MUSIC: Gwen Ansell
‘AUTHENTICITY,” says a Zairois buddy of mine who prefers not to be named, ”was probably one of the few decent things Mobutu ever did.”
He’s referring to the Zairean dictator’s post- independence campaign to reclaim the country’s cultural heritage. Its manifestations ranged from a strict dress code (men had to wear the abacost — a Mao-styled suit) to lion’s- share airplay quotas for indigenous music.
And it was the authenticity campaign which gave a jump-start to the modern Zairean music which is now colonising African dancefloors and World Music concert arenas. One of its graduates is Papa Wemba.
Wemba’s South African shows demonstrated what enthusiastic government patronage for indigenous popular music can do. The Emotion album — and the tour — showcase music which makes generous concessions to US- influenced tastes. Styles, beats, instrumentation, even themes, offer a crossover menu. The stage presentation is slick, tight and professional. But the bedrock of the music is Papa Wemba’s singing — and that makes almost no concessions at all. He sings mainly in Lingala, casting high-pitched harmonies above the familiar themes, threading a songpath which takes us along ancient routes from solemn village ritual to beer party and back.
The man is an astoundingly hard-working performer: for 90 minutes or more he danced, whipped the audience and the band to more energetic efforts and stretched his vocal chords skyward. As well as material from Emotion, he reprised earlier songs like the infectious dance rhythms of Maria Valencia from the Voyageur album. And in the middle, on a starkly arranged ballad, he stopped us dancing and made us hush to see the warm night stars above the open-air bars of the matonge: the township of his home.
Some of us missed the extended numbers which he might have played with his home-based band in Kinshasa. But that’s not to detract from the talent of his touring group, particularly the jazzy keyboards of Patric Bebey, Christian Polloni’s guitar and backing singers and dancers Awa Maiga and Sylvia Doumbe.
And yet we have our potential Papa Wembas in South Africa, too. Support act Ringo displayed a fine voice on original music, backed up by a talented crew of instrumentalists, although his act as a whole seemed constrained, as if conceived for a much smaller venue and stage than Mega Music’s generous space.
What we lack are cultural authorities prepared to take indigenous popular forms seriously. The government’s current best offer (to quote a recent interview with the minister) seems to be that popular performers should ”work on a non-professional basis in their communities” while most of the money still drains away on grand opera. On that basis, we’re unlikely to be contending with the Papa Wembas for a while.