Mbongwana Star (L-R): Doctor L, Randy, Coco (back seated), R9, Theo (seated), Sage.
(c) Florent de la Tullaye

“Here, in the streets, it’s the anti-technology thing that works. Everything’s recorded in the red! Sometimes I over-boost mikes that are recording nothing, just to pick up the kind of environment that’s around me now. Can you hear it? There are three TVs going full blast. Distortion multiplies the energy. I love it!”

Doctor L’s grin pixellates as an atrocious Internet connection dices up our Skype conversation. It doesn’t stop him. He seems to revel in the unpredictable zaniness that kicks in when technology breaks down. His words keep coming, delivered with an accent traceable to some obscure point between Paris and Dublin, his lean face a flag of fearless cheek under the ragged mound of dreadlocks that he credits with the ability to disarm any feelings of hostility a lone white man might otherwise attract in the ghettos of Africa.

It’s not just the sonic dirt that excites him; it’s the free spirit you sometimes find in places that no one is paying any attention to: the garage lands where garage bands turn streetwise anger into DIY productivity, revelling in their own ostracism and self-reliance. Punk rock, in other words. But Doctor L isn’t talking to me from underneath London’s Westway or on New York’s Lower East Side; he’s talking to me from Avenue Kasavubu in downtown Kinshasa, just opposite the Academie des Beaux-Arts. He seems to have found the eternal punk ethic alive and well on the banks of the Congo river, in the raucous swelter-skelter of Africa’s third largest city (equal to London in size), and he’s working hard to bottle it and bring it back to Europe. “It’s not that going to Africa is any big deal,” he says. “The big deal is to try and get something out.”

Horror stories about the Congo have been feeding the gorier side of the European imagination since the British Consul Roger Casement published his report on the abuses of the Congo Free State in 1904. The rape of that immense land, witnessed amongst others by Casement and his friend Joseph Conrad, whose classic Heart of Darkness remains one of the most controversial literary statements about Africa ever written by a white man, has continued to this day under both European and African rulers. It has been perennially justified by the global need, or rather greed, for certain raw materials deemed fundamental to modern existence, rubber initially and then a cornucopia of minerals including copper, gold, diamonds and, latterly, the rare-earth metals that make our digital ‘smart’ lives possible. The Congo wars of the 1990s and 2000s currently sit at No. 15 in the Wikipedia chart of the most costly conflicts in history in terms of human life, and No. 1 in African history. And yet who, outside Central Africa, remembers them now. Rape, followed by injury, insult, ignorance and forgetfulness: is there any other part of our earth that has been so abused and misunderstood?

But the place has its fans. Among them are the Belgian music producer-manager Michel Winter and the French filmmakers Florent de la Tullaye and Renaud Barret. Toiling away down in showbiz’s steerage class to bring some of Kinshasa’s street-level wonders to the attention of the world, they belong to a rare breed. The nightmarish penumbra that envelopes the Congo in the Western imagination tends to repel all but the hardiest souls. It takes a special kind of cultural adventurer to lift the curse and see Kinshasa for what it surely is: a place of immense human creativity, ingenuity and style, with the potential to become one of Africa’s creative powerhouses. It seems that Doctor L has just joined their ranks. “The city becomes a drug,” he says. “Freaks like Michel, like Renaud, like Florent are important. I give the crown to all those guys.”

Yakala ‘Coco’ Ngambali. (c) Renaud Barret

Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye first travelled to Kinshasa in 2004, two virtually penniless wannabe film-makers enticed by an invisible force: ‘invisible’ as in hidden from the rest of the world and ‘force’ as in the tenacious will to survive and create. “At that stage of my life, France was just screwing my head,” Barret remembers. “All those people crying into their cups because they had to have the support of the state just to create something. In Kinshasa, it was the complete opposite; it was people who create out of a sense of urgency, who create because it keeps them alive. I said to myself: “That’s it! That’s the truth, not in the calculation but in the act of creation first and foremost.”

Barret and de la Tullaye’s first documentary film Jupiter’s Dance was a portrait of the Kinshasa music scene through the prism of a musician and street-level philosopher by the name of Jupiter Bokondji. While they were making that film they stumbled across a bunch of musicians in wheelchairs serenading the denizens of the Kinshasa night: prostitutes, renegade soldiers, hustlers and street kids or shégués as they’re known locally, apparently in mysterious homage to Che Guevara. The band was named Staff Benda Bilili (“the people who see beyond”) after a local beer joint. Barret and de la Tullaye spent the next five years and every ounce of energy and courage they possessed making a film about Staff and the extraordinary underworld they inhabited. It was called Benda Bilili and when it came out in 2010, it became the most successful non-Western music documentary since Buena Vista Social Club, helping to propel the reputations of both band and filmmakers to unimagined levels.

But Staff Benda Bilili’s success didn’t bring a deluge of music and film producers to Kinshasa. The ‘freaks’ carried on ploughing their solitary field; the curse remained in place. One reason perhaps is that both Benda Bilili and the other well-publicised Congolese tale of musical triumph against adversity – the undoubtedly remarkable story of the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste which was turned into the film Kinshasa Symphony by Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer – drew their power, for Western audiences at least, not from the originality of their art, but from their shared themes of gargantuan self-improvement and self-empowerment through music. They seemed to satisfy Matthew Arnold’s conviction, so entrenched in the Western humanist mindset, that art can elevate the lowest into the realms of ‘sweetness and light’, the only limiting factors being work, will-power and self-belief. Inevitably, there also was a complex element of pity involved.

And though none would dare admit it, both Staff Benda Bilili and Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste had something of Samuel Johnson’s proverbial dog walking on his two hind legs about them: “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” The allusion is unkind of course, and largely inaccurate, as was Johnson’s original statement, which he made in reference to female preachers. Speaking in purely musical terms, Staff Benda Bilili added a credible new chapter to the very old story of Congolese rumba, a style that, along with its louder, brasher offspring soukous and ndombolo, has been the dominant musical force in the Congo and larges swathes of sub-Saharan Africa since the 1960s. Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste might not yet have achieved the technical brilliance of the London Symphony Orchestra or the Berlin Philharmonic – who could possibly expect them to have done so – but their renditions of Carmina Burana and Beethoven’s Ninth exude a courage and cohesive pride that can ignite powerful joy in those with an open heart and sympathetic ear.

But self-improvement and the triumph of human will over poverty and disability can only inspire and sustain the career of an artist or musician for a limited time. The journey from rags to riches can only be taken once. The world must eventually judge an artist not by the journey he or she has taken, but by the intrinsic qualities of their art, not only the skill but, more importantly, the creativity and originality.

When Staff Benda Bilili split under the weight of their own success in late 2013, their main songwriter ‘Coco’ Yakala Ngambali teamed up with fellow singer ‘Theo’ Nsituvuidi Nzonza to form a new band. At first it was called Trio Mbongwana, then Staff Mbongwana International and finally Mbongwana Star. Mbongwana simply means ‘change’ or ’switch’ in Lingala, the lingua franca of the Congo River. “In Mbongwana Star, we’ve changed all the rules,” Theo says in one of the band’s early promotional videos. “We’ve decided to take control. We choose to produce our music ourselves. We are all bosses now.” Theo went further went I interviewed the band in London recently: “We also changed the rhythm,” he said. “We built a tempo that can wake up any dancefloor on the planet.” Talking to the Theo and the rest of the band, it quickly became clear to me that what the band refer to as ‘rhythm’ actually means something broader, something closer to ‘style’.

Nsituvuidi ‘Theo’ Nzonza.
(c) Florent de la Tullaye

Following the global success and painful breakup of Staff Benda Bilili, whatever style Mbongwana Star chose to play had to be new and surprising. It couldn’t just be a re-run of Staff Benda Bilili minus the brilliance of the young Roger Landu and his self-made satongé (one-stringed tin-can harp), both of whom added such a unique dimension to Staff Benda’s sound. Nor did Theo and Coco want to perpetuate the Dickensian sentiments invoked by their rags-to-riches story and the fact that they’re both handicapped. That was old news. They wanted their music to stand by itself, crutchless and proud, and for it to do that, they needed to find a sound that was startling and irresistible, one that mirrored the creative genius of their home city.

But that mission was still vague and unfocussed. Both musicians were carrying a heavy load of influences and habits accumulated during long lives hard-lived (“All the lives of ghetto people are like odysseys,” says Renaud Barret). That made the task of reinventing themselves harder. Coco was turning sixty, and Theo had left his fiftieth birthday way behind. The Congolese rhumba artists who had nurtured them as children and young men still dominated their creative outlook. It wasn’t easy to imagine a new style that paid respect to those greats whilst breaking the mould they had bequeathed.

The Congolese rumba that was born in the 1940s, a love child of the country’s obsession with imported Cuban dance music mixed and its immense wealth of native dances and rhythms, has become a religion in the Congo. Its ‘gods’ – Franco, Tabu Ley le Rochereau, Le Grand Kallé, Zaiko Langa Langa, Papa Wemba – are cultural icons that inspire pride and loyalty. Their legacy cannot not be toyed with lightly, or irreverently. “Sounds can change, according to what we’re living over there, to what we come across in the streets and elsewhere,” Theo says. “But it’ll never change completely, because we’re still in the rhythm of our forebears: the rumba rhythm. Those are the roots of Congolese music. They’ll never disappear.”

Coco and Theo both contracted polio in childhood, but in contrast to the cruel ostracism suffered by many a Congolese child similarly afflicted, both were treated well by their parents. Coco only left home at the age of 14 when he realised his presence was becoming a burden to his family. He preferred to live with his friends in a special shelter for the handicapped where there was a possibility of learning a trade (tailoring for women in his case). Theo’s father, a fisherman, went to see all the traditional healers in his locality to find a cure for his son, without success. Despite this, Theo was sent to school at the age of six and stayed there until he was fifteen. Then, on the advice of his parents, he travelled up to Kinshasa to live with his older sister and learn a trade, which also happened to be tailoring.

At the time, Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of what was then called Zaire, took a paternal interest in the plight of the disabled and passed laws to ensure that they were, for the most part, properly fed, housed and taught some employable skills. Mobutu also exempted them from charges and duties levied on the river ferries that chugged back and forth over the Congo River between Kinshasa, capital of what had been the Belgian Congo, and Brazzaville, capital of what had been the French Congo. Mobutu’s stroke of largesse attracted many handicapped people to the Kinshasa river port, where, several times a week, their self-made hand-cranked wheel chairs would be loaded up with trade goods and heaved up the gangways onto the ferries for the tax-free journey across the river.

Kinshasa was already a huge city back in the 70s and 80s, and because many of these handicapped traders lived in shelters that were hours away from the river-port, they often decided to move closer and sleep outdoors on large flattened cardboards boxes or tonkara in the local argot (derived from the French slang vocabulary known as verlan, which ‘flips’ the syllables of two-syllable words, turning carton or ‘cardboard box’ into toncar). Despite their street-level existence, the handicapped often managed to achieve a level of security and financial stability that was denied to millions of their fellow Congolese, thanks to the perks afforded them by the law and the strength they found in numbers.

(L-R) Sage, Doctor L, Randy (c) Renaud Barret

Coco’s father went down to the port to try and persuade him to return home, but he refused. His new life down by the river suited him well. His uncle, who was a musician, bought Coco a guitar and he started to entertain his fellow street-dwellers with the popular rhumba hits of the day. He would jam and hangout with another handicapped river-trader by the name of Nzalé, who was an excellent guitarist. Coco was about eighteen years old when the pair began to busk in the swanky bars and restaurants frequented by whites in Gombé, the downtown ‘entertainment’ district of Kinshasa. Years went by in this way: trading, busking, hawking, surviving.

Theo and Coco started playing together after they met down at the river-port in 1999. Theo had learned the traditional music of Bas-Congo from his father and later become the singer in a band in Brazzaville. In 2002, Coco, Theo and their fellow riverside troubadours came to the attention of one of the Congo’s most renowned international stars: Papa Wemba. Enchanted by their rough-cut melodies and fearlessness, Wemba offered them free use of his downtown rehearsal studio, but his patronage ceased after barely more than a year when Wemba was indicted by a court in France for visa-fraud and people smuggling. Not long after this setback, in late 2003, Coco joined up with Nzalé and Papa Ricky, another handicapped musician and doyen of downtown street life, to form Staff Benda Bilili. Theo joined soon afterwards.

“Something you find a lot with people [in Kinshasa], be they musicians or boxers, is that dreams are a way of surviving,” says Florent de la Tullaye. “Dreams allow people to walk tall and create projects. Even if they come to nothing in the end, just the energy of those dreams increases the chances of survival.” Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Coco and Theo lost so little time after Staff Benda Bilili imploded nine years later, before launching themselves on another adventure. When one dream dies, give birth to another one…quick style!

The first Mbongwana Star rehearsals were fairly chaotic. “They bought along this guy and that guy,” remembers manager and exec producer Michel Winter, “mates, members of the family and I don’t know what. And we quickly ended up with a kind of church choir, at least in terms of the voices. It was more like demo stuff than music by a band that was ready to release an album.” According to Renaud Barret, it was Theo who was most aware that what they were doing lacked originality. Barret told him about a friend called Liam Farrell aka Doctor L. Liam and Renaud got to know each other in St Ouen, the scruffy suburb north of Paris city centre where they both lived.

Liam Farrell ‘Doctor L’. (c) Renaud Barret

Liam is the son of the Irish artist Michael Farrell, who exiled himself to Paris when Liam was still a child. He grew into a maverick young drummer and producer on the Parisian hip-hop and electro scenes before becoming one of the most innovative (you might even say ‘disruptive’) producers of music from Africa. Liam had been collaborating with Kabeya Tshimpangila aka Cubain, a percussionist from Kinshasa who seems to have played with everyone who’s anyone in the city’s grass roots music scene, including Jupiter and Staff Benda Bilili. Cubain also happened to be in Kinshasa helping Coco and Theo set up Mbongwana Star. The connections were multiple.

Renaud Barret played Coco and Theo some songs from Black Voices, the album that Liam had made with the Nigerian drummer Tony Allen back in 2004. The name Tony Allen was already enough to put some heat into the idea of a collaboration. Coco and Theo were fans of Afrobeat, the rhythm that Allen had invented with Fela Kuti back in the late 1960s; Black Voices had put new life into that rhythm, just as it was emerging from the confines of African and ‘World’ music fandom and attracting an entirely new audience of white funksters and hip electro-dance priests. “That’s it!” was Theo’s reaction on hearing the album, “that’s the direction we should go in. Because mbongwana means ‘change’. Because that’s the future.”

Liam ‘Doctor L’ Farrell and Michel Winter travelled to Kinshasa in early summer of 2014 for the first real recording sessions. Michel had rented a small house in its own yard near the city centre, a parcelle in local parlance, which offered the most basic accommodation. Doctor L slept in a tiny badly ventilated room that baked in the tropical heat, day and night. The grid provided electricity only for short periods, if at all, so a generator had to be hired to run the amps, mikes and recording equipment. Coco’s wife would arrive everyday with the food – sometimes chicken, sometimes fish accompanied by fufu, rice, manioc, beans. It was the kind of set up that Doctor L thrives in.

The music that Coco and Theo played to Michel and Doctor L was a heedless assault of percussion, guitars and voices that was unsure of what direction it should be heading in. There was work to be done. The sound that everyone was searching for was still latent, like a beautiful stone sculpture embedded in a rough-hewn boulder. Doctor L began to record as much as he could, chipping away, paring down, honing. “When we started, we were still doing the same ideas as before,” Theo says, “but when Liam got involved he proposed a lot of changes.”

R9 & Doctor Farrell. (c) Renaud Barret

“We were looking for something fairly rock’n’roll,” says Winter, whose CV also includes the management of Staff Benda Bilili and the dukes of Congolese distortion – Konono No.1. “We wanted to try and get out of the 100% African, afro-African, straightjacket, into which everybody tries to stick African bands and get back, not in the music necessarily but in spirit, to the 1970s when Africans were really modern, maybe more so than us. I found that Coco already had that in him. People here are a lot more creative than we can imagine; Kinshasa is crawling with creativity. You couldn’t care less if it’s African or not! We just thought ‘Let’s just go for it! Because it’s there anyway. You can feel it in the streets. It exists!’”

