Kisangani Sion Via Virginie Dupray a Chronicle of Return

Home , Kisangani

1 Festival of Lies (2007) featuring Djodjo Kazadi and Marie-Louise Bibish Mumbu. Photo: Agathe Poupeney Photoscene, with permis- Kisangani sion via Virginie Dupray A Chronicle of Return

Virginie Dupray translated by Allen F. Roberts

December 2003, Kisangani, northeastern DRC, a return to the Summer 2005, in the very heart of the United States in the midst country that saw Faustin grow up, a first encounter for me who of Katrina, a night of visionary dreams that impose upon Faustin, by then had shared his life for a year. Ten days to (re)discover the eternal traveler, the necessity of return, to drop off his luggage Translator’s Introduction the city that had just gotten back on its feet after several years as in Kisangani and build a house at the edge of the river. To realize one fine day a “Rebel Zone” at the heart of a vast, sick state. A city in conva- Kisangani soon found itself enlivened by Studios Kabako as a Faustin Linyekula and Studios Kabako toured more more more … lescence where the walls and the miseries tell war stories at each haven for dreaming, hanging out (traîner), and finding time to future across the United States this past year. What a production it was, that the tales one hopes to tell corner, about imported wars like the one of the Ugandans and breathe. In autumn, 2006, “Dinozord: The Dialogue Series III” too, at once poignant to the point of pathos—especially in the prison the Rwandans, and wars that were counted here by the day— was created under Faustin’s direction, as his team from Kinshasa poetry of Antoine Vumilia Muhindo hauntingly intoned in the bari- are not those of exile …. the war of one day, the one of three, the war of six days; and the and Lubumbashi visited Kisangani for several weeks. The piece tone of the gold-spangled vocalist Patient Mufutala Useni—but all the massacres in reprisal and the homes transformed into charnel read like a diary of returning to the homeland. What had become while throbbing with the virtuosic rhythms for which the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been so famous so long. It is hard to char- houses. 2002? Only yesterday. Ten days to (re)learn how to live of the friends with whom, when they were all about fifteen, Faus- acterize Faustin Linyekula’s performance idiom, and although a bit of n June, 2001, Faustin Linyekula came home after many with the family, the families. tin had dreamed of changing African literature and theater—and a stretch, it seems almost a Congolese butoh in its war-weary disgust years on the roads to Nairobi, Kigali, Montpellier, La December 2004, we return, the three of us; a little boy has nothing less? And what might today’s young people dream in for corruption, its despair, angst, and rawest of earthy emotions; yet Rochelle, Vienna, La Réunion. His country was still been born, another will follow three years later. this city so torn by war? any such drama is embodied through the exuberant beat of ndom- divided and partly under rebel control when Faustin bolo, the latest of Kinshasa’s infectious dance genres. For more more landed at Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Repub- more … future, ndombolo’s “charged, sultry brew of funk, rumba, and lic of the Congo, ex-Zaïre, ex-Belgian Congo, ex-Congo traditional Congolese rhythms” (La Rocco 2011) was set forth by the Free State—capital of a land drained of its blood after so many brilliant composer, bandleader, and electric guitarist Flamme Kapaya, years of conflict. with Rémi Bassinta Nightness on bass and Patou Tempête Kayembe I on drums. Captivated by these musicians, “the body wants to burrow Faustin’s family asked, “Why would you return to the fire when into” their riffs, “but the mind is stopped, or at least given pause, by the you have escaped from it?” Faustin chose the fire and began vociferous political message it carries” (ibid.). the adventure of Studios Kabako with four companions on the scene: Papy, an artist still working with him, Djodjo, Madrice, With catchy costuming by Lamine Badian Kouyaté, the Malian and Edwige, with Bibish in administration.1 Studios Kabako is designer whose label Xuly Bët (“Keep an open mind” in Wolof) not a company, but rather a place (or places in the plural) for has made its Parisian splash, and the muscular choreographies exe- dialogue and exchange in a country with so few of them. At first, cuted by Faustin Linyekula ably seconded by Papy Ebotani and the these places were only ideas and reflections, for at the time there astounding break-dancer Dinozord, more more more … future was exhilarating, as the horrors of conflict were countered by Congolese was neither roof nor floor, only the wonderful welcome of Jean- courage and resilience. Civil strife has broken out again in northeast- Michel Champault at the Halle de la Gombe, the French Cultural ern DRC in December, 2012, just as this piece is going to press, and Center of Kinshasa. one can only pray that peace and fulfillment will be soon be found Faustin: “Studios Kabako is a place where we work, where by people who have suffered so long. As engaging as Studios Kabako we are always searching for ourselves and where, sometimes, productions are and have been, then, of even deeper significance is we find what we are looking for. A place where we have many 2 more, more, more ... future (2009), the arts activism of Faustin Linyekula and his colleagues. The editors featuring Papy Ebotani, Dinozord, and doubts but where some evenings, certitude asserts itself. A place Faustin Linyekula in costuming by Lamine of African Arts invited an account of these uplifting efforts, and Vir- where notions of elegance often take precedence over those of Badian Kouyaté for Xuly Bët. ginie Dupray was kind enough to send us the following: Photo: Agathe Poupeney Photoscene efficacy or profit.” with permission via Virginie Dupray

