Chapter 6 Conclusions and Further Questions

Rumba Lingala played a large role in the configuration of the Congolese nation. The new geography of the urban centers provided the matrix that birthed this revolutionary music, which was, according to Nkashama, a necessary response to "a social situation that achieved the disintegration of the traditional man."²⁹² Like the jùjú of pre-independence Nigeria, as interpreted by Chris Waterman, Rumba Lingala was the most compelling artistic expression for the interculture of the urban wage force.²⁹³ This population occupied an entirely new social space, existing between the colonizers, who monopolized military, industrial and political power, and the rural segment of the colonies. The urban interculture also navigated the ideoscape between European and African modes of expression and ways of life. Rumba Lingala provided a forum for discourse; within it Congolese encoded their experiences in a syncretic universe, fashioned a sound that united diverse communities rather than divide them, and restructured society around a single nationality. Thus a revolution occurred on multiple levels, one musical, one social and, eventually, one political.

The revolution in identification was a reconfiguration of affiliation, a redefinition of "Congolese-ness." Central to the new definition was a relationship to a nation that was founded on Lingala and expressed itself through Rumba. This music was played everywhere, sung in a language that everyone could understand, and with rhythms both foreign and familiar. The combination of the music's familiarity, respectability and ubiquity integrated into people's lives. Its popularity everywhere helped people relate to one another. Its nexus was the Malebo Pool, so that it had an international following from the start. Its basis as an international music expanded people's horizons beyond their villages/cities. The sounds of highlife, palm-wine and other African musics gave it a continental feeling -- an anti-European quality. Non-ethnically rooted, this music was a pan-Congo statement.

Just as important as the Congolese feeling of the music was the expunging of European flavor. Fanfares gave way to rumba ensembles, tubas to string bass, bass drum to congas. The institutional rejection of the popular European dances, in favor of an idiom infused with African and diasporic material, constituted a move to suture the rupture of colonialism. In the imaging of a cultural connection to their Cuban cousins through a history of slavery, the music forged links across time and space. In the rumba the Congolese could hear themselves, and thus it was a twinkling star in a pre-colonial sky. Among the variously unified Congolese ethnic groups, bridges were built, joining the nation in space and spirit, founded on the common struggle against colonialism. The new music fostered a sensibility of individuation from the hegemonic discourse, and its performance acted as a “positive [agent] in the creation and maintenance of such a sensibility.”²⁹⁴ The new style became in musical terms what Fanon called a “literature of combat.”²⁹⁵

Rumba Lingala succeeded because people liked it, because it rang true to them -- it must have said something that needed to be said and that no other music at the time was saying. Listeners supported its growth by listening to it, telling others about what they heard, going to bars to dance to it, and buying records of it. Musicians in turn responded to the audience's feedback and sought to innovate within the slowly changing ideoscape of post-W.W. II Léopoldville and Brazzaville.

As Anthony Kwame Appiah has stated,

Invented histories, invented biologies, invented cultural affinities come with every identity; each is a kind of role that has to be scripted, structured by conventions of narrative to which the world never quite manages to conform.²⁹⁶

The narrative form that scripted Congolese cultural affinity was the Rumba Lingala song. The identity invented was a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, educated member of a large society, whose myriad other members shared something uniquely theirs: Rumba Lingala. The connexion of the music was uncommonly strong because it brought people together to dance and confirm their relationship to the whole. The commonalty of Lingala meant that people from all corners of the colony could celebrate their filiation. The widely understood lyrics enabled most everyone to relate to the topical narratives, which described Congolese lives -- if not their own, then someone else's, a someone who represented countless others. These innumerable individuals were, for the first time, perceived as being familiar, in that they all shared something fundamentally Congolese. What they shared was not in essence Congolese, but Rumba Lingala, their expression of life in the post-W.W. II colonies. The growing popularity of Rumba Lingala had a cascading effect. Despite the quotidian difficulties imposed by colonial rule, this music flourished. It became an outlet, a chronicle of the community's successes against colonization. Rising record sales and the growth in number of Rumba Lingala groups and dancing bars indicate that people turned in ever increasing numbers to Rumba Lingala to express themselves and to relate to their larger, imagined group.

