Polaf 100 0069

VARIATIONS ON THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE CONGOLESE WORLD OF
SOUNDS
Achille Mbembe
Editions Karthala | Politique africaine
2005/4 - N 100
pages 69 91
ISSN 0244-7827
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Politique africaine, 2005/4 N 100, p. 69-91. DOI : 10.3917/polaf.100.0069
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Politique africaine
69
Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds

Achille Mbembe
Frime, escroquerie et cosmopolitisme. Le succs
du coup-dcal en Afrique et ailleurs
Dominik Kohlhagen
Corps, ville, violence. Why blackman dey carry shit
Ntone Edjabe
Mots choisis. Le sexe de Matonge
Sony Labou Tansi
Notes de fond
Politique africaine n 100 - dcembre 2005-janvier 2006
71
Achille Mbembe
Refusing the contrast between high and low art

forms, this text examines Congolese music as an aesthetic
form exhibiting particular modalities, sounds, harmonics,
and relations to sensorial experience that produce
particular effects on the listener; including that of
beauty. The meaning of musical beauty is not a matter
of categorization, but is rather its capacity to produce
effects on the human senses. With reference to the
historical trajectories of various strains of Congolese
music, the author assesses the aesthetic signification
of Congolese music as an experience of listening, but
also as a social and political act that contributes
to the performance of both resistance and resignation
or historical and personal experiences of order
and disorder.
Theodore Adorno, known for his aversion to Jazz, would no doubt have
disliked Congolese music 1. In all likelihood, he simply would not have

considered it to be music. Instead, one suspects, he would have thought
of it as deafening, painful noise: the discordant emission of primitive energy.
Should he have deigned to identify it as music at all, he likely would have
classified it as low art.
Low art, for Adorno, encompassed the vulgar in both form and content:
crude simplicity, stupefying effects, a propensity for encouraging social
passivity and intoxication. With this definition in mind, in Congolese music
the philosopher would almost certainly have decried coarse stimuli, banal
1. T. Adorno, Introduction la sociologie de la musique, Paris, Contrechamps, 1994, p. 38. See also
T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, New York, Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1982.
Variations on the Beautiful

in the Congolese World of
Sounds
lyrics, and rudimentary production. Adorno would have viewed Congolese

music as vulgar also because of its intended audience: people (both the
Congolese elite and the masses) whom he would no doubt have deemed
cut off from what they might be and marked by the precariousness of
their own existence 2 captive consciousnesses that have come to identify with
the orchestrated humiliation to which they have been subjected throughout
history. Finally, Adorno would have thought Congolese music vulgar for, to
him, it would have seemed to be essentially frivolous, lacking in autonomy and
inexorably colonized by commercial concerns.
Adorno, however, would have been wrong. To reduce Congolese musical
experience to an auto-hypnosis lacking aesthetic content, neither embodying
nor revealing elements of universality, as it is indeed likely that Adorno would
have, is to mistake the very nature of music. Music exists insofar as it is an act
of composition, interpretation and performance. It exists, that is, when there
is an act of listening, and when the body and the senses are set in motion,
whether through dance, meditation, trance or any other subjective effect. As
Bernard Sve remarks, the musical work is an organized whole of sound
events, and the entire set of the effects produced by these events in the listener 3.
The formalization of the sound event through graphic notation is merely an
exercise in domestication. It seeks to give a linguistic equivalent to an extralinguistic event.
To a large extent, this means that the aesthetic signification of the musical
work cannot, as Adorno would have us believe, be measured simply by its
ability (or its inability) to expose social alienation. The aesthetic signification
of a musical work is revealed through that which links the work to a world
of sensations. Musical beauty therefore has meaning in and through its
effects, through the feelings and passions that the musical work produces
in the subject who is listening to it, is present at its performance or is dancing
in accompaniment to it. As relates to Congolese urban music, this is a fundamental observation.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of
the new millennium, Congolese rumba and its offshoots, the most popular
music heard and performed in the cities of Congo-Kinshasa and CongoBrazzaville, has exercised an intimate power over the African imaginary. More
significantly, the music at hand has demonstrated itself to be the most successful
expression of serenity in the face of tragedy. At once poetry, dance and prayer,
it has become a dual experience of both inner freedom and possession, of
sadness, anguish and loss on the one hand and radiant happiness and emotional
expressiveness on the other. As a result, far from resembling a narcotic religion
which becomes more powerful as dissatisfaction with reality increases, it has
72 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de lAfrique et du monde
Politique africaine
emerged as a declaration of the most radical and the most immediate faith in
a life which is necessarily contradictory and paradoxical.
If this is so, the question then is to establish what actually happens in this
music. What makes it arouse, in the African subject hearing it, listening to it
or dancing to it, a force so unique and so intimate that the subject experiences
a feeling of complete jubilation? What is the relationship between this intimate
force and the idea of the beautiful? How can we understand its power, its
penetrating strength and energizing force, and hence its aesthetic signification?
What experience of joy and of life does it document and, in so doing, how does
it bring about a fusion of sound, happiness and sensation?
In responding to these questions, my starting-point is that there is neither
beauty nor ugliness other than in relation to a form of life of which the beautiful
(or the ugly) is a manifestation, a celebration, or even a contradiction. From a
purely musical perspective, the beautiful is that which, judged so by the ear,
touches and moves, provokes pleasure or sensory joy. But the ear is not all. This
too is a starting point for what follows. As I will demonstrate, in Congolese
music such sensation is evoked in the body by what might be called sound
forces, and is subsequently experienced at different levels of intensity and
through different organs 4.
With these two points of departure in mind, I seek below to offer an aesthetic
description of the works of several Congolese composers whose music has
imparted rhythm to African urban life over the last fifteen years, etching a deep
impression on collective imaginaries. By aesthetic description, I mean an
attempt to put into words the totality of sensations, pleasures and energies
provoked by a particular work, or set in motion in the subject listening or
dancing to it. For these sound forces to have the effect of touching and moving,
something has to take place both in the music itself and in the emotional
nervous system (feelings, sentiments, passions) of the subject possessed by it.
This something is what this essay endeavours to identify.
The point that African music can be legitimately listened to still needs to
be made, writes Kofi Agawu 5. Bearing this in mind, the pages that follow are,
more than anything else, the description of an experience of listening. It must
be underscored yet again, however, that I do not focus here on the sense of
hearing alone. To comprehend the aesthetic signification of the works studied
2. T. Adorno, Introduction la sociologie, op. cit., p. 33-35.

