Culture in the Republic of the Congo: everything shared with the city across the river

Why rumba belongs to two capitals at once

Congolese rumba is a couple dance and the music played for it. UNESCO's inscription of 2021 describes it as common to the urban areas of both Congos, traces it to an older dance called nkumba, a Kikongo word for the waist, and records that it is played for celebration and for mourning, in homes, in public and in church. The element is listed under two states, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Congo, and neither file claims it alone.

How maringa turned into rumba

The music the two cities came to call rumba started as maringa, a Bakongo partner dance practised in the old Kingdom of Loango, whose lands now lie in the Republic of the Congo, southern Gabon and the Cabinda province of Angola. Between the 1920s and the 1940s it moved into the bars of Brazzaville and Léopoldville, the colonial name of Kinshasa, played on a bass drum, a bottle struck like a triangle and the likembe, a thumb piano. In the 1920s accordions and acoustic guitars began to replace the likembe.

The name came from a mislabelled record. Cuban son by the Sexteto Habanero and the Trio Matamoros reached the region in the 1940s and 1950s sold as "rumba", and the word stuck to the local music. The ethnomusicologist Kazadi wa Mukuna has argued that what resulted stayed maringa underneath, with the Latin records used mainly as a model for learning new instruments and arrangements.

Brazzaville's share of the early years can be named group by group. The vocal ensemble Bonne Espérance formed in 1935, the group Mannequin in the Bacongo quarter early in 1937, and in August 1941 Paul Kamba founded Victoria Brazza in Poto-Poto, setting a bass drum, bells and the likembe beside accordion, guitar, mandolin and banjo. The music's history as Wikipedia summarises it draws a contrast between the banks: Brazzaville became known for its vocal groups, Léopoldville for its instrumental bands.

Why the records were cut across the river

The recording industry settled on the Belgian side. Ngoma, a studio opened in Léopoldville in 1948 by the Greek trader Nico Jeronimidis and named after the Kikongo word for drum, was joined by labels such as Opika and CEFA, and Kamba's Victoria Brazza crossed the river to make its first record at Ngoma. The cities were also growing at different speeds: Brazzaville went from about 45,000 people in 1940 to about 84,000 in 1950, while Léopoldville went from 50,000 to more than 200,000 over the same decade. The record now gives Brazzaville 2,145,783 people on 1 January 2023.

Brazzaville kept a transmitter. Radio Brazzaville broadcast four hours a day in the late 1950s and was heard as far away as Lagos. Les Bantous de la Capitale, a Brazzaville orchestra, and OK Jazz were the first Congolese rumba bands to play the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, in April 1966. The Bantous took the music to Havana in 1974, 1975 and 1978, after the Brazzaville singer and guitarist Joséphine Bijou had become the first woman rumba guitarist to perform there early in 1974.

Rumba is sung mainly in Lingala, which is why one of its other names is Rumba Lingala, and the bands of both cities shared musicians. Nino Malapet and Jean Serge Essous are two of the players named as moving freely between the banks. Brazzaville's scene ran strong until the unrest of the late 1990s and produced Extra Musica, Les Bantous and the hip-hop group Bisso na Bisso.

What Brazzaville built to hold its share

With the music, the language and the players held in common, the part of Congolese culture the Republic of the Congo can point to as its own is largely institutional: a run of foundings, over seventy years, that bring the continent to Brazzaville.

The Pan-African Music Festival, FESPAM, held its first edition in 1996. It is a public cultural institution of the Congolese state, organised by the government under the auspices of the African Union, and its own presentation gives it three kinds of African music to promote: traditional, modern and religious. Each edition brings concerts, a symposium, an African music market called MUSAF and an exhibition of traditional instruments.

The festival is meant to meet every two years, and the calendar has broken. RFI reported that economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic kept it away from 2015 to 2023. The eleventh edition opened on 15 July 2023 in the Alphonse Massamba-Débat stadium, with at least 17 countries represented and rumba as its theme, and ran until 22 July across five sites in the city. The twelfth was scheduled for 19 to 26 July 2025, on music and the economy in the digital age.

Brazzaville joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network for music in 2013. Its profile there credits Paul Kamba with starting the rhythm, names the African Music Council, the regional branch of the International Music Council, as based in the city, and lists a second festival, Feux de Brazza, given over to traditional music.

The state's own song has had its reversals too. La Congolaise, with words by Jacques Tondra and Georges Kibanghi and music by Jean Royer and Joseph Spadilière, was adopted in 1959, replaced in 1969 by Les Trois Glorieuses and reinstated in 1991.

