politics
Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH
The Democratic Republic of Congo has always aroused two contradictory emotions in me as an African: the ecstasy created in the soul by appreciation of some of the best music on the continent, and the fear and anger aroused in the mind by irrational, blood-spattered politics that resurfaces every so often, bringing shame to every African.
I’ve loved Congolese music ever since I bought my first wireless set. I used to tune in to a listeners’ request programme on Radio Brazzaville called Les Disques Demands. The short-wave reception in Accra, Ghana, was not of the best quality. But not even the ear- numbing static could diminish the beautiful guitar notes from the incredible fingers of Franco and The OK Jazz, Rochereau and the African Fiesta, l’Orchestre Shama Shama and other superb Congolese bands.
In later years, one of the most pleasant surprises of my life has been to arrive in Harare to find that, by pure chance, a live performance by Pepe Kale was to take place in the very hotel where I was booked to stay.
The music and dancing – including naughty forays under the skirts of women dancers by the dwarf who appeared in the film, La Vie est Belle – had me in stitches. The banquet hall in the Harare Sheraton was packed, although Zimbabwe is an English-speaking country, and Pepe Kale, like most Congolese musicians, sings only in French and Lingala. When music speaks, what is the relevance of language?
In London, too, again by pure accident, I have been lucky enough to arrive at a BBC studio to take part in a programme, only to find that Papa Wemba and his group are there to play, as a musical interlude in the programme, a track from their latest album.
Afterwards, I invited myself to join the band in their bus, in order to chat with the musicians, and ended up going with them to the studios of Virgin Records, where they performed live for more than an hour.
I discovered that Papa Wemba’s chief guitarist was not from the Congo, but from Cameroon! But should I have been surprised? After all, Cameroon is almost next door to the Congo, and the people there also use string instruments a lot, which makes the guitar easy for them. In any case, the Cameroonian guy came from as much an excellent musical pedigree as that which gave birth to Manu Dibango, didn’t he? Me, I was in heaven that day with Papa Wemba (who, incidentally, is quite a masculine-looking character, despite the way he indulges in high-note singing!).
I am sure I did not know it at the time, but subconsciously it must have been the possibility of a chance to hear Congolese music first-hand that made me jump at the chance of making my first visit the Congo. This was when United Nations troops were still trying to restore order there after the first flush of killings that had taken place, in the wake of the revolt of the Force Publique, immediately after independence in June 1960. Ghanaian troops were among the UN forces and I was invited by the Ghana Army to cover the visit of a Ghanaian dance troupe that the Army was taking to the Congo to entertain the Ghanaian soldiers in the UN contingent.
The Ghanaians had their headquarters in Luluaborg, and it was from the airport there that we flew one day to a small UN encampment called Mwene Dittu. Even though UN aircraft had been landing regularly at the airstrip, and armed Ghanaian soldiers were there to meet us, our aircraft was surrounded by Congolese troops as soon as it landed.
For some reason, the Congolese soldiers refused to allow us to disembark. We could see from the windows of the aircraft that somehow a fierce dispute seemed to have broken out between the UN authorities and the Congolese troops. The Congolese soldiers, to my surprise, seemed to be taking their orders from a woman dressed in a cloth outfit, like the market women seen all over West Africa! My mind did a double take to Makola market in Accra: imagine a Makola market woman leaving her milk and sugar stall and daring to command a unit of heavily armed troops! The Congo is full of surprises, I learned.
Nothing seemed to be able to convince this lady that we were on a mission to entertain, and were not a group of spies masquerading as musicians and dancers. The argumentation was so intense I feared it would result in a shoot-out, with us caught in the middle.
As we baked in the sweltering heat of the midday sun, dying by inches inside the airless cabin of the DC-3 aircraft, all the news agency stories I’d been reading from the Congo now began to flash before my eyes with the intensity of a military bombardment: hapless nuns raped and killed; unarmed priests massacred; civilians caught in the crossfire of a battle between armed factions; 43 Ghanaian UN troops surprised by Congolese soldiers they had “befriended”, and murdered in cold blood at a place called Port Franqui …
Finally, we were allowed to disembark, but the incident marred my visit. For although I summoned enough courage one evening to go to a nightclub at Luluaborg to hear Congolese music, the fear that something unpleasant could happen at any time made me so nervous that all the joy went out of the outing.
And now, in 1998, here we are again. The ousting last year of the kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko, had raised everyone’s hopes that at last a new Congo would rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the nightmare years of Mobutu’s misrule. Western investors seemed to be falling over one another seeking investment rights, especially for the country’s immense mineral deposits. Surely, under proper management, the country would be ushered into a new era of prosperity for a population that has suffered – perhaps for longer than any other African country, on a continent where life and suffering seem to go together.
But were our expectations not unrealistic to a degree, one wonders. At first, everyone seemed to brush away the signs, even through the obvious hubris of Laurent Kabila’s victory, that all might not be what it seemed. Hadn’t Kabila rebuffed the efforts of President Nelson Mandela to mediate a peaceful transfer of power? Hadn’t the expert revolutionary, Che Guevara, who had fought with forces under Kabila’s command in the Sixties, from a base near the Tanzanian border, commented in his diaries (published posthumously a few years before Kabila’s re-emergence on the Congolese scene) that Kabila was “unreliable”? Yes, but … maybe Kabila had changed in the three decades since Guevara made his unfavourable comments on him in his diary?
Well … did anyone say anything about a nation that seems to favour leopard-skin caps, and how no leopard ever changes his spots? Eh? Now we know, don’t we? Three African states on Kabila’s side; two against. Where will it end? Eh?