“First off, it wasn’t easy,” Theo admits, “but afterward we adapted to the rhythm very well. We changed very quickly…changed rhythm, changed everything. We called it ‘rhumba rock’, because we sing in Lingala, but the rhythm is rock.”

After a few weeks, Doctor L went back to Paris and worked on the material in his studio. He spent the rest of the summer working on it. It was an alchemical process, taking raw sketches of sound, stitching them together and transmuting them into something that shone bright and grabbed the ear. The direction was as evident to him in Paris as it had been back in Kinshasa. There was something out there, a street-level Kinshasa aesthetic that had be captured and distilled into musical form. It wasn’t the old rumba or soukous, whose heyday was in the 1970s and 1980s, or anything traditional or folkloric. Traces of all those elements were present, but the spirit itself moved beyond all of them. “Coco and Theo, they’re not talking about their village anymore,” says Doctor L. “That can be generations away from them, and they get bored of this kind of caricature. What they have [in Kinshasa] is a certain ‘Yoruban’ way of life.”

Doctor L’s use of the word ‘Yoruban’ is strange. It’s not meant in the strictly ethnic sense of course; Kinshasa is “a cauldron of all the 400 ethnicities of the Congo” according to Renaud Barret, with the Kongo, Luba and Anamongo in pole position and Yoruba holding only a minority presence if at all. To Farrell, ‘Yoruban’ seems to have more of a spiritual meaning related to the dynamic and polyglot freedom of an immense urban space: “Kinshasa reminds me of the New York of the 1980s. In fact, Kinshasa is more New York than New York itself! It’s Yoruban, and from a Yoruban place you can have a gay band, new wave, punk rock, what the fuck! It’s not griotic, with heritage from your father or your grandfather. It’s more like the European way, like garage music, like when you get ‘Louie Louie’ African style, or James Brown from Ghana, or the like the late 60s and 70s in Lagos, when it was rock’n’roll man!”

Keyboard Percussionist, Kinshasa. (c) Renaud Barret

Technology, the Internet, have changed the game in Kinshasa, like as they have everywhere else. The gamut of influences has exploded. “Cable TV is only four or five years old in West Africa,” Farrell continues, “and already, in four or five years, it’s totally changed the kids. They won’t listen to rumba any more, they’ll be listening to Beyoncé. They already know so much more about London and Paris than we’ll ever know about Kinshasa, and that changes what the expectations of people are from music. But it’s good. I mean, fuck it, the world is like that. Everything needs to be communicating; it’s difference of style, of vibe that makes your originality.”

For Doctor L, this opening up of the arteries of communication and influence isn’t just inevitable, it’s positive. Roots may be important, but they can’t entangle an artist in modes of expression that limit his vision or prevent him being an honest mirror to the life going on around him. “I think Africa deserves, like everybody, to have artists who can take different trips, which may or may not be 100% related to Africa,” he says. “It’s not like we’re busy saying ‘We’re European!’ What does that fucking mean? It’s important that all this magic of art can exist there as well, without it being Iike me saying ‘Ok, I’m going to Ireland to do Celtic music because that’s who I’m supposed to be.’ We’re not talking about Africa here, we’re talking about guys who are doing music.”

When Doctor L’s mixes were heard back in Kinshasa, the effect was one of puzzlement, stupefaction even, followed by escalating excitement and wild dancing. “It was a bit different compared to our rhythm here in Kinshasa,” Theo remembers. “Really, really different. We loved it from the beginning.” Really? From the beginning? “Immediately! It was…WHAAAA?…oh yes, this is good! Those were rhythms that we could get close to.”

What about guitarist R9, one of the ‘youth wing’ of the band? How did he react when he heard the mixes? “Well, it was brand new music,” he said, “but it wasn’t complicated, because it was based on music that we’ve already been hearing for a long time. It was a just a modification for us. For me, it was a joy; I was happy to have created a new style with that. The youth of Kinshasa are more interested by new things. It’s really very important.”

Barret, who was with the band in Kinshasa when Liam’s mixes came through, remembers them dancing all over the place. The songs were on constant replay. Crucially perhaps, the reaction of the band’s entourage was also very encouraging. Fans would gather whenever the band rehearsed in their studio in the Ndjili district. “They would throw flowers at us, support us, shout ‘Mbongwana Star Forward!” remembers Sage, the band’s percussionist and vibe master. “We never expected that. They [the mixes] were great. And they made everyone dance. Without even singing the style, people were already dancing.”

For Theo, danceability is the ultimate litmus test of any new musical venture: “Whether it’s in Kinshasa, or here [in Europe]: that’s the most important things for me. We’ve done quite a few concerts and everybody dances; everyone is into that rhythm.”

Thanks to a fortuitous meeting at a soirée in London dedicated to music from the Sahara Desert, Michel Winter pressed a copy of the mixes into the hands of Nick Gold, famed founder and A&R man of World Circuit. Love at first sight in rare in showbiz, and the offer of a contract on the basis of a simple demo even rarer. But those Congo River gods must have been working overtime because Gold listened to the mixes on his way home that night and a deal was on the table within weeks. Not only was Mbongwana Star the first new band that World Circuit had signed in a long while, it was also the first in over twenty years to be produced by someone other than Gold himself and the first ever to have come from the Congo (Mali and Cuba being World Circuit’s habitual hunting grounds).

By the time Liam and Michel returned to Kinshasa in November, Coco, Theo and their new musicians were busy making the new sound their own. “What’s really interesting with Coco and Theo is that they’re ready to run with it if they feel it, whatever it is,” Liam says. “It’s not me inventing them. They’re artists. This is something really interesting that I love in Africa, and that people don’t talk about a lot: the strength and rapidity they have to integrate whatever comes up.”

Doctor L and Randy. (c) Renaud Barret

The band line-up was beginning to reduce and solidify. First on percussion, then drums, was a handsome young ghetto dude with an intense gaze, a neat splay of short dreads and an easy respectful manner. Forty years younger than Coco, Randy Makana Kalambayi was born in Kinshasa to a family who survived by hawking and doing odd jobs. When he was still a child, his father decided to move the family to Bas Congo but died shortly afterwards. Randy went back to Kinshasa to live with his mother’s family; it was hard to make ends meet. At the age of seven, he met Coco, who was the neighbour of one of his uncles. Coco set him up with a family in Brazzaville; the mother sold peanuts down in the market and Randy contributed by selling plastic bags on the streets. Water had to be fetched from a standpipe hundreds of metres from the house. Life was an accumulation of all these little rites of survival.

Randy played percussion in a local church in Brazzaville before deciding, aged only eight but not quite tender anymore, to go back to Kinshasa and reunite with Coco. He became his mentor’s chief wheel-chair pusher, a position that earned him Coco’s protection, as well as some standing in the informal street syndicate of the homeless and handicapped. In the brutally Darwinian world of Kinshasa’s streets, such an alliance could mean the difference between survival and obliteration for a young shégué or street kid.

Randy even joined Staff Benda Bilili for a while and contributed percussion to their first album Très Très Fort. But before he could board the sweet chariot that carried the band off to Europe and success, Randy was persuaded to come back to Brazzaville by his mother to help support the family. He worked as a fare-collector on the busses and a labourer on a building site, a job that turned out to be lethally hard and very badly paid. Eventually he crossed the river once again and landed back in Kinshasa. There Randy learned that Staff Benda Bilili had become a worldwide success and were currently on tour in Japan. When they returned they asked Randy to rejoin the band, but visa problems prevented him from going on Staff Benda’s next tour. He did play some percussion to the band’s second album however. Then, when Coco and Théo decided to quit and set up Mbongwana Star, they invited him along as drummer.

Although Randy is a father now, he still lives in a shelter for the homeless and handicapped, a place that functions, according to Farrell, like an African village lost in the middle of a megapolis. He’s become a master of the Kitéké rhythms of the Batéké plateau, the old name for the country surrounding the ‘pool’ between Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Those rhythms, subtle and strangely familiar, are the pistons of the new Mbongwana sound.

For the pivotal role of guitar-player, an instrument that has supplied the melodic pulse of Congolese music since the 1950s, Coco and Théo chose Jean-Claude Kamina Mulodi, aka ‘R9’ because he was the ninth and last child born to his parents. R9 is a thirty-something guitar hero, who long ago pledged his allegiance to Zaiko Langa Langa, the Congolese band who dominated the pan-African soukous boom of the 1970s and 1980s. He’s also a huge fan of ACDC and Angus Young, but his stock-in-trade remains the intricately flowing, delicately sparkling Zaiko-esque guitar loops, the ones that send your soul skywards while your feet make love to the ground.

R9. (c) Renaud Barret

R9’s father, who was in the army, had a career in the Catholic priesthood mapped out for his son; but R9 had other ideas. He began making his own instruments out of junk when he was barely five years old, and was taught how to play by his elder brothers, who sang ndombolo. Having started off as a drummer, R9 gravitated towards the guitar and eventually became lead guitarist in a band in his hometown of Dibaya in Bandundu, a huge province that lies to the east of Kinshasa. R9’s parents had both died by the time he was seven, and his brothers sisters drifted away leaving him alone to survive on the sums of money sent him by his siblings. After graduating from the local lycée, R9 travelled up to Kinshasa and began performing with small neighbourhood groups, eventually working his way up to becoming a guitarist in the band of Pépé Kallé, a huge star in the Congo. When Coco and Théo formed Mbongwana they asked R9 to become their guitarist. “The guitar loops he plays made Liam and I think of techno and electro music from afar,” says Renaud Barret, “so he adapted well to that electro aspect of the project.”

Completing the line-up was Sage (as in the French word that rhymes with ‘massage’ and means ‘kind’, ‘good’ or ‘well-behaved’). Son of Coco’s wife Marie, Sage is a self-taught percussionist, a tropical cyclone on-stage, a ghetto rude-boy who enjoys his strolls on the wild side. “Very rock’n’roll” was Barret’s succinct description of Sage’s lifestyle.

In January 2015, just as Kinshasa was going through one of its periodic spasms of political violence and mayhem following President Laurent Kabila’s unconstitutional attempts to extend his time in office, Coco, Theo, Farrell and the other musicians were holed up in the Hotel Finesse on Avenue Kasavubu, patiently working out how to reproduce the challenging dynamics of Mbongwana’s revolutionary new style live on stage. Farrell’s position in the project had evolved from that of mere producer to producer, bassist, synth and sound FX player, arranger and conceptualiser. He was no longer the white European strategist who stays in his studio, one step removed, and envelopes his charges in a skin of sound that will, he hopes, make them palatable to the ears of the world. Mbongwana Star was no longer a purely African band. It was a trans-national, trans-ethnic, trans-cultural sound machine, a coalition of black and white, Africa and Europe. Don’t think James Brown; think Sly and the Family Stone.

Given the pressures of history and the build-up of sensitivity around topics such as race, culture and colonialism, it’s easy to guess at the prevalent line of questioning that Mbongwana star will be subjected to in the media and the cybersphere. Can a white man play such a prominent role in a black African band? Does it not risk smelling of appropriation, paternalism, cultural colonialism, exploitation, racial arrogance, dilution or all of the above (delete as applicable)?

Mbongwana Star (L-R): Coco, R9, Randy, Theo, Sage, Doctor L. (c) Florent de la Tullaye

Not only is Liam unapologetic about the level of his involvement in this project, he also considers the sensitivities and malaise that often surge to the fore in reaction to any cultural collaboration between white Europeans and black Africans to be misplaced, even reactionary: “I think, if you like music, and you like art, colour’s got fucking nothing to do with nothing. That’s what’s great about this world. We all need each other. Let’s stop pretending. I’m very happy that white guys make black guys exist and vice versa. It’s like all these old Analogue Africa records. You always need these white mad motherfuckers to dig out all the old dope African music…that’s what’s great about this world. And I’ve got African records where the mix is over the top man! The guitar is 20DBs too strong, but it’s fucking killing! It’s like magic. I never could have done that. So thank you guys!”

Why do I believe him? Several reasons. First the passion and sense of commitment that boosts the voltage of everything he says. Secondly, the time he’s sacrificed to this project, to sleeping in bedroom ovens, plugging into chugging generators, making videos on shoestring budgets, mixing, remixing and remixing the remixed remix, all in search of his grail: a sound that IS Kinshasa, right now in 2015. Thirdly, the feeling that Doctor L has moved beyond the naiveté that paints African musicians as angelic beings, imbued with a mystical spiritual power that a ‘fallen’ white man can only admire and serve. Like musicians everywhere, African musicians are humans who suffer from creative blocks, daft ideas, moments of madness, bad-judgement and breakdowns in reason. Should they be allowed to own their own music and determine their own creative path? Of course they should. The answer is so obvious that it makes the question superfluous. But they should also be able to search any place, consider any approach and collaborate with anyone they want to, white or black, European or African, to create something extraordinary.

Although there’s black blood in almost every note ever played by a white pop musician since the end of the First World War, the traffic has never been one way. Ragtime, jazz, blues, RnB, funk, soul, all have been fed by a minority of white as well as a majority of black cultural influences. In fact, the band with arguably the biggest influence on the evolution of black music in the last three decades, was white. And German! So, as Farrell suggests, let’s not pretend. The true creative impulse is colour-blind. It goes where it wants, talks to who it feels like talking to, collaborates with anybody that takes its fancy. As well as a mutual respect, it’s the brilliance, the originality at the end of the process that counts. “What’s interesting with Coco and Theo is that they’re ready to run if they feel it, whatever it is,” Farrell says. “We’re not like dictators. It’s not me inventing them. They’re artists.”

Coco repays the compliment: “Really, I like Liam. We work well with him. He’s courageous. He’s a real artist is Liam. I recognise that.” And when I ask the band if a white man can play African music, the response is heartfelt, and unanimous: “It’s not colour that plays music,” Theo says, “it’s the spirit. We don’t see the white, the black, the yellow, the red. We all have red in our veins. We’re together. We play music.”

Mbongwana’s aim is to express an attitude, a creative spirit that already exists in Kinshasa. It’s a spirit built on garbage. Renaud Barret has coined a cheeky moniker for it – System K – which he intends to use as the title of a forthcoming feature documentary. It refers not only to Kinshasa, but also to rue Kato, the downtown drag that has become the epicentre of the garbage-to-art revolution. It’s also a skit on the French term Système D, after the verbs se débrouiller (to get by, to find a way) and se démerder (to find a way without landing in the shit). Roughly, Système D means to manage and survive in the face of poverty and rejection with only your wits and your courage to protect you. The term combines English concepts such as the underclass, the black economy and the daily hustle of survival into one neat tag.

“System K runs the entire city,” Barret explains, “that’s to say, it’s imposed by the current climate, by la débrouille (making do), by all those gestures of daily life that are the creativity of survival. As you know Kinshasa was once the musical capital of Africa. Then everything crashed politically and so [there were] no new instruments or anything. De facto, a whole generation of young musicians with nothing in their hands and nothing in their pockets began making their own instruments, not to get into any kind of found-object art, but just out of necessity. Rue Kato is an artery, about two kilometres long from end to end, and on both sides of the streets you’ve these guys making stuff and creating stuff. They’re creating a new musical style. [They’re] recycled grooves but it makes me think of the first Wu Tang album, very minimalist stuff, all based on recycled materials. There are at least 10 creators there, who create loops with tape machines that are themselves reconstructed, and then people come and add stuff, whether it’s a female singer, a rapper, poets. Poverty has created this sound. That’s what’s fascinating. And It’s totally creative. If you listen closely, all the sounds of the city are in there.”

