In 1960s London, two distinct rivalries shaped popular music. The first was cultural: The Beatles versus The Rolling Stones. Good boys versus bad boys, pop sophistication versus blues rawness. A polarizing split that divided youth culture and sold millions of records. The second was artistic: The Beatles versus The Beach Boys. Less visible but more profound, a direct arms race between Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson. Rubber Soul pushed Brian Wilson to create Pet Sounds, which pushed The Beatles to make Sgt. Pepper’s. This competition transformed the recording studio into an instrument and established the album as an art form.
Two different battles, two different fronts.
Now imagine both happening simultaneously between the same two artists, and not for a year or two but for three relentless decades. Not in London studios but in a brand-new nation searching for its voice. Not for chart bragging rights, but for something larger: the sound and identity of a country coming into being.
That was Kinshasa from 1960 to 1989.
For thirty years the city revolved around two men: Franco Luambo Makiadi and Tabu Ley Rochereau. This was more than rivalry. It was full-spectrum opposition, cultural and artistic, carried out in bars, on vinyl, on state radio, and in the streets. You could walk into a club and know instantly where you stood. TPOK Jazz or Afrisa International. You chose a camp, and the music chose you back.
Two Camps, Two Worlds
Franco left school after the third grade and never pretended otherwise. Fans called him the Sorcerer of the Guitar. He picked with two fingers, not a plectrum, spinning a dense, metallic web of interlocking lines. Flashy solos were beside the point; the groove was king, a cyclical engine that pulled dancers into its orbit.
He sang in the Lingala of Kinshasa’s streets, slangy and direct, the language of markets, taxis, and corners where news travels fast. His lyrics bit down on real life: gossip, money troubles, neighborhood feuds, infidelity. When he poked fun at the pretensions of the educated, the crowd howled. He stood with the petit peuple, the working majority.
His shows at spots like Un-Deux-Trois in Matonge were endurance trials. Walls beaded with moisture, cigarette smoke braided with the smell of Primus beer, bass lines thumped through the floor. When the sebene hit, that hypnotic instrumental passage, the room slipped into a collective trance. Sets could run eight hours.
Tabu Ley lived in a different air. Educated, urbane, cosmopolitan. “The African Elvis,” people said. His tenor was honey-smooth, his diction crisp in French, standardized Lingala, Swahili, and Portuguese. Where Franco rooted everything in rhythm guitar, Tabu Ley floated on melody. Horns glinted with Cuban brightness, arrangements carried a pop sparkle, and the overall feel was lighter, faster, forward-looking.
His concerts were choreographed and sleek. Les Rocherettes moved in lockstep under professional lights. In 1970 he sold out the Paris Olympia for 26 straight nights, a milestone no African artist had reached. He showed the world that Congolese music belonged on the biggest stages.
The split ran through daily life. If you worked the docks, Franco was likely your prophet. If you were a student with eyes on Europe, Tabu Ley was your ambassador. The lines still blurred. Franco’s genius crossed class, and Tabu Ley’s modern vision spoke to everyday aspirations. Still, your choice said something: What Congo did you want? One grounded in local pride and tradition, or one sprinting toward international recognition? Street or salon? Underneath the music was a debate about postcolonial identity.
The Artistic War
Franco’s radical move was to enlarge the sebene. In classic rumba, that instrumental break might last half a minute before vocals returned. Franco heard a doorway. He opened it wide. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Sometimes twenty.
Once the sebene arrived, song structure melted away. Vocals stepped aside, the bass locked into a deep, cyclical trance, and the guitars began to speak in their own language. They spun high, intricate patterns that sounded like shimmering heat haze rising from the asphalt, clean and sharp as splintered glass. Dancers pushed past fatigue into something like flight. On many mid-70s TPOK Jazz sides, the singing ends around the three-minute mark while the guitars carry on for another ten. This was not just music to hear. It was music to change you.
Tabu Ley answered by raising the tempo. He quickened the pulse of rumba again and again. He popularized the word soukous from the French secouer, to shake, which is exactly what the beat did to your body. He brought in a Western drum kit for extra snap, added soul influences and later synthesizers, and drove the sound toward a gleaming modernity.
Put on Tabu Ley’s “Sarah” and Franco’s “Mario.” They are not only different songs. They are different worldviews. Franco draws you into a deep, layered groove. Tabu Ley lifts you into motion right now.
