Culture | Papa Wemba

The king of the rumba

A revered Congolese musician dies on stage

His last hurrah

MOST peoples measure their national history in rulers; Britons count back in monarchs, Americans in presidents. Many Congolese like to reflect on five generations of musicians, whose languorous rumbas and faster modern beats, adored across Africa and beyond, have served them better than any government. Papa Wemba, who died on stage in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, on April 24th, was of the third musical generation. But as the most travelled of Congo’s peripatetic singers, possessed of a distinctive and beautiful voice, he often seemed to stand for them all.

Jules Shungu Wembadio Pene Kikumba, as he was properly called, was born in Lubefu, central Congo, in 1949. This was at the end of a decade of growth, driven partly by wartime demand for Congolese resources. A swelling music scene in the colonial capital, Léopoldville, catering for a rising African middle class, was one result. It was fuelled by enthusiasm for the new Congolese rumba, a sound the first generation of stars had repurposed from the Cuban songs they discovered on a budget range of ten-inch, 78rpm records put out by a British label, “His Master’s Voice”. Wemba moved to the city soon after.

The adopted son of a pleureuse, a professional singer at funerals, he learned to sing in church, perfecting the keening falsetto that would remain his trademark. Church music influenced his songwriting, too. He once said: “With religious music, the minor key always recurs. When I compose songs, I often use the minor key.”

Wemba’s first band, Zaiko Langa Langa, launched in 1969, announced him as an innovator, not an acolyte, however. Its name came from a garbled folksaying about the Zaire, or Congo, river—Zaire ya bankoko, “Zaire of our ancestors”. But Zaiko was rebellious, not folkish. Reacting against the big bands of the latest titans of the rumba, such as François “Franco” Luambo, Zaiko swapped brass instruments for a snare drum and electric guitars, and upped the tempo. The critics were scandalised; but this was a time of hope and change in Congo which Zaiko’s thrusting rhythms captured. After five years of upheaval and war, following Belgium’s abrupt exit from the country in 1960, Congo was enjoying a burst of optimism under Mobutu Sese Seko, its first dictator. By 1970 the Congolese were buying a million records a year.

Then Mobutu lost the plot. He launched a nativist programme, “Zairianisation”, which began as a cultural revivalist campaign and would end with the expropriation of white-owned industry, wrecking the economy. Wemba, who, like all Congo’s star musicians, naturally maintained an ambivalent attitude to power—sometimes critical, but generally compliant—at first played along. He and his bandmates adopted folk instruments such as the lokole, a log-drum; he would also sometimes perform in traditional raffia skirts, wearing hats decorated with cowrie shells. But Wemba soon became associated with a more compelling and subversive fashion movement, the Religion Kitembo, or “worship of clothes”, which was in part a sardonic comment on the charmless weeds and general decay that Zairianisation had brought.

Through the sad boulevards of Kinshasa—as the Congolese capital had been renamed—worshippers strutted (and they strut still) in glorious assemblages, perhaps matching a sharp suit with an ebony cane and a fur coat, quite possibly lifted from some faraway European boutique. They were also known as Sapeurs, after another of their names, in English, The Society of Ambience Makers and Elegant People; and Wemba—Le Pape de la Sape, “the Pope of Sapeurs”—was the movement’s high priest. “Listen my love,” he sang, “On our wedding day/The label will be Torrente/The label will be Giorgio Armani/The label will be Daniel Hechter/The label for the shoes will be J.M. Weston.”

By now the star performer of several bands—including Viva La Musica, whose hit single “Ana Lengo” sold half a million copies in Africa—Wemba wanted more than a wilting Kinshasa could provide. In the early 1980s he moved to Paris, where he produced ballads in Lingala and pop versions of the rumba, more accessible to a Western audience that was increasingly eager for exotic “World” music. He sang with Stevie Wonder and toured with Peter Gabriel, whose Real World label produced one of his best-selling albums, “Emotion”. He kept his feet in Congo, however—as was apparent, in 2003, when he was arrested in Paris, and briefly jailed, for smuggling dozens of Congolese into Europe as bogus members of his entourage.

His fans back in Kinshasa were aggrieved. The fine reputation of Congolese musicians is one of their country’s last boasts. Many also believed Wemba, despite his success, had been overcharging desperate migrants for their passage. But they still turned out, in multitudes, to welcome him home to Kinshasa from prison. And when Wemba announced, at a packed press conference, that although he had reconnected with Jesus there, he still liked dancing and pretty girls, the crowd thundered with joy and relief.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "The king of the rumba"

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