Boy with recycled instrument, Kinshasa (c) Renaud Barret

The rue Kato isn’t just producing musical instruments: Fashion, sculpture, video, photography, art, jewellery, automata, pedal power contraptions, motorised vehicles are all rising like the undead from the inexhaustible scrap heap. “Every instrument could be in a museum, with special lighting trained on it,” Barret says with a chuckle, “but it’s all happening in an atmosphere of general indifference, as always happens out there, a kind of enclosed world with no horizon.” In other words, it’s the old curse. Few people know about what’s happening in rue Kato, or the rest of Kinshasa, and few care. Barret hopes that his new film will shine a positive light on this subterranean world.

But the new spirit has to exist; there’s no choice: “That energy, that desire, that electricity, that vibe, it’s not just an invention,” Barret says. “It’s really coming through and it’s nourished by the fact that people are fed up with politics, with what’s happening at the summit of the state. It’s very new in fact. I’ve never seen that anger before, that punk aspect that’s swelling up.” When I ask Mbongwana Star about that spirit, Coco makes an uncharacteristic demand to be heard: “I can answer that particular question,” he says. “First of all, we’re an a-political band. If we’re asked questions, they should be about music. There are problems in Kinshasa, many problems, but they don’t concern us.” I point out that I’m not talking about politics, but rather a spirit of self-reliance. “If you can get hold of some money,” Coco answers, “then yes, with that spirit, you can build things like schools, where children can study, you can help friends too maybe…”

In our excitement about the potential of Kinshasa as a temple of creativity, it’s easy to forget that, in the end, it’s all about means and graft and courage. The band are well aware that, as they sit in a London hotel, talking to journalists, drinking coffee and playing with their smart phones, thousands back home are still tight-rope walking on the meagre line that separates survival from oblivion. “God pushes us to rediscover what we really see,” says R9, “so it’s a big feeling. What I can say to our friends who are still behind us, they have to work hard and give their energy to go further. No job is unworthy. Only people are unworthy. All that can be done, must be done, must be expressed. One mustn’t go backwards, or stay blocked; you have to give your energy, your inspiration. May we always remain mobile and work hard to prepare the future…”

The Congo Astronauts. (c) Renaud Barret

The video for ‘Mulkayi’, the first single by Mbongwana Star, is a remarkably innovative piece of work by any measure, doubly so if you consider the tiny budget Barret and Doctor L had at their disposal to shoot and edit it. It features a local character, a happening on two legs called The Congo Astronaut, who wanders around the ghetto in a space suit for no obvious reason other than to be seen, be noticed and be stylish. When Renaud ‘premiered’ the video on a huge screen at Kinshasa’s École des Beaux Arts, where the video was shot, the response was exhilarating, heartening. “Everybody was saying ‘that’s it! That’s us!’” Renaud recounts. “And when we played them Liam’s mixes of Mbongwana star, those guys said ’that’s our music! We want that! Our artistic imagery is completely incarnated in that music.’” Coco agreed: “I thought it was great. It made me happy.” Doctor L and Barret’s second video ‘Kala’, is zinging twitching black and white celebration of Kinshasa dance styles, filmed down alleyways, deep in the shanties, out on the drags. They’re working on a whole string of further videos in the same lo-fi System-K spirit.

If the master plan succeeds, Mbongwana Star could become the Trojan Horse that penetrates the bastion of the world’s indifference (and revulsion and paranoia) and lifts the curse to bring that creative power out of rue Kato, the Beaux Arts, and other parts of Kinshasa. “The Beaux Arts is like a town within a town,” says Renaud. “Mbongwana Star has started rehearsing there and there’s a correlation with visual artists, stylists, people working on logos etc. It’s this kind of electric movement, this new vibe in Kinshasa that we’re trying to mix in with the music and the image.”

Theo, Coco and the other members of Mbongwana Star are all aware of the talent that exists back home, and the potential ways in which it might transform their visual appearance and live show. But they remain patient: “All that will come bit by bit,” he says. “We have ideas, but we’re starting with what we’re doing right now and then, little by little we can add other things.”

The journey ahead may be long, but the time for lift-off has surely come. The Congo Astronaut has waiting long enough.

Andy Morgan,

Bristol, June 2015

The post MBONGWANA STAR – Kinshasa’s Afro-junk revolutionaries appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Kinshasa Cellist © Vincent Boisot / Riva Press for Le Figaro Magazine. www.vincentboisot.com

Nathalie is a single-mum who struggles to clothe her little boy and pay the rent. She plays the flute and the sax. Josephine gets up at 4.30am every morning to sell omelettes at the market. She’s in the chorus. Papy is a part-time mechanic who also runs his own pharmacy. He plays the tuba. Josef is a freelance electrician, a kind of African version of the Robert de Niro character in the film ‘Brazil’. He also runs his own hair salon and plays the viola.

Nathalie, Josephine, Papy and Josef are adepts of the Congolese art of debrouillardise, a French word that means ‘getting by’, ‘making ends meet’ and ‘surviving’. Their lives are oddly schizophrenic. For most of the day they do whatever they must to hustle their daily bread in the Congolese capital Kinshasa, one of the biggest, noisiest and most dysfunctional cities on earth. Then in the early evening they set out on a journey that often takes several hours to go and rehearse with The Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste de Kinshasa, the only all-black symphony orchestra in the world. There they find release from their daily cares. “When I sing Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony, it takes me far away,” says one of the other singers in the choir. “I’m not here any more,” .

“They come because they’re passionate about music,” says Armand Diangienda, the man who founded the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbaguiste almost twenty years ago. “It gives them something more in terms of confidence, of feeling capable and of being able to contribute to a collective endeavour.”

If the musicians in the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste are masters of individual survival, the orchestra itself is an epic example of debrouillardise, of thinking the impossible and then just doing it. Armand Diangienda lost his job as a pilot when the Fokker F-27 he used to fly across the Congo crashed into the hills above the town of Goma in 1992, killing all 37 people on board. Luckily, he was on holiday at the time. Finding himself unemployed, he rallied some of the followers of his father’s church, the hugely popular Kimbanguiste Church, and created a symphony orchestra, a strange endeavour for a confirmed reggae fan who had only a passing interest in European classical music at the time.

“We told ourselves that creating a symphony orchestra would be great because the church already had a brass band, a flute orchestra, a guitar ensemble and a number of different choirs,” Armand tells me over a distorted phone line from Kinshasa. “I couldn’t read music but driven by my passion and with help from my friends I gradually learned.”

In the early days, instruments had to be borrowed or made from scratch by reverse engineering. Violin strings had to be concocted from bicycle brake wire. Hundreds of scores had to be copied out by hand. Arrangements to symphonic works by Mozart and Beethoven had to be deciphered by listening to the works on CD, over and over again. Music stands had to be cobbled together from old pieces of wood.

Despite attracting huge interest locally, the Orchestra remained a secret until two German film-makers, Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer, made a film about it called Kinshasa Symphony, which was released in 2010. It’s one of the most beautiful and honest portrayals of the power of music and the human spirit that I’ve seen in ages.

Last year, the Orchestra travelled outside Africa for the first time, performing at the TED conference in California and later in Monaco with the Monaco Symphony Orchestra. CBS devoted a hour coverage to them and Peter Gabriel joined them for a gala soirée to raise funds for a music school in Kinshasa.

But that’s not all. Armand Diangienda is on his way to London to become an honorary member of London’s Royal Philharmonic Society, an accolade previously granted to the likes of Mendelssohn, Rossini, Wagner, Brahms and Stravinsky. “The day I was told I had tears in my eyes,” Diangienda says.

The fact that many Congolese regard Armand Diangienda as something of a living God has no doubt helped him to achieve the seemingly impossible. His grandfather, Simon Kimbangu, was a healer and preacher whose sermons instilled pride and self-belief in ordinary Congolese people and deep fear in their Belgian colonial masters. He died in 1951 after spending thirty years in prison. One of his most prophetic statements was “The black man will become white and the white man will become black.”

For Armand Diangienda however, performing western classical music on the banks of the Congo river has nothing to do with turning his back on his own African culture. “Everything we’re learning by playing classical music will allow us to enrich our own music as well and immortalise it by writing it down,” he says. Diangienda himself, and the orchestra’s first violinist Heritier Malumbi and bassoonist Balongi, have already composed several original symphonic works full of rich Congolese flavours.

“My grandfather claimed that to sing was to pray twice,” Diangienda says. “Music is already a form of spiritual wealth to us, the Kimbanguistes. But what inspires me even more is that my grandfather’s message was a universal one; a message of peace, of love, of reaching out for others and bringing people together.”

It was also a message about work, perseverance and self-respect. The stirring finale of Kinshasa Symphony sees the Orchestra performing Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on a large piece of waste ground in front of an ecstatic local crowd. The beauty, pride and common purpose that oozes from the performance make mincemeat of the clichés of chaos and hopelessness that burden the Congo. A small but growing group of cognoscenti already know that Kinshasa is one of the most culturally dynamic and creative cities on earth, and OSK only reinforce that conviction.

So here’s another prophecy: sometime in the future, in 30, 50 or a 100 years time, Kinshasa will rival the Paris of the 1920s or the London of the 1960s in terms of its impact on global culture. By then, by the grace of Simon Kimbangu himself, the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste will be old and venerated and Armand Diangienda’s most cherished dreams will have come true.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013

First published in The Guardian – May 2013

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Jupiter and Okwess International at Carlisle Railway Station, September 2012. Photo by Andy Morgan

In the early years of that epic conflict known as the cold war, an Irishman wrote a funny-sad piece of theatre, a kind of excruciating fairy tale about a pair of old tramps who sat around waiting for this guy called Godot. Except that Godot wasn’t a person of course; he was an idea, a fantasy, a spectral solution to every ill who lurks just out of sight but never actually arrives. Life is what happens when you’re busy waiting for Godot, the play seemed to say.

The Democratic Republic of Congo reminds me of that play. The whole country is waiting for Godot. Godot in the form of fat hand-outs from foreign aid-workers who glide around in their brand new Toyota Land Cruisers; Godot in the form of a passport, a visa and a plane ticket to Europe or El Dorado; Godot in the form of a winning lottery ticket, a bag of diamonds, a super rich husband, a bucket of full gold, neodymium, europium or cerium uncovered by pure fluke; Godot in the form of an honest politician, who really and truly loves all his people and is ready to sweat blood for their well being; Godot in the form of God Almighty, with the keys to the pearly gates jangling at His belt and the lure of everlasting bliss in His eyes.

Unlike those taciturn old tramps in Samuel Beckett’s play, the DRC sings and dances and taps out rhythms of an incredible variety, endlessly, while it waits. Most of its better known pop tunes are about love. Ma cherie this or mon amour that. Most of them bounce along on a beat known as soukous, which is the African love-child of Cuban rhumba, American funk, Antillean zouk and a jumble of local rhythms. In cultural terms at least, soukous is the DRC’s greatest export. It’s the heads-down-no-nonsense-fuck-art-let’s-dance pop beat of sub-Saharan Africa. And it’s the nation’s tonic, its Viagra, Valium and Mogadon all compacted into one enticing musical pill which, while it waits for Godot, the DRC downs like tomorrow never knows.

But not the Rebel General. Not Jupiter Bokondji

Tall, languid and lean as a beanpole in his khaki fatigues and red epaulettes, with his beaten up snot-green Merc and his voice that rumbles like tectonic plates, Jupiter refuses to play the waiting game. At least, not THAT waiting game. In his own solitary way, he’s been refusing to play it for the past 20 years. Godot can go and take a leap in the majestic Congo River for all he cares.

Jupiter knows all about Europe. As a young boy and teenager, he lived there for ten years with his father, a diplomat and card-carrying member of the Congo’s elite, who was posted to the Congolese Embassy in East Berlin in 1970. At that time, President Mobutu was the darling of the CIA and Zaire, as Mobutu’s ‘fiefdom’ was then known, was considered by the Western powers to be a bulwark against the red menace in Central Africa. So communist East Germany must have been quite a situation for Bokondji senior. As for his seven-year-old son, experiencing the cold war gloom of Alexander Platz and Unter Den Linden for the first time must have been like landing on the darker side of Mars. Make that Pluto.

“I crossed the wall twice daily to go to the French school in the West,” Jupiter recalls. “I was always being called neger. The word reached my ears almost every day. I asked, ‘what does this neger mean?’ and I was told it meant ‘nigger’. Poor people, I thought. They understand nothing. They call me nigger but they’re like prisoners, whereas I can cross the wall and leave this place when I want. They knew nothing about black people. They were blinkered and they were living in misery.”

Jupiter formed a band called Die Neger with his mates. Nice touch that, turning an insult into a badge of honour. The band did covers: the Jackson 5 (NOT Michael Jackson, Jupiter insists), James Brown, the Commodores, Kool and the Gang, Boney M, maybe a bit of Deep Purple. The harvest breeze of rock and funk’s greatest decade wafted in and out of Jupiter’s ears. He learned a lot in Berlin, not least that Europe is no stranger to misery or tribalism.

Returning to the Congo aged 17 was another shock, but not an altogether unpleasant one. “I discovered that all the sounds I’d been hearing in Germany existed back home,” he says. “But in a raw state. And I said to myself, ‘Hey, all that music I listened to on the other side, it comes from my homeland, from Africa. It’s not their music, it’s our music. It’s just raw and we have to modernise it.’ So that became my mission in a way.”

Although Jupiter travelled extensively around the Congo in his 20s and 30s, working the cargo boats that plied the Congo river or managing the affairs of a government minister, who had interests far and wide, he’s never been to the northern Equatorial province where his ancestors, the Mongo people of the rainforest, come from. But in the Congo, you don’t have to travel with your feet to discover the musical riches of this vast territory, the eighth largest country in the world and one of the richest in terms of its cultural diversity. You can stay in the capital Kinshasa and just travel with your ears. Every single tribe and clan is represented in the capital. Moreover, Jupiter’s grandmother was a traditional Mongo healer who took her grandson along to rituals and wakes from an early age, and, when he came back from Germany, it was that underrated world of street-level musical culture that pulled him in like the overpowering gravitational pull of some celestial body.

“People would come and fetch me to play at mourning ceremonies and wakes,” Jupiter explains. “I became famous for that. And at those wakes I heard the music of all the ethnicities of the Congo, all 450 of them. And I said to myself, ‘Wow! What a story.’ After that I recorded a lot and went deeper into the documentation of Congolese culture. I just woke up, you know.”

It was, to mint a phrase, a revolution in the head, made all the more powerful by the anomaly of discovering one’s own musical culture at the advanced age of 17.  The musical variety and vitality that the young Jupiter stumbled upon in Kinshasa formed the basis of a credo that has motivated him ever since, one that sees the current might of soukous as an suffocating anachronism detrimental to all the other myriad styles that exist in the country.

“First, I really wanted to convince the population of Kinshasa that we’re very rich in culture. It has nothing to do with gold or diamonds and all that stuff which the multinationals are suffocating us with. There’s this other wealth that no one can steal from us and it’s huge.”  Certain words keep tripping off Jupiter’s tongue; “diversity”, “riches”, “immense”, “unexploited.”  “We’re sleeping on a mattress stuffed with dollars,” he likes to say, “but we’re dying of hunger!”

This belief in the cultural rather than the mineral or agricultural wealth of his country underpins Jupiter’s latest album Hotel Univers. The Congo is a universe in one hotel. The swimming pool has no water in it and the lifts don’t work, but the potential of the place is none the less astounding.

“With this album, I wanted to show that Congolese music has no limits,” he says, “You can play almost any rhythm that can be found in this world. ‘Hotel Univers’ is a new sound for Congolese music.”

Bokondji senior gagged at the idea of his European-educated son singing at wakes in the ghettoes of Kinshasa. So he kicked him out of the house and Jupiter became homeless for a while, at least until his mother’s family took him back in. “When I dived into that world, it was a discovery for me,” he says. “I rebelled. I think that this rebellion was first and foremost about changing mentalities. During the Mobutu dictatorship, a certain way of thinking was imposed on us, of begging. The brakes were put on the development of the youth. But now we have to find ways of evolving and imposing a different mentality. We mustn’t always wait to be given something.”

