(b Bunkeya, 1930; d nr Lubumbashi, 22 Sept 1991). Congolese composer and guitarist. He began to play guitar at the age of 16 in Jadotville (now Likasa) in the Belgian Congo, and within a few years, by the 1950s, he had developed a highly individual style, the Katanga guitar style which he maintained, throughout his nearly 40-year career. He was discovered by South African musicologist Hugh Tracey on a field-trip to the Congo and was first recorded in Jadotville in 1952. That same year he received the first prize of the newly established Osborn Awards for the ‘best African music of the year’ for his composition Masanga njia. He began a full-time professional career, and by the late 1950s he was one of the most acclaimed composers of guitar-songs in Central Africa. From 1952 to 1962 Bosco recorded approximately 156 pieces for the Gallotone Company of South Africa. In 1959 he spent six months in Nairobi. In 1969 he took part in the Newport Folk Festival and undertook an extensive concert tour throughout Europe in 1982 (see illustration). Bosco’s premature death in a car accident was a shock to his admirers throughout the world.
Bosco’s most famous guitar compositions include Masanga njia, Bombalaka, Sokochomale zikita, Mwàámi, Namlia ee, Kitambala moja and Bibi mupenzi (all included on the CD Mwenda Jean Bosco, 1997). The first study, including transcriptions of Bosco’s music, was carried out by David Rycroft and published in 1961 and 1962. Rycroft compared the dual F–G tonality in Masanga njia to William Byrd’s The Woods So Wild. Bosco’s unique music influenced many contemporaneous guitarists in Central and East Africa, including John Mwale in Kenya and Faustino Okello in Uganda, among others. Kenyan-born English musicologist John Low studied guitar in Lubumbashi with Bosco in 1979, and his book Shaba Diary is an account of Bosco’s personality and music.
D. Rycroft: ‘The Guitar Improvisations of Mwenda Jean Bosco, Part I’, AfM, ii/4 (1961), 81–9
D. Rycroft: ‘The Guitar Improvisations of Mwenda Jean Bosco, Part II’, AfM, iii/1 (1962), 86–101
J. Low: Shaba Diary: a Trip to Rediscover the ‘Katanga’ Guitar Styles and Songs of the 1950s and ’60s, Acta Ethnologica et Linguistica, liv (Vienna, 1982)
K. wa Mukuna: ‘The Genesis of Urban Music in Zaire’, AfM, vii/2 (1992), 72–84
African Guitar: Solo Fingerstyle Guitar Music, Composers and Performers of Congo/Zaire, Uganda, Central African Republic, Malawi, Namibia and Zambia, videotape, Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop (New Jersey, 1995) [incl. notes by G. Kubik]
Mwenda Jean Bosco (1930–1990): Songs with Guitar, Shaba/Zaire, Museum Collection Berlin MC 21 (1997) [incl. notes by G. Kubik]
GERHARD KUBIK