How the sapeurs made clothing an argument

La Sape takes its name from the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, an acronym built on the French slang sape, clothes. It began among Congolese in Brazzaville and Léopoldville, the second large piece of culture the two cities hold in common. Its walk, the diattance, a slow and deliberately posed way of moving down a street, started in both cities in the 1920s, when most Africans went on foot or by bicycle and a dressed-up walker was setting himself apart from labourers.

The movement tells three founding stories about itself, which the clothing historian Manuel Charpy of the CNRS has set out. One reaches back to the Kingdom of Kongo, whose sixteenth-century court adopted Portuguese dress. One belongs to Brazzaville: it runs through Camille Diata, who led the movement there in the 1930s, and through André Matsoua, whose Amicale, founded in France in 1926, helped Africans arriving in Paris, and whose portrait sapeurs carry in their processions. The third is a Paris story about Christian Loubaki, a worker from Brazzaville employed in the city's 16th arrondissement.

Dress carried status long before the acronym. In 1930 the lieutenant governor of Middle Congo complained that a well-dressed African elite was growing too confident with Europeans. In 1947 a researcher in Brazzaville recorded educated men without work wearing broken watches, dark glasses and visible pen caps. Sailors and workers coming home from Antwerp and Le Havre in the 1930s went on wearing their winter wool in the equatorial heat and were nicknamed trop-chauds, the too-hot ones.

Under the People's Republic the sapeurs stood on the wrong side of official taste. The Marxist-Leninist government discouraged conspicuous European fashion, a socialist youth union put students in uniform, and government media campaigns portrayed the migrants in Paris as irresponsible or delinquent. At a football match in Brazzaville in 1980, several well-known sapeurs marched in front of officials and burned clothing, an episode often cited in histories of the movement.

Paris became the second mirror. Sapeurs described Paris and Brazzaville as mirror images of each other, and after nightclubs reopened in Brazzaville in the early 1980s some admitted guests on a Paris Métro ticket or, better, a Carte Orange, the photo travel pass introduced in Paris in 1975. The return of a migrant from Paris had its own name, the descente. Outside attention grew in the 2000s: a Paul Smith collection in 2010, an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in 2015 and a performance at the opening ceremony of the 2023 Jeux de la Francophonie.

Which languages Congolese speak and where

French is the official language under the constitution of 2015, the medium of school instruction and, in Britannica's description, the language of the upper classes. The same constitution names two "national vehicular languages", Lingala and Kituba. Both are trade languages that grew out of contact among Bantu-speaking peoples, and each has a territory. Lingala runs north of Brazzaville and across the thinly settled north. Kituba runs between the capital and the coast, along the railway from Pointe-Noire where most of the population lives. Ethnologue counts 62 languages spoken in the country.

Kituba carries the state's history in its names. The constitution of 1992 called it Munukutuba, "I say"; the constitution of 2015 calls it Kituba, "way of speaking". Across the river the same creole of Kikongo is Kikongo ya leta, "the state's Kikongo". It is a national language in both Congos, and public radio and television on both sides read the evening news in it.

About half the population identifies with the Kongo peoples, among them the Laari of Brazzaville and the Pool and the Vili of Pointe-Noire and the coast. The shares published for the other groups carry no survey year: the Teke, north of Brazzaville, at 16.9%, the Mbochi of the north and east at 13.1% and the Pygmy peoples at 2%. Except for the Pygmies and the Adamawa-Ubangi speakers of the north-east, all of them speak Bantu languages.

Most Congolese get their news from broadcast media, in rural areas mostly from state radio, with programmes in several languages. The printed press sits in Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire, in French, with weeklies that include Le Choc, L'Observateur and the Catholic La Semaine Africaine.

What the painters and writers of Brazzaville made

How Poto-Poto became a school

In 1951 Pierre Lods, a French amateur painter who had come from Indochina, set up a studio in what is now Moungali and named it after the neighbouring Poto-Poto quarter. Lods said the idea came from watching Félix Ossali, who worked in his household, paint blue birds on a map; the history of the school published by Rhodes College notes that the story is unproven. Lods gave no formal courses and commented on colour only once a painting was finished. Ossali's simplified figures in black line, which look like animation sketches, became the school's best known style, called the Mickeys after the Disney mouse, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed the school's work in 1956.

Lods left for Dakar in 1960 at the request of Léopold Sédar Senghor, and the artists formed a cooperative. Nicolas Ondongo, one of the first students, headed it from 1962 and taught the second generation the way he had been taught. By its seventieth anniversary in June 2021 the school had trained several thousand artists, RFI reported, among them Marcel Gotène, François Thango and Michel Hengo, and it had begun to receive a UNESCO grant of 15,000 dollars to build an online gallery after the pandemic left it without income.

