Congo (83 page)

There are more than two hundred organizations for women’s rights in Goma alone right now. There are a lot of fake NGOs among them, local organizations that line their own pockets with foreign money at the expense of women who are ill. Everyone just comes here and starts something up. The money from the donor countries goes by way of the United Nations, but they take a substantial commission, up to 20 or 30 percent. There is a true UN Mafia! I don’t work with them anymore. The UN Food Program, UNICEF . . . they come here with enormous budgets, but 60 percent of it goes to logistics, without any results being booked first. All these foreigners apparently have to receive “danger pay,” all these offices have to be air-conditioned, they have to be well-furnished and guarded. And a terrible amount of money goes to public relations. They want to have a high profile, even here. But the women it’s all about are in danger and require discretion.
²⁹

Tough language, and Masika is not just anybody: in 2005 she was one of the thousand women jointly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2009 she received the prestigious Human Rights Defenders Tulip from the Dutch government and the Pax Christi International Peace Award.

C
OMPARED WITH THE HUMANITARIAN PRETENSIONS
of development aid, trade and industry were at least straightforward about their financial priorities. Profits were the thing. That there is nothing dishonorable about this requires no explanation for Dolf van den Brink. After taking a degree in philosophy and business administration, this irrepressibly dynamic young Dutchman became commercial director of Heineken in Kinshasa: the number two man at Bralima. In that position, he was one of those responsible for the exceptional growth seen in recent years. “When I came here in 2005, Primus had a 30 percent market share in Kinshasa, while Skol, the brand sold by our competitor Bracongo, had 70 percent. Now the situation has been reversed: we have 70 percent and Skol only 30.”
³⁰
He showed me a slide from a PowerPoint presentation. The line on the chart showed a rising curve. Written above it, in hip management lingo:
On a gagné beaucoup de batailles, mais pas encore la guerre!
We’ve won lots of battles, but we still haven’t won the war! In Bralima’s conference room there hung a plaque, to remind the staff of their first obligation:
Esprit de combat!
(fighting spirit!)—as though this country had not just emerged from a hideous conflict.

And a war it was. The main reason Bracongo had done so well at first was that it had Werrason, while Bralima had to make do with J. B. Mpiana. Werrason and Mpiana were wildly popular pop musicians who had taken part in both breweries’ promotional campaigns. In 2005 Werrason was clearly more successful and it was unthinkable that any of his fans would ever order a Primus. At a time when politicians were not elected, people had no jobs and three-quarters of the urban population was under twenty-five, pop musicians wielded immense power.

The rivalry between J. B. Mpiana and Werrason was legendary. Each generation in Congolese pop music had known its own clash: between Franco and Kabasele in the 1950s, between Franco and Tabu Ley in the 1960s, between Papa Wemba and Koffi Olomide in the 1980s. In the late 1990s, though, the mood became even grimmer. In 1981, Mpiana and Werrason had joined forces in a band with the megalomaniacal name Wenge Musica 4x4 Tout Terrain Bon Chic Bon Genre. That was asking for a row. It was a legendary lineup that bestowed upon the world in general and Kinshasa in particular the
ndombolo
, the most popular dance style of the nineties and of the new century, a choral dance in which the men bent down low and seemed to be boxing while the women rolled their buttocks in truly spectacular fashion. The
ndombolo
was provocative, obscene, hilarious, and, as often goes with trendy dance styles, also kind of fun. Onstage Werrason and Mpiana showed off their Telecels, the first generation of cell phones, which were the size of a rubber overshoe. At that point those devices were reserved almost exclusively for top military officials and cabinet ministers, but now fans shoved beer bottles far down into their back pockets to create the impression that they, too, owned such a voluminous example of cutting-edge technology. Wenge Musica was
the
sensation of the nineties. When Kabila took Kinshasa, people danced the
ndombolo
. But Wenge Musica went the way of all Congolese pop groups or political parties once they gain a bit of success: it fell apart. Werrason and Mpiana were at each other’s throats, the fans were splintered, and even today they will talk to you of the power struggle with a passion and precision one rarely hears when they speak of the war.