Jupiter calls Laurent Désirée Kabila, the longstanding Congolese rebel leader who overthrew Mobutu in 1997, his hero. Unusually, he doesn’t seem the least bit sentimental about the memory of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first President, who was assassinated only a year after independence with the connivance and even active participation of a cabal of opposition leaders, Belgian grand colons, CIA operatives and, as has recently been uncovered, agents of the British secret service MI6. Kabila senior lead the political rebellion that ushered in what Jupiter calls “our timid democracy.”  Jupiter himself, the Rebel General, lead and is still leading a complementary musical rebellion.

In 1983 he formed his first band Bongofolk, or “the people of the tam tam” as he subtitles the name. “It was my first laboratory,” he says. The band mutated into Okwess International in 1990, ‘okwess’ being the Kimbunda word for ‘food’ or ‘nourishment’. For a while the band flourished and became a kind of unofficial music school through which a stream of well and lesser-known Congolese musicians passed. In 1999 Jupiter and Okwess were chosen to represent DRC at the MASA Music fair in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Then the Congo experienced one of its periodic descents into hell. President Laurent Kabila attempted to oust the Rwandan and Ugandan troops who had helped him to topple Mobutu and seize power and this lead to the Second Congo War, one of the bloodiest Africa has ever known. Over four years, millions perished and hundreds of thousands fled the country. Kinshasa limped along among the blood and chaos. Jupiter refused to leave but gave up the music and band leading for a while. It was only in 2003, when a delegation of young musicians including his nephew, the seraphim-voiced Yendé Bongongo and the percussionist Claude Kinunu Montana, also a member of the late-lamented Staff Benda Bilili, came to see Jupiter and asked him to recommence operations, that Okwess got back on its feet and the mission continued.

Then in 2004, by the kind of fluke that might be mistaken for the long-awaited arrival of Godot, Jupiter met the French filmmakers Florent de la Tullaye and Renaud Barret. “When they arrived, I told them that I’d been waiting for them,” Jupiter recounts. “Waiting for them for far too long. Because I’m a visionary and I knew then that things would begin to happen.”

And happen they did. Through creative happenstance and fate rather than any bold or preconceived master plan, the film that Barret and de la Tullaye eventually made about Kinshasa’s extraordinary grass roots music scene was loosely focussed on Jupiter and they called it Jupiter’s Dance. To my mind, it’s a classic of African music cinema, a precious snapshot of a musical giant in the process of reawakening. By ‘giant’ I refer mainly to Kinshasa but also to the Congo and Jupiter himself.

“We filmed Jupiter a lot. He was the most interesting character for us and the most incredible musician,” Florent de la Tullaye told me, adding that Jupiter was doubly attractive because he was one of the rare musicians in Kinshasa to speak French at the time and neither De la Tullaye or Barrett had yet mastered Lingala, the local lingua franca. “But it was also because his music was totally different, quite complex and well mastered, even too much so perhaps,” he went on to say. “At the same time he had a culture and was well travelled. He knew about music from everywhere. He also had quite an unusual message. He was very critical of his own society and wasn’t the kind of guy to spit at whites.”

Neither is Jupiter under any illusion about what the white man’s burden had done to his people and his country. “The whites came to civilise us,” he says with tired irony. “We had the land. They had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. And when we opened them again, they had the land and we had the Bible.”  But he’s equally critical of the Lumumba and Mobutu generation, the generation of his father, which, in his opinion, “sacrificed” the generation that followed, his own. “When talking about the older generation, it’s the result that counts,” he says. “Where are we now? We’re fucked. We’re a lost generation. So we have to think differently now and not listen to the advice of the old any more.”

The release of the film Jupiter’s Dance in 2007 set off a chain reaction that ricocheted involvement with Damon Albarn’s Africa Express off against Okwess’s first European dates, the recording of ‘Hotel Univers’ and a seat on the Africa Express train tour of 2012, all leading without too much of a slalom to the main stage of Glastonbury on a glorious Friday in June of 2013. Jupiter and Okwess International had been asked to step in for a malarial Toumani Diabate to become the opening act of the world greatest fiesta of rock’n’roll. The crowd was small at first, but swelled nicely as Jupiter laid out the fruits of his thirty year long mission in a rainbow of rhythmic colours. “For me, it was one of those joys,” he says. “I really don’t know how to express it. And what’s more I represented Africa, the great continent, with its cultural and musical diversity that remains unexploited. It was a proud day for me.”

When we met for the first time, six years ago in Kinshasa, I asked Jupiter as simple question: “How’s it going?”. “On se bat!,” he answered with a gentle knowing smile, “We’re fighting.” He’s still fighting now, but perhaps his long wait is over. I wish I could say the same for millions of his fellow countrymen.

Andy Morgan. (c) 2013

First published in Songlines – October, 2013

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Baloji in the vaults of the Musée Tervuren, Belgium     (c) Andy Morgan 2011

Cowering under a statue called ‘Belgium Bringing Civilisation to The Congo’, one of four large golden effigies in the entrance of hall of The Royal Museum of Middle Africa in Tervuren near Brussels, there’s a sculpture depicting a miserable African native, naked and blatantly ‘savage’ in the estimation of the colonial artist who fashioned it. Baloji, one of the most innovative rappers and video producers to have emerged from Africa in recent years, loiters next to this unseemly pair before our interview, tall and pensive in a two-piece suit of dark blue plaid, a peach pink shirt and elegant Puma trainers.  It’s a telling trinity: Europe the pompous ‘father’, Africa the down-trodden ’son’ and Baloji, the holy ghost or ‘super sorcerer’, the meaning of his name in Swahili, standing there all cool and dapper, like an embodiment of a young and creatively ambitious Africa which is ready to consign the cruel nonsense of colonialism and post-colonialism to the vaults of history where they belong.

Baloji is due to start filming his next video, a radical Africanisation of the Marvin Gaye song ‘I’m Going Home’, in the endless vaults of the Tervuren Museum itself, a scary place full of stolen fetishes and serried ranks of game trophies where irony lurks mischievously like a grimacing ghost monkey.  Baloji has even persuaded the Museum to part-fund the filming, a monumental feat in itself.  But that’s Baloji in a nutshell. Few other African artists have demonstrated such bone-headed tenacity in the face of indifferent labels, managers and public servants in their relentless drive for quality, innovation and creative power.  “What takes two weeks for Kanye West, takes me a year,” he says.

Once a member of Starflam, one of Belgium’s most successful hip hop crews, Baloji has been ploughing his own furrow for the past five years. He produced his first solo opus ‘Hotel Impala’ in 2007 and is currently limbering up for the worldwide release of his new album, ‘Kinshasa Succursale’.  It’s an ambitious attempt to marry hip hop with an glittering casket of African and African disapora styles, from mellifluous soukous through snaky funk and bumping ragga to the raw and rasping sounds of traditional Congolese music. It hits you a bit like Congo’s answer to The Beatle’s ‘White Album’, one of Baloji’s all time favourites.  Several tracks, including the other-worldly ‘Karibu Ya Bintou’, which rides an alien riff by Kinshasa’s finest, Konono No.1, are unlike anything that has ever come out of Africa’s musical imagination.

But it’s Baloji’s videos that reveal the true extent of man’s energies and creative power.  Self-funded, filmed on location in The Congo by the Belgian directors Spike & Jonze and cameraman Nicholas Karakatsanis, his clips for ‘Independence Cha Cha / Le Jour d’Après’ and ‘Karibu Ya Bintu’ are like mini masterpieces, short stories in celluloid, that draw power from Baloji’s fascination with cinema and photography (his cousin Sammy Baloji is a famous Congolese photographer).  Names like Almodovar, Jarmusch, Ken Loach and Francis Ford Coppola trip lightly from his tongue, with enthusiasm rather than pretence.

He was born Baloji Tshiani in Lubumbashi, south eastern Congo, in 1978, the product of an indiscreet liaison between a rich businessman and a hotel chambermaid.  At the age of three he was sent to live in Belgium, first in Oostende and then in the grim mining town of Liege, with his step family.  When Baloji was seven, his father lost most of his assets in an ethnic war that ravaged the east of Congo, and promptly disappeared from his life.  “Every day I wondered where he was,” Baloji says. “He was my only link with my own blood.”

I ask what it would have been like to meet the ten-year-old Baloji?  “Horrible,” he replies with a rueful laugh.  “I distanced myself from my family.  I was angry and aggressive. I failed all my tests at school, so they considered me retarded.”  He began to run with the Sicilian hoodlums of the Liege ‘hood, getting up to no good.  “Worse than that, I just had nothing to loose.”  He ended up in a special school for delinquents run by nuns, but said goodbye to formal education at the age of 15.  “In fact, I learned everything with the nuns,” he claims without irony.

Then rap came and saved him from the worst.  Thanks to his brothers, who danced professionally with the band Technotronic of ‘Pump Up The Volume’ fame, he discovered American

Baloji in the main lobby of the Musée Tervuren. (c) Andy Morgan 2011.

and then French rap.  Tonton David and the Marseille crew I Am where huge early influences. They taught him that his flow needn’t be dumb and simplistic.  “This was the first time I heard music that talked about people like me and my mates,” he tells me.  His first rap outfit, Les Malfrats Lingquistiques (‘The Linguistic Hustlers’), morphed into Starflam and Baloji became something of a Belgian hip hop heartthrob.  Meanwhile, living above a legendary record store called Caroline Music in Liège did wonders for his musical education. “I heard everything…PIL, Kraftwerk, Queens of the Stone Age, The Smiths…those guys really helped me.”

As grim, grey and racist as life on the cold plains of Belgium could be, Baloji can thank his adoptive country for his broad musical education and eclecticism, which is almost unique in the African music sphere.  Until recently, however, he hated soukous, the Congolese-born gold standard of post-independence pan-African pop.  “For me it was the worse music in the world,” he tells me.  Nonetheless, when he received a three page letter from his mother out of the blue, in 2007, his Congolese heritage came back to into the foreground of his life with a vengeance.  “She alluded the fact that I had been sent to Oostende as a child,” Baloji says. “To the city of Marvin Gaye. That’s how I discovered his song ‘I’m Going Home’”  The song seemed portentous and it spurred Baloji to return to his roots and record an album, a kind of soundtrack without a film, that would tell his mother what his life had been like over the past twenty years.  That’s how ‘Hotel Impala’ was born.

Baloji went ‘home’, to the Congo, to give the record to his mother in person.  He met her in a restaurant in Lubumbashi, dressed “like a little prince.”  But his mother couldn’t understand why he wasn’t a rich and successful careerist, like his father had been, rather than the struggling musician that she saw before her.  The meeting was a disaster, and Baloji is still working hard to build bridges.

“I want to make music that is very African, and very modern,” Baloji tells me.  “You have to be proud of who you are.  Rappers sample Bob James, Curtis Mayfield etc, but it means more when Talib Kewli or Kanye West samples them because that’s their heritage.  But we Africans also have an interesting heritage, which has a richness and a diversity that is huge and under-exploited.  We can also go deep into it and make it modern, celebrate its value, just like the Americans..”

It needed a special of sorcerer to conjure up that mix of heritage, modernity and blistering lyrical flow…a baloji perhaps, tall, dapper and fearlessly stubborn.

Andy Morgan. (c) 2011

First published in The Observer, UK – November 2011.

The post BALOJI (Part 1) – Super sorcerer of Belgo-congolese rap appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Front (L-R): Florent, Coco, Renaud, Ricky. Back (L-R): Junana, Theo, Roger, Kabamba.

Filmmakers Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye recount the highs and lows of their incredible adventures in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, during the making of ‘Jupiter’s Dance’, ‘Victoire Terminus’ and ‘Benda Bilili’.

Renaud Barret: I had this journalist girl friend, a big reporter, and at the time I was severely bored with life in general. I was a graphic designer and photographer but I wanted to do other things and so she said, “Listen, I’m going to east of the Congo to cover the demobilisation camps for child soldiers. Why don’t you come?” That was in 2003. And I was lucky, during the ten days we spent in Kinshasa, to meet a musician, a guy called John Jamming. We started to go out and walk around town a bit. The name ‘Kinshasa’ evoked plenty of things for me.  It was the Muhammad Ali fight.  It was the capital of African music.  It was a word that cracked like the lash of whip. There was all this kind of imagery of the very heart of Africa.  Pagan Africa.

Florent de la Tullaye: I was a photojournalist. I’d taken up photography at the age of 15 and I had been Marc Riboud’s assistant. I admired the great photographers of the Magnum school.  In 2003, I had won a scholarship from this organisation called the Villa Medici ‘Hors Les Murs’ who organised residencies in Sao Paolo, New York and Moscow.  I was at the Moscow one and there was this whole saga surrounding a project that was very important to me and which I had been forced to abandon because of the Russian mafia. I sent an email to Renaud to tell him a bit about my problems and adventures. That’s when he answered me by mail saying, “Listen, I’m in Kinshasa. You absolutely have to come. You’ll love it.” That was it.

RB: I knew Africa quite well. I’d travelled a hell of a lot, and I’d visited quite a few countries, in tourist mode. Kinshasa had nothing to do with what I had seen, or perceived of Africa until then. There was music everywhere, and that music wasn’t only by Koffi Olomide and his ilk. It really was ghetto music. The place totally bowled me over, so I called Florent, who was a very old friend.

FdlT: So Renaud pitched this film project to me, about the INA, the National Institute of Performing Arts.

RB: I found myself there one day and all the clichés you could wish for were there too. There were holes in the wall, there were double basses with only one string, and everybody was trying to study with this kind of feeling of rage, there was nothing. I thought it was really perfect. It summed the situation pretty well.  So I said to Florent, “Listen, we don’t give a shit. We have no producer or production company, we have nothing. We’ll put our own money into it.  I had a bit of money from my graphic design work.

FdlT: I was completely in debt ha ha.

RB: And so we said, OK.  We’re going to buy a camera and just go for it.

RB: We went straight into the ghetto, found a hotel with rooms at $10 a night in Baroumbou, the hoodlum’s neighbourhood, and we started to do some mad stuff.  What we did then, I’d never do it again now.  That’s to say, we went into houses, camera at the ready.  We never gave anybody any money.  We were completely nuts.  And we began to meet musicians and film them, and to film these little gigs…

FdlT: As we went along, we realised that it was a lot more interesting to meet musicians in the ghetto than in the INA. We spent about a month and a half on that first trip, and the first musician with whom we really started working in a serious way was Jupiter…

RB: We began to understand that the city is a cauldron of all the 400 ethnicities of the Congo, with their rhythms and all that.  And yet there’s a stylistic which is common to everyone, this kind of melancholy in the voices, in the melodies, this kind of DIY approach to making instruments, using rubbish and scraps, which is due to the poverty but which also creates a certain sound. It’s almost as if the city has this DIY recycling soul.  We were totally into that whole thing. So we meet Jupiter, towards the end of that first stay of a month in 2004, in the final week.

FdlT: And in the meantime we met Staff Benda Bilili. We were coming out of a bar one night, somewhere in the city centre. We were a bit…you know…

Roger Landu from Staff Benda Bilili

RB: We’d been filming all day.  We would spend all our days filming.  We were a bit done in, smashed.  And we heard this tune. “What’s that??!”  And we turn up, and they there are in front of the SONAS roundabout, rehearsing. We arrived, slightly on tiptoe, we put our cameras away in our bags, we sat down and just listened…

FdlT: …A little intimidated I’d say by the whole entourage that was there; down-and-out soldiers, street kids, girls and then the handicapped guys.  It was quite an atmosphere.

RB: What was really strange was that they already knew who we were.  Like everyone in town, they knew that there were these two daft white people who were filming in the ghetto, looking for musicians. So they saw us with our two cameras and pretended not to know anything whereas they knew everything about us already. And there you have it. We were the ones, simply because we were the first to take an interest in them. That’s all. If we had been a bunch of Japs from NHK, they would have done exactly the same.