3. B. Sve, LAltration musicale, Paris, Le Seuil, 2002, p. 20.
4. On this kind of thinking, see G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, Paris, Le Seuil,
2003, p. 57-61; M. Merleau-Ponty, Phnomnologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard, 1945.
5. K. Agawu, African music as text, Research in African Literatures, vol. 32, n 2, 2001, p. 9.
73 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds
here 6, it is essential to remember that the latter mobilise several senses and
organs (hearing, voice, sight, touch, and further, movement and waves of
energy). There is nothing more complex than verbalizing that which involves
the non-verbal, or describing sound, which in essence is neither linguistic nor
involves the purely spontaneous practice of language. Aesthetic interpretation
here supposes that sensory material is reorganized by what might be called
the sound event, in the very process through which the latter frees the
imagination. It is such an exercise that I attempt here.
In order to understand the aesthetic dimensions of popular urban Congolese

music, we need to examine the context in which that music was born and
developed. While, from a strictly musical perspective, the history of modern
Congolese music remains to be written, the socio-political and economic
context of its evolution is relatively well documented 7. The sounds, rhythms
and ethnic dances of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville
and a large area of Angola, it is firmly established, birthed the music of which
we speak. Mixtures and borrowings from African and foreign styles, as well
as from Christian hymnody, were then added to this base. The rhythms and
sounds born of this mix emerged alongside colonial urbanization and the
social and economic transformations that it engendered.
At the heart of these transformations was the relationship between the
categories of being and time. Indeed, Belgian colonial rule can, to a large extent,
be analyzed as an endeavour aimed at restructuring local time and space.
This reorganization of autochthonous space and time proceeded in two ways.
The first was conversion to Christianity. Several studies have shown that this
involved a series of memory exchanges. Conversion took place in stages,
culminating in the convert assuming an externally-imposed identity and
lifestyle, which he or she subsequently assimilated and displayed in his or her
daily life. As a form of disciplinary power, Christianity introduced a new
calendar and a new temporality: a religious economy in which the days, the
months, and the years embraced a clearly defined liturgical calendar (from
the Nativity to the Ascension via Calvary and the Resurrection). Together
with this new temporality went a new celestial geography, which gradually
became a source of production for all kinds of utopias and fundamental shifts
in moral vocabularies 8.
This state of affairs had a powerful effect on the development of music in
the colonys burgeoning urban centers. One of the most important contributions
to Congolese music made by Christianity proved to be aesthetic indoctrination
Background
Politique africaine
an imposition of views as to what constitutes beauty, rules concerning correct

