Touring Zairean superstar Papa Wemba talks to GWEN ANSELL about fashion, music and his African roots
PAPA WEMBA is quiet but emphatic. ”Please, I don’t want to talk about le sape. The French press have made a great noise about my clothes, but my first identity is as a musician.”
Zaireans, of course, are great nightclubbers, and (like their fellows the world over) set considerable store by style. And the Papa Wemba myth has it that he founded the ”Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes legantes” (Sape), which created a cult of flaunting designer labels — sometimes to the point of turning jackets inside-out to display their provenance.
The man himself is elegant enough as he sits, surrounded by sociable homeboys, in Ruffin N’Gbanzo’s Zairois restaurant in Yeoville. The suit is cream silk, the striped polo shirt has a designer logo lurking on the left breast. But the eyes in a mature, serious face don’t light up until we start talking about music.
”Music was what I was born to, through my mother. She was a professional mourner in a small village in Kasai Province and my first example, my first teacher. I followed her everywhere, and also began to sing with her at the funerals. She encouraged me to think of music as a career 26 years ago when I was approaching my 20s.”
By then Papa Wemba was living in Kinshasa, and with a gang of musically inclined township buddies (”mes amis du quartier”) he formed Zaiko Langa Langa. This band broke with many of the previous conventions of the music, using a strong team of vocalists and electric instruments to create complex cross-harmonies around themes which drew on both folk roots and American and Latin pop. And floating over the top of Zaiko’s sound was a high-pitched, soulful male voice: the voice of Papa Wemba.
Other bands followed: the rootsy Isifi Lokole and the radical fusion of Viva La Musica. Always, that voice haunted the music.
But his third album, Emotion, marks an even more radical departure for the now Paris-based singer. ”This one is universal music: music to appeal to Africans, Americans, Asians. We need to enlarge the audience for Zairean music.”
He feels it’s artificial to deny the cross- fertilisations which have been taking place throughout his lifetime between African, American and European music and, like Manu Dibango before him, feels the emergence of an ”electric Africa” must be acknowledged. ”The synthesiser is expanding the range of what our Zairean bands can do — and besides,” he shrugs, ”that’s the way the world is going and we too must participate.”
It’s possibly his time as a mourning singer that has given Papa Wemba’s voice its unique timbre: his choice on Emotion of the Otis Redding ballad Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa (Sad Song) clearly draws out the vocal parallels with American gospel choir graduates like Redding himself.
But Papa Wemba is emphatic that he cannot leave his African roots behind. ”There’s no single genre of African music. In the north, east, west, the south and the centre, African singers are drawing on their distinctive heritages to create new things every day. And this music is still largely unexploited.” Looking wistful (and sounding uncannily like the South African musicians fighting similar battles with our own ministry of culture), he asserts: ”If our politicians could only realise that music is an industry, and give it the resources it needs, we could be contributing to economies in a major way.”
So far, Papa Wemba has mainly encountered the vocal music of South Africa, and particularly the voice of one heroine: ”Ah! Miriam Makeba! What can I say about her? She’s quite simply the first lady of song in Africa.” But he’s hoping that his visits to education centres like Funda in Soweto next week ”will let me meet young musicians. I’m interested to hear what new sounds are developing here.”
And he sees a common thread in the work African musicians are doing across the continent. ”We take from rural music and we make new things from it. Soukous is a modern music — we took it in a different direction from its origins. But traditional music remains. It’s always there, a deep wellspring to refresh our creativity with something of the spirit.”
Wemba performs at Mega Music, Johannesburg, on April 3, 4 and 5, then at the Dock Road Venue at the Cape Town Waterfront on April 6, 7 and 8