Hi, everybody, I really appreciate everybody coming here while it's so beautiful outside and it's going to turn,
I hear, so you're missing the last rays of Sun.
I first want to thank both Miles Lomror and units for inviting me today and for being a part of this of this meeting.
I have a PowerPoint, which I should have opens.
So this research that I'm presenting is mostly research for a new projects, a new project on the history of art economies in VR, in the DRC,
in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which I trace sort of craft economies and art economies that emerge around academic arts.
And so the part that I'm going to be talking about is the academic art today.
So I'm not going to be talking about popular culture. I'm actually talking about the opposite.
I'm going to talk about state efforts and the use of state ideologies in attempts to try and control both appropriate and
control a sort of an academic artistic field in Zaire at the time and use that to sort of further the goals of the state.
I don't know how much of you know about sort of the history of Zaire, but this in 1970,
one of which is this a sicko as he came to be called president of the Congo,
declares authenticity or authenticity to be sort of the the state's official ideology.
And the idea was that they were reorienting the country's cultural identity to so-called the
indigenous African values intended to end the cultural alienation caused by the colonial experience.
And so the goal of this new ideology was sort of a cultural revolution in which a new national
authentic Zulu nation would be born out of the values and traditions of pre-colonial Zaire cultures.
And in this paper, I want to address the role of the Mobutu regime's cultural politics of authenticity in the shaping of
a post-colonial modernism in Zaire late 1960s into the late 1970s as a period that I will address.
First, I'm going to talk about the creation of a national modern visual arts,
quote unquote authentic inspiration by a group called Zaire in avant garde east.
And I will talk about the ways in which their work became embedded in the public profile of the state.
And then what I'm going to do second, which is to think more of interest to serve the Copperbelt project,
is that I'm going to investigate the reach of these cultural policies in the Copper
Belt Region through the career of two artists in Lubumbashi to Shinji Brothers.
So most of you will probably know post-independence history of Congo is highly turbulent,
but Botha commits the first military coup fairly early on, but then returns power to a civilian government.
He commits a second military coup in nineteen sixty five, which becomes the start of a reign,
an enormously long reign until 1997, when he removed by by Kabila,
the father of the I was going to say, the father of the current president,
but he's no longer the previous president, the father of the previous president.
But this origin of the Mobutu regime in its structural origin in the colony, you could say,
and its origin in a very undemocratic coup mean that's sort of the narrative of the past is a unique concern to the regime.
And that helps explain why cultural politics is certainly in the beginning of the Mobutu's period were quite important to the regime.
And so authenticity was supposed to help with this.
Central to it was the belief that some suffered from cultural alienation, which manifested itself as,
and I'm quoting an inferiority complex and a negative self-image and which led them to quote,
copying and conforming to colonisation in a foreign model end quote.
But that could be combated, according to the ideology, by a cultural struggle for the right person.
idolisation the rehabilitation and the promotion of national creations and values.
The most visible practises associated with this authentic authenticity were marches and public spectacles that included dancing and singing,
which was known as any martial, political and cultural guttural, which also become the parts of this ideology that become the most reviled by the
population because they're sort of forced to participate in these at a certain point.
But what is also what I think is more known is that during this period, Zaire aeons were required to africanised their names,
so they were required to like, discard their Christian names, africanised their names, africanised their clothing.
Many colonial monuments are removed from the city cityscape.
You can see it's sort of this this effort to or to, you know, turn the page, if you will.
The very vagueness of automaticity also makes it a very powerful rhetorical tool for the regime.
It was simultaneously a new aesthetic vision and a tool for political action,
for the forging of a national culture and for the promoting of centralised state authority over ethnic or cultural divisions.
It was also, as we shall see, the theoretical and political foundation for the creation of a post-colonial modernism.
These cultural politics also found expression and implementation in what Tony Bennett has called the culture complex,
which comprises of and I'm quoting a range of sites in which distinctive forms of
expertise are deployed in making culture as a set of resources for acting on society.
These sites, which include libraries, museums, heritage sites, schools and so on,
but also a range of knowledge, practises and disciplines such as ethnography and art history,
are aimed at bringing about quote calculated changes in conduct by transforming beliefs, customs habits, perceptions and so on.
Most of these institutions and disciplines are connected to particular rationality of government,
as he argues, and in my view, to say here these institutions,
including museums, art schools and National Ballet and National Library and Archives National Cultural Festival, and plans for a national theatre now.
Two of these institutions are going to be central to my talk here.
The first is a museum or museum. The Institute for National Museums.
This is a 2006 photo, and this institute was actually one of the subjects of my first book.
So it pops up in this in this project as well.
It was founded through an agreement with Belgium in 1980, between nineteen sixty nine and 1971 to create a national museum for Congo.
