Super Mazembe traces its roots to the Shaba Province of southern Congo, near the copper mining city of Lubumbashi, near the Zambian border. The band's founder, Mutonkole Longwa Didos, came of age when Congo music's second generation--Franco and Tabu Ley--was in full force, but he and his friends were more focused on the younger groups coming up with the Verckys label. Using borrowed instruments, Didos and his cohorts began rehearsing in 1967, and two years later, they took their band, then called Super Vox, across the border to Zambia.

In Lusaka, they were dependent on local clubs for equipment, but they fared well after settling on the formula of recording Congo music in various languages, Nyanga for Zambia, Kiswahili for Kenya and Tanzania, and Lingala for Congo. In Lusaka, members of Kenya's Super Eagles Limpopo Band inspired them to check out Nairobi, a musical hotspot at the time. So in 1974, they arranged visas and headed north-east. This proved a good move, as Nairobi had far more nightlife than Lusaka or Lubumbashi. The only problem was that the city also already had a band called Super Vox. So Didos and company adopted the name that would put them in the afropop history books: Super Mazembe, a reference to huge, earth-moving bulldozers used in construction projects at the time.

In the lively Nairobi scene of that day, Super Mazembe rubbed shoulders with fellow Congo groups Les Mangelepa, Les Kinois (Samba Mapangala's first group), later on Orchestra Virunga, and the Kenyan/Congolese group Les Wanyika. Bands of that era needed a dance, and Mazembe's--the mushosho--was an automatic hit with club goers. In March, 1977, Super Mazembe scored its first big hit with the song "Kassongo," titled for one of the band's rhythm guitarists. It uses a traditional 12/8 rhythm, switching to the Latin-tinged seben sound that was then all the rage only in the last minute of the track.

Super Mazembe built on their successes, traveling throughout Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, winning new fans constantly until there was constant demand for their performances. They were also prolific as recording artists during their heyday. Their career culminated a 1982 album for Virgin Records. As the '80s progressed, deaths, defections, and economic problems beset the band and they faded from the scene. Various efforts to revive them failed. Longwa Didos's death in 1999 put this dream to rest once and for all. Still, superb recordings of the band survive, most notably on the 2001 compilation Giants of East Africa (Stern's/Earthworks). This biography was adapted from liner notes for Giants of East Africa written by Trevor Herman.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre