UNESCO announced Tuesday admission to its list of this flagship music of the two Congo.
Le Monde with AFP
In paradise of the two shores of the Congo River, the Dad Wemba, Grand Kalle, Wendo, Tabu Ley Rochereau, Franklin Boukaka and others Pamelo Mounka are happy: The Congolese Rumba officially is part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. .
UNESCO, gathered this week to study about sixty applications, announced Tuesday, December 14 on Twitter that the Congolese Rumba – file presented by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Congo-Brazzaville – was admitted on its listing. It joins the Cuban Rumba, listed in 2016 and, for Central Africa, Pygmy Central Pygmate (2003) or Burundi drums (2014).
“This wealth from Congo and exported around the world is one of the elements of our pride,” Tweeted the Minister of Communication and Spokesman of the Government of RDC Patrick Muyaya from Thursday, while a conference Press was organized to comment on the event, with a few days ahead. “It’s our duty to all promote #rumba,” he added.
In Kinshasa and Brazzaville, the specialists situated the origins of the Rumba in the former Kongo kingdom, where one practiced a dance called Nkumba, which means “navel”, because it was dancing man and navel woman against navel.
Music of “Resistance and Resilience”
With the negative trafficking, Africans took their culture and music into the Americas. They made their instruments, rudimentaries at the beginning, then sophisticated, to give birth to the jazz to the north, to the rumba to the south. Before this music is brought back to Africa by traders, with discs and guitars.
The Rumba in its modern version has a hundred years. It is a music of cities and bars, meeting cultures and nostalgia, “resistance and resilience”, of “sharing pleasure too”, with its lifestyle and clothing codes (“sape”) Recently explained to AFP the Pr André Yoka Lye, Director in Kinshasa of the National Institute of the Arts (INA). For him, the Rumba is “sprawling, present in all areas of national life”. It is marked by the political history of the two Congo, before and after independence.
She has experienced ups and downs, her stars sometimes do polemical or scandal, her production and distribution networks are criticized for lack of rigor. But she lives and is renewed, he assures in the two Congolese capitals, where we count on this registration world heritage to give him a new notoriety, including with the Congolese themselves. “We are the country of the Rumba, what do we do with it?”, The Minister of DRC Communication wondered.