30 | african arts Spring 2013 vol. 46, no. 1 vol. 46, no. 1 Spring 2013 african arts | 31 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00042 by guest on 25 September 2021

Other_121210-001_030-035_CS6.indd 30-31 12/20/12 1:54 PM 1 Festival of Lies (2007) featuring Djodjo Kazadi and Marie-Louise Bibish Mumbu. Photo: Agathe Poupeney Photoscene, with permis- Kisangani sion via Virginie Dupray A Chronicle of Return

Virginie Dupray translated by Allen F. Roberts

30 | african arts Spring 2013 vol. 46, no. 1 vol. 46, no. 1 Spring 2013 african arts | 31 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00042 by guest on 25 September 2021

Other_121210-001_030-035_CS6.indd 30-31 12/20/12 1:54 PM In 2007 we decentralized, following the ways that excite. Faus- 6 Concert of the vocalist Pasnas, Place de la Poste, Kisangani, 2009. tin creates frameworks in his works in order to explore what Photo: Studios Kabako, with permission happens out on and beyond their margins. The choice of Kisan- gani suddenly became obvious, for it was far from the tumult, economic inflation, and the frantic crowdedness of the capital, Kinshasa—that great mess (bordel) of eight million souls, every one of them preoccupied with daily survival in a city with next to no infrastructure. There is no infrastructure left in Kisangani either, as the third city of the DRC and capital of Eastern Prov- ince, itself the largest province of all with an area about the same as France. But Kisangani has fewer people living there than Kin- shasa, perhaps 800,000 (in a country where counting stopped long ago) drawing breath along a great river and a creek, the Congo and the Tchopo, and from equatorial forest all around. Green, green, everywhere. Everything grows quickly and with vigor, even as the forests’ huge trees are felled and their great trunks are sent down river, victims of Lebanese companies that never replant, that restore nothing but keep money flowing into the pockets of a few powerful people, these companies whose names like “Congo Future” thumb their noses at us. Kisangani, the diamond capital, where businessmen thrive like Fofo Force, Bassam the Very Very Strong, Maradona, or the Sun of Mosindo, whose money transits in complete opac- ity, with nothing left behind. The only notable investments are disappeared long ago. The Bralima Brewery produces soft drinks Goma. A road leading eastward has just been reopened after a a few immense mansions with adventuresome colonnades and like red and yellow Fanta™ and Coca-Cola™ as well as Primus decade of being lost to forest, and one can now get to Béni near multiple roofs. Gross autos that, if possible, are unknown to local lager. And of course, tolekas—meaning “let’s go” in Lingala—are the Ugandan border in two days if there is no rain. City roads citizenry, like the first Hummer of the city that is owned by Fofo symbols of the city. Everything is transported on these taxi-bikes are dirt roads, and one dodges the potholes as one avoids the and was “baptized” with freely flowing beer at the Roundabout made in China or India: men on colorful little cushions; roughly pedestrians. And finally, a university called Unikis has four or Bar. Diamonds feed the cheap dreams of young men: to go into treated pigs, chickens, and goats; metal roofing, cement, bunches five thousand students who will find no work once they gradu- the quarries in the middle of the forest, to dig and maybe come of bananas, mountains of manioc leaves. Having appeared dur- ate. A Franco-Congolese Alliance survives by renting its theater back with a large stone with which to buy a motorcycle, cloth- ing the war when the lack of fuel and wild requisitions made all and carefully maintains the only general library in Eastern Prov- ing, what’s needed to drink Primus beer every evening and make vehicles disappear from the city, and as the least costly mode of ince. No hospital worthy of the name. Here people die all the a splash for a