The Nganga, the Prophet, and the Orchestra
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.