FdlT: What was special about Staff was that they had their own songs. At that very first meeting we realised that this wasn’t just another group out busking for pennies and playing covers of well known songs. They were doing their own thing. Then something happened which was to really cement our friendship and bring us much closer on a mutual footing. We spent a part of the next day filming them. We didn’t know Kinshasa very well at that point, and we were just having fun filming from Coco’s mobilette, sitting in the back, and at one moment we pass right in front of the ANR, the Agence Nationale des Renseignements; the local FBI.  And there, on the square, we soon realise that all the shopkeepers and traders are in fact plainclothes police. And so, inevitably, we’re arrested. This guy in shades takes our letter of authorisation to film and holds it upside down, pretending to read it.

RB: It freaks us because at that time we didn’t quite understand the local humour. These guys turn up with a man they call ‘The Gorilla’, this giant with slavering lips and injected eyes. We were there going, “Jeez! Holy Shit!” We didn’t understand a word he was saying, and we ended up in prison.  And from the cell, which overlooked the street, we began to see the Benda Bilili gathering on the opposite pavement.  It started with three or four of them; Ricky, Coco, Theo etc, and then slowly others started to join them. They grow to twenty, then thirty, and then Coco kick starts his motorbike, revs up and rams the gates of the police station!

RB: Everybody was shouting: “Free our whiteys!  Free our whiteys!  They’re our beefsteak!  They’re our meal ticket!  Free the whites otherwise you’re all going to have problems!” There’s this expression in Kin which goes:

Toye bin operation, Toye bin lakou! It means: “Operation we know your place, we know where you live.”  They also call it Stylo Rouge, the ‘Red Pen’ Correction!  So, the major at the station, who was a little bit sharper than the others, started to get a bit scared, because no one messes around with the handicapped in Kinshasa. He freed us and we ended up getting hammered with the Staff Benda Bilili.  And we were saying to each other, “Check these guys OUT!  They assault the police station to free us, and they freed us!”  Some crazy shit!  And so we got pissed with them just to celebrate it all and that’s how our relationship started.

FdlT: They felt there was something different about us, because they beg on the streets, and there are whites who give them money, who might even buy them a guitar from time to time, but nothing more, and in our case, I don’t know, I think we had a way of looking and talking to them that they liked. We didn’t propose to make a music recording with them straightaway.  And if you like, just the fact that they let us film their world was important in that it showed us that handicapped people can do almost anything.  And afterwards it was even they a bit who decided, “hey we’ll go a film this, we’ll go and film that…” A couple of days later Ricky was introducing us as “here are our producers…”   But like all musicians, you know, like everyone who’s a bit lost in life does if they have a whitey to hand.  And so, as it happened, their status on the streets grew because of us.  There were plenty of interconnected issues.

People are needy out there as well for another reason, which is that people have no trust in each other.  They’re always ripping each other off.  And totally bizarrely, they think the white man is honest, despite all the tragic history between the whites and the blacks in that part of the world.  So whites are really in demand, as it were.

RB: There are times when you arrive in a city like a crazy person, you know, like a punk with his fingers in the air, and everything is possible. You can drown in that narcissism, but it never happened to us.  People were calling us producers and all that stuff but we knew very well who we really were and that at home our lives were in a total mess. In a way, we were completely unconscious of what we were trying to do but the desire to do it meant that we just went ahead with it, saying “Fuck it!” you know.  It was almost the lets-go-straight-into-a-wall option, but we went anyway. We were acting only with our hearts, not with our heads. There’s this role that you endorse but you have to keep it in proportion There were moments when you had to say, “Hey, guys, we don’t have a magic wand you know.  All we’re doing is trying something together.”  We tried to be honest. And it’s true that at the time when we arrived, we idealized plenty of things. As time passed, we became aware of the horror of that city.

FdlT: Well, as Mark Twain said: “They didn’t know it was impossible, so they did it.”

RB: On that first trip we were just filming as much as possible. We were living in the ghetto. We didn’t see another white face for months. But by choice, by desire, by the cultural romanticism of all the people you’ve admired in your short life, people who you’ve read, whose artistic approach you’ve appreciated…

FdlT: The exchequer as well…What you have in your pockets. That put us there too.

RB: Let’s say that we knew that the money we had was destined for this project.  There was no question of talking about salaries or anything like that, but at the same when you work with people like that you’re involved in welfare in some kind of way. Suddenly, everything hits you in the face. You’re not just filming a normal film. Everyday there are problems to solve. If you put yourself in the midst of people’s lives, you have to play that role as well. Try to explain that to an accountant afterwards, try to explain all you’ve blown on bakshish, on bottles of whiskey, on repairing tyres for such and such prtdon, you know. We were in another world and in fact that world suited us too in the sense that, back in France, at the stage of my life, I understood nothing. That country was just screwing my head up. All those people crying into their cups were doing me in. All those people who needed support from the state just to create something were doing me in. In Kinshasa, it was the complete opposite. It was people who create out of a sense of urgency, who create because it keeps them alive, and suddenly you identify yourself with that, at your own minuscule level. You say to yourself: “That’s it!  That’s it. That’s the truth. That’s were it is. It’s not in the calculation. It’s in the act of creation first and foremost…”

FdlT: And in the dream. But we went home after that first visit and went to see plenty of record companies etc. No one was interested. Everyone took the piss out of us. I showed a friend some videos of Jupiter. He was a jazz fan and all that and he said, “Hey, that guy there, you’re right. You have to record him.” So we went back in July 2004 to record Jupiter. And at the end of that session in the studio we had some time left and we said, “Well, Ok let’s bring Staff in.” It was like a test.

It was pretty good, but not good enough. I have to go back a bit. Back in March 2004, you had Staff Benda Bilili in one part of the city, you had Jupiter in another part of the city, and in the middle of it all, in another neighbourhood, we came across Roger, but in a completely furtive way.  In fact, we were on our way to the rehearsal of the music group, les Jahfros. It was taking place in a kind of parish church, in a courtyard, and this little kid walked by with his strange instrument. We thought he was about eight years old but in fact he was a bit older. He was this kind of apparition, who started playing in front of the camera.

RB: At the time we were neither filmmakers nor record producers. We were absolutely nothing in fact. We just had a few cameras, a few cameras and an ear. Perhaps an eye too. But at the time, especially an ear. So Roger walked passed us.  He played about ten minutes of satongé for us.  Then we did an interview – Hello. What’s your name? We have to meet again. You know, I recently found all the notebooks we were using at the time, those little Chinese notebooks which we bought, with all our rendezvous and all the info, day by day.  We imposed this schedule on ourselves.  It’s so curious to read all the notes we wrote in those little books; such and such is doing this that and the other, we meet, we find it disappointing, brilliant, all that stuff. Who was it that was asking us to do all that?  No one. It was our own sense of urgency, or desire, and that city created that urgency in us. We have 2,500 hours of rushes on the city, and they have enormous meaning today.

RB: After that first meeting with Roger, he disappears, as people do out there. Now we’ve understood why he disappeared, because he was living with his mother at 30 kilometres from the city centre, you know. He had to take the train to go home.  And for a whole year…no news!

FdlT: We filmed the majority of ‘Jupiter’s Dance’ in 2005.  That’s to say, that we carried on meeting plenty of musicians, even during the recording sessions, at night etc.

RB: We carried on carrying on.  And still not a bit of interest back home in what we were doing. But it has to be said that we were, you know, a pair of tossers, who hadn’t been to film school, who didn’t really know how to hold a camera, and who had nothing much to their name except the energy to say that it was wonderful out there. I can understand that they said, “Ok guys…thanks but no thanks.”

FdlT: Our main battlegroun was in France, in Paris.  We even went to see Wagram, who now own the licence for the Staff Benda Bilili CD in France. I had to remind them of that the other day. I said, “Well, you know, we did come and see you way back then.”  Ha ha ha.  But we went and knocked on the door of the same guy who had paid for Jupiter’s recordings, who we’d never been able to pay back. He was in finance and this was his little side project. He gave us €7,000 to go and record Staff Benda Bilili.

RB: That recording happened in 2005, in the studio that you see in the film.

FdlT: And fifteen days before we were taking the band into the studio, paff Roger reappears. By chance! And that’s how he became part of the band.

RB: I showed Ricky the footage I had shot of Roger when we had met him the evening before, of Roger dancing with the girl, and Ricky said, “What on earth is that instrument?  Bring me that little fella!  Bring him to me.”

RB: The Business side was simple, at least it was in 2005. Things are clearcut.  They trusted us and you know why they trusted us? Because we came back three times, four times. And we’d always go back to see the same people. We weren’t like those little journalists who come along saying, “Yeah man. Yo! Your music’s cool, the world is yours, we’re gonna get you shown on RTBF, and all that.”  And then it’s see you later alligator. The difference between the journalists and us is that afterwards, in effect, we walk around the streets with them and they say, “Yeah!  Big journalists…big producers!”  And all that, because they mix everything up.  But we’re not sodding journalists.  We’re totally subjective. Staff saw us once time in 2004, they saw us come back a second time again in 2004 to reconfirm that we’re sticking with the project. 2005…the same thing. 2006…the same thing.  That’s were the trust exists.  Then there are highs and lows but they really did understand that we were working for them, all of them.

RB: Jump to 2006.  That was when we went into the studio, the first studio in the film, and we spent seven whole months in Kinshasa.  Fuck the rest! You know.  We were so touched by all the people around us. Everything was becoming mixed up; Jupiter, the Benda Bilili, all the other musicians. We filmed them, we began to edit their footage together, we began to put stuff up on You Tube, we began realize that people are curious and interested. The spiel of the record companies was “What? African music? No, never. That ain’t never going to work.” And then you put a clip on You Tube and you get 300,000 hits. What they were telling wasn’t true. And in any case, we were arriving in the midst of a total crisis for the record companies. A catastrophe. You realise that giving your little bits and pieces to a label is almost like putting all you possess into a boat that’s in the process of sinking. Those A&R people are telling you what works and what doesn’t work whereas they themselves are going down, loosing millions every day because they have no idea any more of how things work and how to catch up with reality. They were like the Titanic.

RB: And we also realised the absurdity of the system. There we were working with musicians who were in a situation of emergency in terms of their sanitary conditions, of life in general, and then we were talking to people at the major labels, who have I don’t know how many thousands of employees, with how many thousands of pensions. And you say to yourself, “where’s the music in all of that?  All they’re talking about is profitability.”  And it’s because even they are no longer on top of the game, you know.  They’re no longer in tune with what’s happening.  And when you’re working with musicians from countries like the DRC, you can’t be dealing with pay slips and invoices and certificates of this and that and all that stuff, like in France.  No no, you give each of the guys 500, because that’s it, you give them 500, and if you have to justify the payment, you just cook up a false invoice. There’s no Society of Musicians in The Congo or if there is it’s some guy who runs it, grabs all the money and scarpers.  That’s what happens.

FdlT: After filming Staff Benda Bilili and others, we had loads of rushes, plenty of material, and we had this friend who came along and who knew how to edit films.  And so he began editing all that and after a while we said, “Ok, listen, why don’t we do a film.”

RB: Night and day, during the three or four months we spent in France, that’s all we did; edit, edit, edit, edit material.  Just to create something so that someone with some cash just might come along and say “Jeez, fantastic.  I’ll slap 10,000, even 15,000 euros on the table and we’ll see.” Well, it didn’t happen like that. At the time we were still working on other stuff.  Florent was taking photos and all that. But we couldn’t do it any longer.  We couldn’t work any longer.  I couldn’t spend a month at an agency doing logos. The treatment of the pictures, you know, the pre-edit, edit, validation, it all takes so much time. Fuck you! You know. THIS is what we’re doing. That’s when our standard of living began to nose dive drastically.

FdlT: But there’s something else that happened in 2005. We finished the first cut of ‘Jupiter’s Dance’ and we were invited to a Festival in Montreal called ‘Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire.’

RB: With a film captured with mini-Camcorders, edited gonzo, you know, 100% gonzo!

FdlT: Well, not to dwell on that too much, but even a film filmed on these little cameras doesn’t look too bad on a big screen.

RB: Yeah, that’s was cool.

FdlT: And what’s more we saw plenty of other documentaries by people a bit like us, that’s to say, who worked alone in their own corner, on difficult subjects, without any money. It really gave us a second wind. It was strange because we were in a super luxe hotel, and we didn’t even have enough money to go to the takeaway on the other side of the street.

RB: To buy a packet of chips with vinegar.

FdlT: At breakfast we stocked up on food and stashed it away in our pockets.  We spent our days in screenings looking other documentaries, and as we had a project that we had been thinking of but hadn’t yet formally embarked on, it was then that we said, “Shit…the Female Boxer Project…it could be a goer.”

RB: We already had the material for the film because all day long, during those first two years, from morning until the next morning, we filmed. We hardly ever slept because you can’t sleep in a city like. You just stick some matches between the eyelids.  And after we had written the scenario for the Female Boxers, we said, “Shit! That’s the film.”

FdlT: We saw some lovely films by complete unknowns in Montreal.  Other than that, I admit that the documentaries of Wiseman influenced us…

RB: Yes, in terms of their intimacy…

FdlT: Intimacy, and no voice-off commentary. For us it was a good way of looking at Africa because who were we to narrate the lives of Africans. We’re a new generation.  We don’t have any colonies and we haven’t got any complexes linked to all that.  That’s our past, but we’re not in it now.  Even less so, in the case of an ex-Belgian colony.  So who can gives us permission to comment, to talk about life in Africa.  It’s just the fact that we had captured these scenes with those people that enabled their story to be told.  It’s only through that.

FdlT: There are certain sequences in the film, like when the news breaks about the fire at the centre for handicapped in Bandal, that seem manipulated and ‘staged’. The reality of the fire is that Renaud was in the studio.  We learned that there had been this terrible event at the centre. So Renaud leaves for Bandal to see what was happening, meets Ricky’s wife, and gives his own telephone to Ricky’s wife, because they didn’t have a phone there, and they call Ricky to explain. That’s why you have this impression that the narrative in the film is almost too good. But where we did cheat a bit in editing, is that that scene with the telephone call was put before the reaction in the studio as if…

RB: No, but wait, I’ll tell you the truth. We were in our fourth day in the studio. All of a sudden, there’s a guy from the centre who calls and says, “Papa Ricky…Catastrophe!…What can we do?!” Ricky hands me the telephone and says, “Listen…you have to deal with this. Me?…concentration, concentration, concentration!”   I take the telephone and the guy’s saying, “Help, it’s all burning down!”  I say to Ricky, “Listen, there’s a big fire at the centre.”  He says, “Go!  Go and see what’s happening.” As you might imagine, I take my camera with me. I arrive and film the end of the fire. And I see Ricky’s wife who’s in every state imaginable and who says, “Waaah. I have to call Papa Ricky…telephone!”   I give her the telephone.  I film her.  She explains everything, and then afterwards I go back to the studio and I tell them that everything has gone up in flames and I show them the footage I’ve filmed. And at that moment Ricky says to me, “Oh shit.  We’ve lost everything.” But as you can see in the film, he just says, “That’s life.”  As he always says.

RB: Take another example, the opening sequence of the film, when you hear this boy saying that he’s going to rob us and steal all our equipment, that happened in 2004. When we filmed it, we didn’t understand a word the boy was saying. That snippet staying in the box for months and months and months, even years. Imagine, it was our first month in Kinshasa and there was this guy already saying, “Shit, I’m gonna shake you down.” But we only understood what he had said months, even years later. The scene fitted in well with where we were at then, at the beginning, in relation to our surroundings. We didn’t know what was going on around us. We understood strictly nothing. That’s a bit why we wanted to put that sequence at the beginning of the film. That guy hits the nail on the head in terms of how much we conformed to the cliché of the daft whiteys with plenty of good intentions out there.

