Play Lumumba Heros National
{Audio + Still Pictures}
[DRC]
Joseph Kabasele Tshamala (1930-1983),
Le Grand Kalle himself, was in many
ways the founding father of modern Congolese music[1];
a brand of music which we, a good number of us, have come to know as #LingalaPop.
Many keen observers will acknowledge that LingalaPop in many ways became the
roots and trunk of Afropop, and now dominates all of Central, Eastern and
Southern Africa – and even parts of West Africa. Its counterpart in North
Africa is the even more recent phenomenon – ArabPop and/or MaghrebPop. Afrobeat
is dominant in Nigeria, and has a huge influence among its neighbors –
particularly Ghana, Togo and Cameroon.
In Lumumba Heros National, Joseph Kabasele and his pioneering band,
African Jazz, sing the praises of Patrice Emery Lumumba (1925-61) – a leading
pro-independence politician and Republic of the Congo’s first Prime Minister[2].
The song is a finely fitting and
absolutely spell-binding melody. Though the clip makes use of still pictures rather
than ‘moving’, the visibility of the song’s hero and the events around him
that it offers is co-equal with the sounds that the ear is ‘fed’ with. It is
both memorable and historic in tenor, like the lyrics and the band’s
instrumental rendition of moments in a young nation’s early life that are at
once triumphant and tragic. It’s a forever song.
One noteworthy and perhaps most
surprising feature of this song is that the lyrics were written and sung (in
the early Sixties!) almost entirely in Swahili and not, as one would have expected,
Lingala![3]
Likewise noteworthy, too, is that Swahili was one of the four languages which
Lumumba, a sapeur of sorts, spoke.
How he learnt it, and what motivated him, one would love to know. Let me know
when you do.
I vividly remember the song’s mournful
and funerary sounds from long ago – not when it was released, but as the
Sixties got going. The sounds came mostly over wired radio – and sometimes
levitated over vinyl – in our pioneering ‘gated community’ of railway workers
and, as I can say now, their young families – there in Nairobi’s Eastlands,
some 2,415 kilometers (roughly 1,500 miles) far, far to the east of Kinshasa,
DRC’s capital, as the pigeon – or the Osprey[4]
– flies.
But I remember just as clearly conversations
that I, playing with mates, could hear
going on among despondent grounds-workers in our ‘estate’ – nay, ‘lawn-mowers’ of
sorts and such – when the news of Lumumba’s assassination arrived and churned
in our midst at radio and ‘bush-telegraph’ speeds. It must have been January
1961.
A song which had surely begun its
unique life-course as an inspirational, celebratory, chante for an independence hero in circa June 1960, so soon and so tragically became, in effect and in
the space of only seven months or so, a dirge! Those who encountered its distinct
and entrancing tunes in the years after January 1961, and knew of the fate that
had befallen their hero Lumumba, must have been, I imagine, hard put to believe
that it had ever been anything but a mourning song. Not knowing exactly when
the song was released, I, for one, had for the longest time, indeed until year 2020
came calling, assumed that it had been prompted, ‘inspired’, by Lumumba’s
assassination. The lyrics, mostly in a quaint version of Swahili, included a
few distinct words (such as ‘sikukuu’) and phrases with patently ‘broken’
meaning-strings and allusions which one could be forgiven for not taking too
literally.
In 1967, Franco and L’O.K. Jazz also
released a music audio by the same title. It was much more conducive to dancing
than its introspective and soul-searching predecessor, and in it Mobutu’s name
featured prominently. But that’s not the only reason I much prefer Kabasele’s.
Comparisons will probably rage forever. Here it is: Lumumba Heros National. The
lyrics, both in Lingala and in English translation, appear on the same YouTube
page as the audio of the song.
LISTEN: Tabu Ley Mourns Kabasele
{Audio}
The lyrics of Franco’s version, which
appear lower down the page to which the link just given takes you, don’t have
the funerary bent of the earlier song. But it adds references to Mobutu which,
given his reported complicity in the execution of Lumumba, will surely rub
Lumumba’s admirers the wrong way. As Vientianegirl remarked in one of the public
comments on the song’s YouTube page, “Franco is praising Mobutu as [an] heir [to] Lumumba’s
legacy, while in reality Mobutu actively took part in Lumumba's assassination.”[5]
[1] See Chris May (2003) “Le
Grand Kalle: His Life, His Music” www.allaboutjazz.com
[2] He was in office only from June 30th, 1960 to September
1960, when he was deposed by a cold-war
coalition of local political and military actors (spearheaded by Joseph Kasavubu
and Joseph Mobutu) on the one hand and foreign state and multinational actors
(Belgium, the US and the UN) on the other. He was then into custody in October
and – after three months or so of byzantine machinations, prison-break,
cat-and-mouse pursuits and final capture – executed by his captors
on January 17th, 1961. martyred national hero.
[3] Lumumba Heros National is
not the only song he sung in Swahili. Another song, released in 1961-1962, is
now titled simply and confoundingly as B.B 69. It is a truly funky
piece, and was extremely popular on radio in Nairobi, back in the day. It
remains super-hot, even now! But most of B.B 69’s visibility, I hazard to say,
was in the clubs and at parties – and secondarily in the modest but
aspirational homes of the lumpen proletariat, the nascent elite, and parents of
future ones.
