Some of the impressive eyewear featured in the video below
A video has surfaced of Madilu System’s amazing funeral, the biggest in years. After some reverent ogling of the open-top casket, you can see some impressive crowd scenes, the arrival of various local dignitaries and pop stars and some impromptu singing.
They say a blog should have a niche. Seeing as it’s standing room only in the design and technology departments, I’m making a bid for funerals in Kinshasa....
Farewell to a legend
Sometime last year, I was listening to a rhumba band in a Kinshasa pizza restaurant. Reacting to the opening chords of the Franco classic ‘Mario’, a fellow diner of impressive girth stood up and gestured for the microphone. I didn’t recognise him, but an awestruck waiter told me that the big man had once been part of Franco’s TPOK Jazz. As he sang, he danced with one arm around the waist of a somewhat slimmer woman, like this:
He was Bialu Madilu, also known as Multi Système, Grand Pharaoh, Grand Ninja, Sa Majesté and Grande Baleine. Born in Matadi, in the province of Bas Congo, he sang with Simaro and Tabu Ley Rochereau before joining TPOK Jazz. Sadly, he died on Saturday, and all of Kinshasa is in mourning. Radio stations have been...
On my bookshelf, side-by-side, are two books called Staying Alive. Both are, in fact, extremely useful guides to staying alive (in one sense or another), and so they both have their uses in emergencies, but that’s where the resemblance ends.
One is about how to stay safe as a humanitarian worker in a conflict zone. Written by a former British Army colonel who joined the ICRC after leaving the Parachute Regiment, it provides just enough technical background - accompanied by the inevitable silly cartoons - to demystify the dangers and thus render them manageable. There is information on different kinds of landmines and how to avoid them, what to do when the shooting starts, how to deal with roadblocks, how to make a basic shelter, and, for example, how to deal with looters.
A lot of...
‘Playtime is over,’ declared President Kabila at his inauguration (’J'annonce la fin de la recréation sous toutes ses formes’). The phrase has reverberated around Kinshasa ever since, and interpretations are diverse. Optimists hope this edict will prove applicable to the members of the new government, but time alone will tell.
This week, though, playtime’s extended: we have a five-day weekend, due to the coincidence of three nationwide days of mourning.
Monday was for Cardinal Frédéric Etsou, Archbishop of Kinshasa, who popped his clogs on 6 January 2007, at the ripe old age of 76. Yesterday’s holiday was for Laurent Désiré Kabila, assassinated by a bodyguard on 16 January 2001. Although the facts remain remarkably obscure, this looks to have...
I had a little nightmare this morning. I was awake at the time. Read on, and you’ll be glad I spared you the photograph.
When heading somewhere exotic, whether for a week or a year, there’s a particular frisson to be had from flicking through those sections in the guidebook which warn of some of the bad things that can happen there. Passages on street crime might not impress someone who already knows their way around a big city or two, but anecdotes about popular scams are more reliably entertaining. Moreover, the latter can be read with a certain feeling of smug reassurance that at least this savvy traveller is forewarned and thus forearmed against deception.
Further dangers - biohazards, in fact - lurk under the innocuous heading, Travellers’ Health. Skip past the...