harmonic progressions, voice leading, types of vibrato and timbral characteristics. The introduction of choral singing, in particular, was significant in this
regard. Through Christianity, the Congolese learned how to sing Gregorian
chants and, in the process, to arrange notes or phrases sparingly. They learned
how to maximize breathing capacity, and were introduced to postures required
for good singing: standing straight upright, chest slightly protruding. More
importantly, they were initiated to the narrative, representational and dramatic
character of music. The Congolese singing body is therefore partly the work
of Christian missionaries. In seminaries, musical technical training (harmony,
intonation, expression, vibrato) was also dispensed, via which the whole body
was transformed into a musical instrument. Nevertheless, religious music
was less a form of art than that which, providing benefits to the soul, made it
possible to link beauty and moral worth.
A second key way in which space and time were reorganized under colonial
rule was via arts of disciplining and cultivating the body. Complex and uneven
transformations in the economy (relations of ownership, property, labor) were
accompanied by the development of new social relations, especially in the
cities. These prompted novel uses of the body and its pleasures, new ways of
living and dying and new forms of desires 9. Social reproduction increasingly
depended not only on the availability of the means to meet human survival,
but also on a vast array of imaginary forms, on the circulation of dreams,
fantasies and fictions 10. The city as a space of heterogeneity profoundly
transformed long-standing ideas about the meanings of belonging, the
symbolics of sexuality and traditional markers of culture and identity. All of
this led to an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human
identity as a manipulable, artful process.
6. The principal works studied here are: Koffi Olomide, Effrakata (Next music/Sono, CDS 8919MD862,
2001); Papa Wemba, Molokai (Real World, LC3098, 1998); Werra Son, Kibuisa Mpimpa: Operation
Dragon (CDJPS, 2001); JB Mpiana, TH Toujours humble (Sacem, n. d.); Extra-Musica, Bon Pied Bon
Look: Champion dAfrique (Declic Communication, 1997); Wenge Musica Maison Mre, Solola Bien!
(CD JPS, 1999); Wenge BCBG, JB Mpiana Souverain (Simon Music-Sipe, n. d.); Koffi Olomide,
Attentat (Sonodisc, 1999), Tshala Muana, Malu (CDJPS, 2002); Zaiko Langa Langa, Eureka! (CD JPS
217, 2003); Werrason, la queue leu-leu (CDJPS 234, 2003); Koffi Olomide, Affaire dtat (Next
Music/Sono, CDS 8979, 2003); Papa Wemba, Mze Fulangenge (Sono, CDS 8836-SD30, s. d.).
7. See, for example, Kazadi wa Mukuna, The origin of Zairean modern music: a socio-economic
aspect, African Urban Studies, n 5, 1979-1980, p. 31-39, and The genesis of urban music in Zaire,
African Music, vol. 7, n 2, 1992, p. 72-84.
8. P. Ngandu Nkashama (dir.), Lglise des prophtes africains. Lettres de Bakatuasa Lubwe Wa Mvidi
Mukulu, Paris, LHarmattan, 1991.
9. N. Hunt, Colonial Lexicon, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998.
10. See L. White, Speaking with Vampires, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.
Disciplining the body was accomplished through labour on the one hand,
and intensive techniques of caring for the self on the other. One such technique
was the deployment of elegance and self-stylization 11. The body, humiliated
and made ugly in the workplace or at the hands of a brutal colonial regime,
could acquire a new value and be rehabilitated through various arts of making
it beautiful, through masquerade, simulation, imitation and dissimulation.
In this context, appearances emerged as powerful tools and signifiers of
action. In urban centres, the body was introduced to the rudiments of colonial
bourgeois civility 12. In this context, a new culture of taste and leisure emerged 13:
a global culture with its own spaces. Bars (nganda) were a case in point. This
global culture produced its own activities, linked, among others, to the sex trade
(mwasi ya leta), to sports (football clubs) and the consumption of alcohol 14.
In these various settings, cultural artefacts local and foreign rubbed shoulders,
juxtaposing places near and far.
From its inception in this context, Congolese popular music was less
concerned with flawless beauty and purity of form than with its power to
act as a sign system devised to free the imagination. It was a hybrid, a bastard
child, at heart. In the 1940s the Rumba arrived from Cuba. It came by way
of gramophone records and instruments such as the guitar, the accordion and
harmonica, brought by immigrant workers from West Africa, coastmen whose
music of choice was Highlife, a fusion of American Jazz, European and
Caribbean dance styles and folk music from West Africa. New dance steps in
transit from Loango (the Maringa, Polka, Tango, Waltz and Quadrille) were wed
to the Rumbas beats and the songs of villages thither and yon. Following in
the wake of the Bolero, the two rhythm Cha-Cha-Cha, the Merenge, Pachanga,
Beguine and Mambo, these sounds and steps were rapidly adopted in
the main urban centers, as well as among traders and migrant workers in the
diamond and copper mines, on the railways and beyond.
The first major bands (Congo Rumba, Victoria Brazza, Jazz Bohme) were
created during the first half of the 20th century in Leopoldville, Brazzaville,
Pointe Noire and San Salvador. Some combined West African and European
musical practices. In the process, local musicians learned to play the violin, the
guitar, and a variety of brass and woodwind instruments. At a later phase,
these various instruments were adapted to traditional melodies. At this initial
stage, however, Caribbean and Latin American music were all the rage. This
called for the introduction of still other instruments rhythm and lead guitars,
double basses, clarinets and percussive instruments such as conga drums,
maracas and claves.
For decades to come, Caribbean and Latin American music would inflect
the structure as well as the innovative and creative processes of the urban
Politique africaine
music scene in Congo. The Rumba proved a particularly rich source of inspiration, spawning a wealth of stylistic variants, starting with the Rumba Boucher,
the Rumba Odemba and Rumba-Sukuma at the beginning of World War II,
through to the Rumba Kiri-Kiri and the Rumba-Sukusu of the 1980s. These
developments, in turn, were nurtured by the availability of rich and compatible
rhythmic formulas, dances steps and body movements (Agbwaya, Nzambele,
Ebongo), as well as a plethora of stringed instruments (njenje, kokolo, likembe)
and drums (patenge) from various regions of Congo 15.
The two principal Congolese bands of these early days, both founded by
Joseph Kabasele, African Jazz and OK Jazz, later headed by Luambo Makiadi
(best known as Franco), are positioned at the very confluence of these external
and internal influences 16. Both played a central role in the emergence of
modern urban Congolese music as a form of entertainment intimately linked
to key social occasions, ritual and drama. The birth of African Jazz in 1953 was
a milestone. Kabaseles orchestra brought discipline to the emerging local
field of big band music, restructured ways of singing, integrated the tam-tam,
the electric guitar and wind instruments, classified repertoires and enhanced
the social status of musicians. Its trademark was a popular fusion of imported
and local music with a deliberate Latin flavour. Francos main contribution,
when he took over from Kabasele, lay in his use of indigenous rhythms and
folklore styles. Drawing on these, he introduced long stretches of purely
instrumental music a technique Fela Anikulapo Kuti was to refine later in
his own drawn out, wordless stretches of saxophone, piano and bass guitar.
Franco also transformed the art of guitar-playing by adopting an aggressive
style which stood in marked contrast to Kabaseles flow and the lyrical, idyllic
expansion of his melodies.
One of Francos early innovations was the incorporation into his pieces of
a distinctive short-long, upbeat-downbeat attack, followed by the reiteration
11. C. D. Gondola, Dream and drama: the search for elegance among Congolese youth, African Studies
Review, vol. 42, n 1, 1999, p. 23-48.
12. See V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994, chap. 4.
13. P. Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
14. E. Dorier-Apprill (dir.), Vivre Brazzaville. Modernit et crise au quotidien, Paris, Karthala, 1998.
15. Kazadi wa Mukuna, 1980. The author cites such dances as the Mokonyonyon (of the Tetela ethnic
group) introduced in 1977 by the singer Papa Wemba, or Lita Bembos Ekonda Saccad (originating
among the Mongo people), Empire Bakubas Kwasa-Kwasa (of the Kongo ethnic group) or T.P.O.K.
Jazzs Mayeno (Bantandu people).
16. See S. Bemba, Cinquante Ans de musique du Congo-Zare, Paris, Prsence africaine, 1984;
C. D. Gondola, Musique moderne et identits citadines. Le cas du Congo-Zare, Afrique contemporaine,
n 168, 1983, December 1993, p. 125-168.
of a single note from a dominant guitar. Important as well for the later development of Congolese music were dissonant twinges he introduced in the first
half of a piece, followed in the second by chromatically tinged episodes of
rhythmic irregularity. Lyricism here became imbued with a brittle undercurrent,
a half-heartedness still heard in most contemporary Congolese productions.
Franco also brought into modern band music the high-register alto and falsetto
male voices that were common in traditional music and used the vibrato to
create an ornate electric guitar sound. Simultaneously, he introduced the
method of playing runs of sixths that has become yet another trademark
of the Congolese guitar style. This he combined with a grinding, metallic
sound which reproduced the resonance of a traditional zither. Finally, he
unleashed the sebene, a master stroke consisting in taking up a musical phrase
and repeating it until it becomes hypnotic 17.
By the mid 1970s, music had become a key means by which Congolese
urban society reflected on itself, on its own identity, and on the modes of
representation it adopted. In many respects, music epitomized joy, festivity
and happiness, elegance and serenity. It enabled the Congolese to sing what
could not be spoken about in any other kind of speech. Musical instruments,
the guitar in particular, did the talking and explained how what was said was
to be danced 18. As an art form, music played a crucial role in the definition of
taste and sensibilities and in the invention of formal codes of good manners
and civility. It became a vehicle for commenting on morals and an engine for
social satire, a repository for discourse on virtues, vices and passions pride,
hate, envy and idleness, ugliness, deformities, greed and sexual predation.
In the 1980s and 1990s, many artists took their inspiration from Kabasele and
Franco. Such was the case for Sam Mangwana, and, later, for Zaiko Langa
Langa and Papa Wemba. These artists, however, also brought considerable
change, disrupting and destabilizing the rhythmic figures, tempos and musical
concepts inherited from their predecessors. In so doing, they prefigured one
feature of the Congolese musical scene: the recurrent splintering of groups,
along a continuum fuelled by the power of imitation, inter-textual borrowings
and never-ending reinterpretations. Later generations also distinguished themselves from their forebears stylistically by adding or subtracting instruments
from their repertoire. Zaiko Langa Langa developed a style in which wind
instruments were deliberately omitted and prominence was given to rhythmic
patterns borrowed from traditional music. In the compositions of his ensemble,
among the most renowned of the second generation of urban bands, the sebene
grew in length, overtaking the singing section. Lyrics gave way to rhythm
at the heart of the piece. The role of the lead guitar was no longer limited
to harmonic accompaniment and melodic improvisations, writes Kazadi
Politique africaine
wa Makuna, but expanded to interact rhythmically with the percussion

