Joyful Resonances: Spirituality and Civic Engagement in the Music of the Congolese Diaspora Eugenio Giorgianni Royal Holloway, University of London A dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music 2019 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Eugenio Giorgianni, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 20 September 2019 2 Table of Contents Chapter one. Introduction Seke Bien 1.1. Presentation 1.2. Joyful resonances 1.2.1. Kongo musical rites and the empowering other 1.2.2. Slave revolts: the political shift of joy 1.2.3. Dancing cosmopolitanism 1.2.4. The city of joy 1.2.5. Indépendance Cha Cha 1.2.6. Political animation and the joy of the worlds 1.2.7. Les Combattants and the silent nexus 1.3. The research protagonists – places, people, ideas 1.4. Methodology – filming in fieldwork 1.4.1. Music video clips in diasporic circulation 1.4.2. Music video collaborations 1.4.3. Ethnographic music video clip and the politics of invention 1.4.4. Beyond Ethnofiction: music video clip as radical collaboration 1.5. Thesis overview Chapter two. Mulele. Ethnographic encounters through the lens 2.1. A voyage to mikili and conscious music: Mulele’s life experiences 2.2. The way forward. The agency of silence in Congolese diaspora 2.3. Back to Africa. Fluid positioning to avoid ghettoization 2.4. The encounter and the idea of a music video 2.5. More fiyah! Enthusiastic collaborative video making 2.5.1. Digital magic: collaborative video editing 2.6. Other collaborative texts 3 2.7. Conclusions Chapter three. Sonic Architecture: on and off stage dynamics, strategies and discourses in Mulele’s performances 3.1 Composing an African sound scape in London 3.1.1 The kino-eye on stage: reflexive pleasure and ritual enhancer 3.2 Scenic xenophilia and stage sharing in Congolese Diaspora 3.3 Getting there: new scenarios with the same audience 3.3.1 Cosmic transculturalism and self-questioning on stage 3.4 AfroJOY: exotic originality 3.5 Conclusions Chapter four. The branch and the root. A musical dialogue about Africanness 4.1 Conscious Black men 4.2 Digital Organicity 4.3 Ancestral Oneness 4.4 Over 400 years ago 4.5 Conclusions Chapter five. The liturgical rhythm. African Christian music and the project of inculturation seen from the Congolese Diaspora in Rome 5.1 Congolese Rome 5.2 Spiritual patterns 5.3 The heretical genius 5.4 Black saints burning at the stake. Four centuries of Congolese Christianity 5.5 Congolese and African Christianity under colonialism 5.6 The cultural shift 5.7 Don Pierre 5.8 Music as self-implication 5.9 The rhythmic paradigm 4 5.10 The African Theology of Inculturation 5.11 The music of inculturation 5.11.1 Music example 1: the Missa Luba 5.11.2 Music example 2: Udi Dibue 5.12 Conclusions Chapter six. Bondeko, esengo, bolingo. Musical liturgy of the diasporic Congolese Rite in Rome 6.1 An African Catholic liturgy 6.1.1 The Zairian anomaly 6.1.2 Politics of the ancestors 6.1.3 Putting Africa at the centre 6.2 A musical anthropology of the sacred 6.3 The Bondeko choir 6.3.1 L’Abbé Cola 6.4 Feeling at home. Bodily engagement in the diasporic mass 6.4.1 Maundy Thursday 6.5 A sensitive liturgy 6.5.1 Tokolonga. Reactions to Congolese war from the pulpit 6.6 Christian policies on migration 6.6.1 The Bondekos in St. Peter’s Basilica 6.7 Conclusions Chapter seven. Conclusions List of audio visual works made during the research Bibliography 5 Abstract The research explores musical expressions of spirituality and political discourses produced by diasporic Congolese popular music makers through a participatory audiovisual ethnography. The main research fields are the following: elaboration of a Congolese musical nationalism in London underground jazz and African music scene; and the weekly performance of the music-based Congolese Catholic liturgy by the Bondeko parish choir in Rome, Italy. The common thread among these experiences is the idea of joy as a Central African mode of social and political action connecting human bodies to other entities through collective music-induced sensory ecstasy. The fluid nature of this ritual nexus links social reproduction to contact with the empowering, legitimating dead, configuring otherness (cultural, spiritual, and digital) as a source of vital energy. Thanks to the inclusive nature of music rites, Congolese musicians negotiate their position through new creative encounters, fostering processes of transculturation. The scenic display of Africanness spectacularises the diasporic joyful nexus without losing its ritual efficacy, while at the same time attracting other social and musical actors into the creative nexus. By renewing