Last month, President Felix Tshisekedi’s government in Kinshasa suffered a stinging defeat when the AFC/M23 rebel coalition captured the key and strategic eastern city of Goma.
Goma, which sits on the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, is the capital of North Kivu province. It is also the unofficial mineral capital, not only of the extravagantly mineral-rich eastern DRC but of the Great Lakes region.
It is also the sharp point of juxtaposition between the DRC and Rwanda, with Kinshasa accusing Kigali of backing the rebels, a charge which Kigali meets with studied denial.
Rubavu, on the Rwanda side, and Goma both kiss the edge of Lake Kivu, yet they might as well be worlds apart. The Rwanda border point gleams with cleanliness modern infrastructure, and automatic swipe gates. The Congo side is bedlam, epic chaos. Several of the elite in Goma get their clean water from the Rwanda side. Until the recent flare-up, many foreign and Congolese businesspeople who made their fortune in Congo lived on the Rwanda side, fleeing the former’s lawlessness, leaving Rubavu every morning and returning in the evening to its safety and manicured lawns. Kenyan banks, sniffing the money, are aplenty in Rubavu. Here, the electricity is always on. On the Congo side, it is erratic.
At night, the Rwanda side of Lake Kivu is lit up by the world’s largest concentration of floating methane platforms extracting gas from the lake’s bottom, turning it into electricity onshore. Goma remains in shadow. The Congo side is in darkness. By day, the Rwanda side is patrolled by police boats with mounted machine guns. It is tightly governed, with periods of rest to allow fish stocks to recover before fisherfolk are allowed to go out with their nets. The Congo side is spotted with small, struggling fishing boats.
Resorts and big homes with private piers have sprouted on the Rwanda side of the lake. The Congo side has fishing villages.
Despite this, Goma is regarded by many as the cleanest city in DRC. Though data is hard to find, the popular belief is that more money was generated in and around Goma in a day than in the capital, Kinshasa. Before the crime and violence that enveloped it as Congolese and allied forces massed there ahead of the AFC/M23 advance, the other area where Goma trumped Rubavu was in liveliness. Wild and loud, it reverberated with the world-famous Congolese rumba and soukous music.
These stark contrasts fuel the stereotype of Congolese as people more inclined to dance than to govern, their energies and imagination consumed by music, dance, and flamboyance.
As AFC/M23 took Goma, this image of slothful and party-happy Congolese was amplified by a viral video that showed Congolese military men and women in a club, with their guns, dancing and grinding against each other. The AFC/M23, perhaps referencing the more restrained tradition found in parts of eastern DRC, issued a statement ridiculing Tshisekedi for throwing a lavish birthday party, and his kin dancing away in clubs as the country burnt.
The Congolese leadership’s approach, turning to the UN and seeking foreign intervention rather than confronting the crisis head-on, only reinforces the narrative that they can’t fight their battles. The Congolese government set up shop at the UN in New York to get the UN Security Council not only to condemn AFC/M23 and Rwanda but also to sanction them. Its Foreign Minister, Thérèse Kayikwamba, was visibly irritated by a Security Council she thought wasn’t going far enough.
She has since spent time fighting a war against Rwanda in European capitals, writing to European football clubs which have sponsorship deals with Rwanda to cut them off, and beseeching the world motorsport governing body, FIA, not to consider Rwanda’s bid to host the return of a Formula One race to Africa. This is the first time Africa has seen this kind of diplomatic war.
Tshisekedi himself is traversing the continent looking for countries that can send soldiers to help him fight the rebels. In the battle for Goma, 14 South African and three Malawian soldiers in the South African Development Community (SADC) force supporting Kinshasa were killed. Nearly 300 European mercenaries fighting for the government were cornered. They were released to go back home through Kigali airport, in a walk of shame across the DRC-Rwanda border. Burundian forces were routed in the rebel advance, and it is reported that possibly up to 10,000 of them are massed in Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, on which the AFC/M23 are advancing. Thousands of pro-Congo militia and troops surrendered to the rebels – too easily, according to Kinshasa, which is putting nearly seven dozen of them on trial for cowardice.
The peculiarity of this Congolese approach is stark when compared with several of its neighbours. Take the case of Uganda to its northeast. Uganda was wracked by rebellions in its northern regions from late 1986 after President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) rebels (in which President Paul Kagame and other Rwandans who were refugees in Uganda fought) had taken power earlier in January.
The longest of these rebellions was by the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony. South Sudan was then in the grip of a long rebellion against what was termed a “repressive and discriminatory Arab and Muslim-dominated regime.”
Museveni and the charismatic Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement leader John Garang were close friends, having been revolutionary buddies at Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania. Khartoum believed Museveni was giving succour to the SPLA and backed the LRA and two other groups linked to former Uganda military ruler Idi Amin (who had been deposed in 1979) and regrouped inside Sudan. Its air force bombed Ugandan territory frequently.
