It's been a while since the last Friday Evening music session, and I've missed it. So here's a great discovery: Youssoupha. He's French but of a Senegalese mother and a Congolese father - Tabu Ley Rochereau. The song is titled "L'effet papillon" (The butterfly effect) and it makes Kinshasa look like you've never seen it before. Enjoy!
A few days ago, browsing AfricaNews, I came accross this video describing the difficulties of getting a taxi in Kinshasa. Since the city doesn't have a formal public transportation system, people have to rely on taxi-vans or regular taxis to get around. And in big city of about 8 million people where a lot of people have to commute great distances to go to work, this means a huge traffic chaos on a daily basis. To get a better idea about what I'm talking about, watch this video:
And if the lack of proper public transportation wasn't enough of a problem for people who can't walk to work, the lack of road maintenance adds up to the daily hurdles of commuters as shown by this other video (it's in French, but the images speak for themselves):
A few years ago Timothée Rolin decided to start documenting his life through photographs in an ambitious project that he would carry on until his death. From the moment he wakes up until he's in bed about to sleep, he continuously takes pictures of his daily routine with a self-imposed discipline that includes photographing every object and person he interacts with, every unusual happening or any act of handwriting. I met him in August 2005 in Kinshasa, and at first I thought he was very mysterious and eccentric. But we eventually became friends and he hooked me onto photographing more of my daily life. I had always been into photography, but considered it more of an artistic media or a way to record special events for posterity. He changed that perception, and photography became an extension of myself. I even tried to keep up with his strict routine of 100-200 photos a day for a while, but ended up giving up for lack of discipline, or for fear of turning myself into an art object -or both.
I never quite understood what he was exactly intending to do with those thousands of photos of his life, since obviously they would be too boring and time-consuming to revisit. Sometimes he talked about a conceptual project based on "Crime and punishment" with very abstract details, and some other times I understood he was creating a bigger-than-life photo archive of his existence. Searchable by date, location and people so that he could use it as a reference library for his memories. He could do stuff like: "What was I doing on the 18th of March 2002?" "Oh, I watched a movie with Aurore". "And how many times did I do something with Aurore last year?" "127". He could draw stats on his life, find patterns, or simply keep track of little events. But I always had the impression he was up to something much more philosophical that he was not entirely sharing.
Although I'm still unsure about the bigger scheme of things, a few months ago I saw one of the forms of his life project: Six Mois (Six Months). It's a site where he's been uploading several videos made up of hundreds of pictures, each condensing portions of 6 months of his life in about 30 minutes. Of course, I had to watch the two videos comprising 2006, a year he spent in Kinshasa for the most part and in which I made a few guest appearances. The pictures flicker really fast at the sound of a melancholic tune, faster than the eye can grasp. In spite of that I recognized many faces, places and emotions. At the risk of sounding cliché, it all seems like it never happened. It all seems so far away it hurts.
During the first half of 2006 I spent more time in Kinshasa than in the second half, since I was living in Bukavu then. But the video that really transports me to those strange days is the second one, copied below. It is said that when you are about to die life flashes before your eyes really fast. I'm sure that when I die my flash about Kinshasa will pretty much look like this.
I often find gems in my old Delicious bookmarks, as was the case a couple of days ago when I rediscovered the song below by the band Staff Benda Bilili from Kinshasa. During my last trip to the DRC in May, a friend told me about a documentary film that had just come out about the music scene in Kinshasa in general, and about one of their most charismatic figures in particular, a funky guy named Jupiter Bokondji. So a few weeks after the trip I tried to watch the film, which is called Jupiter's dance, but all I could find was this trailer that really got me interested. Jupiter's myspace page only got me more hooked.
And so, from link to link, I stumbled upon Staff Benda Bilili which is a band that Florent de la Tullaye and Renaud Barret (aka Belle Kinoise) encountered while they were filming their Jupiter's Dance. Formed by four homeless handicapped singers/songwriters on hand-built tricycles and accompanied by a young, all-acoustic rhythm section, with stand-out, 17-year-old Roger Landu playing the satonge, a one-string lute he designed and built himself out of a tin can, a bit of old basket and a lone electrical wire. In Lingala Benda Bilili means “look beyond appearances”, literally: put forward what is hidden. In one of their songs they states that the only real handicaps are not in the body, but in the mind.
Due to the success of Staff Benda Bilili, they have now released an album titled Très, Très Fort, not surprisingly produced by Vincent Kenis, already responsible for introducing and producing Konono N°1, Kasaï Allstars and the Congotronics series. The songs were recorded out in the open, mainly in the zoological garden near where the musicians live and where the video below was also filmed.
But as amazing as the back story, the music surpasses it all, as this recent article from The Times UK so well put it:
All bands need a back story, a carefully constructed series of ever more improbably tumultuous events and circumstances that aim to grab as much of the potential audience as possible. In the history of back stories, however, none has come close to the Congo’s Staff Benda Bilili, and the more you read about them, the more you listen to them and watch them, the more you think none ever will. How could they?[...]
If this all sounds a bit hair shirt, a bit worthy, it isn’t, because, most important, Staff Benda Bilili are a really, really good band, the sort of band who, from the moment you hear them, make all the rest of their story, as amazing as it is — this is a band that sued the UN for $100,000 in a royalties row over their song Let’s Go and Vote — simply fall away.
So enough reading already. Just enjoy the music.
Since I "reunited" a couple of months ago with my hard drive that I was using in Congo, I have been revisiting and selecting pictures and videos of those times. Unfortunately, most videos have a very low technical quality, but I have found some decent pieces here and there and I have uploaded them in the awesome Vimeo site (which has a much better quality than YouTube):
Since the videos are very short, they are tiny pieces of memories, little appetizers for those with the desire to travel to Africa some day, or simply for those wishing to imagine how life looks like there. For me, they are tickets to go back to those days whenever I want.
The first video is of a women's group in Bukavu singing a little welcome song (karibu means welcome in Swahili), before starting an electoral sensitization session in April 2006.
The second video is of a street in a village called Aru in the Ituri province in Northeastern Congo (relatively close to Bunia). As you can see, it was shot (in February 2006) from a car window at dusk, showing a typical village evening.
The third video, even shorter, is of a graduation ceremony at the University of Kinshasa, in which students are celebrating with family and friends.
The last video is of the Congo river, shot from a boat sailing back to Kinshasa after an afternoon spent barbequeing and sunbathing on a sand island in the middle of the river.
