2021 was the year when Congolese rumba music was officially added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This was also the year when a definitive film on the roots and influence of this genre of music was released.
The documentary film, “The Rumba Kings” chronicles Congolese rumba music, the rhythm that helped Congo fight colonial oppression, the music that became the soundtrack to the country’s independence and took Africa by storm with its mesmerising guitar sounds.
Through the voices of Congolese historians, music experts and a cast of legendary musicians like Papa Wemba, Simaro Lutumba of T.P O.K Jazz and Cameroonian Manu Dibango, this is as comprehensive a story of rumba on film as Gary Stewart’s seminal 2004 publication “Rumba on the River”.
American-Peruvian director and journalist Alan Brain started researching the topic in 2012 while he was in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) working for the United Nations peacemaking mission as a filmmaker. The actual filming started a year later and the film was completed early in 2021.
When he first arrived in the DRC in 2007, Brain had little idea about the country’s great tradition of music. “I didn’t know that Congolese rumba stars like Franco and his T.P.O.K Jazz were as big in Africa as the Beatles were in the West,” he quips.
Brain describes an immense wall behind which the cultural hegemony of the West hides the musical treasures of the African continent, in recent times categorised under the generic label of World Music.