On Saturday, October 5, the legendary superstar Kanda Bongo Man performed with his Orchestra Belle Mambo at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center as a part of Celebrating Congo 2013. In an eye-opening event, the festival showcased celebratory elements of Congolese culture as a means of helping Westerners understand both the vibrancy and the conflict that co-exist in Congo. The festival, which took place October 4-5, was sponsored by the UNC Music Department and hosted by student group Yole!Africa U.S., Celebrating Congo 2013 featured guests from across the world and across the spectrum of creative backgrounds. Yole!Africa U.S. is a student led, non-profit organization at UNC-Chapel Hill advised by Dr. Chérie Rivers Ndaliko of the music department. The goal of Yole!Africa U.S. is to foster cultural exchange between Congolese youth and their peers at Carolina. The organization seeks to do this through sharing and co-creating cultural pieces, in particular music and film. As both an arts festival and academic conference, Celebrating Congo 2013 sought to “engage the Carolina community in meaningful discussion about both the cultural power and conflict of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” as stated on the festival website. The culminating point of the festival was Kanda Bongo Man’s performance Saturday night. Kanda Bongo Man and the Orchestra Belle Mambo have been international superstars since they began performing in the 1980s. They have toured throughout the continent of Africa, Europe, Australia, Middle East, Canada, and the United States. According to Lubangi Muniania, an art educator who participated at the festival, “His popularity helped him meet with so many African heads of states as the leading ‘ambassador’ of popular culture of Africa.” For most Carolina students, however, Kanda Bongo Man and Congolese culture are as far off their radars as the Democratic Republic of the Congo is far in terms of geographical distance. I was ignorant of the man and his music until about a week before the festival. When talking about Kanda Bongo Man and the soukous genre, I was told by one of the event’s coordinators that soukous is “the sexiest booty shaking music you’ll ever hear.” Having now heard and experience Kanda Bongo Man firsthand, I can affirm this statement. His band, a modest four-piece group consisting of electric and bass guitars, keyboard, and drums, they created a sound which sounded familiar. In some regards, soukous has a very similar aesthetic to Afro-Cuban music. Rhythmically, the bass and drums groove hard with syncopated, but not totally inaccessible lines – it is dance music after all. Muniania, who has worked closely with Kanda Bongo Man and many other Congolese musicians, has written on soukous: “It’s lilting, rippling, dance groove that seems to smile from every register, with inseparable melody and rhythm.” At the beginning of their set, the band performed separate from Kanda Bongo Man. The upbeat group built up excitement for the main attraction, and as I soon discovered, there were many passionate fans in the audience. “ALLÉ, ALLÉ, ALLÉ, ALLÉ,” shouted Kanda Bongo Man over the mic, yelling in French “GO, GO, GO, GO!” Distinctly cool. That is what I thought of Kanda Bongo Man. With his wide, round-brimmed hat and relaxed spirit yet energetic vibrancy, I felt like he was the embodiment of cool. What surprised me most was how quickly the crowd got up, or rather shot up, out of their seats. As soon as he arrived on stage, Kanda Bongo Man compelled almost the entire auditorium to dance. I couldn’t help but smile at a young father who danced as he carried his daughter on his shoulders. I could easily compare him and his stage presence to that of funk legend George Clinton. When Clinton performed at Memorial Hall last month, I realized what made his performance so exciting. When I saw Kanda Bongo Man just a week later, I instantly had a flashback and realized that the performance of a man who I had known for several weeks was just as exciting to me as the performance of Clinton, whose music I’ve been listening to and obsessed over for almost a decade. Kanda Bongo Man and George Clinton are successful as performers because they are leader – they get what they want out of a band and know what a crowd needs to hear and see in order to excite the most people as quickly and for as long as possible. At the end of his performance, Kanda Bongo Man invited students onstage, and the dancers who had previously occupied the space in front of the auditorium nearly swarmed him and the band. Surrounded by fans, both new and old, he professed his love for the crowd, his excitement for the event, and his pride in the message of the festival. Through all the music, the fun and the dancing, he brought Celebrating Congo 2013 full circle and to an excellent close, reminding everyone of the beauty and brilliance of Congolese culture. If the goal of Yole!Africa U.S. and Celebrating Congo 2013 was to help UNC students see Congolese as people, people with a distinguished and nuanced culture, people with a story to tell, then the festival in my opinion was a major success. Visit Yole!Africa U.S. on Facebook here. To learn more about the ongoing challenges in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, visit Friends of the Congo. *End Article* “Kanda Bongo Man” links to http://www.youtube.com/channel/UChqKkwzMCF6o_-ZIThZ6ZqQ “Celebrating Congo 2013” links to http://www.salaamkivu.org/skiff-us-celebrating-congo.html “Yole!Africa U.S.” links to http://yoleafrica.us/ “Lubangi Muniania” links to http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/KandaBongoMan “here” links to https://www.facebook.com/YoleAfricaUS “Friends of the Congo” links to http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/ ––John Reardon Photo's by Maggie Zabrine
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