while in the neighborhood before the inevitable transportation, tolekas are indispensable to the everyday life of time, never with a second thought and for nothing—a treatment return to the hell of the quarries. Boyomais—as those living in Kisangani are familiarly known. for ten dollars that one simply doesn’t have. Timber, diamonds, and then … not much else in Kisangani, Kisangani also possesses a past as Stanleyville, with marvelous Here, then, is the field for the activities of Studios Kabako, in fish eaten near where it’s been caught, family gardens cultivated villas built by Belgians in art déco style or like Louisiana man- a city that was and never ceases to ever be again, held hostage by in small yards. Plantations of rubber, coffee, and oil palms all sions, and ticky-tack little homes stuck together like working the catastrophic management of the Province; a city where it was class housing in Manchester, once destined for “evolved” Con- still possible to dream when a teenager in the 1980s; a city that golese.2 It was in Kisangani that Charlie Allnutt, captain of the could become the cultural capital (and nothing less!) that exists African Queen as played by Humphrey Bogart, met the gaze of nowhere else in the DRC. How does one inscribe an approach, Rose (Katherine Hepburn) for the first time in a villa that still a singular journey like Faustin’s, upon the heart of such a place? exists, more or less, and where several dozen families now live. Let us return to 2006–2007. Theater hardly existed any more, Here that Lumumba “improvised” his famous speech of 1959. contemporary dance not at all. The only vibrant scene was music, Here, the capital of the Simba Rebellion of the 1960s, when and especially rap, born in the war and the city’s rebel occupa- people were lightheartedly mutilated in public! Here, the for- tion in the mid-1990s. Three young men competed for the city’s mer palace of Mobutu on the bank of the Congo River, pillaged spotlight and engaged in polemic in imitation of the great stars and now inhabited by policemen’s families as squatters. A few of Kinshasa. Fans of one or the other insulted each other and early glories: the Hotel of the Waterfalls, the Wagenia, and the would not converse, even if they had grown up together. Studios

3–4 Le Cargo (2011) featuring Faustin Zaïre/Congo Palace now sheltering storage areas and randomly Kabako took up their music and brought the “three sworn ene- Linyekula. divided lodgings. The price of a night in the old days is now the mies” together on the same bill in three concerts offered to three Photo: Agathe Poupeney Photoscene, with permis- monthly rent for entire families packed into the old VIP suites. neighborhoods of Kisangani. sion via Virginie Dupray According to Virginie Dupray, the figurative stool is Kisangani has a railroad station that hardly functions any In 2009, Studios Kabako took over a vast house in the center of meant as a reference to African symbolism rather more, a few boats that can get to Kinshasa in two weeks or so, town and created offices, a room for music rehearsals, and places to than to Luba culture explicitly. a ferry that crosses the river toward the community of Lubunga store lighting and sound equipment purchased when Faustin won 5 Pour en finir avec Bérénice (2010), featuring when there is fuel and anyone can afford to take it there, and the Grand Prize of the Prince Claus Fund in 2007. Studios Kabako Daddy Kamono and Moanda. an airport that was once international and has been put back has opened the first professional recording studio in the eastern part Photo: Agathe Poupeney Photoscene with permission to work by the United Nations to link the city to Kinshasa and of the DRC, and three albums have already been recorded. via Virginie Dupray

32 | african arts Spring 2013 vol. 46, no. 1 vol. 46, no. 1 Spring 2013 african arts | 33 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00042 by guest on 25 September 2021