By 1989, Khartoum had made a major push against the SPLA, and the rebels were on the back foot. The spectacle of SPLA rebels falling back into Uganda with the Khartoum forces at the border was too scary for Kampala. Uganda didn’t go to the UN Security Council or even the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the precursor to the African Union. Museveni left Kampala and camped in a tent in northern Uganda to mobilise a counter-war effort.
In 1990, it unleashed its fightback. Thousands of Ugandan troops swarmed across the border into Sudan, overrunning camps of the Amin-linked rebel groups and linking up with the SPLA in a campaign that pushed Khartoum’s forces more than 200 kilometres away beyond Juba. In later years, it would pursue the LRA through eastern DRC and into the Central African Republic.
Rwanda did the same thing, following a string of attacks across its border from DRC in its northern region by FDLR, formed by forces that carried out the Genocide against the Tutsi, and by the Congolese army in 1996. It ended in the ouster of the corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko and the installation of Congolese veteran rebel leader Laurent Kabila as president in May 1997. Along the way to Kinshasa, other “progressive” forces in Africa at that period – Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, South Africa, and others – joined in a big anti-Mobutu alliance.
That alliance fell apart spectacularly in 1998, leaving Rwanda and Uganda ranged against Kabila and southern African forces. The same pattern is repeating this time too in the Congo crisis.
This led to the deadly so-called “Second Congo War”. The course of the war began to turn with the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement, which was signed by the six warring countries (DRC, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Uganda) through July and August 1999. The shooting didn’t stop, and the peace-making rolled into the Sun City Agreement, signed between the same warring parties and several Congolese groups on April 2. 2002. It was so named because the talks and signing took place at the vast luxury South African casino resort of Sun City.
Sun City produced many stories about Congolese who “weren’t serious”, skipping the talks to play at Sun City’s casinos and dancing in the clubs.
As the agreement was headed to the printer and delegates were gathering in the hall, Congolese groups threw a last-minute curveball into it.
The outside players decided that the issues holding up the signing could only be decided by the Congolese, so they were given time to break away and resolve them among themselves without outsiders.
What happened next is a juicy tale still told in the political corridors and bars of Kampala today as if it were yesterday. The rest of the world waited in the hall for them to return. They didn’t. One hour became two hours, then three. After a long time, fearing the Congolese might have disagreed violently and killed themselves in a fight, it was decided to send Ugandan Brigadier Noble Mayombo to go and check what was going on. Mayombo had been Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s point man in DRC and had close links to many rebel leaders.
When Mayombo entered the room, he was stunned. The Congolese adversaries weren’t even in talks. They had formed a circle and were playing phantom instruments, singing classic Congolese soukous hits by greats like Franco and Tabu Ley, and dancing away. A perplexed Mayombo sneaked away to report that all was okay.
Left alone, the Congolese had seemed to set aside their differences and sang and danced to the best of their land. But what if the biggest error has been to see DRC as a country of just “people of ndombolo” and nothing else?
More thoughtful reflection on DRC increasingly sees what seems to be the Congolese obsession with music and the good things in life as fundamentally political, born of its uniquely brutal Belgian colonial history and its vastness. Africa’s second-largest country, it has some of the worst infrastructure on the continent, with large swathes of it still cut off from the rest. It is one of the few countries in Africa that doesn’t have a single unified paved road linking one border to the other, unlike Algeria, which is bigger, where the Trans-Sahara Highway runs for 2,300 kilometres from north to south, with sections of it being particularly well-maintained.
This view sees music in DRC as the “big connector of a huge country”. It is the way Congolese speak to each other, and the people – as opposed to the politicians – dialogue. It is founded on the fact that music has been a vehicle for political expression since the colonial period.
During the push for independence in the late 1950s, the song “Indépendance Cha Cha” by Joseph Kabasele (Le Grand Kallé) became an unofficial anthem for independence movements, not just in Congo but across Africa.
After independence in 1960, music continued to be a political platform. During Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship (1965-1997), music was both censored and used for propaganda. However, musicians like Franco Luambo Makiadi subtly slated the government in songs. His song “Mario” (1985) was an indirect critique of Mobutu’s regime. It tells the story of a young man named Mario, which many interpreted as an allegory for the suffering of the Congolese people under Mobutu’s rule.
Franco’s song “Attention na Sida” (Beware of AIDS), while ostensibly about health, was seen as a commentary on the corruption and decay under Mobutu.
Even Koffi Olomide, who many wouldn’t consider a likely champion for any worthy cause, served up “Congo” in 2012, a song which continues to resonate as it reflects on the suffering caused by the various conflicts in Congo, calling for peace and highlighting the plight of civilians caught in war.
Dances like ndombolo and kwassa kwassa have also been known to convey political messages, with the context in which they are performed or the energy of their execution signifying resistance or critique.
In DRC, it’s often more than the song: who sings or dances to it, where, and how is significant. A pro-M23 intellectual told me; “our people will win because they understand better what the Congolese are saying with their music”. And despite their criticism, seeing Tshisekedi’s brother dancing lavishly as the armies battled for Goma could have been a useful piece of publicly available intelligence.
