01 One nomination, two states

The reason is in the previous article in this series: Brazzaville and Kinshasa are the world's only pair of capitals that grew facing each other on opposite banks of a river, within sight of one another. What is cooked up here crosses the water, and what is cooked up over there crosses back.

That is why the genre is documented as originating in both Congos and, in particular, in those two adjacent cities. Neither invented it alone, and neither can claim it whole. It is probably the cleanest example there is of a culture that ignores a border made of water.

02 Where it comes from

Congolese rumba — also called African rumba or Lingala rumba — takes shape in the late 1930s, and its genealogy has two very different branches. On one side, the Kongolese dance music called maringa, from here. On the other, Cuban son, which arrived on record, crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the one its own roots had taken.

A music that left Africa for the Caribbean, was transformed there over centuries, and came back on vinyl to merge with what had stayed at home.

From that mix came a genre that has in turn produced others. Soukous and ndombolo, danced across half of Africa and on plenty of dance floors elsewhere, are direct derivatives of Congolese rumba. And its influence can be traced in Kenyan benga, Cameroonian makossa and everything that in East Africa is simply called "the Congolese sound".

03 How it sounds

The instrumentation is recognisable once you know what to listen for. The guitar leads, and it is played with the fingers rather than a pick; the bass is often acoustic; there are drums, brass and voices, almost always several, threading over one another. The usual language is Lingala, one of the country's two national languages alongside Kituba.

A rehearsal in a room with peeling plaster walls and an earth floor: on the right, a man seated on a yellow plastic chair plays a small-bodied wood-coloured electric guitar, leaning over the neck; behind him, another man in a felt hat plays an acoustic guitar on a blue chair; on the left, a woman in a dress printed with green and blue leaves dances standing, smiling with her arms open; around them, white plastic chairs and several people sitting and watching.
A rumba rehearsal across the river, in Kinshasa. Fingerstyle guitar and threaded voices are the genre's signature.Jeanne Vu Van / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0·CC BY-SA 4.0

04 Where to hear it

Here comes the part that has to be said honestly. There is no listings site you can check from home, no official venue, no programme announced weeks ahead. Rumba is played where it is played, and the times are found out by asking: at the hotel, at the market, from whoever is driving you.

That puts a lot of people off and should not. It is exactly the same mechanism by which live music works in any city where the genre is alive rather than packaged. And there is an institutional fact backing up that it is alive here: in 2013 Brazzaville was designated a City of Music and joined the Creative Cities Network.

A market street seen along its length: on both sides, tables and planks on trestles with large blue and red parasols open above them; on the left, green and blue basins full of peeled white cassava roots; on the right, a long table with dark smoked fish laid out and a wall covered in a graffiti mural of rounded lettering in blue, white and red; two people walk away down the middle of the street, and at the back the unfinished frame of a building under construction shows.
An ordinary neighbourhood street. Asking here where the music is tonight works better than any search engine.Xavier Hakiza / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0·CC BY-SA 4.0
The city seen from the water: the lower half of the frame is the river, brown and chopped into short waves; on the bank, a low line of white and ochre buildings among trees, with a launch and some barges moored; above everything rises a cylindrical tower with a fluted shaft and a slightly swelling profile, an aerial at its top; the sky is white and loaded.
The river between the two cities. This is the only thing separating the two countries that signed the same file.Leon Bilili / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0·CC BY-SA 4.0

And one last note, the one that makes the fact worth keeping. If you end up hearing rumba one night in Brazzaville, bear in mind that a few kilometres away, across the water and in another country, people are listening to exactly the same thing. A heritage file rarely describes something so literally true.

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Lucía Montes

Worth Knowing editor · Flowtravel

Lucía chases the fact that changes how you look at a place.

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