September 1974, Kinshasa. For once, the planes from America weren’t carrying mining executives or military advisers. They were carrying James Brown.
For a century, Congo had been a place things left from. Rubber that cost countless lives. Minerals shipped out to build other people’s cities. Extraction was so normal that the idea of something arriving felt like a rupture: equipment, artists, genuine excitement.
On the flight to Kinshasa, the American artists were buzzing. They were coming to meet family. Fourteen years after independence, a plane landed at N’djili Airport with sixteen‑track recorders, film cameras, and a lineup that looked unreal: James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz, The Spinners. They came to play the Stade du 20 Mai in a “cultural homecoming” between Africa and its diaspora.
And it worked. For three nights, tens of thousands of Kinois filled the stadium. Zairean masters like Franco Luambo Makiadi, Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Abeti Masikini stood alongside the visiting Americans, all sharing the same world‑class sound system, the same lights, the same stage.
But then, something strange happened: only part of the story got told. The performances that defined those nights were recorded, then split. The American sets made it into films and onto records. The African sets mostly disappeared into a vault. By the time producers Stewart Levine and Hugh Masekela finally released Zaïre 74: The African Artists in 2017, more than four decades had passed and every major bandleader from those nights was dead.
Across those three nights, everything that extraction had taken away seemed to run in reverse.
Three Nights When Everything Aligned
Zaire 74 was designed to build excitement for the “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. When Foreman was injured in training and the fight was pushed back five weeks, the festival stayed on its original dates. The tourist crowd vanished, so Mobutu Sese Seko opened the gates and tens of thousands of Kinois poured in.
Franco and TPOK Jazz opened. When the sebene hit, time stretched. The sebene, a long instrumental section in Congolese rumba where the vocals drop back and the guitars lock into a hypnotic pattern, was built for dancers, not radio. Franco was not introducing himself; he was showing the diaspora what Kinshasa had built.
Tabu Ley Rochereau followed with controlled elegance, his band crisp and international. Horn lines, tight backing vocals and careful arrangements made clear that Kinshasa did not see itself as a provincial scene.
Abumba Masikini and Abeti Masikini pushed the sound in another direction. Abumba’s guitar tone bit harder, closer to rock, and his band leaned into a heavier groove. Abeti took that weight and turned it into drama, shifting between rumba, soul and rock in a single set, her voice cutting through the stadium.
Miriam Makeba brought the history of exile and return onto the stage. She moved between languages, carried songs she had sung in Europe and the United States back into an African crowd and tied the evening to a wider liberation story.
Then the Americans took the stage. When James Brown sang “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” on that ground, after those Congolese and pan‑African sets, it landed as an answer rather than an announcement. The Zairean artists were not opening acts; they were headliners in their own city. The Americans came as guests and were treated like family.
Those nights in the stadium were clear and loud. The version the rest of the world got was much blurrier.
The Incomplete Archive
In the years that followed, the archive began to fracture. B.B. King’s set appeared on video. The Fania All-Stars got a release.
In 1996, When We Were Kings won an Oscar. It is a brilliant documentary about Ali, but the music festival appears only in flashes, enough to set the mood but not enough to capture the scale. At one point, a Franco track plays over a montage. The credits list it simply as “African Chant.” No name. No acknowledgment.
Franco had been dead for seven years by then.
In 2008, Soul Power was released, a documentary built entirely around the festival. It finally gave screen time to Franco, Tabu Ley, and Abeti. Their performances were visible and undeniable. Yet the film’s emotional arc still followed the Americans’ discovery of Africa. The framing pushed the Kinshasa artists slightly to the side, treating them as local color for the main event.
Meanwhile, the full African audio recordings stayed on tape.
“We Didn’t Realize They Were That Good”
For decades, the explanation for the delay was: “The rights are complicated.” That was partly true. But when producers finally prepared to release Zaïre 74: The African Artists in 2017, Stewart Levine revealed something more telling.
He admitted that when he and Masekela finally sat down with the tapes, four decades later, the two of them were stunned.
This was Franco, the “Sorcerer of the Guitar.” Tabu Ley, who had sold out the Olympia in Paris. These were masters at their peak. So why the surprise?
When those tapes were recorded in 1974, the people behind the machines assumed they were capturing “roots”: authentic atmosphere and cultural context. They didn’t anticipate that Congolese rumba would be as sophisticated as anything coming out of New York. They didn’t imagine that Franco’s polyrhythms were exploring complexities that wouldn’t surface in Western dance music for years.
Because they did not expect excellence from those sets, they felt no urgency to share them. Everyone around the project treated the American performances as the prize and the African performances as background. Because of that, the tapes could wait.
What History Lost
The tragedy isn’t only that the artists died before the release. The way the story is remembered was twisted as well.
For anyone learning about Zaire 74 from afar, films and albums are the only guide. The releases that did come out made it seem as if the innovation flowed one way, with America bringing modernity to Africa. The unreleased tapes tell a different story.
The world knows Ali fought in Zaire. Many know James Brown performed there. But most don’t know that Zaire 74 was one of the largest music events in African history, a moment when the diaspora and the continent met as equals.
That story was reduced to a footnote. The follow‑through failed, not necessarily out of malice, but because the people controlling the recordings viewed African excellence as supplementary. Worth filming, perhaps. But not urgent.
Conclusion: The Sound of Waiting
When Zaïre 74: The African Artists finally arrived in 2017, the music was intact. It was vibrant, sophisticated, and alive. Critics praised it. New fans discovered the genius of Abeti and Tabu Ley.
But the album could not return the simplest thing: the chance for the artists to experience that recognition.
Franco died in 1989. Abeti in 1994. Miriam in 2008. Tabu Ley in 2013.
Somewhere in those intervening decades, someone could have said, “We need to release this now.” Instead, the recordings sat unheard for more than four decades.
In 1974, Kinshasa opened itself up. The planes brought the guests, and the city gave them its best. That was the gift.
What followed was the void: the sound of the host country sealed in a vault, a silence in the official story that lasted a lifetime.