Rumba Lingala's success as a catalyst in the independence struggle owed much to the recording industry. The recording technology gave a fixity to the sound, and radio gave it wings. The influential music performances that were taking place in the urban areas could reach every corner of the colonies. Their musical appeal lay in the balance of familiar and foreign. Their lyrical appeal lay in the accessibility of Lingala and the themes of modern life. Whereas each region had its own music to recount its particular past, these records spun tales of a generalized Congolese nation. The unified national sound made the nation imaginable. Like the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio Bantu, RCBI and Radio Brazzaville used local music as a media tool, albeit for opposite reasons. Radio Bantu attempted to depoliticize the black population by stressing ethnic identification through the playing of local music and the broadcasting of news in vernacular languages. This program and mandatory Afrikaans education were tactics of divide and rule, aimed at countering the growing use of English as the lingua franca among different ethnic groups, and as a means for communicating with the rest of the world.²⁹⁷ The Congolese stations, on the other hand, achieved an audience who identified with the sounds they heard and, thus, empowered them. People all over the country were tuning in to the first mediated sound that was their own. The recorded songs have become archival records, contributing to the nation’s collective antiquity.

Is it important that the modes of production mentioned above, namely recording studios and radio stations, are nationally non-specific in character? I believe it is, for analyses of socio-cultural movements like this often ascribe a national or ethnically essentializing character to engines of solidarities and modes of cultural production, especially when music is a mobilizing factor.²⁹⁸ This mystifies the creative processes involved in exploiting such modes of cultural production. When analyzed along the bias of ethnohistorical specificity, revolutionary actions can be tacitly depleted of their power, transforming them into something to be expected and "natural," as in "Well, of course they did that -- it's in their nature." Thus, the successful, innovative manipulation of available technology becomes instead the deployment of weapons from the cultural arsenal, the domain of just one side. Our recognition of the neutrality reveals these particular modes of production to be exploitable by both sides.

After independence, as the nascent countries sought to consolidate power within the European political system, Rumba Lingala's potential as a tool of propaganda was fully exploited. The ability of the music to draw people together both physically and around social issues had been keenly observed by the young men who now occupied positions of leadership. Just as Rumba Lingala had been a successful means of marketing commercial, it could advertise a political candidate and his program. President Mobutu recognized the influence the stars had, in particular that of the celebrities Franco and Tabu Ley, and he took advantage of their popularity. The following excerpt is taken from a song written by Ley to win support for Mobutu’s decision to put the country under military rule for five years in order to redress the economic crisis. It was broadcast frequently in 1966 and became a kind of signature tune to underscore news bulletins. Originally in Lingala and French, it is reprinted here in its translated form as it appeared in John F. Carrington’s 1966 study. Unfortunately he elided its title.

They say that the town [sic] of Congo is full of people.

Fathers, mothers and children, come out into the open,

Let us agree together, let us put the town [sic] right.

Five years! Five years! Mobutu will set up the Congo.

Five years! By the fifth year, we shall agree together.

Five years! Five years! Mulamba will carry the government.

Five years! By the fifth year, we shall agree together.²⁹⁹

But why music? Because it has the power to move like little else. Dance music accompanies most life-events in the cultures of the Congo. With such a place in the psyche, it has a conduit to the soul. It can be appreciated regardless of educational level, created on homemade instruments and transmitted anywhere. Songs identify different social spaces, for example, the religious community, rural world, urban family, etc. Within the first few bars the song's æsthetics communicate its entire social landscape. Then, the desire to dance sets in, and the body transforms into a vessel.

If a type of music is popular with a group of people, they hear something in it with which they have chosen to identify. The music's appeal lies at least partially in its proposing of an image that coincides with an ideal held by members of that group. Meanings attach themselves to the music's instrumentation, timbre, rhythmic motifs, harmonic and melodic idioms, etc. These meanings then determine how long the music will remain popular; it will cease to circulate once the music's image no longer appeals to the group.

My thesis, that Rumba Lingala was a crucial part of the struggle against colonialism and the fight for independence, stems from the observation that all changes involving large numbers of people against powerful forces, require the participation of many. To participate people must feel strong in number -- righteous indignation is insufficient to liberate a nation. Rumba Lingala reinvented the ways people imagined their community. Onto the matrix of small, rural, kinship affiliations and medium-sized regional, commerce-based relationships, Rumba Lingala added a network of unprecedented dimension. The large, urban, inter-ethnic communities that produced Rumba Lingala mapped their perceptions of city, colony, nation and globe into their music. In the decade after the first recordings of Rumba Lingala were made, this revolutionary imaging of the Congolese geoscape spread far and wide. The recognition of size challenged people's previous images of self-in-the-world. A new phase of identification was initiated, one in which people saw themselves as belonging to a Congo full of other selves, a space that was no longer arbitrarily demarcated, but was becoming for the first time a nation. The music enabled people to travel virtually around this new nation. Strength in imagined numbers provided the critical mass for the fight for independence.

