Notes on the Aesthetics of Congolese Rumba
In the last fifty years, Congolese popular dance music (also known as “Congolese rumba” and “La musique zaïroise”) has become something of a musica franca for much of sub-Saharan Africa. As Congolese like to say, the captivating sound of their music, firmly grounded in Africa’s encounter with Afro-Cuban culture, has “colonized the rest of the continent”, but the music has gone through a series of important aesthetic changes since it first emerged in the urban colonial centers of the Belgian Congo. Despite this rich history, limited research has been done on the subject and very little has been published on Congolese popular music from the point of view of aesthetics. By tuning in on local conversations about certain aspects of the music’s structure and form, this text attempts to understand how Congolese popular dance music transcends the ugliness of la conjoncture and how this particular expression of beauty enables us to explore the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Drawing from the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, the metaphor of listening is used to argue that the impossibility of hearing music from someone else’s point of view should not stop us from trying to listen.