For the past fifteen years, Americans have received a steady diet of pop music from Africa, but they've had little help in understanding its significance. A small but growing literature on modern African music gets a boost with the publication of Rumba on the River, A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos (Verso) by Gary Stewart. Stewart has spent more than a decade researching the music variously known as rumba, soukous, kwassa-kwassa, Congolese, and Zairois. As he worked away, the capitals of the two Congos---Kinshasa and Brazaville, cities that face each other across the great Congo River---have been devastated by war and civil unrest. Poverty and an epidemic of untimely deaths have all but erased the vibrant nightlife that fed this powerful music, and the survivors have mostly dispersed to other countries. The story Stewart tells is comparable with that of Motown or New Orleans jazz. It contains visionaries, prodigies, operators, innovators, and most of all performers who inspired generations and gave their lives meaning, at least for awhile. Though the two Congos now lie in ruins, Congo music has had a greater influence worldwide than any other modern music from Africa.

For fans and scholars alike, it is a godsend to have so much history packed into a single, well-indexed volume. On the most practical level, this book makes sense out of literally hundreds of CDs of Congo music that have been released with nary a word of explanatory liner notes. The French label Sonodisc, who managed to inherit rights to much early Congo music, has produced the bulk of these ghost releases. Anyone who has followed African pop knows the outlines of the story, that African rhythms went to Cuba and came back to Africa as dance band music in the 1920s and 30s, and that Kinshasa became the hub of a dance pop movement producing stars like Franco, Tabu Ley, Papa Wemba and Kanda Bongo Man. But even the most dedicated Congo music lovers will learn things from this ambitious account.

Oddly enough, it was Greek entrepreneurs in the 1940s who first set out to record and sell the unusual music that was growing up in Brazaville and Leopoldville, as Kinshasa was then known. The early Greek-run labels, Ngoma, Opika, and Olympia, inspired African competitors like Loningisa and later Veve and a variety of artist-run outfits. In the process, an industry was born. Studios had house players and instruments, singers competed to write songs that would outsell the last big hit. Clubs sprang up throughout the two cities. Bands developed loyal followings and shaped pop music sensibilities for much of the continent in the 1960s.

There was the rough, rootsy sound of Franco and his feisty OK Jazz, and the lyrical romanticism of African Jazz, featuring the father of Congo guitar Dr. Nico, stardom-bound singer Rochereau (later known as Tabu Ley), and Cameroonean legend Manu Dibango who was lured to Kinshasa by its rich music scene. In the 1970s, dictatorial President Mobutu sought to revive his country's African cultural heritage. The policy he called authenticité made an opening for a new kind of band: hotter, rawer, more dedicated to the flashy rhythms of the village than the cool Cuban sound. The so-called "youth bands," Zaiko Langa Langa, Choc Stars, Bella Bella, Lipwa Lipwa and many others, introduced rock `n' roll intensity to the Congo sound. As the Zairean economy deteriorated under Mobutu's blood-sucking regime, that once-promising music industry began to fail, and many successful artists fled to Paris and Brussels to pioneer the slicker sound that the world came to know as soukous.

Stewart has his work cut out for him keeping track of all the defections, schisms, reunions, and re-defections these bands engendered as the music struggled to rise above the conditions in these two hell-bound countries. But even if you lose track of the details, the big picture is impressive. By the time artists arrive in Paris in the 1980s to vie for the attention of early "world music" hunters like Island Records, it's no wonder that neophyte talent scouts have difficulty comprehending the musical universe confronting them. Congo-watchers were stunned when Island dumped soukous acts in favor of the "obscure" King Sunny Ade.

The book's final chapter reads like an extended obituary with many deaths attributable to rampant AIDS, and it is frankly depressing. Stewart's tentative attempt to find hope amid the human and political wreckage of the two Congos at the dawn of a new millenium is hardly reassuring. But this dark ending does not undercut the glory of the earlier decades Stewart so lovingly details, any more than the rise of rap and hip-hop undercuts the lingering charms of soul and classic R&B. Almost as much as the music itself, Stewart's book ensures that Congo music's golden age will survive in memory.

Banning Eyre

Contributed by: Banning Eyre
Originally published in: Boston Phoenix