People speak without irony of
la guerre des albums
,
la guerre des salles
, and
la guerre des stades
. Initially, Werrason was the contender who displayed exceptional militance: his first CD was called
Force d’Intervention Rapide
(rapid intervention force). With song titles like
Attentat
(Attack),
État d’Urgence
(State of Emergency),
Ultimatum, Couvre-feu
(Curfew), and
Cessez-le-Feu
(Cease-fire), it was clear that military jargon was already trickling into pop culture.
³¹
Each album brought with it a new dance and a new fashion. Fans waited to buy clothes until the new CD was released. But in 1999, when Mpiana became the first of his generation to fill the legendary Parisian concert halls Zénith and Olympia, Werrason took revenge by playing to twenty-thousand fans at the Bercy sports palace, and then moving on to the Zénith and Olympia. In France,
bien sûr
; from now on, Congolese history would also be acted out in the haunts of its expatriates.

Around the metro stations Chateau d’Eau in Paris, Porte de Namur in Brussels, and Seven Sisters in London, Congolese entertainment districts arose, complete with hairdressers, music shops, and greengrocers selling manioc and smoked grubs. The country’s misery had caused tens of thousands to emigrate. In Kinshasa, Werrason and Mpiana tried to score points off each other during concerts at the Stade des Martyrs, where the audiences sometimes numbered more than one hundred thousand. In 2005 they held a showdown
fara-fara
(face-to-face), with podiums set up at opposite ends of the field. This
concert du siècle
was intended to be a war of attrition, to decide who was strongest. The bands began playing at 10
P.M.
and went on all night. When police marshals tried to pull the plug the next morning, street children formed a living shield around the electrical generator. At one in the afternoon, the army put an end to the event with the use of tear gas. Despite the more than two hundred thousand spectators the battle remained undecided and Werrason’s star continued to rise.
³²

Roi de la forêt
they called him, king of the jungle. His bodyguards were the
manzaka na nkoy
, the leopard’s angels.
³³
With his deadpan expression, his bombastic sunglasses, and razor-sharp goatee he became the living epitome of Congolese “cool.” Born on Christmas Day 1965, he seemed destined for greatness. The UNESCO appointed him its peace ambassador. The pope received him in Rome, and on CNN Jamaican superstar Shaggy called him “the greatest living African artist.”
³⁴
But to Kinshasa’s thousands of street children—little boys thrown out of their homes on suspicion of witchcraft, children who ran away voluntarily, AIDS orphans who camped out permanently in the sand in front of Werrason’s rehearsal rooms, all those who called themselves
sheges
, after Schengen, for they lived in an extremely free market place—to all those young bodies in worn-out rags he remained
Igwe
, the high priest. For him they were prepared to die.

And then, in July 2005, the news came in: Werrason was switching from Bracongo to Bralima! It struck like a bombshell. Werrason had been in Europe for months. On a Bralima expense account? To keep from having to serve out his contract with Bracongo? Everyone was speculating about it because music in Congo is more important than soccer in Italy. How much must they have paid him? To this day, the price of that transfer is the best-kept secret in Kinshasa. Dolf van den Brink knows how much it was; he is the one who arranged the deal. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” he laughs from across the desk when I ask him. “Believe me, pop music costs us many hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. It accounts for two-thirds of our marketing budget. We’ve invested in a concert stage that cost three hundred thousand dollars, the biggest one in the country. We have trucks, generators, and stewards. We have an agency with thirty employees, so we can stage free concerts in the city. Once a year the artists write a Primus song for us. We pay for the studio and for the CD and video clip. That alone costs us between 100,000 and 150,000 dollars. We pass out four thousand free CDs and nine thousand cassette tapes through the bars in the
cité
. Everywhere, people dance to those Primus tracks.”

He seemed slightly dazzled by it himself. Given, he had written his thesis under the supervision of Dutch sociologist Dick Pels on the subject of “the aestheticization of business,” but he had never dreamed that he would become the patron of an African international superstar. “For me, there’s a symbiosis between music and the brewery. Werrason has three orchestras; more than a hundred people depend on him for a living. He can’t get by from the sales of CDs and cassettes alone. Concerts are prohibitively expensive. So sponsoring is crucial for him, in addition to VIP concerts and performances in Europe. And we handle that too. When he goes to le Zénith, we pay for fifty airline tickets; if we didn’t, he would leave.”

Werrason, an informal survey shows, has a reputation for being very difficult. A peace ambassador, true enough, but above all a pain in the ass. His sponsors are expected to import dozens of cars for him and his entourage and get them past customs. Appointments are of no importance. The rare person granted an interview catches at best a glimpse of him, and then futilely waits for hours for him to return, as this writer found out one icy cold December day in Paris. Dolf van den Brink sighs. He rummages around on his desk and shows me a scrap of paper. “Sylvia Mampata just came by, that’s his wife. She’s going to be giving a party soon and she’s asking us for fifty garden chairs, thirty crate loads of beer, and fifty thousand dollars. That’s how it goes the whole time. Do you get what I’m saying?”

