He taught for thirteen years before going back to what he had built as a boy. In a scrap-metal workshop behind Liberty Market, he winds his own strings on a machine he invented, cuts a neck from a block with a machete, and works with three tools that do most of the job. His son is his last apprentice. His youngest child already plays as if the guitar were a first language. We went early, stayed long, and came home with a morning we are still thinking about.
A beautiful woman: everyone will admire her, even with a bad character. And a woman very ugly on the outside, but very beautiful within. With that parable, filmed near the end of his life, the Kinshasa painter Roger Botembe defined the doctrine of his career: judge a painting the way you judge a person, by what it holds, not by its skin. He named the doctrine trans-symbolism, a decade after Baudrillard set down a neighboring word for the opposite idea. Whether he ever knew, the record does not say.
The photograph exists because a father from Wala decided that his daughter’s limbs should not remain private receipts of the company’s shortfall. He carried them to the house that stood outside the system, the one place that kept records and made images that could leave the forest. What he hoped would follow is not in the record. Everything that did follow belonged to others. He came into the archive carrying the heaviest thing in the world and left it with one sentence.
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.
Mihalina Nyota Buzilu paints vanity with the oldest equipment the theme owns, a mirror and a skull, and makes the arrangement carry her own point: a life that should be welcomed with integrity and gratitude, lost instead to the craving for admiration. In Pembeni mwa nafsi (At the Edge of the Self), the reclining body is painted cold and the skull is warm. In a short video, she explains the vanity, the narcissism, and the death her subjects work to forget.
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.
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.
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 that trail into the stadium and into the tapes that slept for decades. If you want to know how a homecoming could turn into a silence, read on.
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 of Soukous, and together expanded the boundaries of African music.
History remembers the moment the titans clashed, but it forgets how two warriors were transformed into those titans. That story was written during the five-week delay that stranded them in Kinshasa. The city itself was a crucible, forging each man into his mythic role. One became a titan by dissolving into the world around him, drawing strength from its soil and people. The other was hammered into an opposing titan by his solitude, his power hardening in the silence, fueled by alienation and a longing for home.
And that is how myths are forged. In the unseen struggles. Long before the first bell.
In June 2022, King Philippe of Belgium handed President Tshisekedi a Suku mask in Kinshasa and called it a restitution. Two weeks later, a prosecutor passed Patrice Lumumba’s tooth to his family in a Brussels box, also called a restitution. In Berlin, Germany signed over the Benin Bronzes by contract, also called a restitution. None of them were. This essay offers a six-point test, drawn from what European law does when the victim is European, so any reader can check whether a ceremony deserves the word or whether the case is being closed on a gift.
The cross was everywhere in the Kingdom of Kongo, and for the European missionaries who found it, the meaning was obvious. It was a sign from their God, a relic of a shared past.
They saw everything but the truth.
For the Bakongo people, this symbol was no mere icon. It was a key; a map that unlocked the path of the soul, the journey of the sun, and the very structure of the universe. This is the story of a truth hidden in plain sight, and the world that comes into view when we learn to see it through the eyes of “the insiders.”
New writing on Congolese art and the artists making it, about once a month.