Congolese Rumba and Other Cosmopolitanisms

Abstract

In this paper I will look briefly at how Afro-Cuban music came to be imported and distributed in the Belgian Congo and I will discuss some of the stylistic borrowing that has given Congolese music a strongly Afro-Cuban flavor. But I am also interested in the way that Congolese rumba has gradually undergone a process of indigenization which has made it the “musica franca” of much of sub-Saharan Africa and an important marker of Congolese national identity. My central argument is that Cuban music became popular in the Congo not only because it retained elements of “traditional” African musical and performative aesthetics, but also because it stood for a form of urban cosmopolitanism which was something other than European. By comparing the appropriation of Afro-Cuban music in the Congo during two distinct historical periods (during the peak of colonialism and several years after the death of Mobutu), I hope to show not only how changes in larger political economies correspond with changing notions of cosmopolitanism in a local setting, but also how popular music mediates at various levels between the local and the foreign.

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