The Amazing Authenticity Machine
In 1971 the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Belgian Congo) became Zaire and the concept of authenticité was put at the center of a nationalist project that used the past as a means of projecting itself into the future. At the same time that the Mobutu government was trying to create an image of a single national identity (Zairian), it was also insisting on the importance of the more than 350 ethnic groups that made up the national cultural landscape. The management of this diversity was made possible by a strategy of making culture public through traditional song and dance from different parts of the country : animation politique et culturelle. Inspired by the thinking of negritude but also by the patriotic choreographies that Mobutu had observed during an official visit to North Korea and China in the early 1970s, animation politique dominated not only the public sphere in the Congo, but also the political imaginary. The imposition of this phenomenon in almost every aspect of public life (schools, businesses, state-owned companies, television and radio, neighborhood associations, etc.) enabled Mobutu to consolidate his authority as “President-Founder” and “Father of the Revolution”, but it also had the effect of transforming the way that the notion of culture is experienced and understood.