By: Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula
A recent piece by Thomas Salter, an independent consultant in the Great Lakes Region, claims that musicians rarely provide a critique, but continue to provide solace. As someone with close intellectual and personal connections to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I do not believe that Salter’s conclusion that the Congolese music and musicians have rarely provided a critique to the political situation is excessive. Could Congolese singers help shake the collective political apathy and sharpen the consciousness of the population about their economic, political, and social rights?
Yes! Salter’s argument appears to be adopted in comparison to the role that music played during the apartheid regime in South Africa, for instance, in raising awareness about social and political issues. This could be said also of the role that music and the arts played to educate the masses and to encourage resistance against oppression and slavery. I have interacted with many Congolese who are critical themselves of the striking dearth of committed artists. But this route to cultural rather than political commitment may be a result of the Congolese political trajectory.
However, Salter’s claim that Mobutu instrumentalized culture and demanded that popular music be exclusively in Lingala seems far-fetched and does not make much sense to me. The cannon of the modern Congolese music was already established in Lingala by the 1950s and had neither to wait for an explicit linguist policy nor to receive a political stamp for it to achieve its cultural lingua franca status. On the contrary, Lingala was already the vernacular of the capital, and the language of the military, hence why it traveled across the country and gained the political prominence it enjoys amongst other national languages.
In the same vein, the idea that Mobutu’s cultural authenticité survives in the work of singers such as Fally Ipupa and Ferré Gola is preposterous. Why? Simply because these singers are more in line with the Congolese rumba that predates the Mobutu’s authenticité policy than anything else. Besides, the Congolese can’t dream of what they think they possess naturally; they take their musical gift for granted, not as a project for any sort of cultural independence. That the politics of “authenticité” resonated with the Congolese is to be placed rather in continuity with the spirit of the Negritude movement than with Mobutu’s instrumental ends.
While the intellectual battle in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s used Marxist historical materialism to reclaim a just social order for the liberation of the poor, the early generation of African and Black scholars from the diaspora, including theologians, understood Africa’s poverty as resulting from the negation of Africa’s cultural identity. Independence, for Africans, meant primarily rehabilitating their cultures that were denied, demonized, and rejected under the colonial regime. I believe it was this urgency to reclaim their humanity and ascertain their cultures that gave Mobutu’s politics of authenticité its universal appeal more than his cunning strategy to use culture as a political ploy. Given how the colonial rule erode their self-esteem, Africans opted to ensure first the solidity of the cultural grounds upon which they stood before they could dream of anything else, including political freedom and economic independence.
Read the full piece, originally published in The Conversation here.