Where the older art is kept

The Musée national du Congo, founded in 1965, holds masks, statues, money and knives from different regions of the country. Britannica singles out the masks at the Marien Ngouabi Museum, many of them Kongo, from a people tracing descent to the kingdom that once ruled parts of the Congo and Angola. The Musée Galerie du Bassin du Congo exhibited the kiebe-kiebe, a sacred dance of the Mbochi, Kouyou and Teke. The Basilica of Sainte-Anne in Brazzaville, designed by the French architect Roger Erell, was built in 1949.

Why Sony Labou Tansi wrote about the state

Sony Labou Tansi, born Marcel Ntsoni in 1947, had a life that crossed the river too. He was born in Kimwaanza, south of what is now Kinshasa, was schooled first in Kikongo, and began speaking French at twelve, when his family moved to Brazzaville. He trained at the École Normale Supérieure d'Afrique Centrale there, taught French and English in Kindamba and Pointe-Noire, and in 1971 took a pen name partly in tribute to Tchicaya U Tam'si, an older Congolese writer whose poems attacked the oppressive state.

His novel La Vie et demie appeared in 1979, the year he founded the Rocado Zulu Theatre, which played his work in Africa, Europe and the United States. L'Anté-peuple won the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire in 1983. His subject was the post-colonial state that kept the habits of the colonial one, and his politics followed his writing: he co-founded an opposition party with Bernard Kolélas in the late 1980s, was elected deputy for Makélékélé in Brazzaville in 1992, and had his passport withdrawn in 1994, which kept him from seeking treatment for AIDS abroad. He died on 14 June 1995, fourteen days after his wife Pierrette.

Which churches and prophets Congolese follow

About three quarters of the population is Christian, in Britannica's estimate. The CIA World Factbook's breakdown for 2010 gives 33.1% Roman Catholic, 22.3% Awakening and revivalist churches, 19.9% other Protestant, 2.2% Salvation Army, 1.5% Kimbanguist and 1.6% Muslim, the last mostly foreign workers in the towns, with 11.3% declaring no religion.

The prophets of the Pool region stood on opposite banks as well. Simon Kimbangu's movement began in the Belgian Congo in 1921; he was sentenced to death, had the sentence commuted to life imprisonment and died in prison in 1951, and his followers founded the Kimbanguist Church, which joined the World Council of Churches. On the French side André Matswa, also spelled Matsoua, a former tirailleur sergeant, founded the Amicale des Originaires de l'A.E.F. in 1926, was arrested in 1929, deported to Chad the next year and died in the prison at Mayama in April 1942.

After his death his followers treated Matswa as a prophet, and the colonial administration never broke the movement. The Matsouana Church is one of the independent churches Britannica lists. After 1960 politicians of many camps claimed his memory, among them Fulbert Youlou, Alphonse Massamba-Débat and Bernard Kolélas, and a statue of him stands in Kinkala. The sapeurs who carry his portrait are claiming the same man for dress.

What a liboke is and what goes with it

Cassava, from which chikwangue is made, came from the Americas. Britannica places its arrival, with maize, in the slave-trade centuries between 1600 and 1800, when the two crops allowed denser populations and a market for food grew up.

A liboke, plural maboke, is both a dish and a method: food sealed in leaves and cooked on a grill over a wood fire or buried in embers. Le Journal du Congo describes leaves of the Marantaceae family, called ngolo or ndunda, laid in several layers so that no juice escapes and tied with vine or raffia; French Wikipedia gives banana leaves. Fish is the usual filling, capitaine or tilapia, with onion, garlic, ginger, lemon and bird's-eye chilli, and there are chicken, bushmeat, mushroom and pumpkin versions. It is eaten with chikwangue, a cassava bread, with fried plantain or with foufou.

The dish is shared property like the music. TasteAtlas associates fish liboke with the Republic of the Congo, French Wikipedia places it in both Congos, and Le Journal du Congo writes that it carries a story running from Brazzaville to Kinshasa. In May 2025, according to a DW report that French Wikipedia cites, the word liboke entered the Larousse dictionary.

Where Congolese sport won its titles

The Congolese Football Federation was founded in 1962 and joined FIFA the same year. Three years later Brazzaville held the first All-Africa Games, from 18 to 25 July 1965, forty years after Pierre de Coubertin first proposed continental games for Algiers. About 2,500 athletes from 29 nations marched into the stadium while the army patrolled every road into the city. Men competed in ten sports and women in two, athletics and basketball. The host's one gold medal came in football.

The national side, the Diables Rouges, won the Africa Cup of Nations in 1972. The country first competed at the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964, and beyond football, men's and women's basketball and women's volleyball have large followings.