We have failed to maintain order in our capital city

I am rereading Gary Stewart’s gem titled Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos. Published in 2000, Stewart’s book is an encyclopaedic portrait of the flowering of Congolese music in Brazzaville and Kinshasa — or Léopoldville, as it was originally known. Some readers have problems with Stewart’s detailed historical style. Yet as Wes Freeman, a reader, says, “reading it is like absorbing a whole new paradigm.” The book presents Congolese music as fully formed and yet still evolving. But Stewart’s story is not just about music. It is also a depiction of the debilitating social, economic and political environment that is the canvas for this portrait. As this music — once shipped to Latin America on slave ships — was discovering its way back to Africa, the continent was at a cultural crossroads. Africa and Europe were fighting over space in the emerging African urban environment, in the first half of the 20th century. Stewart observes, “Africans entering colonial cities on their own continent were urged to leave Africa at the door. This was the white man’s world of clocks and order, of identity cards and regular jobs.”

Yet that was not all. Léopoldville was racially segregated. The white lived in what was called “the ville,” while Africans lived in “the cite.” We read, “Only Africans who worked as servants for white families could stay legally in the ville between 9pm and 4.30 the next morning, and then only as long as they lived on the property of their employers. Even in the cite, Africans were forbidden to move about from ten until four.”