I used to think I knew what “wrestling” meant: bodies, rules, technique, a ring that separates the show from the street. In Kinshasa, that definition doesn’t survive the first hour.
And first, don’t translate it.
People outside will call it “voodoo wrestling” because that’s the easiest label to export. But to me that translation already misses the point. It reduces something dense into a stereotype. Voodoo comes with its own prejudices, its own ready-made images, and it pushes you to watch with a Western filter: exotic, irrational, “dark,” whatever people project onto the word.
In Kinshasa the right name is the one people already use: catch fétiche.
And fétiche is not a cute synonym for voodoo. It’s an important concept in Congolese society. It refers to objects, forces, protections, fears, powers — the whole practical vocabulary of the invisible that people grow up around. It’s not a theme you add to wrestling. It’s part of how many people already interpret the world. So catch fétiche is not “wrestling + magic decorations.” It’s something more authentic, funnier, more chaotic — an atmosphere that only exists the way it exists in Kinshasa. One name can hold all of it because it was born there.
You can compare it to WWE if you want, because there are characters, entrances, theater, a crowd that loves drama. But catch fétiche is not polished entertainment. It’s not contained. It can be reckless. The ring doesn’t protect you from the street; it leaks into it. The crowd doesn’t stay neutral; it becomes part of the fight. And the line between performance and belief stays intentionally unclear — not as philosophy, but as lived experience. You’re not there to judge technique. You’re there to be caught.
We learned that before we even entered.
We were sitting outside first, in a bar, waiting for the doors to open. We didn’t know what the night would look like, what kind of “rules” existed, what would be staged and what might slip. Then the contenders started moving through the crowd with their teams and musicians, dancing, chanting, showing off little pieces of their power. People answered immediately — yelling slogans, chanting back, laughing, provoking, participating. It felt like the arena had already started in the street, like the show refused to wait for permission.
When the doors opened and we entered, it didn’t feel like we were walking into a venue. It felt like we were walking into a current.
We got lucky: front row. Direct view of everything. Nothing between us and the ring except a thin idea of distance.
From there it was intense in a way that kept changing shape: funny, cruel, weird, chaotic. Not chaos as incompetence — chaos as part of the contract. The kind of chaos that adds pep to the show because it reminds you that you’re not watching something sealed behind professionalism. You’re watching something alive.
One contender arrived carrying a baby coffin. Inside it, a baby doll. They put it right in front of us. Even before anything happened, it did its work: it made the air heavier. He fought and started losing. After two rounds, he came back to the coffin and set it on fire — supposedly his magic trick.
But the fire didn’t behave like a controlled effect.
It went out of control in a way you could feel immediately: smoke, heat, panic. Organizers and security rushed in trying to stop flames that were now exactly in front of the first row. We had to move back one or two rows just to breathe and not get burned. For a moment it wasn’t “a scene.” It was a real problem.
And still — it didn’t kill the night. It became part of it. The scramble, the shouting, the improvised control: it blended into the logic of catch fétiche, where the boundary between show and accident is always thinner than you expect. The night moved from one near-catastrophe to the next, but in a way that fed the energy instead of destroying it.
Later another voodoo—no, another fétiche fighter came in with live snakes around his shoulders. He put them into a bucket beside his corner of the ring. Two left the bucket and went straight into the crowd. People jumped and screamed, then laughed, then screamed again. He had to go after them himself. Someone said one of the snakes was very dangerous. Whether that was true almost didn’t matter. The reaction was real. The crowd wasn’t outside the fight. The crowd was part of the risk.
A lot of the bouts weren’t really wrestling in the technical sense. They were what I can only call magic wrestling: each side “casting” something, the other reacting as if the body had been hacked. Everyone had their tools. One contender had a doll — and each time he did something to the doll, the opponent did the same, like a mirror under a spell. It was clearly well prepared, and also clearly amateur. Effects that required planning, executed with rough edges, missed beats, improvisation.
And those rough edges were the charm.
Because the imperfections didn’t make it less real — they made it more authentic. You could feel how close everything was to slipping. The wrestling contact itself was rough, unpolished, amateur. The technique wasn’t the point. The point was the mixture: danger and comedy, ritual and street show, belief and play, all compressed into the same space.
Even the coffin fire — unplanned as it was — added a strange warmth and beauty. Literally: the glow and smoke. But also aesthetically: bodies shifting back, people shouting, organizers fighting the flames while the crowd watched the boundary between performance and accident dissolve in real time. It was messy, but alive.
So if you’re in Kinshasa, go. Don’t miss it. Sit close if you can. You’ll see how thin “civilization” is when the lights are bad and the rules are optional. Catch fétiche doesn’t pretend to be respectable sport. It’s risk sold as entertainment, belief turned into theater, and the crowd paying to feel danger without having to name it. It’s messy, sometimes cruel, often funny — and maybe that’s the most honest part: at least here nobody is pretending the world is under control.
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