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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