Country in West Central Africa. Proclaiming its independence from France in 1960, the Republic of the Congo retains relations with the former colonial power and continues an economic partnership. The country is situated in the equatorial zone of Africa bordering the Atlantic Ocean in the south-west, with approximately 170 km of coastline. Its land and river-marked borders are Gabon to the west, Cameroon to the north-west, the Central African Republic to the north-east and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the south-east. There is also a small border with the Cabinda region of Angola to the south-west. The country covers a surface area of 341,821 km2. In 2000 the population was estimated to be approximately 2.98 million inhabitants, with close to one million living in the capital, Brazzaville, and about 600,000 living in the port city Pointe Noire. Rural flight has become one of the biggest problems in the country because outside of the cities there is almost no work available for young people. In the sparsely populated rural areas, people live by fishing, hunting and gathering. A small number of people, mostly women, practice agriculture in these areas.
While the official language is French, Monokotuba (Munukutuba) and Lingala are used by the media and by politicians to address and inform the general public. Many local and regional dialects exist in each of these two large Bantu language groups, including Kongo and Bembe (Beembe; Monokotuba) and Sangha, M'Bochi (Mbosi), Teke and Pomo (Pol; Lingala). Two other languages, Sango (the lingua franca of the Central African Republic to the north) and Diaka (the language of the BaAka or Baaka ‘pygmies’), are spoken by comparatively small numbers of people in the north. Both before and after independence, religion has played a major role, including the creation of two Christian-derived sects, Kibanguism and Lassyism, based on the lives of two African prophets. These religions, though fuelled initially by missionary influence, became indigenized African religions that are now expressed within a repertory of unique songs and drum rhythms played by adherents during worship, which includes aspects of spirit possession.
Much traditional music and dance in the Congo is linked to ritual contexts: homage to the ancestors, songs for healing, funeral chants and songs for fertility. There are also many varieties of songs for daily life, work and recreation, such as labourers' and boatmen's songs.
There is a wide variety of musical instruments. Among the Bateke (Teke), one of the largest Bantu groups in the south-west of the country, there is a long sanze (sanza; lamellophone) tradition. This instrument is played during a variety of celebratory occasions and also, as it is easily portable, for personal entertainment on long walking trips. Among the Mongala (Mangala) people in the north of the country, one well-known instrument is the mokoto, a wooden slit-drum in the shape of an antelope. A rectangular opening at the top (on the ‘back’ of the antelope) releases the sound of the strokes played with two heavy wooden sticks. This drum is often played in ensembles of three or four different sizes. Each clan or subclan has a special carved design that identifies their drums. Before the colonial administration regrouped the rural villages (to control and exploit the population more easily), these drums played important roles as the centre of social music and dance recreation and as public address systems that announced upcoming events to neighbouring villages or alerted them to imminent danger. Although during the pre-colonial era, everyone knew how to interpret the drum signals, this knowledge has been lost and the mokoto (which was denounced by missionaries) is now rare.
Colonial and post-colonial missionaries denounced and degraded not only musical practice, but also traditional ancestral charms for aiding hunting, fishing and health. In the north of the country, however, there is an ethnic minority, the Kaka (Kako), who share certain songs and dance rhythms with the BaAka ‘pygmies’. They also share the ‘pygmies'’ rejection of Christianity and continue to worship their own Kaka creator, named Ngakola. The BaAka ‘pygmies’ of the Congo, who live in the northern forested region of the country, are regarded by Congolese to be excellent musicians. The Congolese BaAka also create songs and dances and teach them to BaAka across the border in the Central African Republic. From time to time, masters of particular dances also journey into the Central African Republic to teach their brethren, bringing back payment in the form of hunting nets and other goods. As one of the purposes of these dances is to enhance the efficacy of the net hunt, the dances are valuable as both cultural and economic currency (see also Pygmy music).
Urban music in the Republic of the Congo began to develop only after independence. Initially, however, in 1957 several young musicians from Brazzaville (Jean Serge Essou, Eddo Nganga and Michel Boyibanda) moved to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to join Franco (Luambo Makiadi) to form the famous band O.K. Jazz. When the Republic of the Congo became independent several years later, the new government insisted that their musicians return home, so back in Brazzaville they formed the band Bantous de la Capitale, which was an immediate and long-lived success. Their songs, such as Makambo, Mibale (‘Money and Women’), Massoua (‘The Boat that Took My Love away’) and Marie Jeanne, contained elements of social commentary. Bantous de la Capitale earned the nickname ‘Mokolo ya Mboka’ (‘The Roots of the Country’), because young musicians would play with the band to learn their style and then depart to form their own offshoot bands. Though Bantous de la Capitale and O.K. Jazz had their own distinctive and inimitable sound, the fact that the Bantous were trained under Franco provided a certain unity of style, essentially forming the basis of the popular musical genre Congo rumba, which branched into contemporary forms such as soukous and ndombolo (see Congo, Democratic Republic of the, §III, 3).
During this same period L'Orchestre Super Bo Boto (‘Super Heart Band’), also known as SBB, was active in Brazzaville. Hit songs included the group's C'est toi que je préfère and La patience a ses limites, songs that reign supreme in the memories of people who lived in the Central African region during that time. During this period, there was yet another intrepid figure who shaped the musical and political scene, Franklin Boukaka. Several of his songs were written in Sango, the national language of the Central African Republic. Boukaka was called ‘the voice and the ear of the people’ because he did not hesitate to comment (often critically) on any issue and because his performances in city clubs would immediately incorporate the current events of the day. Many of his songs, recordings of which were destroyed by the government of the period, criticized the presidential regime and proved such a threat that they led to Boukaka's murder by government agents.
Several years later, around 1970, there were many small bands playing around the country, developing the Congo rumba style. These included Bana Mai (‘Children of the Water’) in the city of Ouesso in the north, and L'Orchestre de la Jeunesse in Brazzaville, who continued Boukaka's role as social critic. At first L'Orchestre de la Jeunesse couched its songs of critique in such subtle wordplay that it was protected from government retaliation. Later, when President Marien Ngouabi took power in 1969, it became a voice of the Socialist Party, touring all over the country to inform and educate the public, raising national political and cultural awareness. The group continued to perform even after President Ngouabi's assassination in 1977 and his replacement by the pseudo-Socialist regime that lasted into the early 1990s.
Around 1976, Youlou Mabiala founded the band Les Trois Frères, which had brief success. His songs, like those of Franco, were abstract and difficult to pin down as politically subversive. After the death of Franco in 1989, Mabiala joined O.K. Jazz in Kinshasa and helped rejuvenate the band. One of their hits of the late 1990s was Sylvain, which parallels in subject matter and style one of Franco's biggest hits, Mario. Both these songs, which criticize men who live the high life but do not earn their keep, are now part of pan-African popular culture and are familiar to middle-aged people from Dakar to Nairobi and Harare, as well as to expatriate Africans worldwide.
Unlike many other African nations, in the Republic of the Congo today there is little interplay between traditional or rural musical styles and the popular music emanating from the cities. This is largely because the rejection of tradition (a result of Christian missions and French cultural hegemony) introduced a split between ‘modern’ and rural (or traditional) culture; in other words it separated many urban Congolese from their indigenous past in favour of the idea of modernity.
GEWM, [i] (‘Central Africa: an Introduction’; G. Kubik)
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JUSTIN SERGE MONGOSSO (with MICHELLE KISLIUK)