Constructing affiliations with unknown but imagined others played a crucial role in the liberation struggles of colonies around the world. India's successful war of independence against the British empire in 1947 must have empowered Ghanaians, who also opposed the British. In turn, their own independence in 1957 sent a message of common experience and shared ideals to other oppressed peoples in Africa, especially in cities like Léopoldville and Brazzaville, where Ghanaians and other West Africans were present in large numbers. This feeling of oneness provided moral and physically real support for those engaged in their own battles.

Rumba Lingala, like all genres of music, developed an æsthetics of existence uniquely capable of expressing the ideoscape of 1940's and 1950's Congolese society. Its lyrics were oral literature, relating conditions of life common to many, no matter where they lived. This ability to weave together so many different lives made it a "musica franca." Over time the expanding repertoire elaborated this æsthetic system, this stylization of daily life. Rather than romanticize pre-colonial Africa, Rumba Lingala constructed an image of the Congo as a modern, globally engaged social entity, connected to diasporic communities throughout the world. The establishment of artistic links to other societies through the exploration of foreign musical contexts in turn helped individuals in the Congo to make sense of changes in local affiliations and to comprehend the global meaning of being Congolese.

Rumba Lingala's success owed much to its successful merging of foreign and local elements. The tradition of audience participation continued in the writing of socially relevant lyrics and the fashion-forming, frequently changing dances. This constant reciprocation between performer and audience prevented Rumba Lingala from becoming abstracted from society. Musicians' use of both local and imported instruments gave the music the aura of being modern yet old, strange yet familiar. The names of ensembles and individuals, as well as bands' repertoires, reflect an expansion of their horizons, a sophistication rooted in an appropriated power. The new technology of electric instruments and records empowered the music in a society demanding change. It must have at first seemed mystical, giving Rumba Lingala and the artists themselves, as well as the men who owned the labels, an aura of the fantastic.

The Beguen Band's signboard, erected in front of the band for a promotional photo in 1959, is a rich image of the bridge between worlds constructed by Rumba Lingala. It shows a pluriarch (a bow lute), an ngoma, a tenor sax, and a frame drum or small bass drum. The sign is positioned between two amplifiers for the hollow-bodied guitars. This juxtaposition of local and imported instruments is interesting: it represents the merging of elements in the music more than just in the ensemble's instrumentation. With their name the band appropriated the imagined potency of the biguine, a dance and genre of music enjoyed and often recorded in the mid-1950s.³⁰⁰

The desire to assume the significations of technology, music and language of those perceived to be powerful is what links the Lari big men of Brazzaville who included phonographs among their burial goods; musicians like Franco and Saak Sakoul who in the 1960s intoned James Brown with shouts of ”Come on!” and “Sex!” (from "Sex Machine"); and the doctor in western Colombia who adorned the cracked, mud walls of the “alternative” clinic with framed advertisements from European and American medical journals.³⁰¹ The song "Mwana Pause," recorded by Pholidor and Bana Loningisa 1955-1956, celebrated the club "La Pause," which derived its name from "la pose." Elegantly dressed youth were fond of posing in public places, copying attitudes from European fashion magazines (some of whose styles, like those of Yves St. Laurent, were based on fashions from Africa and elsewhere).³⁰²

Sounds, like all images, carry magic, waiting to be imitated. When mimetically reproduced, this energy is appropriated. The soundscape becomes infused with this energy and thus is altered. Both the original sound and the soundscape of the imitator undergo alterity. Musicians most likely could not wait to get their hands on a guitar in the beginning; reports of aspiring youths making them out of tin cans and wire are almost archetypal. When the guitar became cheap enough, it took over the music scene. Other than being a new sound, I wonder what it meant to them, what, in copying, they felt they gained.

The significance of reinforcing the bond with the Latino-Caribbean world lies in Rumba Lingala's articulation of what had been implicitly known but never expressed on a national level. The shared history of the Congo and the Americas, especially Cuba, was evident in the rumba and son montunos; their shared modernity was made audible by Rumba Lingala. The hypocrisy of colonial "civilization" and the myth of European superiority were challenged through the blending of iconic African and diasporic cultural forms with themes and imagery of contemporary life.