RB: The same thing can be said about the sequence in the zoo when the young kids talk about God and Europe and all that! No fabrication! It was filmed after the recordings with Vincent, at about the same time that we were learning how to speak Lingala. I’ll explain how we did it. To begin with, they were used to us. I was there trying to film the rehearsal and we saw those kids with a booklet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they were just talking about it amongst themselves. I said to myself, “Shit, this is brilliant,” and I gave them a radio mic, and said “see you later.”  I didn’t understand a word of what they were saying. I stood about 20 or 30 metres away from them, with a zoom lens. We knew we were getting something good, but there was no trickery involved.

Same thing in 2009, in the sequence when the new album is heard on the radio.  On that day we were filming at the zoo, filming the whole shebang, and those two kids, Ricky’s boy and the other one begin to start saying, “Yeah, well, what is Europe?” and all that. At that point we spoke Lingala perfectly, to a point where nothing escaped us anymore. I heard the kid talking to his mate and in a flash I put a radio mic on him. But I never said, “This is what you’re going to talk about.”

FdlT: No one would artificially put “God created Europe to provide a comparison with life here where we live” in the mouth of a little kid.

RB: And the fact that we submerged ourselves in Kinshasa for so many years also meant that we were less likely to miss things like that…

FdlT: But it’s lucky that those little miraculous scenes happen. You also end up filming a hell of a lot, because you feel there might be something about to happen. Often, in the end, nothing does happen, but from time to time they do come. That’s to say, you have to be slightly awake, on your toes, vigilant, and from time to time a potentially brilliant sequence actually starts far from the main action. It’s not yet a scene, and it’ll only become something interesting much later. That’s why you have to film a lot. And very often you also miss some wonderful opportunities.

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FdlT: It’s true that we’re attracted to people living on the margin, especially people on the margin who are also dreamers, you know…

RB: Because we’re also marginals who dream…

FdlT: The characters in ‘Benda Bilili’ are people living on the margins who dream.

RB: Jupiter is a marginal who dreams. The female boxers are marginals who dream.   Pygmies who want to go back home are also marginals who dream.  We’re marginals who dream.  And forget misery too.  WHAT is misery? Let’s define misery. I’ve never seen Staff Benda Bilili as miserable people.  Never for one second. And perhaps that’s what you get from the film as well, is our love for them.

FdlT: I think we’re a generation who has grown up after colonialism. And well, often, you get the impression, with the soixant huitards for example, the rebels who threw stones at the government in Paris 1968, that they carry a bit of guilt. We, at least I, have no impression of carrying guilt like that around.

RB: I’m guilty of nothing. I don’t give a shit.

FdlT: And the more we interacted with people, the more we realised what was really going on.  We said that we idealised things out there a bit at the beginning, but very rapidly we learned that you cannot idealise social relationships in the Congo, you can’t idealise families, you can’t idealise all that.

RB: All that wisdom beneath the mango tree stuff. It’s all nonsense. I think that Florent and I have a right to speak out, just like any African who’s been in France for five years. An African, a Congolese or whatever who has been living in France and has become naturalised, in effect he’s a Frenchman.  So, how come I can’t express myself in the same way about The Congo?  You know what I mean.  What’s the problem? Because I eat like you, I shit like you. It’s not about handing out derogatory judgements. It’s about human judgements.

FdlT: Yes, it’s like we’re always asking ourselves the question: what’s the role of the camera in all of this?  Because it has an influence.  It has an eye. It records things.  Afterwards, you’re going to use what you’re captured.  You see.  And I think that being able to show snippets of life, without judgement, but as they are, leaving the door open for the spectator, that’s openness in my opinion.  It’s strange for us to see the kind of reactions that people have to the film, when we do panels and discussions for example. People ask very much the same questions, but they all have a different view on the film.  That’s to say, everybody will be touched by the same moment, but also by very different moments.

FdlT: Our key to Africa is the artistic and musical milieu.  There you’re not involved in politics, and if you’re not involved in politics, you’re outside all that colonial history. It helped us to go around Kinshasa with musicians, because even if they’re not that famous outside their own hoods, they’re still among the most respected people in their own neighbourhood and the pride of the area in a way, you know.  Each neighbourhood has its own musicians behind it. The music scene isn’t by any means the only scene that we frequented out there, because we were in the boxing scene, in other scenes. But I can tell you that they weren’t the same. The music scene is the one in which people have the most freedom to speak.

RB: Because in the Congo people are chicken, really chicken.

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FdlT: ‘Jupiter’s Dance’ came out in 2007 on DVD. Not really properly, only as a bonus item in fact, as part of a box set.  But at the same time it allowed us to poke a foot in the door of that world because in the end many people saw the film.  And it was well pirated, and all that.  So, in the end, we had an audience and it was our first.

FdlT: We’ve shown all our films in Kinshasa. We’ve organised many screenings.  Even at the French Cultural Centre, which often has pretty paltry audience attendance. But the places is normally packed for your films. For us it’s very important to show our films out in Kinshasa, to have a bit of feedback from the people who live there.  And they love it, precisely because they really recognise themselves in our work. They also see plenty of things that they didn’t even know about, you know. That’s always the advantage of being an outsider. You have a fresh point of view and you’ll seek out things that happen in someone’s next-door neighbourhood that he himself will never see.

What’s more, we took an real interest in ghetto people, the marginal people who are often spoken of only in terms of human misery, with all the illnesses, the wars, and all the other misfortunes that you know exist out there.  And in our case, we look at their lives through music. Music really is a good way in.  Even in some shack out there, they’ll have a TV and they’ll receive the Francophone channels and every time there’s something on about Africa, be it Sudan or Rwanda, it’s always treated in this pitiful way.  It’s always about war, tragedy, or a plane crash, because are plenty of those out there, you know. Whereas, in our case, we were always with musicians and there’s that pride in music it allowed us to really get into people’s homes and to talk about everything that’s going on. In our films, we don’t dwell on those classic tragic issues that exist out there. You feel them anyway, and everybody knows about them. You don’t have to talk about corruption. You can see it with your own eyes.

RB: Because we as much hoodlums are the people we’re filming!  The people know us. I reckon that even if we were filming in France we would still be attracted towards the margins, to people in the margins.  Because those are the people who interest us.

FdlT: Yeah, if you were to film the rich in the Congo you’d find yourself nodding off pretty quickly.

RB: But it would be interesting to film the rich out there, the black rich.  They have to be filmed, that sodding caste of people who are so to speak the ‘elite’.  They’re a calamity.  They’re uneducated arseholes.

FdlT: And what’s more very contemptuous.  But it would be dodgy for us to make a film about them because it would involve plenty of judgement…

RB: And that’s not our way.  The system that we’re ramming down the black man’s throat doesn’t even work here in the west anymore.  Or at least  it has reached its limits. How can you be the salesman for such a shit system. We don’t believe in what’s happening here at home, in that model of growth. It only works for those for whom it works really really well. Despite everything there’s still a majority who are on the breadline and psychologically, even if they have a well stocked fridge, even if they eat and have electricity at home, I mean, misery can be alive and well there too, in people who are stuffed with anti-depressants and who pass the week at their shrink’s. All is not well.

FdlT: I think there also something that’s changed in terms of the different generations.  If the black man says that he’s in an impasse, the white man can also say that his society is in an impasse.  Everybody is facing a similar fate.

RB: Yes, and the problem is that the African is running after our impasse.  He’s dreaming off it and demanding it with all his heart.  He wants that impasse in which we find ourselves today.  And you can’t blame him.   So, you see, what can one say!

RB: Jupiter has got a song called ‘Congo’, which is an eponymous track on his forthcoming album.  But what’s he saying, basically, simply?  He’s saying – Alright, fifty years ago, our grandparents were slaves.  They were whipped three times a day.  They ate three times a day.  Our parents, after independence, no one whipped them any more but they only ate once a day, and at midnight.  Are the whites to blame, or are our parents to blame?

FdlT: So, back to the story.  In Kinshasa, we were often in these lousy hotels.  We stayed a lot with Jupiter as well.  And we also stayed for a while with this French guy, who was 25 years old, who discovered Kinshasa thanks to us so he invited us in at one point.  So, there you go.  At times we really didn’t have anything.  In 2008-9, we were totally in the shit.

RB: I’d had a child. When I say zero, it was really zero! There were only debts, with bailiffs coming round, you know. And all that just for this shitty project in Africa, you know!  At certain points I wanted to say Fucking Niggers! And what’s more there are always people who suspect you of using these poor Africans to make a mint of money.  Whereas we were really in the shit…big time!

FdlT: And what’s funny is that Benda Bilili saw that we were really not in good shape whereas things were beginning to take off for them. They hadn’t yet started to travel and tour but I was organizing quite a few gigs for them, to train them up in stagecraft and to earn a bit of money.  There were times in Kin when they would sub us $100 you know, just to keep going.   Ha ha ha.

RB: You know, they’d go: ”Eh Petit!  Voila cent dollars. Il faut manger hein?!   Petit, faut manger.  Faut manger petit!” Ha ha ha. But there’s no reason for us to boast. This wasn’t a pose. No one’s was pulling a knife on us and forcing us to do what we were doing. You’ve got no reason to cry because you don’t have any money left. You’ve got no money left because you yourself decided not to have any left.  You have other options whereas they don’t.  You have to take it on board. You have become miserable BUT also rich inside. No one can rob you of that internal wealth.  It’s yours…and you pay the bill!

RB: We were focussed on so many things at the same time. I was doing sessions of five, six, seven hours with Bebson, the next artist we’d like to produce, during which I would film everything. It was magical. Because the talent in Kinshasa is SO strong. Shit, I know Senegal, and I know Mali and they’re LIGHTWEIGHTS next to Kinshasa, you know. Those places have that kind of wall surrounding their creative thinking, the minaret, which means that at some point you can’t go any further because there’s this religion saying, “No!”   You can’t go there. All those people in the Kinshasa ghetto who are creating instruments, creating musical mixtures, who is going to give those people a voice?!  Who is going to make them audible? Those were the questions we were asking ourselves at that time.  I was sending Florent these MP3, with the little bandwidth I had, and he was going “Wow!  My god.  What shall we do?!  What shall we do??!!”

FdlT: At end of 2005, beginning of 2006, we met Vincent [Kenis, producer of the first Staff Benda Bilili album] for the first time, in Paris. It was in the winter of 2006 I think. I remember it was in a bistrot near the Gare du Nord. Vincent was deeply embroiled in his Congotronics thing, and couldn’t really see how Staff Benda Bilili could fit into all that. Nonetheless he said, “Come to Brussels and meet Marc [Hollander, boss of Crammed Disc in Belgium].  So I went to meet Marc a few weeks later and then things stayed there for a while, during which I was showing him some video footage of Staff Benda Bilili but nothing more.  And in fact, what happened, was that in 2006, we were filming ‘Victoire Terminus’ during the day but at night we were with Staff Bend Bilili.

RB: We were doing two films at the same time.

FdlT: we were filming their daily lives all the time, throughout 2006. And then, at the tail end of the filming for ‘Victoire Terminus’, towards October, November 2006, Vincent Kenis was in Kinshasa finishing a recording with the Kasai All Stars or someone else, I can’t remember, and since he was there with his studio he said, “Well, OK.”  And he set up the first recordings sessions in the zoo. And it was after that, with what Vincent brought back with him, that Crammed became interested.

RB: At one point we were so broke, so Benda Bililian. We lost 8 kilos in six months. But we were fine. That’s how we had to be, you know. That was our sporting weight, our boxer’s weight. But it did create a kind of anxiety in us, and we had to get into the nuances of the way people thought around us, people who had become very close to us because their quest became our quest too.  We started with a much higher standard of life that them, but then it became more equal, more balanced. It was the result of staying out there for a long time.

FdlT: It was also the beginning of Myspace, Facebook, YouTube and all of that, and we used to upload our videos there and at the time, that was a pleasure, having people writing comments like “Yeah, your video is brilliant.” We began to realise that film was the best medium, in Kinshasa at least.  And we love it anyway, because we spent our whole time making films, and even physically, we felt good doing it. Let’s say that, the camera protects you. You find yourself in difficult people situations and it gives you a bit of protection, even if, later on, when you stay a bit too long…

RB: It catches you out. It wasn’t just a matter of going out and filming people saying things. We lived certain experiences and our implication was different to most similar projects. We had this common aim with our the people we were filming, this mutual project at every turn, which was to hatch something, to cross boundaries.

FdlT: Many of the musicians would say, “Hey, why don’t we try and make a video clip together,” Just like that. So we had fun with that. It was immediate.  You need a video clip?  We’ll do it. It gave us a role that allowed us to meet loads of people.  We would never had been able to do that with a stills camera.

RB: And the next day it’s on the Congolese TV promoting this or that musician you know. It gave us credibility in the street. Now musicians, even famous musicians of great calibre, want to work with us.

FdlT: Our films are well known because ‘Jupiter’s Dance’ has been pirated a go go out there. It’s been on TV I don’t know how many times. And we’ve also starred in some films ourselves, as actors, and we’re really…well speaking for myself at least…the worst actors who have ever existed.  But they liked it.  You play the bumbling white guy who’s ripped off by this smart canny black guy, always.

RB:         They’re like soaps.  They call them ‘Petit Theatre’.  They’re on TV.

FdlT:         But they have this enormous success.

Staff Benda Bilili (L-R): Coco, Randi, Roger Theo, Ricky, Junana

RB:         Yeah, you had these black guys pummelling us. It was brilliant.  You say to yourself: Yeah, that’s it! Go on, beat us to a pulp. Regain your dignity. Shit, the whites are nothing, you know. We’re not there to be the big helpers. It’s them who are helping us to make these films.  It became very easy to work because we’d played the right game with everyone, and hadn’t put ourselves in the posture of saviour.  In the end, they’re our saviours.

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FdlT: Then afterwards in 2008-9, we went back to Kinshasa.  We thought we’d landed a fantastic job out there.  We had to take care of the Miss Neighbourhood competitions, which were organised by a brand of beer called Skol.  We had to film, edit clips, and broadcast them on TV and all of that. And the Miss competitions were a great gig, because every fifteen days there was work, and it was going to last a year.  In the end, it only last two months. The crisis came along. As we thought it was going to last a year, we blew all the money we had, on our families, on presents, this and that.  And so we really found ourselves stuck in Kinshasa, in 2008-9…

RB: And that’s when Ricky used to help us out with $100 saying, “Hey, friends, you’ve got to get something to eat. Gotta fill yourselves up. Just look at you.” It was the hardest time.

FdlT: It was really the hardest time, because we’d begun to get really tired of carrying everything on our shoulders, and then nothing happening. ‘Victoire Terminus’ had won a prize in London, but when we heard the new we were in Katanga.  We heard about it one month later and it was more of a symbolic prize…

RB: There wasn’t any money involved.

FdlT: Then in May 2009, we were in Paris and we were lucky enough to meet these producers who agreed to become co-producers of the film and who made it possible to finance all the rest of the post-production work. That’s what allowed us to make the film for the cinema, and not just TV. So it was really those guys who saved us.

RB: Yes, they saved us.

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FdlT: We were just newbies at the start, back in 2004, and we learned how to make films on the job, and even how to work in a studio, you know. Bit by bit we discovered our own ears, eyes, ideas. Now that the project is successful, it has given us confidence to know that what we always felt but sometimes had trouble talking was good and sane. Because we weren’t always sure of ourselves

What I find extraordinary about a camera, is that you can film people that seem to be so far from you, culturally speaking, and thanks to the emotion that your work expresses, you can relive certain emotions through them and make them appear extremely close. And it’s clear that you need time to do that. If you want to understand a culture, you need to understand the language; you need to live in that culture. You can’t just do that in 15 days, it’s impossible.  So it’s really a matter of total immersion, which is good because we like that way of doing things in any case. You learn loads and above all you manage to capture scenes which go further than fiction in some ways, you know.

