Kongo with a K : acoustic repertoires and hegemony in Kinshasa

In this dissertation I study how cultural, historical, and linguistic Kongo references have been mobilized for emancipatory purposes throughout Kinshasa’s history. According to MacGaffey (2016: 159), Kongo remains an “ill-defined” identity, sometimes understood as an ethnicity, a kingdom, a culture, or a region. The historical legacy of the well-documented, precolonial African polity of the Kongo Kingdom, Kongo dia Ntotila, indeed plays an important role in the imagination of a shared Kongo past in which linguistic and national unity are said to have thrived. More recent Kongo actors, such as the prophet Simon Kimbangu (1889/1890-1951) and the DR Congo’s first president, Joseph Kasa-Vubu (1917-1969), too, contribute to what in this dissertation is called ‘the (Ki)Kongo repertoire’: a popular set of references consisting of language (Kikongo) but of also a proud belonging to the imagined community of Ne Kongo or Bena Kongo – the dignified descendants of the Kongo Kingdom –, based on imaginations of a shared history, cultural patterns, moral norms, and references to important Kongo individuals. Based on archival research, literature, digital sources, and a total of eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kinshasa, I argue that the (Ki)Kongo repertoire is an important source of counterhegemonic collective self-making in Kinshasa. The targets of its counterhegemonic use are multiple but to a large extent mutually related: missionary paternalism, colonial governance, and those who collaborated with it until 1960; Mobutu’s and Kabila’s regimes, ‘immoral’ urbanity, Christianity, and the unfulfilled promises of ‘modernity’ after 1960. The hegemonic position of the ‘the killer language’ Lingala, runs through that history as a linguistic leitmotif. The dissertation first explores Kinshasa’s amplified ambiances and its anti-colonial political Kongo history of the 1950s. It then singles out three spheres in which counterhegemonic (Ki)Kongo meaning making are at play: the production of political memory, the competition among the city’s many religious actors, and the quest for authenticity and patronage in Kinshasa’s music scene. The result is a Kinshasa-centered ethnography of historical Kongo imagination with particular attention for language and its acoustic features