms of currency also indicates the intermingling of peoples from distinct regions. If those currencies were used throughout a wide area, then it is probable that the trade brought together different lineages, ethnic groups, language groups, etc. Evidence of interethnic commerce goes back a long way in this region. Brass, introduced by the Portuguese in 1484, was shaped into rods, wire and large-headed nails; raffia cloth was in use before European penetration. These were important historical currencies of the Kongo Kingdom and neighboring regions, a vast area that includes Kinshasa, Brazzaville, Boma and Matadi.48
Labor
"Colonisation, instead of being a standstill moment for the expansion of [Congolese music], was the time of acceleration, owing to its technical contribution and the crowding up of the masses."49 European mining projects increased population movements (see chart p. 36). Early European expeditions to the Katanga region followed rumors of gold. These rumors, though false, led to the discovery of copper reserves. These finds prompted the founding of thirty-three commercial companies prior to the establishment of Léopold II’s Congo Free State in 1885, and twenty-seven more by 1915.50 Together with the other two arms of the “Colonial Trinity,” the colonial apparatus and the Catholic missions, the gravitational force of private companies exerted immense pressure on inhabitants throughout the country.
The new communities included populations from neighboring countries, as well. The Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, now known as Général Carrière de Minerais, was founded in 1906, a partnership between the Belgian Katanga Company and the British-owned Tanganyika Concessions Company. To exploit the copper and tin deposits, a railway connecting Katanga to the South African system was constructed. This route would become an artery of migratory labor movement.51 Companies such as these greatly increased the diversity of peoples inhabiting the developing centers, who migrated with their different musical styles. Labor requirements demanded that workers be brought in from near and far.52 Alongside workers hired for low-level jobs, foreigners played leading roles as prospectors and engineers. Vellut notes that not only did English and South African languages prevail in Katanga, one of the early centers of new Congolese music, but that “[u]ntil the 1920s the fourth of July, anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, remained the great public holiday in Tshikapa, the diamond capital.”53
When history is recounted as smooth flow, eliding the eddies and counter currents, a false, romanticized harmony is often depicted. Mystification of this sort is perhaps even more of a tendency in studies of music history, due to the difficulty discourse has in disciplining music. Lest it be assumed that the movements of people from far and wide into labor communities were the happy wanderings to blissfully productive enterprise, from which would later emanate mellifluent melodies celebrating "the good old days," I include the following report from Le Chemin de Fer du Congo, founded in 1889 in Léopoldville for the building of railways:
. . . [M]en were fleeing into the forest, deserting work sites and camps. In the ten-week period from 15 November 1891 to 1 February 1892, we lost 14 percent of our staff. By 30 June 1892, after a year and a half, death had taken 900 men. The number of sick was in proportion; those who could work were demoralized, and rioted frequently. In one boat load, we were obliged to send back a large number of sick representing 13 percent of our total staff. . . . In these conditions, recruitments on the occidental coast of Africa, where blacks had lost their fear (respect for white authority), became very difficult: It was necessary to hire black workers in the Antilles and in Macao, Chinese who could not stand to work under Congolese climate.54
This report shows the ebb and flow of populations and diversity of peoples present in the area. Food shortages and labor shortages constantly plagued the industrial sector, despite forced conscription, manual labor as tax, permanently settled work forces, the hiring of migrant labor on contract, even the abduction of strong, young men in the middle of the night. The common practice of nocturnal removal, known as “Batumbula” in Katanga and “Mundele Ngulu” in Léopoldville, was perpetrated between 1910 and 1922.55 It was so terrifying that it became myth and lived on in song and literature long after it ceased. In 1929 a “stabilization policy” was adopted first by Union Minière and then by other companies. Mandatory extensions of workers’ contracts to three years staunched the ebb and flow of migrant workers, whose labor often could not be counted on from year-to-year. Company officials also knew that the cost per unit of work with a short-term, untrained workforce was much higher than it would be with a stable, skilled one. Workers’ camps were built, and employees’ families were permitted to accompany them for the first time.56 As a result of the policy, Union Minière’s annual turnover rate dropped from ninety-six per cent in the early 1920s to less than seven per cent only a decade later.57 This policy fostered the growth of what have been called by Sylvain Bemba, Kazadi wa Mukuna and others, the “detribalized centers” and “centres extra-coutumiers," the heterogeneous communities that became the crucibles for Rumba Lingala.58
Source: Crawford Young, Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).
Life in the Cities: Poly-ethnic Communities
The congregation of Congolese from different origins and languages, the sojourns of Africans from other parts of the continent, the arrival of Asian and Antillean laborers, and the pervasion of Portuguese, Belgian, Greek, French, British, Dutch, American and South African ex-patriots made diasporic agglomerations of the industrial centers and port towns. “A new world was born on the banks of the Congo in the 20s. . . . Léopoldville and Brazzaville, intense centers of acculturation, served at the same time as centers of ‘re-folklorization’.”59
On the one hand, the new city-dwellers developed ways of life different from that of the village. The collective approach to work in the village setting was utterly rent by the division of labor in European employment, in positions such as the domestic, the clerk, or the nurse.60 One could say generally about the industrialization process that, for most migratory Congolese, it transformed a rural and largely homogeneous existence into an urban, poly-ethnic one. The cities’ draw was manifold: industry and administration that offered the possibility of employment; an opportunity to escape the grip of clan chiefs, which tended to tighten in the tax-economy of the colonial system; the reduction of self-governed agricultural activity in certain regions; financial burdens and material desires caused by the cash economy; military service; the evangelical message that extolled the life of the individual; and the attraction of the new and its promise of an easier life.