Of course we do, because Dolf has just explained his PowerPoint graph. “Look, you can see it very clearly here,” he says contentedly. “Werrason came to us in July 2005. Within two months our market share rose by 6 percent: from 32 to 38. And that upward trend has held. Today we’re at 70.” Bralima became one of the Heineken concern’s fastest-growing subsidiaries. In 2009 it even had a market share of 75 percent: figures that European managers can only dream of. Van den Brink was rewarded with a transfer to America where, at the age of thirty-six, he became CEO of Heinken USA.

Bralima had indeed done its homework before Werrason’s historical switchover. A few days after his return from Europe—tens of thousands of young people accompanied him from the airport to Samba Playa, his rehearsal hall—he gave a Primus concert in his home town of Kikwit under the title
Changement de fréquence
(change of frequency). He had never performed there before. It was the biggest pop concert ever.
Changement de fréquence
, those were the riverboats full of sound equipment and lighting, electrical generators, and fifty thousand crates of Primus that Bralima had sent from Kinshasa months earlier.
Changement de fréquence
, that was the huge field close to the airport where the podium was erected and to which tens of thousands of people came on foot, from everywhere, sometimes even 120 kilometers away.
Changement de fréquence
, that was Werrason who arrived on the day of the concert in an Air Tropic Fokker, with traditional chieftains and village chiefs, and who kissed the ground when he had landed.
Changement de fréquence
, that was the King of the Jungle who was welcomed like a head of state, perched atop a Bralima truck.
Changement de fréquence
, that was his twenty-man orchestra, knocking the first notes through the sound system a few hours after sundown. The phenomenally tight rhythms of Kakol, the crystalline guitar solos of Flamme Kapaya, the effortless falsetto of Héritier, the burlesque raps of Roi David. The latter was the successor of the unforgettable “Bill Clinton,” the
animateur
who had gone solo and was now under contract to Kerrygold, where he composed tunes for powdered milk.
Changement de fréquence
, that was finally seeing in real life all those names you had been hearing for years. Seeing the improbably supple buns of Cuisse de Poulet roll as she danced the
ndombolo
on stage next to Bête Sauvage and Linda la Japonaise. My God, what a party!
Changement de fréquence
, finally, that was Werrason, coming on stage after midnight, looking out implacably over that sea of ecstatic humanity (how many were there? 300,000 according to the most sober estimates, 700,000 according to the fans), singing three songs and then passing out medicine to the widows and the sick, a gesture the government could learn from, with all its messing-about and infighting!
Changement de fréquence
, that was the heavyweight bout with Muhammad Ali revisited, the difference being that this time it was not the president footing the bill, but a limited-liability conglomerate from Amsterdam. That too was a change of frequency.
³⁵

“The crowd in Kikwit was enormous,” Flamme Kapaya told me one morning in Kisangani. It was the start of a sultry day and we were sitting in the overgrown garden of a house beside the river. For ten years Kapaya had been Werrason’s star guitarist and artistic director. Ask any young person in Congo who is the greatest living guitar player and they will inevitably reply: Flamme Kapaya. “We had to warm up the audience, tell them how fantastic Werrason was. We had to play and dance to get him to come up. But he sang for maybe fifteen minutes in total and he raked in all the money. We didn’t even get paid. The whole switch from Bracongo to Bralima didn’t change a thing for us. He took everything, we got nothing! Werrason became filthy rich and bought a house close to Brussels. He was like an heir to Mobutu.” And since profits were more important than reeducation, Bralima kept the system going, because the Heineken shareholders wanted to see pleasing charts and graphs. There is a fundamental similarity with the foreign interference of yesteryear: just as America gnashed its teeth but kept Mobutu in the saddle, so Heineken learned to live with Werrason’s whims, for otherwise he would switch to the competition. Loyalty came at the expense of integrity. Kapaya is still angry about that: “I composed the songs, I arranged them, but he had the songs registered in France under his own name.
Arrangeur—compositeur: Werrason
, that’s what it says on the CD. I’m only mentioned as the guitar player.” Kapaya was the musical brain behind
Kibuisa Mpimpa
, which is generally considered Werrason’s best album, one those in the know refer to as “culturally and musically revolutionary.”
³⁶
“I handled the recordings in Europe, I mixed the album, but when it was finished I didn’t even get a copy! Werrason even stole my five author’s copies.”