instruments, especially in the sebene section of the composition 19.
The 1980s in Congo were marked by a renewed cycle of violence and a
militarization of everyday life. The weight of wars and rebellions, rapes and
massacres, drugs and unrest, pillage, political and economic violence was
added to the heavy load of a history steeped in suffering 20. The music scene
registered this new onslaught. The languid melodies characteristic of classic
Congolese rumba (1950s-1970s) gave way to tremendous pace, its swaying
rhythms and steps to increasingly stereotypical choreography and a sense of
emotional intoxication 21. This was the new sound the sound of Koffi Olomide,
Quartier Latin and Wenge Musica. At the heart of this new sound was the
scream, a technique that made its way onto the music scene in the 1980s,
causing a radical shift in the rules of musical beauty.
As all of this suggests, the rules of musical beauty in Congolese urban
music have undergone manifold changes over time. How and why is the stuff
of a complex and fascinating social epistemology. At the heart of this is voice:
orality. Despite the pressures of a written culture, oral communication has
remained predominant in Congolese urban and rural settings alike. Such communication takes place in the context of plural languages and a reciprocal
interpenetration between different artistic genres and improvisational tactics.
Hard and fast distinctions do not obtain here; speech and music, dance and
theatre, each itself the site of multiple languages, overlap. Juxtaposition is the
name of the game.
(Mis) Rules of Beauty

Juxtaposition
Aesthetics, in this context, are born of tensions between a model fixed in
writing, the indiscipline arising from linguistic creolization (a must for oral com-
17. See G. Ewens, Congo Colossus: The Life and Legacy of Franco & OK Jazz, Norwich, Buku Press, 1994,
p. 94 ff.
18. See Kazadi wa Mukuna, The hanging role of the guitar in the urban music of Zare, The World
of Music, vol. 36, n 2, 1994, p. 62-72.
19. Ibid., p. 68.
20. R. Devisch, Frenzy, violence, and ethical renewal in Kinshasa, Public Culture, vol. 7, n 3, 1995,
p. 593-630, and La violence Kinshasa, ou linstitution en ngatif, Cahiers dtudes africaines,
vol. 38, n 150-152, 1998, p. 441-469.
21. P. Ngandu Nkashama, Ivresse et vertige: les nouvelles danses des jeunes au Zare, LAfrique
littraire et artistique, n 51, n. d., p. 94-102.
munication), and the hegemony of images. From this, extremely complex relationships arise. Words commonly reference a plurality of concepts. The things
they designate are multiple and their significations structurally ambivalent. The
same is true of images, be they drawn from TV series, videos or the work of
self-taught urban painters: intrinsically composite, they demonstrate an extraordinary capacity not only to represent, but also to tell a story and, simultaneously, to make it happen 22.
Music renders visible the multiple juxtapositions that shape daily life. In the
process, it becomes an archive, a relic, of human experience on the streets
of Congos cities. Plays on length and pitch in Lingala, Kinshasas lingua
franca and the language in which most music is sung, foster an intimate relation between tone and word. In Zaiko Langa Langas Eureka, for example,
every sound espouses the tones, accents, sighs, and inflexions of the worded
voice, telling and making a story. Word play, a staple of most songs, adds to
the telling of the tale, as do words invented and adapted from different languages, local and foreign. Borrowings and neologisms are a constant, signifying
an experience that is constantly changing, accounting for the instability of
reality and its dependence on the sound that domesticates it. Such domestication is possible only through a combination of image and text, words, sounds
and movements, the sonoric, the visual and the theatrical. To tell the story of
life in Congos cities, music calls on and produces heterogeneities of representation. Here as in theatre and painting, signification takes place through the
juxtaposition of words, colours and sounds, an alchemy in which each element
both retains and loses a part of its intrinsic power. The end product, writes
Bogumil Jewsiewicki, is more of a kaleidoscope than a fixed image 23.
Ugliness and Abjection

In the colonial and, thereafter, in the postcolonial period, ugliness and
abjection took on a distinctly political dimension 24. Congo has been living
in a spiral of terror ever since the start of the colonial era. At various points in
its cycle, this spiral has assumed ghostly allures, its spectacle of pain varying
in intensity as days and events unfolded. At its peak moments, the human body
has become a site of violent confusion: distinctions between what is flesh and
what is meat have fallen away 25. So too, distinctions between what is true
and what is false, that which is to be believed and that which is beyond
belief. Power has been shown to break bones and strip subjects of their flesh,
disfiguring them, forcing them into a demonic dance 26. Power has taken to
producing carcasses, penetrating the bodies of its subjects with nervous
energy 27. This has become its raison dtre. Its modus operandi, tried and true,
is to thrust them into extremely dangerous and vulnerable situations, which
Politique africaine
arouse in them different orders of sensations from physical pain to convulsions and spasms of envy and greed.
In a demonic play, power entices its subjects to savour corruption, while at
the same time making them suffer like beasts. In these spectral conditions, music
has broken with the limited circle of sounds on which it previously relied 28.
This has been so in particular from the 1990s forward. In the 1990s, the range
of timbres was increased and many artists undertook to play more aggressively
with dissonance. This called for a willingness to blur distinctions between
sound and noise and, in the process, to join art to the world of screams 29.
Various devices have emerged to effect this crossing of boundaries. At times,
the scream has morphed into a howl the howl of meat, from the height of a
cross, under the eye of a government transformed into a spirit-dog 30. Screaming,
howling, throughout the last quarter of the 20th century and into the new
millennium, part noise-sound, part musical scream, Congolese music has
endeavoured to account for the terror, the cruelty and the dark abyss for the
ugly and the abject that is its country 31.
Noise and Sound