Throughout most of the colonial period in both the French and Belgian Congos, the lack of commitment to education for Africans limited the opportunities for social, economic and political advancement. Indeed, this stunting of Africans’ potential was much of the plan. Differences in French policy between West Africa and Equatorial Africa were based on this prejudice, published for the 1931 Colonial Exhibition: “. . . [T]he cycle of evolution of the black race turns more slowly in equatorial Africa than in neighbouring colonies.”61 Both the Belgian and French colonial administrations turned education over to the missions, who agreed to teach the masses, urban and rural, in exchange for land.62
Missionary education also had an acculturative effect. On arrival in the city, the freedom felt by many youth from the patronage system and other traditional social responsibilities revealed its less appealing flip side: anonymity. By providing an organization to fill the social void, an education and its promise of upward integration into the colonial system, as well as a substitution for the abandoned way of life, missions attracted increasing numbers of youth. Followers of the new customs and beliefs (which, judging by the impact Christianity has had, must have been fashioned first to dovetail with, and then to gradually replace, previous Congolese cosmo-theology) were able to immerse themselves in this new way of life in the relative safety and tranquillity of the missions.63
On the other hand, the urban environment had, as a by-product of colonial city planning, the effect of reinforcing some customs and traditions from homogeneous village life. As the population of Léopoldville and Brazzaville grew, it became “necessary” for the Europeans to segregate themselves from the Africans. In Brazzaville the first measures were undertaken soon after the city was named capital of French Equatorial Africa, in 1909. The European neighborhood was located on the plateau, for the higher elevation was thought to be less debilitating to the European constitution. In addition, Europeans feared that close contact with the black masses would increase the likelihood of contracting malaria. Two villages, as they were called, were reserved for the Africans, one on either side of the plateau. The southern neighborhood was named Bacongo, while the northern was called Poto-Poto, meaning “mud” or “mire” in Lingala. The former was for speakers of Kikongo and the latter Lingala. Since many spoke both, this division translated into linguistic and ethnic segregation; indeed, the French enforced the carrying of identity cards that declared ethnic origin. By dividing the Africans and constructing inequalities between the two villages they could be made to compete. Green separated the whites from the blacks – parks off-limits to Africans were positioned between the communities.64
In Léopoldville the Africans were segregated into the ville indigène. It appears that no physical segregation of ethnicities or languages was enforced as in Brazzaville; Léopoldville, Elisabethville, Kananga, Matadi and Boma were, in particular, referred to as “detribalized centers” and “centres extra-coutumiers,” as mentioned above. The administrations of Brazzaville and Léopoldville permitted and encouraged the development of associations based on ethnic or regional origin.65 This retrenchment of ethnic and regional identity was nurtured by the commonplace custom of newcomers’ staying with relatives while looking for work and housing. Furthermore, they came into close contact with West Africans:
In Brazza as in Léo, West Africans were attracted by the establishment of the first Dutch and Belgian factories, in which they fulfilled the enviable and longed-for function of accountant. But they did not come alone, and, as the Bible says, they were accompanied by their maidservant, by their donkey, by their ox, but also by their music, by their culture.66
Actually, there were two groups of West Africans who came to inhabit the Lower Congo region. Those referred to as “Haoussa” included Ivorians, Senegalese, Mauritanians and Nigerians, who occupied office jobs, positions to which the Congolese were denied access. Those called “Krou-Boys” or "Kroumen" came as warehousemen of the merchant marines from Sierra Leone and Liberia (from the Kru people of the same countries). The Force Publique, or police and security forces, included men from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Zanzibar and Benin, chosen for police and military service, because colonial officials believed them less likely to desert, since the area was unfamiliar to them. Officials also hoped that, as they had no cultural bonds with the local society, they would less likely collude with locals against colonial authority.67 Inhabitants of many West African countries settled in the burgeoning cities along the Congo River. Together they were called “Coastmen” and “Popos” and formed a large community.68
The large-scale migration to cities precipitated cataclysmic upheavals in the terrain of identity-images. The ethnoscape of Léopoldville and Brazzaville after World War I became increasingly complex, as the multitudes mingled, withdrew into homogeneous enclaves, recirculated among one another in the job force, heard each other's musics, had the opportunity to eat each other's foods and wear each other's clothes, traveled to and from other homes in distant places, broke free of familial restrictions, assumed new obligations, and struggled to maintain a sense of dignity and hope while suffering destructive dehumanization. The challenge and celebration of survival in an environment as vertiginous and blinding as the twin cities stimulated the growth of arts awe-inspiring in their wit, creative use of restricted resources, piercing commentary and fierce dedication to the vision of a better life.