Despite everything, the film documentary is in fact a very liberating medium. You’re not as bound by reality as a journalist. You’re allowed to cheat a little bit, to invent a little bit, to fictionalise your story a little bit. There are only two films which we actually wrote; ‘Victoire Terminus’, and ‘Pygmy Blues’.  With ‘Victoire Terminus’, everything we wrote down eventually happened of its own accord.  For ‘Pygmy Blues’ we’ve written this script and we think that it’ll happen, we don’t know yet, but we know it will be close enough to what we’ve written. That’s how we can make the story more universal, more understandable by many people, many from a completely different culture. ‘Pygmy Blues’, our next film, is extremely interesting and extremely important to us. we know that we’re going to be able do it, to make it happen, and we’re going to be able to talk about subjects which we think are essential, which are even beyond the comprehension of the main protagonist. If he were just to tell you his own story, you’d say, “OK.”  But when you show everything that happens around him, you can touch on a huge number of issues just by following that story …

FdlT:         When we write a scenario, more often that not, reality then delivers that scenario to us without much manipulation. But first you must do your research, and know your characters well. We know Wenge, the star of ‘Pygmy Blues’, very well.  We’ve really listened to what he’s told us and tried to understand whole aspects of his story that he can’t even encompass. We know certain things that allow us to imagine how things come to pass. Then, if things don’t happen that way then, on the contrary, it will only deepen the feel. The story will be a little more directed, because we have to get from point A to point B, but after that everything that happens around the straight line narrative can be imagined. We  know that we’re going to take that trip up the river, and we know exactly how things happen out there on the water. We know the boats, we know that they’re little floating villages, that there are births, there are deaths, there are mass ceremonies, during which people pray. We know the status of the pygmies in that society. So, already you can portray that whole external journey. The biggest unknown for us will be when Wenge gets back and meets the family that he hasn’t seen for twenty years. Will he be able to readapt to that life? And what’s more, to them it’ll concern them less because they consider that kind of situation almost normal. Whereas we know that deforestation is something that is destroying their people.

We’d like to talk about deforestation, because here in Europe, people will talk to you about ecology and stuff like that, and that it’s good to build with wood and all that, without knowing that those attitudes are creating social crises in the places where the wood is taken from. In a TV reportage made by journalists, it will appear on the same level as the Iraq war or, you know.  Whereas if you can see the problem through the eyes of living human being, you’ll be saying, “Shit.  What a disaster!”  Because, the disaster isn’t only that the wood has been cut down, and that it’s bad for the ozone layer. It’s a disaster for all the pygmies and we don’t even given them the means to adapt to the situation. On the contrary, they’re pushed aside. They become an impediment, a problem. And then there’s all that Pygmy mythology, which is very very interesting because the souls of their ancestors live in tree trunks. And for Wenge, that means that his ancestors are travelling all over the world, you know. Then, you can imagine footage of the Disneyland Center in Los Angeles, which is all made out of wood that comes from the pygmy forest.  The soul of the Pygmies is in there.  Maybe that’ll please Walt Disney…ha ha ha.

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FdlT:         There’s always been a certain trust between ourselves and Staff Benda Bilili, which I think is due to Ricky. And Coco. Coco is very discreet in the film and he is discreet by nature. He’s timid but he’s also one of the main composers, and he’s the most observant of them all. Roger is a bit like our son, you know.  We housed him. We gave him moral pep talks every now and then, so that he didn’t turn down any dark alleyways.

What’s funny is that last year winning a prize at WOMEX was a great success and all that. But we were in a hole at that time. We didn’t have a hotel room at WOMEX, or anything like that. They would let us sleep in their beds, you know.  We’d sleep in the same room. And as they were receiving their per diems they would buy us food. All they wanted was for the film to be released so that it could help us. Because they were on the up and up and they saw us staying down below. After that we didn’t see them for a while because they went back to Kinshasa, or they were on tour, so when we told them that the film would be shown at Cannes in February, it meant nothing, but they sensed that it was important to us andthey were really overjoyed, you know. When journalists asked them about the film, they spoke of it as a great triumph. Afterwards, Ricky hugged us and told us, “All of this is thanks to you,” and we said, “No way, it’s thanks to all of us.”  You see, it’s really balanced. I would say that our interests are on the same side. We don’t have any outstanding business issues with them. There’s nothing that could lead to argument between us. We really have a relationship that goes beyond friendship. It’s more like a family, in the sense that we were in the shit, the same shit that they’ve always been in most of their lives, but which we suddenly found ourselves in too, and that in the end we both tasted success together, even if it was a little staggered, but basically together, and so there were great moments of happiness.

The sequence in the film that happens at the Eurockéenes de Belfort, with Renaud, was perhaps the biggest moment of our lives. For them too.  Even at the sound check. We had never heard their sound on such good equipment.  When we heard Cavalier’s bass sounding like that, it was marvellous you know.  We were filming with tears in our eyes.  And afterwards we threw ourselves into each other’s arms screaming “We’ve done it!  We’ve won!  We’ve won!”  Because on that day, we had all won.  And all that means that we have a close relationship. We’ve lived through a lot together. Each time we see each other, it’s party time, you know.  We know that they’re going to spend the winter in Kinshasa, and we’ll be there.  Now that they have houses.  Now that they have cars to drive us around in ha ha ha.

FdlT: Yeah, maybe it’s too simplistic to say that meeting Staff has changed us.  I think we’ve learned a lot of things but they to us from every direction you know. It wasn’t only Staff. We were really stubborn in the pursuit of our goals, as they were too. You could say that they taught us never to give up, but maybe we knew that already. When we spent those first few months in Kinshasa in 2004, we already changed then, you know, like one always changes when one goes to Africa for the first time. After that, you can’t really complain any more.  And you can’t listen to people complaining anymore. They just do your head in.   You also have to become a bit of an outlaw out there, a bandit, because that’s the system. You become a bit of a liar in some ways, but in the best sense of the word. That’s to say, that there’s such neediness among the people that you end up never saying “No.”  You just say “Later” or “Tomorrow” or you invent a story.  Just so that things turn out the best they can.  It’s like being a couple maybe, I don’t know.

But, no, what really changed us was that we had so many doors slammed shut on us when we presented project, and now there’s a demand, it reassures us a bit. We now know that we weren’t completely crazy, which is what we felt at the time.  We weren’t just whistling in the wind. We did have something. I find Kinshasa is an extraordinary world because it’s a prism in which you can narrate and illuminate plenty of things, even about our own society here in Europe.  You know?  It’s a world which is a bit pagan.

FdlT: And there’s humour, you know, people have plenty of humour. It’s the number one weapon. It diffuses plenty of conflicts. It allows you to survive, to turn everything into satire because, in reality, plenty of things are really derisory.  And then also, there’s that thing that you find a lot in those people, be they boxers or musicians, it’s that dreams are a way of surviving, secrets and dreams. They allow people to walk tall and create projects, and even if they come to nothing in the end, just the energy created increases the chance of survival. You sense that in those people in Kinshasa. And, talking about misery, for us it’s precisely those people who have given up on those dreams who are miserable.  When you meet such people, then you say, “Yeah. The person who gives up in that world, he’ll die sooner than the others.”  Our main source of anxiety during all those years with Staff Benda Bilili, was that one of them would die. Well they’re all still here you know. I think that it’s because they had an energy which allowed them to survive. Normally, in a country like that, if you’re not in perfect health, you won’t resist for long, especially when you live on the streets and you’re handicapped.  If you don’t have a cycle-chair, or something like that, then you’re literally on the floor that’s when you’re more prone to Typhoid and all that stuff.

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FdlT: I think we’ll always be involved in Kinshasa on a musical level. Beyond that, if we do other films in Kinshasa, they’re probably going to be fiction. It’ll be a new adventure.  We feel the potential that’s out there, with all the amazing stories that we hear.  They’re simply extraordinary.  People from Kinshasa are natural actors and comedians but then when you ask them to act a specific part, it’s hard. In a documentary there’s no problem because in the end you just capture reality, and even if they play with the camera from time to time, they also have a tendency to abandon that very quickly. It’s just a brief moment. But it’s also, in a sense, that habit of playing in front of the camera that allows us, as whites, to be forgotten, you know. That’s what happened with ‘Victoire Terminus’.  We filmed in a situation, you just won’t believe it, places where normally no one could ever film.  But it was our presence over a period of time, which made it possible.  After a certain period, after people had provoked you, had tried to empty your pockets, and all that, and we were still there, then…ha ha ha.  What’s left to do?!!!

Interviewed by Andy Morgan.  (c) 2011

An edited version of this interview was published in Songlines, February 2011.

The post ‘BENDA BILILI’ – “They never told us it was impossible…” appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Socklo outside his workshop. Photography by Vincent Kenis

Last summer, when Staff Benda Bilili wheeled themselves up onto the main stage of the Eurockeenes de Belfort Festival in France and unveiled their bitter-sweet rhumba to an exultant European audience for the first time, many keen-eared listeners were intrigued by their extraordinary guitar sound. It was powerful, bright, full-bodied and yet as raw as an uncooked onion, fizzing with the kind of raunch that many rock guitarists have been searching for in vain since the end of the 1960s garage band boom.

On closer examination of the instruments themselves, curiosity turned to amazement. The guitars were unlike anything seen before in Europe. Their shape and décor varied from silver grey or electric blue sunburst with classical curlicue sound holes to blended black and copper red tiger stripes with round sound holes. The bridges, nuts, frets and other bolt on mechanisms were all rough hewn yet functional. The guitars seemed to be the product of an eccentric craftsman with the eye and imagination of an artist.

Staff Benda Bilili soon revealed their secret. All their guitars are made by Misoko Nzalagala, universally known as ‘Socklo’, a guitar-maker from Staff’s home city of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Once a guitarist himself, Socklo now makes about 2 to 3 instruments per week, with the help of a couple assistants, in a clapboard shed in the Lembas district of this enormous teeming city. Tools are rudimentary; no workbench, no electric jigsaws, drills or shape cutters, just a heap of hammers, chisels, planes, saws and anvils made from recycled ordnance, all lying at the feet of the kind-faced Socklo while he sits and patiently fashions his artisanal wonders on his lap.

A hand-cranked turning machine serves to make guitar strings from bicycle brake wire coiled with copper filament which has been recycled from old engines and dynamos. Apart from the plywood used to make the sound boxes of the guitars, all the other raw materials are recycled from bits of wood, old engine parts, refrigerator innards and plastic chairs. Socklo’s workshop is a shrine to all the positive things mothered by necessity: ingenuity, skill, artistry, imagination, pride and, of course, plenty of invention.

Across the city in Bandal, Socklo’s rival Almaz has a few more mod cons in his breeze block and wood workshop. Almaz actually stands for Atelier Lutherie Mazanza, but the avuncular white-haired patron is also known by that name. He owns a few electric tools, but an 11-month long power cut made them inoperable until recently.

The main market for guitars made by Socklo and Almaz has been Kinshasa’s own legion of hopeful guitarists. But even though a typical Socklo guitar sells for only about $25 locally, they’re beyond the reach of most of Kinshasa’s wannabe guitar heroes, thanks to the relentless economic crises and general poverty that cling to the DRC like a curse.

Photography by Vincent Kenis

But help is at hand. A Belgian NGO called Music Fund has decided to support both Socklo and Almaz, initially for year. Lukas Pairon of Music Fund traveled to Kinshasa in 2007 and met both guitar-makers. “They’re struggling to survive, which is hard to see,” he tells me over the phone from Ghent in Belgium. “They’re both very proud of their work, and they’re very well known locally, and supported by musicians like Jupiter and Staff for Socklo, and others for Almaz. After my first visit I went back to see them with two expert luthiers from Belgium. They could see see a number of problems with the guitars, but most importantly, they were completely amazed by both Socklo and Almaz.”

Music Fund are importing guitars to Europe on a regular basis and selling them through their website. Most importantly, Music Fund order the guitars in batches of ten and pay 50% up front, which allows Socklo and Almaz to buy better materials and support themselves while they fulfill the orders.

Lukas confesses that distributing and selling guitars isn’t Music Fund’s core activity and he is now actively seeking a European guitar distributor to take over the operation and increase the marketing push.

Socklo himself has little doubt that his future survival depends on finding new markets. “I am very very happy, even VERY happy to work with Lukas,” he shouts through a telephone blizzard from Kinshasa. “It’s important for me to sell guitars in Europe. But to develop I really need more tools. They’re hard to find here and very expensive. With tools I could work faster and produce a higher number of guitars.”

Photography by Vincent Kenis

Vincent Kenis, the Belgian producer of so many of the recent bands to emerge from the Congo, including Staff Benda Bilili, is a huge fan of Socklo. “He’s very modest and very conscientious. I think he makes the best guitars in Kinshasa. But he’s a bit discouraged with the economic situation. Nevertheless he manages to keep going.” Kenis helped Staff Benda Bilili to adapt their guitars for their European tour, adding western tuning mechanisms and piezo mics for amplification. “These guitars have a real personality, and no big defects of note. I bought a guitar from Socklo last December and I was pleased to see that following the visit of the Belgian luthiers, many basic problems have been ironed out. They last long too” Vincent reassures me. It seems that Staff Benda Bilili’s musical rallying cry also extends to the amazing artisan guitar-makers of Kinshasa: Tres Tres Fort!!!

To buy a guitar by Socklo or Almaz please visit the Music Fund website at http://www.musicfund.be/

Andy Morgan, (c) 2010

First published in Songlines – July 2010

Kinshasa: au coeur de la musique from Music Fund on Vimeo.

The post SOCKLO – The genius guitar maker of Kinshasa appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

I imagine that most of the party of musicians and adventurers who have arrived with me in this beer-crate and sawdust joint on a voyage of musical discovery organised by Africa Express, are asking themselves the same question.  After all, finding the appropriate rank in the global hierarchy of suffering for a disabled musician who lives rough on the streets of Africa’s most deranged and dysfunctional megalopolis seems like a no-brainer.  Or is it?

Amadou Bagayoko, one half of the Malian duo Amadou and Mariam gets up on stage to inject some sharp and slithering guitar licks into the rippling song.  Damon Albarn adds his melodica to the mix.  Sam Duckworth’s grin is broader than Broadway.   Scratch and the rappers from De la Soul look entranced.  This is no time to get all morose and philosophical but if the beer weren’t so sharp and cold, the music so warm and honeyed and the whores so statuesque and impossibly graceful, the temptation to slip into a bout of soul-searching would be overwhelming.

Sharing the stage with Djunana are four other disabled musicians, an able-bodied bassist and a young b-boy dressed in hip-hop baggies who is playing his satongé like a panhandling Paganini.  I later learn that this lean gentle looking kid, who goes by the name of Roger Landu, actually invented the instrument he’s playing with such dazzling virtuosity.  The raw materials of the satongé consist of a milk powder tin, a section of fish basket frame and a single electrical wire.   Arpeggios, cadenzas, glissandos and obbligatos all flow effortlessly from Roger’s nimble plectrum-clutching fingers.   A few days later, at our hotel, Roger makes up santongés to order and sells them to us for $20 a pop…good business for a shégué or homeless kid who until recently was surviving by busking for pennies in Kinshasa’s central markets.

Roger’s resourcefulness actually makes him a model citizen, a fine practitioner of the infamous Article 15 of the Congolese constitution, which exhorts all true patriots to find a way to cope and survive by fair means or foul.  The French have a fine verb for it…”se debrouiller”   In the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, a country that has been raped and abused by men in power, both foreign and native, for more than a century, you either embrace Article 15 or you die.  It’s that simple.  Most residents of Kinshasa wake up in the morning with one goal and one goal only in their heads: to find something to eat and make it through the day.  And only the gilded few have much more armoury than their wit, courage and cunning with which to achieve this task.  Tomorrow doesn’t even trouble their minds.  Yesterday is a murky mire of civil wars, riots, oppression, mismanagement, embezzlement and corruption.  Self-pity is suicidal.   Today and the next meal are all that count.