Contemporary Congolese music seeks to establish a precarious balance
between noise, sound and scream 32. The music is produced in an environment
itself strongly shaped by the omnipresence of noise. Kinshasa is a town full
of noises and full of smells, comments an observer. Everywhere music is in
the air, a baby crying, the sound of car horns or portable radios singing. Smells
22. See B. Jewsiewicki, Vers une impossible reprsentation de soi, Les Temps modernes, n 620-621,
2002, p. 101-105.
23. Ibid.
24. On the notion of abjection, see J. Kristeva, Pouvoir de lhorreur: essai sur labjection, Paris, Le Seuil, 1980.
25. See the special volume edited by J.-L. Grootaers, Mort et maladie au Zare, Cahiers africains, vol. 8,
n 31-32, 1998.
26. See L. Joris, La Danse du lopard, Paris, Actes Sud, 2002.
27. See F. De Boeck, Le deuxime monde et les enfants-sorciers en Rpublique dmocratique du
Congo, Politique africaine, n 80, december 2000, p. 32-57.
28. Compare with the limited range of sounds that characterizes the convention of Western art music.
It can be argued that until the development of electronic sound generators, this range remained
confined within a relatively small compass. See S. Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music
from Wagner to Cage, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 218.
29. On the theme of the scream in contemporary African thought, see J.-M. Ela, Le Cri de lhomme
africain, Paris, LHarmattan, 1980.
30. I have been inspired, here, by G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, op. cit., p. 28-61.
31. On the subject of cruelty, see A. Artaud, Le Thtre et son double, Paris, Gallimard, 1964.
32. In another context, see T. Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America,
London, Wesleyan University Press, 1994; J. Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
too are noisome. There is always the scent of food emanating from cookingpots or from a nganda, the smell of a cars exhaust pipe or a sewage pipe, or
the smell of urine against a wall or a tree bearing a Do not urinate sign 33.
Congolese musical works dip abundantly into this culture of noise. Any and
all sounds are used, if not as a musical sound, then at least to create music. Often,
musical sounds are based on imitations of natural sounds. Onomatopeas
abound. Noise is used to modify sound understood as pure form. This does
not make music heard or composed any less instrumentally rich quite the
contrary, as evidenced by the virtuosity of guitar riffs and the improvisational
flourishes they and other instruments bring forth. Noise adds to rhythm
spasmodic eruptions that break the stream of slow melodies. Purity of form
or sound is not the goal: the effect sought is one of corruption through noise.
Yet this noise is not anarchic, not least because it expresses joy. Noise, here, is
part of the practice of joy. Joy is noisy within this musical genre. And noise,
an impure sound, is used in the service of joy and beauty.
Any event involving sound is called music if it involves a certain surplus force.
At particular moments, carried by the imagination to the brink of intoxication,
the musical phrase takes the form of a volcanic effusion. Mixed with words,
soaring bursts from guitar, screams, percussion and melody, it is transformed
into an image of the very gates of hell ear-punching frenzy, groping disorder
and energy. Or instead it becomes an effusion of tears, provoked by the
haunting memory of mourning or by jubilation and the unchained outpouring
of emotion. And so it reflects as much the hollow tolling of reality as the
pending fulfilment of still awaited promise, an interweaving of myriad figures,
the beautiful and the ugly intertwined in the image of life itself.
Dimensions of Form
Rhythm
The rhythm of Congolese music draws on that of poetry, of religious song
and prayer and of autochthonous dance. It is produced not only by musical
instruments, but by gesture and voice as well. Rhythm imprints itself on the
dancers body, infusing it with pulsating waves of energy. Polyrhythm is the
dominant model: bursts and sequences that are at times regular and others
intermittent. Variations between increasing and decreasing energy, and
movement upwards to a peak and then back down again, are characteristic of
most musical pieces. The energetic tension is enhanced by repetition of a same
musical phrase, over and over, by the solo or bass guitar, or by ramping up
pressure through a series of screams. Sounds, syllables and phrases, all the
while, are manipulated with increasing momentum.
Politique africaine
A distinctive feature of the music thus created is that rhythm is expressed

as tension. This tension is produced by variations in energy, as in the later works
of Koffi Olomide 34 or Wenge Musica BCBG 35. Rhythm, here, is the ordered (and
disordered) distribution of energy over time, in a synthesis of instrument
(especially guitar and percussion) and voice. Voices, instruments and dancers
bodies converge and diverge, unfurling energy, evoking tension counterpoised with release and relaxation. In places, tension is induced by the sheer
length of the piece. These multiple combinations give rise to an infinite number
of possible rhythmic nuances progressions long or slow and intermittent
breaks, syncopated and violent by turns. Wenge Musica and Koffi Olomides
compositions are again excellent examples of this. Each sound is a relay
between two sounds, themselves punctuated by the voice of the guitar or the
endless psalmodies of a vocalist. Hiccoughs, sudden restarts and stops,
violent dips in energy, the residue of voices, the beat, slow or fast, semi-static
or stationary tempos are unleashed at different points to produce an effect
of stupefying intoxication or one of serene jubilation (see, for instance,
Olomides, Affaire dtat).
Dance
Performance is integral to the experience thus unleashed. Consider the
steps women dance to the rhythm known as Soukous 36. There are several
such steps, each with a different name 37. The aesthetic of the names is in itself
revealing. Tourniquet, for instance. The word references a set of movements
around a circle with clearly defined contours. The circle is the dancers body:
all movement is centred on the body itself, or, more precisely, in certain parts
of the body. The dancer lightly flexes her knees, fixes her buttocks, arches her
back and begins to turn her hips. She becomes the curves of her body, sensual,
provocative. The hips act as a chassis for the whole body, yet, like the buttocks,
remain flexible. The other parts of her frame follow, moving from this central
pivot. To dance the tourniquet then basically means to rotate the pelvis. But this
33. B. Mumbu, Kinshasa, un scandale culturel, Africultures, n 53, 2002, p. 24.

34. Listen to Mopao MM Mokonzi, CDS 8983, Next Music/Sono, 2002.
35. Les Anges adorables, vol. I, CDS 8801, Sonodisc, 1994.
36. See Ndombolo Fever. Laissez la fivre vous envahir! Cours de danse africaine. Dmonstrations et spectacles,
Kinshasa, Maison Mre Productions, 2002.
37. There have always existed in the Congo hundreds of dance steps with evocative names: boucher,
caneton, choquez retardez, crapeau-crapeau, ekonda saccade, griffe dindon, kwasa-kwasa,
masasi calculez, mobylette, mutwashi, nagez sous-marin, parachute, pompe bijection, volant,
tsheke-tsheke, caneton a lesema, etc. See I. Ndaywel e Nziem, Histoire gnrale du Congo. De
lhritage ancien la Rpublique dmocratique, Paris, Agence de la Francophonie, 1998, p. 481.
is no simple rotation. Flexibility and dexterity are required. The dancers