Other_121210-001_030-035_CS6.indd 32-33 12/13/12 9:16 PM In 2007 we decentralized, following the ways that excite. Faus- 6 Concert of the vocalist Pasnas, Place de la Poste, Kisangani, 2009. tin creates frameworks in his works in order to explore what Photo: Studios Kabako, with permission happens out on and beyond their margins. The choice of Kisan- gani suddenly became obvious, for it was far from the tumult, economic inflation, and the frantic crowdedness of the capital, Kinshasa—that great mess (bordel) of eight million souls, every one of them preoccupied with daily survival in a city with next to no infrastructure. There is no infrastructure left in Kisangani either, as the third city of the DRC and capital of Eastern Prov- ince, itself the largest province of all with an area about the same as France. But Kisangani has fewer people living there than Kin- shasa, perhaps 800,000 (in a country where counting stopped long ago) drawing breath along a great river and a creek, the Congo and the Tchopo, and from equatorial forest all around. Green, green, everywhere. Everything grows quickly and with vigor, even as the forests’ huge trees are felled and their great trunks are sent down river, victims of Lebanese companies that never replant, that restore nothing but keep money flowing into the pockets of a few powerful people, these companies whose names like “Congo Future” thumb their noses at us. Kisangani, the diamond capital, where businessmen thrive like Fofo Force, Bassam the Very Very Strong, Maradona, or the Sun of Mosindo, whose money transits in complete opac- ity, with nothing left behind. The only notable investments are disappeared long ago. The Bralima Brewery produces soft drinks Goma. A road leading eastward has just been reopened after a a few immense mansions with adventuresome colonnades and like red and yellow Fanta™ and Coca-Cola™ as well as Primus decade of being lost to forest, and one can now get to Béni near multiple roofs. Gross autos that, if possible, are unknown to local lager. And of course, tolekas—meaning “let’s go” in Lingala—are the Ugandan border in two days if there is no rain. City roads citizenry, like the first Hummer of the city that is owned by Fofo symbols of the city. Everything is transported on these taxi-bikes are dirt roads, and one dodges the potholes as one avoids the and was “baptized” with freely flowing beer at the Roundabout made in China or India: men on colorful little cushions; roughly pedestrians. And finally, a university called Unikis has four or Bar. Diamonds feed the cheap dreams of young men: to go into treated pigs, chickens, and goats; metal roofing, cement, bunches five thousand students who will find no work once they gradu- the quarries in the middle of the forest, to dig and maybe come of bananas, mountains of manioc leaves. Having appeared dur- ate. A Franco-Congolese Alliance survives by renting its theater back with a large stone with which to buy a motorcycle, cloth- ing the war when the lack of fuel and wild requisitions made all and carefully maintains the only general library in Eastern Prov- ing, what’s needed to drink Primus beer every evening and make vehicles disappear from the city, and as the least costly mode of ince. No hospital worthy of the name. Here people die all the a splash for a while in the neighborhood before the inevitable transportation, tolekas are indispensable to the everyday life of time, never with a second thought and for nothing—a treatment return to the hell of the quarries. Boyomais—as those living in Kisangani are familiarly known. for ten dollars that one simply doesn’t have. Timber, diamonds, and then … not much else in Kisangani, Kisangani also possesses a past as Stanleyville, with marvelous Here, then, is the field for the activities of Studios Kabako, in fish eaten near where it’s been caught, family gardens cultivated villas built by Belgians in art déco style or like Louisiana man- a city that was and never ceases to ever be again, held hostage by in small yards. Plantations of rubber, coffee, and oil palms all sions, and ticky-tack little homes stuck together like working the catastrophic management of the Province; a city where it was class housing in Manchester, once destined for “evolved” Con- still possible to dream when a teenager in the 1980s; a city that golese.2 It was in Kisangani that Charlie Allnutt, captain of the could become the cultural capital (and nothing less!) that exists African Queen as played by Humphrey Bogart, met the gaze of nowhere else in the DRC. How does one inscribe an approach, Rose (Katherine Hepburn) for the first time in a villa that still a singular journey like Faustin’s, upon the heart of such a place? exists, more or less, and where several dozen families now live. Let us return to 2006–2007. Theater hardly existed any more, Here that Lumumba “improvised” his famous speech of 1959. contemporary dance not at all. The only vibrant scene was music, Here, the capital of the Simba Rebellion of the 1960s, when and especially rap, born in the war and the city’s rebel occupa- people were lightheartedly mutilated in public! Here, the for- tion in the mid-1990s. Three young men competed for the city’s mer palace of Mobutu on the bank of the Congo River, pillaged spotlight and engaged in polemic in imitation of the great stars and now inhabited by policemen’s families as squatters. A few of Kinshasa. Fans of one or the other insulted each other and early glories: the Hotel of the Waterfalls, the Wagenia, and the would not converse, even if they had grown up together. Studios

