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""Rumba Rules" ties dance music to dictatorship, band leaders to politicians, in ways that are sensitive to the struggles of Congolese musicians and their fans in Kinshasa. Bob W. White neither diminishes the artistry and entertainment value of musical performances nor over-determines their role in political culture. This is a book that finely theorizes the relationship between aesthetics and political culture through vivid and often amusing storytelling."--Louise Meintjes, author of "Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio"

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RUMBA RULES

Duke University Press

Contents

Preface..................................................xiNote to the Reader.......................................xxi1. Popular Culture's Politics............................12. The Zairian Sound.....................................273. Made in Zaire.........................................654. Live Time.............................................975. Musicians and Mobility................................1316. Live Texts............................................1657. The Political Life of Dance Bands.....................1958. In the Skin of a Chief................................225Notes....................................................253Bibliography.............................................271Discography..............................................287Index....................................................289

Chapter One

IN OCTOBER 1996, WHEN LAURENT DSIR KABIla's rebel movement began to gain momentum, many people in Kinshasa found it hard to believe that the rebels would push as far as the nation's capital: "He might take Zaire," a young man told me, "but he'll never take Kinshasa." President Mobutu Sese Seko's declining state of health (he was said to suffer from prostate cancer) and Kabila's military and financial support from other African leaders in the region (especially Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda) proved these predictions wrong. When Kabila's name began to circulate as the leader of an emerging rebel movement in the east, the Alliance des Forces Dmocratiques pour la Libration du Congo-Zare (AFDL), relatively little was known about him. A journalist I spoke with told me that people in Kinshasa were ready for Mobutu to go, but that in their hearts they wanted their next leader to be a kinois (someone from Kinshasa). Nonetheless, as Kabila and his troops marched triumphantly into Kinshasa in May 1997, the capital was buzzing with excitement. From loudspeakers and radios all over the city, the musicians of the popular music group Wenge Musica could be heard singing: "Louis de Funs! I saw Fantomas! He was running away! Running Away!" Young people in Kinshasa were quick to make a link between the villain of French popular cinema and Mobutu, who apart from being diabolical was also being chased out of town.

While most people in Kinshasa expressed excitement and optimism about the idea of a Zaire without Mobutu, some of the musicians I spoke with during the transition seemed ambivalent, even confused. Under Mobutu, who ruled Zaire from 1965 to 1997, popular musicians had become accustomed to a system of politics that rewarded them for making public displays of loyalty or for staying out of politics altogether. In response to this system, popular musicians gradually developed a series of strategies (public praise, self-censorship, and new forms of showmanship) that enabled them to thrive both as artists and as international stars. Over time, these strategies became an integral part of the aesthetics and performance of their music, so integral, in fact, that some musicians no longer saw their relationship with the people and institutions of power as problematic. By the middle of the 1990s popular music had become more than just a form of mass entertainment. It had turned into a means of social mobility and self-protection for those willing to immortalize the wealthy and powerful by citing their names in their music. As it became increasingly obvious that Mobutu's days were numbered, many musicians felt nervous because this meant that the intricate networks of patron-client relations built around his powerful presence would be destabilized if not completely overturned.

At first Kabila seemed to have no interest in being the object of musicians' praise. In the weeks following his arrival, rumors circulated that a number of popular musicians had offered compositions in honor of the newly formed government, but that Kabila was ignoring them. People in Kinshasa understood this as an attempt to distance himself from Mobutu and his system of rule, and no one seemed particularly surprised. After all, it was Kabila himself who had been heard saying that people in Kinshasa did nothing but listen to music and that one of the objectives of his leadership would be to get the Congo back to work. Musicians, especially those making a living through music, found this situation unsettling. Walking back from a concert in Montreal in the summer of 1997, I asked a Congolese musician who was touring Canada with his group what he thought about the rumors, and he expressed a sense of frustration with the new regime's stance: "It's no good, mon cher. Kabila doesn't want us to sing him. What are we supposed to do now?" Kabila was either uninterested in playing the old game or unable to understand it, a situation that clearly made musicians insecure about the future.

La Guidomanie

Within Africa, the Congo is known primarily for two things: music and Mobutu. While Congolese music is known for its seductive combination of melancholy and joie de vivre, the legacy of Mobutu's political system is much more sinister (White 2005). A wealth of scholarship exists on political developments in the Congo, especially during the years leading up to and following independence in 1960, and much of it is available in English. I refer readers to this literature for a more detailed analysis of the sequence of events surrounding and following independence: the end of colonial rule, the rise and fall of Lumumba, Mobutu's seizure of power in 1965, the formation of the MPR (Mouvement Populaire de la Rvolution) as the country's only officially recognized political party and later as the "supreme institution of the Republic," the nationalization schemes of the early 1970s (Zarianization, radicalization, retrocession), changes in international markets for copper and oil in the mid-1970s, and in the early 1980s the beginning of a difficult period of democratic denial surrounding the formation of the first opposition party, tienne Tshisekedi's Union pour la Dmocratie et le Progrs Social.

Ongoing concern about the status of opposition politics, along with the controversy surrounding the Bindo lottery scheme (see Jewsiewicki 1992b) and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, contributed to widespread frustration, especially in the capital, and in 1991 Kinshasa exploded in riots. Referred to sardonically as le pillage, this period of only a few days left an indelible mark on the memory of many Congolese as a low point in economic and political history and as a symbol of how deeply le mal zarois ("the Zairian condition") had penetrated society. A similar series of riots occurred in 1993, but this time the civil unrest seemed both more organized and more brutal, primarily due to the role played by disgruntled members of the military. During the 1990s, Mobutu kept a safe distance from Kinshasa, preferring to divide his time between Gbadolite (the presidential village in the north central part of the country) and various villas in Europe. His famous speech in Kinshasa on April 24, 1990, in which, crying, he announced his resignation as the head of the MPR, marked for many people the beginning of the end of mobutisme. Mobutu's decision to retract this decision several days later would confirm for many that the tears shed during...