hands are also used to good effect. They are positioned to produce an attitude
or a pose. Wrists are flexed firmly, but elegantly; hands are placed on the hips,
framing the pelvis as it swivels repeatedly from right and to the left.
Another step, the coucoune, differs from the tourniquet in the way the legs
are parted. Word games tell the story. Coucoune is many things: a variation
on coucou (the laying of eggs), cocu (cuckold) and coquine (mischievous
woman). Because it is based on a particular way of parting the legs, the
coucoune is a sensually suggestive dance step accentuated by adding to the
rotation of the pelvis from left to right another move, from back to front and
back again, which refers to sexual intercourse. The dmarreur, in contrast, is
more of a playful step. The dancer takes up her position as if about to start
a motorbike, and then accelerates rapidly. But, having started the engine,
she suddenly pitches forwards. At the last minute, she recovers and avoids
falling. This step, like the others, assigns a central role to the gyrating pelvis.
But it also includes a more agile movement of the feet, thus combining fixed
and mobile positions.
Other dance steps associated with Soukous are allumez le feu (light the
fire) and enfoncez le clou (hammer in the nail). In the first, the dancer strikes
an imaginary match. The match does not light, however, and she tries again,
fanning the flame (moto in Lingala) with undulating movements of the hips
until the fire finally ignites. But it is hot. She tries to extinguish it in a jerky movement, in which she moves her buttocks and legs like a fan. Enfoncez le clou is
similar. The dancer holds an imaginary gun. She squats on her haunches and
moves from side to side, as if hammering in nails with her hips. Other dance
steps include la feinte (the trick or feint), in which the dancer pretends to
slip, again giving the impression of falling. In extremis, she recovers and again
pulsates her buttocks, just like an accordion.
Dance steps associated with the musical genre Ndombolo also derive from
a demarcation of the hips in relation to the rest of the body. One difference with
Soukous is that the body is gradually reduced to a squatting position, then
raised again. At given points, the dancer turns first to the right and then to the
left, then moves forwards and back, at a pace dictated by the rhythm of the
music. The dancer takes up a firing position as if aiming a gun. She then lifts
her heels and marches, all the while moving gradually into a squat, then turns,
rises again, and suddenly breaks the rhythm, turning abruptly to the left or right,
front or back. Drawing on this model, numerous steps have been devised:
hold-up; no way; whiplash; clear off; kung-fu style; bonda style; sequence emotion;
air-traffic controller, to name but a few.
Congolese dance is a carnal endeavour. Against platonizing ideologies that
Politique africaine
would cast the body as a prison for the soul, dancing here is a celebration of
the flesh. The body is absolute flux and music is invested with the power to
enter it, penetrating it to the core. Music produces psychic, somatic and emotional effects on the organs and limbs, subjecting them to the rule of waste.
Music breaks bones (buka mikuwa) and hurls bodies (bwakanka nzoto),
causing women and men to behave like snakes (na zali ko bina lokolo nioka).
The body is not so much harmed as it becomes a site of transgression, the
locus of a blurring between the transcendental and the empirical, the material
and the psychic. In addition to existing as flux, the body is also a force-field
of contrasts. Music engages in a struggle with these forces. Never simply
movement of the human form, Congolese dance embodies something that
resembles a search for original life, for perpetual genesis, and, through this,
for an ideal of happiness and serenity.
Paradoxically, a state of serenity is attained through noise, screams and
trance. This is the case in Ndombolo, wherein sounds, at times, are simplified to
the extreme: hardly any high-pitched trumpets ringing out, building crescendos
towards a moment of triumph, as in Hugh Masekelas music; no brass instruments with thundering resonance; no saxophone, as in the styles of Manu
Dibango or Fela Anikulapo Kuti; rarely any swaying rhythm, as in the late
Francos Rumba. Instead, orchestral clangings evoke the confusion of life.
Interruptions are fast and frequent. Furious dancing, especially by women, is
interspersed, here and there, with melancholic vocal phrases, the sombre notes
of a guitar, and, now and then, flowing sequences of elegant sound.
Everything suggests a relationship with the body made up of derision and
excess, tamed fear, rage, blows and insults, extreme parody, all at the centre
of an aggressive mass of sound, interrupted from time to time by a guitar
sequence. Still, for all its torrid heat, Ndombolo aims to transform the body
into a figure of life. With ugliness and abjection all about, the goal of the noise
is to compel the body to escape from itself. To allow for this exit, the music turns
the hips and buttocks into a pendulum. The flexed posterior becomes a
parachute, then a vacuum-cleaner and a suction pad. It is transformed into
a semi-autonomous force, in touch at every shift and sway with the world
of sensation 38.
The other path to serenity is through listening to the music itself, its melodies,
rhythms, tensions, and lyrics. The very notion of serenity assumes that each
subject is an ego endowed with the ability to act on its own body. Subjects can
dispossess or rid themselves of their bodies, even if only temporarily. Thus,
38. See G. Rouget, La Musique et la transe. Essai dune thorie gnrale des relations de la musique et de la
possession, Paris, Gallimard, 1990.
in Congolese urban dance, the opposition between body and mind becomes
blurred. Dance emerges as the site of a dual life, wherein all truth, all beauty
has multiple meanings. In a sociological context where misery, anguish, trauma,
terror and horror are not only daily realities, but also constitute the state of the
subject, dancing becomes a way of journeying outside the self.
At the heart of the music is the scream. This is no figure of speech. The
scream is an interpellation, a call to the audience produced as part of the
musical spectacle. Known also as lanimation (literally the bringing to life),
it is voiced by atalaku, or animateurs, men present on the stage throughout the
performance who work closely with the musicians in a dialogue of notes and
words. Animation is used to accompany the playing of guitars. Introduced in
the 1970s, it was relatively insignificant until the middle of the 1980s. In the
1980s, Zaiko Langa Langa introduced a dance accompanied by the repeated
scream of an atalaku: Atalaku, Zekete: Regardez ses fesses. Voyez comment elles
bougent! [Watch her buttocks, see how they move!]
A number of other Congolese bands followed suit. The scream became a
central feature of music produced in cities across Congo. It was developed as
a technique and underwent significant transformations over time at the hands
of charismatic atalakus men by the name of Dolce Parabolic, Bill Clinton, Tutu
Kalondji, Celeo Scram (Animation Maison-Mre); Al-Patchino (Animateur Nouvelle
Ecriture); Robert Ekokota (Wenge Musica); and Theo Mbala Ambassadeur.
Atalakus draw their names from multiple universes: the world of medicine
(Gentamycine, Animation Wenge BCBG); of military operations in the age of
globalization (Djuna Mumbafu Colonel Bradi, Animation Delta Force); high-tech
communications technology associated with secret operations (3615 Code
Niawu); or Egyptian mythology (Shora Pharaon). Each atalaku strives to forge
his own style, but all make use of folklore. They endeavour to coordinate
screams and musical instruments to produce an effect of calling out and to the
dancers, harmonizing sound and movement: the atalaku screams, instructing
the dancers as to what step should be performed.
Screams infuse the musical performance with a torrid and turbulent
atmosphere. The words, the phrases, in crude flights of oratory, burst forth
intuitively from the mouth of the atalaku like lava from a volcano, writes one
commentator. The atalaku cheers on the dancers and incites them to further
passion, creativity and technical brilliance They embellish the dance, loading
it with fantasies and trills of sound, raising it ever closer to the pinnacle. The
rhythm of the percussion has no sooner faded than it is replaced by the hysterical animation of the atalaku. This time, the atalaku is accompanied by a
Music as Sound Scream
Politique africaine
Baby, do you see how this girl rolls her hips? I can hardly contain myself, look, but look, look
My brother, we have to collect the crumbs they have left us. Lets go, come, if you refuse,
what shall we eat?
Can you feel it, this emotion? Let us destroy the elixir, right now.
My young brother, I cry every day, because where are we going to live? In Europe they
want no more of us, and here at home, there is nothing but trouble.
Comrade in exile, why do you stab me in the back? Should we distrust our childhood
friends?
Long live the weed!
Lets let go, my brother, let go for real!
Shamukwale: My brother is returning the money you have stolen. There is no point in killing
me, there is no point in hurting me.
My mother is the mistress of my fathers best friend. My mothers best friend is now
sleeping with my father. How far can immorality go?
Empty the truck! Cemetery full!
That the technique of screams was introduced in the 1980s is not coincidental.
The 1980s in Congo were a time of multiple crises. Music, in this context, was
transformed into an instrument of social revolt. Revolt, however, always went
hand in hand with uneasy compromise. A number of musicians thus found
themselves singing the praises of Saddam Hussein, the nickname given to
Mobutu Sesse Sekos son, who was the patron of various bands in Kinshasa.
But the music nevertheless remained an expression of hate. Instruments
drums, beating faster, synthesisers, bass guitars took to mimicking the
winds of destruction howling through the country. Sounds of suffering and
social fragmentation echoed through the music. The spectacle of bloodshed
and dismemberment that was Congo became the spectacle of the song. Such
is the source of the screams, cries, moans and groans all forms of utterance
that resist language which litter Congolese music at the close of 20th century.
And so the scream, like melody, rhythm and percussion, becomes a bridge
between pain and its expression as language 39.
Scene and Spectacle

