“Kitokongo” pairs kitoko (beautiful, in Lingala) with Congo. We are an independent publication on Congolese culture, written from inside and alongside it, and a small community of artists we believe in and stand by.
We exist because the writing about Congolese culture, in English, has mostly been done by people outside it: often well-meaning, frequently anthropological, occasionally exoticizing, and rarely engaged with the work on its own terms. Kinshasa is one of the most generative cultural cities in the world, and the available English-language record doesn’t reflect that. Kitokongo is an attempt to add to that record, seriously, from where we sit.
Kitokongo started in 2023 as a marketplace alternative, a response to the exploitative gallery practices we kept hearing about from artists in Kinshasa. We built a platform for direct sales. Over time, the conversations with those artists pulled the project somewhere else: toward writing about the work, the scenes around it, the histories that shape both. Three years and forty-some articles later, kitokongo is mostly a publication. We still keep a small artist directory of people we know and trust, but the center of gravity has moved to the writing.
We publish essays on Congolese art, music, history, and the politics around them; interviews with artists, musicians, and others working inside or adjacent to the culture; and close readings of single pieces under Meet the Artwork.
Congolese culture is alive and contested, not a heritage exhibit. We champion artists because we believe in the work, not because anyone pays for placement. Kitokongo takes no advertising, no gallery sponsorship, no money from institutions we might otherwise cover. We don’t pretend to be neutral, and we’d rather get into useful arguments than file safe overviews.
What we hope to become, over time, is a place where serious English-language writing on Congolese culture compounds, where new readers arrive and find the conversation already happening, and where the artists we champion have a public record of the kind their work deserves.
The project is the work of three people. Verena and Skander, who live between San Francisco, Berlin, and Kinshasa, and Billy Gibula, in Kinshasa, who has been part of kitokongo from the beginning. Skander writes most of what appears here; Verena and Billy shape what gets covered, how, and why. Two artists deserve specific mention: Winnart Nsangu and Phinet Kisimba. Conversations with them shaped much of what kitokongo became, and their work runs through the publication’s early years.
Readers can write to contact@kitokongo.art. For press, pitches, and editorial inquiries: editor@kitokongo.art. Comments are open on every article. We read them, and we usually answer.