The band who are weaving spells about our ears with their dulcet rolling rumba and keening harmony vocals are the unrecognised geniuses of Article 15, the dons of the daily grind, the masters of survival.  They call themselves Staff Benda Bilili, which, in Lingala, the lingua franca of this vast and variegated country, means something like “the people who see beyond…”   Beyond what?   Beyond prejudice, corruption, the lies of priests and politicians, the grimy veneer of daily life in a city where nothing works and no one really cares.

Lounging after the show on his extraordinary moped wheelchair contraption, Coco Ngambali, the group’s primary songwriter and poet, explains; “We see ourselves as journalists.  We’re the real journalists because we’re not afraid of anyone.  We communicate messages to mothers, to those who sleep on the streets on cardboard boxes, to the shégués.”   Coco’s face is like a granite boulder bathed in soft evening light, an astonishing mixture of gentle wisdom and rawhide toughness.   As well as being a gifted composer and singer, he’s reportedly a champion arm-wrestler.

The story starts with a microscopic organism that wheedles its away into the gastrointestinal tract and then the central nervous system.  Before the mutilations of recent wars in eastern Congo added to the demographic, the poliomyelitis virus accounted for almost all serious disabilities in Kinshasa.   The victims of this scourge were often abandoned by their parents, first to various struggling religious institutions and then to the streets.   The handicapped are also deemed to have demonic powers, and therefore find themselves ostracised by a suspicious and fearful able-bodied society.  Having been dealt this atrocious hand, the hapless legion of Kinshasa’s polio victims have developed extraordinary survival strategies, which, by a convoluted twist of fate, have often actually afforded them a better standard of life than their able-bodied counterparts at the bottom of the heap.

One of these strategies is to form gangs, which roam the streets in bizarre gizmoidal wheelchairs, extorting protection money from shopkeepers.   Another is to take advantage of one of ex-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s more benign statutes exempting disabled persons from paying any taxes on the ferries which steam across the vast Congo river, linking Kinshasa with Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo, on the opposite shore.  Wheelchairs piled high with cigarettes, alcohol, petrol, rice and all types of stock both straight and crooked are heaved by armies of young street kids up the ferry ramps and onto the waiting boats.  Various ‘associations’ of disabled traders dominate the commerce of Ngobila Beach, the ferry port on the Kinshasa side.   Thirty years ago, it was here that Coco met Ricky Likabu, or ‘Papa Ricky’ as he’s known to the shégués of Kinshasa’s downtown.

Ricky is the backbone and epaulettes of Staff Benda Bilili, the group’s strategist, disciplinarian and motivator.   Like most disabled people in Kinshasa his work life is multifaceted:  tailor, mechanic, hairdresser, street trader, musician.   But for Kinshasa’s street community, he is ‘Papa Ricky’, a tough yet benign father figure and judge of petty sidewalk disputes.    On most days he can be found hanging out with the rest of the group at the Sonas roundabout downtown, opposite the UN building, busking, holding court, surveying the toxic frenzy of Kinshasa’s street life with his steely twinkling eyes.

Coco and Ricky used to be members of Raka Raka, one of the great Papa Wemba’s many backing combos.   But when Wemba was incarcerated in France for visa and immigration fraud, the pair decided to set up on their own.  At the time, they were living in a refuge for the disabled in the suburb of Bandal.   In 2004 a pair of French filmmakers, Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye, happened on the group as they were busking outside one of Kinshasa’s rare gourmet restaurants for ex-pats and aid workers.  It was the genesis of an intense creative relationship.  Barret and De la Tullaye started filming the group, and recording them at the studios of the Congolese Radio and TV.  In 2006, they delegated the recording part of the project to the Belgian producer Vincent Kenis, the man behind many of the wonders, which have emerged from this musically charged city, including Konono No. 1, Kasai All Stars and the Congotronics compilations.   The first Staff Benda Bilili CD, entitled ‘Très Très Fort’, is out on Crammed Discs in March.

It’s clear from a quick peek at the rushes of Barrett and De la Tullaye’s film about the group, that Coco, Ricky and their entire extended family place great store on the world release of their CD to provide the finance needed to realise their dreams.   Ricky talks of opening a centre for the disabled and homeless people of Kinshasa, where trades and crafts, including music, can be taught thereby boosting the ability to survive with dignity and mental independence.   He also dreams of touring Africa with Staff Benda Bilili, spreading the message of communal resilience and self-help.

Whether the crisis-riddled music industry in the west is capable of fulfilling these hopes remains to be seen.  But just in case anyone is tempted to evoke Samuel Johnson’s proverbial two-legged walking dog, Staff Benda Bilili’s music has no need of sentimental crutches.  It stands proudly on its own formidable limbs, mixing 70s funk, old Cuban son and mambo with the mellifluous flow of classic Congolese rumba, evoking the golden age of Franco and Tabu Ley le Rochereau.  The musicianship is subtle and precise, forged by the group’s extraordinary work ethic and their sound has a raw simplicity and uniqueness, thanks partly to Soklo, Kinshasa’s most famous guitar maker, who provides locally made instruments to most of the city’s street musicians.  Roger’s wonderful satongé solos provide the sweetest of icings on this well apportioned cake.

Florent de la Tullaye is a kind of latter day DV Cam Hemmingway who has dedicated the past five years of his life to Kinshasa and its music scene. Filming in the city has required huge amounts of courage and sang-froid, but like most people who have spent time with Staff Benda Bilili in their perilously fragile and dangerous habitat, he is in awe of their mental strength and toughness.

“They’re obstinate, courageous, they’re survivors,” Florent tells me over the phone.  “And they’re very generous.   They’ve taught the street children an enormous amount.  Everybody is in the same misery in Kinshasa but you get the impression that the handicapped cope better than the able-bodied.  They often say, “A handicap is in the mind, not in the legs.””

The fascinating tale of Staff Benda Bilili is about to enter a new ‘international’ phase.   A summer tour of Europe and the UK to coincide with the release of ‘Très Très Fort’ is in its planning stages.  400,000 people have already viewed the brief snippets of film about the band on You Tube.  It seems that an altogether more congenial and auspicious viral chain reaction than the one that robbed them of their limbs all those years ago has already been unleashed.

Whatever the next chapters of the Staff Benda Bilili story bring, dreams fulfilled, dashed, or half-realised, it seems unlikely that Ricky or Coco will loose their battle-hardened grit and determination.  In 2005 their refuge in Bandal burned down, along with most of their worldly possessions.  There was no time for tears.   Staff just regrouped and decamped to the city’s municipal zoo, where they now find the peace and tranquillity to rehearse, hang out and hold band meetings.

On the last day of our all too brief and flighty Africa Express visit to Kinshasa, some of us go down to the zoo to see the group.  Having been smitten by the group at the bar a few nights before, 3D from Massive Attack forgoes a trip to the crafts market to join us.  As we walk past rusting cages inhabited by lice-ridden monkeys with mournful faces, we can hear the sweet sounds of a rehearsal that is already taking it orderly course.   Ricky and Coco greet us with friendly smiles veiling a dreadnought spirit that seems to say, “Go on, pity us if you dare.”   We express our sincere hope that we will be seeing the group in England sometime soon; a hope with apparently is on the verge of becoming a reality.   Then we take our leave of Staff Benda Bilili and their world, where the battle against misery produces traits and values capable of making a pampered sheltered white-man living in his safe European home actually feel jealous.

That’s where all those endlessly predictable images of poverty and disease that dominate the western media’s coverage of Africa are so aberrant.  Africa doesn’t need our pity.   Africa demands and deserves our admiration and wonder, our humility and respect.   Staff Benda Bilili embody this truth with total dedication and style.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009

First published in The Independent – Feb 2009

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“Go on my fine friend!  Pity me if you dare!”  Admittedly, those words never passed Coco’s lips.  It was his expression that spoke.  He was lounging on his hybrid moped-wheelchair cocomobile, smiling up at me.  His face was two parts life-tempered steel to three parts philosophical tenderness.   There wasn’t a flicker of aggression in it.   But the challenge was there, somewhere.  “You have everything, I have nothing,” it seemed to say.  “But don’t get hung up on what the surface of life tells you.  Look beyond…”

Kinshasa is no city for the easily scared.   To begin with it’s huge, the third largest megalopolis in Africa.  In November, the season of thunder and rain, the whole place sweats incontinently.  The very neurons and synapses of your brain get drenched in the stuff.   Down in the raucous toxic streets, here’s a hard, haunted, hungry look on the face of many a kinois man and woman, especially those who are the wrong side of forty.   They’ve simply seen too much, lived too much and suffered too much to try and make their world smile any more.  The city infrastructure is like a piece of chipboard furniture lying sodden in the rain; rotten, decaying, sorry as hell.   Some of the potholes are big enough to swallow a sizeable family car.   Bullet-holes sprinkle the main downtown drags, mute reminders of the civil wars and murderous elections that electrocuted Kinshasa in the late 1990s and mid 2000s.  The whores are beyond beautiful, numerous and very aggressive.  It’s hot.  I’ve never been to a more exciting, captivating and musically alluring African city in my life.

Coco is the chief poet and songwriter of Staff Benda Bilili, a band who were to dominate my blink of a stay.   I was visiting the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo with a group of musicians, showbiz shakers, journalists and wayfarers on a trip organised by Africa Express.  The group mix was as challenging as its roll call was intriguing:  Damon Albarn, Rob del Naja aka 3D from Massive Attack, Sam Duckworth from Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Tony Allen, K’naan, Amadou Bagayoko (Mariam’s other half), Gale Paridjanian from Turin Brakes, the Aliens, two thirds of De La Soul.   We were a motley curious crew, powerfully attracted to the possibilities of this dazzling frenzied messed-up place.

On our first night, some of us ended up among the chaos of cables, speakers, guitars and gizmos that comprised the makeshift hotel-room studio of producer Vincent Kenis, our official guide to the city’s strange musical eco-systems.  Alongside the Belgian label Crammed Discs and the maverick manager Michel Winter, Vincent has been responsible for a global renaissance of interest in Kinshasa’s music scene, producing award-winning wonders by Konono No. 1, Kasai All-Stars and a whole slew of ‘electro-traditional’ orchestras from Kinshasa’s far-flung neighbourhoods.

“Have a listen to this,” Vincent said in his bashful Belgian accent.  A strange seductive brew bubbled up from the speakers; part classic Congolese rumba with keening honeydew vocals, part good-foot JBesque 70s funk, part Cuban mambo and part ancestral trance.  The singer had one of those ‘ancient mariner’ voices that force you to stop and listen, not because of its athletic beauty, but because it oozes the spit and sawdust of an odds-against lifestyle.   And riding atop it all was a mellifluous trebly plucking of indeterminable origin, like delicate and beguiling bird-song.   We were hearing the rough mixes of ‘Très Très Fort’, the debut album by Staff Benda Bilili, due out this March on Crammed.

Even at that early stage of post-production, the music was good enough to flag up a ‘possible-album-of-the-year’ alert without any contextual crutches, but when the band’s tale began to unfold, we knew that we had stumbled across one of those rare phenomena that Africa specialises in; a group whose music and story vie with each other to be the greater source of inspiration and amazement.

Coco Ngambali met Ricky Likabu almost three decades ago on the ferry which plies the immense Congo river, linking Kinshasa with Brazzaville, the capital of that ‘other’ Congo, on the opposite shore.   They were in the same place at the same time because they were both disabled polio victims, and the ferry was a good place to do business.  Ex-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko had decreed that the handicapped could travel tax-free on the Congo River ferries and this rare piece of largesse from one of Africa’s most brutal and avaricious tyrants spawned a frenetic economic sub-culture.   Cross-river trade became the prerogative of various disabled gangs or associations, and it was from this paraplegic workforce that Staff Benda Bilili was to emerge.

Armed with instruments made by Socklo, Kinshasa’s one and only guitar maker, Staff Benda Bilili honed their art by dint of endless busking sessions at the Ngobila Beach ferry port or in the wealthy downtown district of Gombe.  An informal HQ was later established under a shady tree at the SONAS Roundabout, opposite the United Nations building.  There Staff Benda Bilili would attempt to appease the wild and reckless street spirits with songs that spoke candidly of the daily battle for a meal and a roof that blacks out the horizon of Kinshasa’s abandoned souls.   Over time they became a magnet for the shégués, or street kids, of the area, to whom the SONAS roundabout and its tough street-wise disabled squatters constituted a haven of relative calm and trustworthy companionship.

Ricky, or ‘Papa Ricky’, as the shégués call him, is an impressive man.   Disabled since childhood, married with several children, he possesses the courage and temper of a lion and the imperturbable authority of a natural leader.   He sits in his hand-crank propelled wheelchair like a rock in rough seas whilst the flotsam and jetsam of Kinshasa’s street life pounds at him with waves of emotion, tears and laughter.  He’s a street caîd, judge, counsellor and friend of the dispossessed.   He’s also the undisputed leader of Staff Benda Bilili.

In 2005, the refuge for the handicapped in the suburb of Bandal, which was home to the group, burned down to the ground.   The fallout of this tragedy was skilfully captured by a pair of French filmmakers, Renaud Barret and Florent de La Tullaye, who had been following the group around since the previous year.  They also caught Ricky and Coco’s reaction, which consisted merely in urging their fellow-sufferers to be strong and move on.   Nary a nanogram of self-pity is perceptible in either their tone of voice or facial expressions.  The group found a new rehearsal space in the relative peace of the municipal zoo, where most of ‘Très Très Fort’ was recorded in 2007.   Where they now lay their heads to rest at night is anybody’s guess.

The main focus of Barret and De la Tullaye’s forthcoming documentary on Staff Benda Bilili is the group’s youngest and musically most remarkable member, a young shégué called Roger Landu.  He plays an instrument called a satongé, which he invented himself.  Its architecture is simple.  A section of wooden fish-basket frame is attached to the bottom of a medium sized milk-powder tin.  A single piece of electrical wire is then tied taut between the top of the tin and upper end of the curved piece of wood.  By holding the tin against the chest, and pumping the wooden handle in an out, notes, demi-notes and demi-demi-notes can be squeezed out of the instrument.   Roger plays the thing like a ragamuffin Yehudi Menuhin, dispensing subtle flourishes of virtuosity from a tinpot wire contraption that seems at first incapable of ever venturing further than

do-re-mi.

Ricky stumbled on Roger when he was busking for kopeks in one of Kinshasa’s central markets.  He took him into his fold and taught him the rudiments of music theory.  He gave him hope, status, a future and a family of sorts.  He taught him the dictums upon which the whole Staff Benda Bilili philosophy is based; take pride, be strong, hustle yourself some dignity and never be a beggar.

Therein lay the source of my own frailty and self-doubt.  Listening to Staff Benda Bilili play at a crate and sawdust joint in downtown Kinshasa called l’Oeil du Plaisir, and observing them closely both after the show and a few days later at the zoo, I found it hard to think of anything that my wealthy pampered European able-bodied frame could offer them in terms of aid or ‘improvement’.   They certainly didn’t need or ask for my pity or condolences.  With a chasm of material inequality gaping between us, I somehow felt it was they who were smiling benignly down at me, rather than the other way round.

Long ago, Staff Benda Bilili understood that any real handicap exists only in the mind, rather than in the legs.   Stricken by polio whilst still young, abandoned to their fate in one of the toughest and most dysfunctional cities in the world, forced to survive by courage and wit alone, Ricky, Coco, Roger and the crew have always known that life’s path clings to a vertical cliff face which towers above them.  The only way has been up.   The only help has been from their fellow strugglers.   Now, as they possibly near some kind of ease, a plateau, and the realisation of long held dreams, all they’re asking is for the rest of us to see through the outward appearance of things, through the apparent misery of life in Africa’s teeming cities, past stunted limbs and ragged torn clothes, past AIDS, war, corruption and suffering to the human wealth beyond.

In fact, that’s what ‘benda bilili’ means in Lingala, the lingua franca of the great Congo river; “open up your spirit”, “look deeply”, “see beyond…”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009

First published in Songlines Magazine – April / May 2009

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