Palais Omnisport de Paris-Bercy, Paris, 2000. On the stage, Werrason, of
Wenge Musica Maison-Mre. The performance starts off with a cascade of
39. See E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1987.
brisk and lively chorus, and constructs the phraseology of the screams around
a theme parallel to the main text of the work, riding on the back of the dancers
skill in a mysterious journey between gesture and being.
guitars and voices. The musicians are dressed in black and white uniforms.
Werrason, wearing a leather shirt and trousers, appears in the middle of a
song. The solo guitar is unobtrusive, leaving space for the lead musicians
voice, which in turn alternates with the voices of a chorus. The song proceeds
as if in a Christian litany. The names of artists, both dead and alive, are called
out, accompanied by faint gestures, in deep communion with a tradition
hailing back to Franco. The drums are almost inaudible. Now and then, the
guitar seeks to take the lead, but half-heartedly, and is immediately drowned
out by the singing.
Suddenly a group of women appear dressed like soldiers. They sport
striking hairdos; some are redheads, others blondes. They are wearing a variety
of shoe styles, from boots to Nike trainers. The choreography is formal,
controlled by the screams of an atalaku draped in a blue Congolese flag covered
with stars. Now and then, the breaks initiated by the lead guitar and the
atalaku introduce a spasmodic and jerky rhythm, which provokes a frenzy of
movement (legs, pelvis, loins, posterior), synchronised but free enough to
allow for personal style. Two atalakus reply to one other as if in an echo. The
women begin to dance like crabs, lined up in pairs, with a leader dressed in
an orange uniform, like a mineworker. They open their legs, then close them,
accordion-style, move their behinds, slightly off balance, not square on their
feet, but on the tips of their toes, now and then with both arms on the head or
around the neck. At the same time they turn their heads briefly to the left, and
then to the right. Suddenly, they turn their backs on the audience and begin
rotating their hips in front of the men, their buttocks facing the audience.
Now everyone begins to dance. First squatting down, then forwards and
backwards, to the left and to the right, arms raised. The movements are clearly
choreographed, but always leaving room for individual style, depending on
the shape of the body. Everyone kneels. Then comes an abrupt break. All of
the buttocks on stage turn to toward the audience in a series of movements
simultaneously semi-erotic and -obscene. As seconds, then minutes, pass,
the boundary between these two registers is erased. The dancers move as if
penetrating and withdrawing, thrusting, as in an act of unbridled copulation.
The end comes with the furious spasms of an imaginary ejaculation.
The choreography is relatively free and informal. Midway, it is broken by
a duel between two men a kind of phallic collision. Each holds his scrotum,
legs slightly lifted. Suddenly, both spread their legs, like animals about to
satisfy their needs, then they start to spin furiously. The dance is centred
around the hips, which the rest of the body endeavours to move to the front
and then to the back. Both hands rest on the pelvis, which is rotated over and
over again. There are fake moves feints first of one leg, then the other, as
Politique africaine
the rump is thrust violently backwards, then projected forward and back
again.
They feel for their testicles, black bodies swamped in sweat, gleaming
under the effect of the lights and the vivid colours. They pretend to tickle,
then to caress themselves, then halt and let out a deep sigh. The buttocks are
held in a position enhanced by the dancers plump flesh. They pretend to
introduce the penis into an imaginary vagina and then withdraw. They perform
somersaults. They place their feet in imaginary stirrups and mount, before
setting off at a fast trot. They wring their hands in joy. Then, as in a saddle, they
sit bolt upright, closing the legs and enjoying an intense, sensual friction.
They twist and turn like satisfied grass snakes, letting out cries as they thrust
and jerk, moving their loins in a simulation of masturbation, the backside
clearly visible, prepared for the climax of release.
Everything, or almost everything, in this performance seeks to be seen.
Here, the music is above all a language: the language of conscious and
unconscious desires. It keeps all the senses on high alert. Images and scenes
that are the stuff of life itself scroll past behind the spectacle. Everything with
a rhythm is appropriated by the sound a birds song, the staccato of a
submachine gun, their cadences linked and superimposed. The tone changes
constantly. Each construction is temporary.
The body remains at the centre of the performance. Certain parts of the
body, more than others, play a predominant role as the turmoil of sound
increases. The dancers retreat further into themselves, seeking to become one
with the sound. At the same time, the dance distances them from themselves;
their existence onstage takes over: they are no longer who they are in real
life. The dance takes place at the very centre of this alienation from the self.
Song and Melody