32 | african arts Spring 2013 vol. 46, no. 1 vol. 46, no. 1 Spring 2013 african arts | 33 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00042 by guest on 25 September 2021

Other_121210-001_030-035_CS6.indd 32-33 12/13/12 9:16 PM between the exigencies of Europe and the absences of the DRC, this great country that is adrift. The state that will see no end to launching—and never realizing—its “five works in progress,” to follow the slogan of Joseph Kabila, again recognized as President in 2011 after fiercely contested and altogether controversial “elec- tions.” Nor will the DRC cease filling pockets in the capital, sell- ing the staggering mineral wealth in the south, east, and north to the Chinese, South Africans, Europeans, Canadians. Who knows, one day a mining company may come and dislodge Stu- dios Kabako. No problem, we’re building, ever upwards. Please follow us on www.kabako.org.

Virginie Dupray has been managing director of Studios Kabako since 2003. Trained in European Economy (HEC–Paris and the University of Cologne) and Art History, she has directed communications and public relations for the French Institute of the United Kingdom in London and the French National Center for Dance. She was administrator for the Nacera Belaza Dance Company and for Urban Scenography of Kinshasa, and has worked with several choreographers including the Italian artist Francesca 7 Dance workshop at Studios Kabako, Kisangani, Lattuada and the French performer Béatrice Massin. Among other topics, Our raison d’être? To give birth to and promote stories of with Andreya Ouamba, 2011. Kisangani, Kinshasa, Obilo, or Bandundu; sounds, images, Photo: Studios Kabako, with permission she has written about the choreographer Nacera Belaza and the Congolese movement, speech, and perhaps all at the same time; and to visual artist Kura Shomali. [email protected] 8 Sound equipment at Studios Kabako, Kisangani, show them the world, and to the world. And then to return to 2011. Kisangani, Kinshasa, Obilo, or Bandundu and prove that one can Photo: Studios Kabako, with permission Notes go out into the world and come back, create, and construct here 1 [Translator’s note: The author prefers to keep the name Studios Kabako in its in the Congo despite the isolation, instability, dead-ends, and French form, rather than have it translated into English as Kabako Studios. “Kabako” deadlocks. So, we grow stories through workshops for artists and was the name of a dearly departed friend of Faustin Linyekula, and the studios are those seeking administration and technical expertise; through centralization of the DRC, where some would say that nothing named in remembrance of their early days in theater together, Ms. Dupray tells us.] 2 [Translator’s note: Late in the colonial period, Belgian authorities introduced residencies and encounters; through support for local projects, exists outside of Kinshasa. To leave the capital for Kisangani and a social category called les évolués—“the evolved ones”—to encourage an indigenous material, artistic, financial, and production support, all in the then not simply settle in Makiso as the administrative and eco- middle class, but through racial policies that would strictly retain their subaltern sta- context of Faustin’s own work with choreographers, musicians, nomic center of the city, but to extend to the peripheries and tus. To become évolués, Congolese were obliged to pass a rigorous examination, and those who did were rewarded with identity cards conferring privileges such as attend- vocalists, comedians, MCs, and videographers; all with the goal lively places like Lubunga, sixth commune of the city but forgot- ing certain mixed-audience activities.] of diffusion of such work to local, regional, and international ten on the other side of the Congo River. audiences. Studios Kabako will be a place of diffusion, then, and will grow Reference cited In 2010–2011, Studios Kabako produced To Be Done with Béré- in a holding of 650 square meters [7000 square feet] acquired in La Rocco, Claudia. 2011. “Messages from Prison to an Irresistible Beat.” The New York nice, after the play by Racine, and The Cargo, a dance solo by Faus- 2007 and located between the university and the historical and Times, October, 15, p. C4. tin Linyekula; Engundele, a quartet by Papy Ebotani; Boyoka, a solo commercial center of Kisangani. Another place for a perfor- by Dinozord; Banningsville, the first album by Flamme Kapaya; as mance lab and residence enter will be created on a bit more than well as the first album by Pasnas and production of the first long 4000 square meters [about an acre] about eight kilometers from documentary film by Dieudo Hamadi, Examens d’État. Some fifty the city, and not far from the Congo River, where there is a little artists from Kisangani but also from Kinshasa and elsewhere in valley, a creek, fishponds, and children on the banks wondering the DRC became associated with Studios Kabako, and contacts what we might be imagining there. What we do dream of, with have been developed with other cultural structures in Goma and the help of the German architect Bärbel Müller, are studios for Lubumbashi as well as elsewhere in the Great Lakes region. In musical rehearsals and recording, another for video editing, yet effect, Kisangani “naturally” and historically turns toward such another for dance and theater rehearsals, and lodging for invited other places. Relationships have been developed beyond the coun- artists. The foundations were completed in 2010, and construc- try as well, such as in Dakar with the 1er Temps Association of tion is to recommence in 2012. Finally, a third space has yet to Andreya Ouamba, in Maputo with Culturarte, and Tunis with the be found in Lubunga that will be open to the neighborhoods and Chatha/Hafiz Dhaou Company. their modes of association and energies directed toward daily In support of all these stories, Faustin and his friends at Stu- difficulties—this same Lubungu on the other side of the great dios Kabako dreamed of providing a sheltering roof, or per- Congo River usually only crossed by pirogues. Lubungu is the haps more than one. Crazy dreams are needed to answer daily most heavily populated commune of the city and produces most