and pluralising the contact with their ancestors, these diasporic actors creatively face dramatic postcolonial challenges, and make a critique of their society in increasingly digitalised transnational Congolese public opinion by projecting their desires, longings, and frustrations onto the image of a redeemed Congo. The camera becomes an element of inclusion in music making and an intensifier of fieldwork relationships and emotions through the creation of collaborative music video clips with the musicians. Collaborative research practice and bodily involvement in music making through the camera give space for rethinking ethnomusicological practices through nonverbal forms of fieldwork interactions and more inclusive modes of academic communication. 6 Chapter one. Introduction Seke Bien Saturday 23 January 2016. I go to Mulele’s place – a room in a warehouse in Manor House, North-East London – to shoot the video clip of his brand new song Seke Bien. When I enter the room, very smoky and packed with people, Mulele is still adding the vocal lines to the track. Coco Gabana, a Congolese artist featuring in Seke Bien, is singing into a studio microphone, while Mulele is recording through his laptop. Inside the room, there are another two Congolese friends, and Tanya, who is going to dance in the video. Once the recording session has ended, we start setting up the room for the filming. We put some twenty big candles in a large circle, sticking them to the floor with some melted wax. Mulele puts a Congolese wooden mask right outside the circle of candles and places a wooden stick, a shell necklace, a little harp, and a small drum inside the circle, all close to the centre, together with his headstock-less guitar. Then, while I am setting up the camera and lights, he helps Tanya to get ready for the video, fastening a line of shells on her forehead and a straw skirt on her waist. Tanya – quite surprised and amused – tries to ascertain what is going on. She is a Londoner of African Caribbean origin, and she does not have any insight into Congolese culture (apart from the fact that Mulele is a friend of hers). She had been asked a couple of days ago to feature in the video, and she accepted enthusiastically, even if she is quite concerned about how to dance to Congolese music. “No worries, do it your way” Mulele reassures her, “Just listen to the music, and improvise. Look: we Congolese dance like that.” He shows her a sample of how to dance to his song, moving legs and waists, slightly bending the knees. “But you can do whatever you want.” “‘Cause I know a bit of Senegalese dance, and I was thinking of doing a bit of that…” “That’s fine!” Mulele agrees, “It is an open thing, put whatever you like. More fire!” 7 “Am I supposed to use these things you put on the floor?” She refers to the stick, harp, and the rest of the paraphernalia Mulele had spread around on the floor. “The thing is, music is power.” Mulele stops helping her with her makeup, and looks at her seriously “and the power comes out of the spirits, the spirits of our ancestors. And you, as a woman, you are powerful, and this power is magic. This is a bit of the idea of the song. The candles, and the mask there, are the magic. This is like the house of the fétiche, the juju. So, you are gonna be inside the circle of candles, and you are evocating the spirits of the ancestors, to put the power in the guitar.” “Oh, wow! How can I do that?” “You dance as you know, and then you create the atmosphere, you create the vibes, you create the fire!” Tanya laughs. Then, she starts moving around the objects inside the circle; when she moves her arms, the several metallic bracelets that she is wearing clink together. Mulele steps back to watch the whole scenography: “Yes! More fire!” We do the first take, with Tanya enacting the evocation of the spirits of the ancestors to the rhythm of the song. We are all quite satisfied with the result: Mulele and his friends keep on exclaiming ‘Seke Bien!’ (the track’s title, literally ‘it’s all right’, in the Lingala vernacular of Kinshasa) 1 approvingly, laughing every time someone shouts that sentence, which has become the motto of the day. During the break, Mulele has an idea for the next shot: “Now, I have to enter the circle, in a trance. The dance is about trance, all the ritual means the trance.” I film the first attempt, but the dynamics of the scene do not persuade any of the people involved. One of Mulele’s Congolese friends starts explaining to Tanya how to beckon Mulele inside the circle: “The 1 The use of the phrase in Kinshasa appears to be quite recent, as many mature speakers are not familiar with it.