As the spectacle unfurls, time becomes transient, unstable, ephemeral.
Music tells time as it is experienced daily on the streets of Kinshasa 40. Skilful
assemblages of elongations and extensions, curtailments and violent contractions of sounds, bridged by abrupt transitions, are the syntax of the tale.
Thus Koffi Olomide. He opens the first piece of Effrakata 2 with rapid
guitar playing. This is quickly joined and modified by an atalaku, who
produces sounds which are at times screams, sometimes simply noise, or
song, as the animateur loses himself in a long litany of names. This cacophony
40. C. Accaoui writes: Music is above all an art of time: It shapes time and time shapes music. See
C. Accaoui, Le Temps musical, Paris, Descle de Brouwer, 2001, p. 8.
is toned down, from time to time, by a chorus which is itself regularly

interrupted by a combination of lead guitar, bass and percussion. Once in a
while, the lead guitar provides the harmonic framework of the accompaniment.
This interweaving of sounds paradoxically produces a strongly syncopated
rhythm, which is interrupted by spasmodic phrases. Nothing is stable in this
composition. There are no sustained breaks. Each instrument interrupts another,
taking its turn before fading or being extinguished by another instrument, by
the atalaku or the chorus. Then, it all ends as it began, without ever reaching
a peak, and with no clear conclusion.
But an unstable, transient, and ephemeral concept of time carries with it
problems of length. In Congolese melodies, the idea of length is almost always
combined with that of richness. Length and richness are typically achieved in
two ways: by means of the superimposition, flow, and synthesis of voices and
by instrumental cycles intended to evoke a build-up in the depth of the polyphony. But even here, there are always breaks and ruptures. A piece by Wenge
Musica (1999) is characteristic in this respect. It opens with what resembles an
organized harmony, brought to life by a chorus in which each voice is sweeter
than the next. This chorus is at times accompanied, at times preceded, by a lead
guitar sharply distinguished from the other instruments. This first sequence
is soon interrupted, however, and a new phase begins in which three different
sets of voices intervene, one low, one higher, with the chorus taking up a middle
level lulled by the sound of guitar. During the third phase, the guitar openly
takes the lead, audibly influencing the chorus. Suddenly, what was until then
a relatively balanced melody is disturbed by the intoxicated voice of the atalaku.
To the latters screams is added a rhythm which gradually becomes more and
more spasmodic. The lead guitar is soon drowned by the voice of the atalaku,
whose calls become increasingly shrill. Then this moment of disorder and
cacophony is brought under control, as the lead guitar re-emerges and exercises
sufficient authority to discipline both the singing and the screams.
In both of the pieces referenced here by Olomide and Wenge Musica
music reflects the colourful, capricious existence that defines the regime of the
ugly. It is an existence comprised of sudden faintings into nothingness and of
fleeting patches of light. In this heavy atmosphere which all are condemned
to breathe, the beast exhales. The animal side of power is sometimes disguised,
sometimes mischievous. Impassive demon, it forces those who live in its
shadow into a headlong rush for their dreams, a ride on the tigers back. This
is partly what is expressed in dancing. The voracity, the insatiability, cruelty
and repugnance, the criminality and cannibalism that stand at the heart of
power provoke harsh screams, but also melancholy songs, in which a profound
desire for duration and sensation haunts the sombre notes of the guitar.
Politique africaine
life of misery and shady dealings, in which procreation, life and murder are
but one and the same thing. Yet Nietzsches statement that it is impossible for
a man fighting for his survival to be an artist 41 turns out to be false in this
setting. It is contradicted by the insatiable enthusiasm for existence expressed
in Congolese music. In such a torrid space, what then is jubilation? It is essentially the capacity for disguise and dissimulation. Congolese music carries
with it illusion, sycophancy, lies, deception, and ostentation, making the dancing subject into someone who is putting on an act for himself and others alike.
The obligation to lie en masse, distortion and the various ways of counterfeiting life that are life in Kinshasa find their best form of expression in dance.
For, to dance in a regime of the ugly and the abject, is to rid oneself, in an instant,
of the labour of the slave. Suddenly, the demon falls silent. Shaped and sculpted
by sound, the subject relinquishes himself, erases from his face the expression
of destitution.
At the same time, jubilation is an expression of the mixture of sensual
delight and cruelty so characteristic of the regime of the ugly and the abject.
There is always a grotesque and brutal power to be found in jubilation. What
Nietzsche called the duplicity of the mad comes to life in the outburst of frenetic activity that is dance and the spaces of transfiguration that are the spectacle: Pain awakens joy, jubilation in the chest rips out cries of agony. From
the most sublime joy echoes the cry of horror or the longingly plaintive lament
over an irreparable loss 42.
Such is beauty
Achille Mbembe
University of the Witwatersrand
41. F. Nietzsche, La Philosophie lpoque tragique des Grecs, Paris, Gallimard, 1989, p. 181-184.
42. F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, full cite in English.
Here is a world in which everyone behaves like a slave, everyone leads a

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VARIATIONS ON THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE CONGOLESE WORLD OF

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Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds

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Politique africaine n 100 - dcembre 2005-janvier 2006

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Refusing the contrast between high and low art

disliked Congolese music 1. In all likelihood, he simply would not have

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Variations on the Beautiful

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lyrics, and rudimentary production. Adorno would have viewed Congolese

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72 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de lAfrique et du monde

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2. T. Adorno, Introduction la sociologie, op. cit., p. 33-35.

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73 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds

74 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de lAfrique et du monde

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In order to understand the aesthetic dimensions of popular urban Congolese

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an imposition of views as to what constitutes beauty, rules concerning correct

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75 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds

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76 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de lAfrique et du monde

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77 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds

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78 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de lAfrique et du monde

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wa Makuna, but expanded to interact rhythmically with the percussion

(Mis) Rules of Beauty

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79 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds

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Ugliness and Abjection

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80 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de lAfrique et du monde

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Noise and Sound

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81 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds

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82 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de lAfrique et du monde

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A distinctive feature of the music thus created is that rhythm is expressed

33. B. Mumbu, Kinshasa, un scandale culturel, Africultures, n 53, 2002, p. 24.

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83 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds

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