Summary
Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire
Bob W. White / Duke University Press (2008)
Popular musicians in Mobutu’s Zaire drew from a variety of musicmaking strategies to soften the impact of a mounting political and economic crisis. In terms of the sound, they worked through compositional structures that enabled them to lengthen songs, especially during live performance, and this made it possible to increase audience participation, which in turn improved musicians’ access to financial support from fans and sponsors.
Together with the influence of state-sponsored singing and dancing, declining record sales in the 1970s favored the emergence of a new performative aesthetic, one based on choreographed dancing, showmanship, and animation. Faced with audiences that were increasingly distracted by need to make ends meet, musicians developed narrative strategies focused on the deep-seated fear of being abandoned (both by loved ones and by the state), but also reactivated an age-old tradition of praisesinging, albeit in the uniquely modern form of libanga.
Like many forms of social organization in Kinshasa in the 1990s, popular music groups struggled with a “logic of schism” (Bayart 1993: 229) that enabled the reproduction of charismatic leadership, but did very little to provide for their members. As Zaire’s most privileged form of cultural expression, popular music in Kinshasa of the 1990s acted as a mediating force between radically divergent socio-economic worlds, but it also reinforced the symbols and structures of power that came to characterize the political culture of an authoritarian system of rule.
The analysis in this book addressses the question of political culture by examining a broad continuum of leadership strategies, the agonistic relations between popular musicians and the state, and debates about what it means to be a “good chef”.