Recent Essays
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The Nganga, the Prophet, and the Orchestra
The Europeans in the audience were hearing an African orchestra play European music. The musicians on stage were playing Christian music. I sat between those two sentences for an evening in Kinshasa in November 2022, and have been turning them over ever since. The story of how the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste came to play Rodrigo in a wedding hall runs back to 1706, to a Kongolese woman burned at the stake for preaching in her own language, and forward through a century of a faith the West has never quite known how to hear. Read more
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“Pembeni mwa nafsi” (At the Edge of the Self): Mihalina Nyota’s Meditation on Vanity
Mihalina Nyota Buzilu, one of the rising voices on Kinshasa’s contemporary art scene, revisits one of the oldest themes in the history of Western painting and brings it into conversation with the anxieties of her own generation. In “Pembeni mwa nafsi” (Au bord du soi), a reclining figure gazes into a hand mirror while a skull waits patiently nearby. A meditation on vanity, narcissism, and the life we refuse to accept, the work unfolds as a quiet warning about the dangerous border where self-contemplation becomes self-loss. Watch the artist speak. Read more
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Article 15: The Unwritten Constitution of the Congo
When the state provides nothing, you seize what you can and invent the rest. To exist in Kinshasa is to live by Article 15: Débrouillez-vous. Explore the unwritten constitution of the Congo, where the daily hustle dictates everything from a policeman’s traffic ticket to the art sold in local ateliers. Step off the main boulevards to discover how this relentless pressure acts as the invisible gears keeping millions alive while the elites watch from the hills. Read more
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Catch Fétiche: A Night Inside Kinshasa’s “Voodoo Wrestling” Scene
We thought we were going to watch a wrestling match. Instead, we ended up front row at catch fétiche: a baby coffin set on fire, smoke and panic in our faces, live snakes escaping into the crowd, and opponents moving like puppets under spells. Funny, cruel, chaotic and strangely beautiful in its imperfections. Read more
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The Gift and the Void: The Delayed Legacy of Zaire 74
I have already written about the Rumble in the Jungle, or rather how it was neither rumble nor jungle but a clash of two titans on sacred ground in Kinshasa. I have also written about the long rivalry between Franco and Tabu Ley, how their competition bent Congolese rumba into new shapes. Once those two stories sit side by side, Zaire 74 is no longer background. It becomes the missing piece between the fight and the music, the nights when Ali’s city opened itself, gave its best, and then watched much of it disappear into a vault. This piece follows… Read more
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The Sorcerer and the Showman: Thirty Years of Rumba War in the Congo
Every music has its moment of transformation. For Congolese Rumba, that moment lasted thirty years. This is the story of an evolution fueled not by harmony, but by the friction between two monumental figures: Franco Luambo Makiadi and Tabu Ley Rochereau. From 1960 to 1989, they defined the sound of Kinshasa. Franco, the “Sorcerer,” rooted his music in a deep, hypnotic street groove. Tabu Ley, the “Showman,” answered with accelerated tempos and international flair. This is how progress works: through creative tension. Explore the explosive decades where their rivalry became an unintentional collaboration. They revolutionized the Sebene, ignited the spark… Read more
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