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Modern African traditions represent the successive layering of cultural ideas over time. The things that survive today reflect unknowable African pre-history, colonial-era oddities, and of course, the scrambled bric-a-brac of our high-tech media age. The music from present day countries the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) and Congo--variously called Congo music, Zairois, rumba and now soukous--presents a compelling example. Early in the century, townsfolk along the Congo River relaxed by dancing to maringa--thumb-piano, drum, and bottle percussion music, drawn from various ethnic groups: Kongo, Lulua, Luba and others newly united by the emerging trade language, Lingala. When West Indian immigrants and sailors with guitars arrived in port cities, and later, when Cuban pop recordings flooded radio airwaves, Central Africans naturally found themselves in the music that Caribbean descendants of Congolese slaves had helped to create, and they reappropriated it.
In Congolese pop records from the \'50s, you hear the click pattern of the Afro-Cuban clave, and singers adapting the nasal quality of Havana\'s rumberos. But the African Lingala melodies possess a unique cadence and flow that define a timeless vocal sound. And guitars spin mesmerizing cycles that suggest a fresh infusion of African roots. Early Kinshasa bands like Joseph Kabasele\'s African Jazz and Franco\'s OK Jazz played cha-chas, biguines, boleros and rumbas. The sound they settled on was in fact closest to Cuban son, but they called it rumba and the name stuck.
Rumba cut across ethnic, linguistic, national and generational barriers, quickly spilling over into East Africa, where Luo, Kikuyu and other peoples adapted the guitar-based sound to the twists and turns of their own local rhythms, melodies and languages. Once again, fresh styles with deep and deepening histories came to life adding new hues and patterns to Afropop\'s emerging mosaic.
Things have changed for the worse in the DRC since the destructive, failed army rebellion of 1991, but when Afropop first visited Kinshasa in the mid- and late-\'80s, the music quarter of Matongé bustled 24-hours-a-day, fueled on local music. Record stores pointed speakers onto the hot, dusty streets and blared the latest hits by Zaiko Langa Langa, Mbilia Bel and Franco. Families at roadside stalls hawked coffee, cigarettes, and boiled eggs with hot pepper alongside household supplies like soap and toilet paper. On the weekends, they\'d sell all night, confident that people moving from one open air club or smoky bar to another might need something along the way. Wealthier folks from other neighborhoods poured into Matonge for its dusk-to-dawn nightlife. Early in the evening, nameless groups, sometimes still in their teens, took up the house-owned instruments to deliver a few original songs and show off their own synchronized dance moves. Once the club\'s headline act--maybe Choc Stars or romantic singer Koffi Olomide--took the stage, couples sipping tall bottles of beer would casually make their way to the dance floor, to move close with cool understatement. Only in the fast, reveling seben passages, where singers would entice the crowd to follow their latest moves, would couples break apart and shake, before returning to sip their beers. Though the music lasted until first light, few seemed to get drunk, and the dancers maintained impeccable control.
Zairean music adheres rigorously to rules and decorum, affecting the roles of the instruments, the progression of rhythms in a song, and precision matching of voice quality and rhythms in the vocal harmonies. The music\'s feeling of unbridled joy begins with discipline. This unusual rigor mirrors aspects of the strict social and political climate that has nurtured the Zaire sound.
Late in the last century, Belgium\'s King Léopold established a particularly cruel colonial government in the Belgian Congo, which lasted until 1959 when violence forced the Belgians to relinquish power. Patrice Lumumba became prime minister, only to be murdered in a coup a few months later. General anarchy and inter-ethnic warfare followed, sending many refugees, including rumba musicians, into Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, among other places. Then in 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko took over, and despite massive corruption, desperate economic failure, and the attempted military uprising of 1991, he held on until the eve of his death in 1997, when the current president, Laurent Kabila, inherited a nearly ungovernable shell of a nation. Mobutu instilled a deep fear of dissent and sadly failed to develop his country\'s vast resources. But the walls he built around his people and his attempts to boost cultural and national pride certainly contributed to the environment that bred Africa\'s most influential pop music.
Music from Central Africa in the Afropop Shop
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