The back and forth never stopped. It lived not only on stage but inside the grooves, a song calling out another song. Kinshasa had a word for this, mbwakela, the art of the veiled jab that lets a singer challenge an opponent without speaking the name. In 1965, Kwamy Munsi, newly arrived in Tabu Ley and Dr. Nico’s African Fiesta, cut “Faux Millionnaire,” a sly poke from Tabu Ley’s side of town. Franco answered fast. First came “Chicotte,” a scolding put-down with the snap of leather. Then came “Course au pouvoir,” another pointed reply from the same season. Later he shifted from counterpunch to posture with “Mino Ya Luambo Diamant,” a swaggering boast that his very teeth were diamonds. No one needed to spell it out. Kinois listeners spoke the code and the sidewalk radio filled in the rest.
The competition widened beyond singles. Tabu Ley unveiled Les Rocherettes with polished choreography. Franco countered with the Francolettes, dancers who radiated raw, magnetic energy. When star singer Sam Mangwana left Afrisa for TPOK Jazz in 1972, the defection felt like a headline in 72-point type.
The output was staggering. Together they wrote more than five thousand songs across three decades. New releases became public events, immediately debated on Radio Trottoir, the sidewalk radio of rumor and opinion. The rivalry was not background noise. It was the running conversation of Congolese life. You can hear the habit of reply in Franco’s own “Mario” and his later “La Réponse de Mario,” a sequel that turns the hit into an argument with itself. Out of this pressure, Congolese rumba evolved into soukous, the high-energy style that would dominate African pop for years.
Music Under Mobutu
All of this unfolded under the eye of Mobutu Sese Seko. He understood the power of culture and used it. His policy of Authenticité demanded a return to African names and traditions, though the state decided what counted as authentic.
Franco’s approach fit neatly with Authenticité. Local Lingala, classic rumba roots, the voice of the street. Mobutu embraced him as a cultural standard-bearer. Franco wrote praise songs, and the rewards flowed: influence over the country’s only record-pressing plant, ownership stakes in major clubs, money, status. The censors understood mbwakela as well as the crowd. A single phrase could turn a love song into a coded attack, a boast into a threat, and a chart hit into a political risk.
The arrangement carried a sharp paradox. Franco could be both the people’s truest voice and a singer for the ruler who oppressed them. He chronicled hardship while living like a king. The danger never vanished. In 1978, after he released “Hélène,” censors called the lyrics indecent. He was jailed. It was a reminder that even the favored were never safe.
Even in that climate the duel could soften into a handshake. In 1983 they met in Brussels and recorded together, “Lisanga ya Banganga,” the union of sorcerers. It was not a truce, more a clear conversation. Tabu Ley’s polished voice rose over Franco’s interlocking guitars, the production clean, the groove heavy, the blend unmistakable. They showed how well they understood each other, and how quickly they would return to their corners once the tape stopped.
Tabu Ley fit the policy less easily. His international polish and frequent use of French read as outward-facing. He played along at first, then pushed back as the regime curdled. In the late 1980s he released “Trop, C’est Trop,” enough is enough. The ban was immediate. By 1988 he had gone into exile in France.
He could go. Paris knew his name. Franco’s music was tied to Kinshasa’s streets and their daily rhythms. Exile would have snapped that bond. He stayed, compromised, endured.
What they built
Picture them now, somewhere beyond the music, looking back. Franco and Tabu Ley probably laugh about it. The fake millionaire jabs. The whip cracks. The dancer wars. The musicians they hired just to keep them from each other. All of it.
They knew what they were doing. The rivalry wasn’t something that happened to them. It was something they made together. A thirty-year conversation in music, each pushing the other to be sharper, faster, deeper, better. Franco wouldn’t have become Franco without someone like Tabu Ley demanding he level up. Tabu Ley wouldn’t have become Tabu Ley without Franco forcing him to define what he stood for.
They gave Kinshasa more than songs. They gave the city a way to talk about itself. When you chose Franco or Tabu Ley, you weren’t just picking music. You were declaring who you were, what you valued, what kind of Congo you wanted to build. And the beauty was that both answers were right. The street needed the salon. The groove needed the velocity. Local pride needed international ambition. The tension between them wasn’t a problem to solve. It was the engine that drove everything forward.
Five thousand songs. Decades of innovation. A sound that spread across the continent. They didn’t just compete; they collaborated on something bigger than either of them alone.
Franco died in 1989. Tabu Ley in 2013. But the work remains, and so does the argument. One guitar pulls you down into the rhythm. One voice lifts you forward. Listen now and you can still hear them pushing each other, challenging each other, making each other better.
Kinshasa made space for both. They made Kinshasa’s sound together. The records remember.
To go behind the scenes of this thirty-year duel, the following podcast offers a deep dive into the machinery that made the myth possible. It unpacks the rival camps, the coded lyrics, the shifting alliances, and the politics that turned a musical rivalry into a mirror of post-colonial Congo.