misery. We imagine three places in different communities, a of the vegetables eaten in the others, yet it is the least favored, left 9 Jam session, Studios Kabako, Kisangani, 2011. network in Kisangani a bit like urban acupuncture that may to its own devices, without running water or electricity. How can Photo: Studios Kabako, with permission generate points of contact that would instigate the circulation of one talk of a city from its most vulnerable neighborhood? 10 street scene in Kisangani, 2009, depicting “a men and women, ideas and energies across the vast anatomy of Here we are in January 2012, then, with our dreams and sto- city in convalescence where the walls and the miser- the city, and even react and reach out to an economy of means. ries to tell, with ups and downs, for it is true that sometimes we ies tell stories” (Virginie Dupray). This would also be a way to take a position vis-à-vis the extreme have the impression of swimming against the current, caught Photo: Agathe Poupeney Photoscene, with permission via Virginie Dupray

34 | african arts Spring 2013 vol. 46, no. 1 vol. 46, no. 1 Spring 2013 african arts | 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00042 by guest on 25 September 2021

Other_121210-001_030-035_CS6.indd 34-35 12/13/12 9:16 PM between the exigencies of Europe and the absences of the DRC, this great country that is adrift. The state that will see no end to launching—and never realizing—its “five works in progress,” to follow the slogan of Joseph Kabila, again recognized as President in 2011 after fiercely contested and altogether controversial “elec- tions.” Nor will the DRC cease filling pockets in the capital, sell- ing the staggering mineral wealth in the south, east, and north to the Chinese, South Africans, Europeans, Canadians. Who knows, one day a mining company may come and dislodge Stu- dios Kabako. No problem, we’re building, ever upwards. Please follow us on www.kabako.org.

34 | african arts Spring 2013 vol. 46, no. 1 vol. 46, no. 1 Spring 2013 african arts | 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00042 by guest on 25 September 2021

Other_121210-001_030-035_CS6.indd 34-35 12/13/12 9:16 PM