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In these virus-wracked times, some pleasantly surprising news came to us from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
President Félix Tshisekedi said the government plans to buy musician Papa Wemba's (Jules Shungu Wembadio Kikumba), home and turn it into a museum.
Papa Wemba died in April 2016 after collapsing on stage while performing in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He was 67.
Nicknamed the ‘King of Rumba Rock’, the stylish Wemba was not just one of Congo’s most iconic musicians, but one of the most popular musicians of his time in Africa, a big figure in the world or music, and a film actor.
And, not to whitewash, he got embroiled in legal troubles too, and in 2003 was suspected of being involved in a network allegedly smuggling illegal immigrants from the DRC into Europe. He spent three-and-a-half months in prison, emerging a changed man who had seen godly visions.
Yet, little of that detracts from Wemba’s musical genius. There have been books on the man, so it’s good manners not to repeat. But he represented a social and cultural transition that has not yet been much explored.
A while back I was doing some research on African music, and interviewed an obscure but very clever young African musician. Off the cuff, he told me that the one thing that was most different between African musicians and those from the west, was the role of their music video.
“These days all musicians live and die by video, but the difference is that the really successful African ones often must also offer a unique dance routine,” he said. “And so, you have dances like azonto, gwara gwara coming from that and forming the emotional soundtrack that turns songs in classics,” he said.
No African musician of the second post-independence generation reimagined the video dance in that mold like Wemba. He even injected in avant-garde elements, as in “Yolele”.
The story there, however, is greater than just music and dance. When we were young, although almost impossible to imagine today, there would be songs where you’d hold your partner (hopefully respectfully) from beginning to end! But mostly, songs were in two parts. The first slow one where you held your partner, and the second fast-paced one where you let go and freestyled wildly if you liked.
In school, there would be weekly classes teaching us to dance (the waltz, foxtrot and all that), but also how to be gentlemen, and ask ladies for a dance “like civilised” young men.
“You bow at about 15 to 20 degrees, reach out with your right hand to ask her for a dance, with the left hand behind your back. Two hands look too hungry…”
That was the tradition in which Wemba started his music career. Music video and the musical reinventions of people like him ended that.
They, however, were expressing a post-Cold War change; the individualism of the free market that was unleashed from about 1990 in Africa, and a new search for self in a fast-globalising world.
Dancing while holding your partner all the time now seemed cavelike. Doing azonto was braver, and more exploratory. The genius of Wemba is that he was an independence era musician who understood that the clock had turned.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”.
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