It actually came in response to a request for restitution of the collections of
the African Museum in Belgium that Zaire had had that Congo had done at the time.
And this is what if one of the ways in which Belgium tries to deal with this by offering sort of this collaboration deal.
So Zaire hope to gain the resources and knowhow necessary to reclaim the creation
of knowledge about traditional cultures from Western knowledge production.
The other institution is the Academy of Fine Arts in the capital of Kinshasa.
It has colonial roots. It was founded as an equal look by the brothers of the Christian schools, the Belgian brothers of the Christian schools,
but its renamed academy to Bozak in the 1950s and like many other cultural institutions.
The school was intended to safeguard African cultural traditions from the so-called detrimental influences of colonial modernity.
Although students were allowed to practise new art forms such as painting their
education focussed on artisanal or decorative production and the teaching of Western.
Art history was avoided at all costs during the 1970s, this school becomes nationalised and becomes a state school,
and all of the artists I'm going to discuss in this paper were trained there.
Also, many also did stints at European art schools as spaces where the embodiments of cultural authenticity was preferred,
preserved and practised in museum, and the art school were theoretically able to transfer this authenticity back to a nation
and its population through their exhibitions and educational and artistic activities,
altering the position of historical museum objects in the narrative of progress and creating a space
for a new modernism to emerge from it instead of being near representatives of a culturally pure past.
They now played a role in the making of the modern future of slavery as a nation, as museum objects, historical arts would to help educate a museum,
visiting the public on the richness of pre-colonial cultures now firmly cast in the context of the post-colonial nation states.
Their presence behind the glass of display cases also suggests the deeply altered relationship
between the viewer and the object where the former is transformed into a modern citizen.
Now, one of the bodies of scholarship that this particular chapter addresses is this sort of emerging body of scholarship on African modernism.
A lot of the kind of art that I'm describing here and art that was made in in academies in Senegal and in Nigeria, for example,
but also in southern Africa, has for a long time been regarded as derivative as not interesting enough as modernism in their own right.
That is starting to shift significantly under the influence of writing, much of which is coming from African scholars as well,
who sort of are concerned with sorry, the exclusionary narrative established by the canon of art historical scholarship.
Not only are Western narrative silence on the practise of modernism outside the global north, the critique goes,
they also ignore the fundamental role of colonialism in the encounter of framing of the other in the genesis of modernism.
In response, scholars of Africa have been writing and analysing African modernism by dismantling the false universalism of Western modernity,
which casts these modern isms as derivative. Some instead argue for a plurality in a global city of modernism,
arguing for multiple sensors as opposed to a centre periphery model in understanding modernist art and literature,
which is heavily influenced by sort of the Senegalese example in the Nigerian example is attempting to change the very definitions of
modernism by contesting the exclusionary mechanisms therein and relocating the origin of modernity to the African continent itself,
which is a much more radical move in a way. And it's particularly scholars of architecture that have been very productive in this sense.
There's an older book by Gwendolyn Wright that talks about sort of the French Empire this way.
And then there's work by Johan Le Guy, who works on the Congo, which argues a similar point.
So what is the mobilities modernism that I describe here? And where does it fit into this larger history?
What I call the which is modernism describes the artistic production of a group of artists,
many of whom refer to themselves as the artists who pledged to translate the tenets of ideology and authenticity into a new Zaillian modern arts.
I'm less interested in this paper in the artistic work itself. I'm also not an art historian.
I'm a historian. Then, in the ways in which the Mabuti state used it to create a particular image of itself through the
incorporation of a particular kind of modernist art into the nation's representational heritage.
This strategy carried traces of some of the practises that accompanied late colonial cultural policies in the Congo,
but was both by the Mabuti state and the artists involved.
Very self-consciously conceived of as modernism, Elizabeth Hani theorising of Senegalese modernism is useful for the Zaillian case,
especially for use of stagings of modernity or overlapping in succeeding modern moments of modernity.
The particular modernism, promoted in the early 1970s under Mobutu, is one but one of several stages of modernism,
and specifically its artistic modernity and specifically its artistic extension modernism in Congo Zaire.
It is equally important to recognise, as Hani does, that modernism can be simultaneously hegemonic and enabling.
While Buddhist modernism entails some appropriations from Western modernism as a form of nationalism,
actually that was interpreted, these intersected with local artistic practises.
So I'm going to talk about three things now I'm going to talk about the event that sort of started the avant garde this Zoe as a as a movement.
I'm going to talk about this sort of origin story, and then this is the most important part.
I'm going to talk about their rise in this cultural complex of the Mabuti site here.
All in the early to mid nineteen seventies. And there are a number of strategies that are used, and after that,
I'm going to talk about centralisation and ethnicity in the Kuiper Belt, as I said.
One of the tactics strategies that the Mobutu regime used to gain international
visibility was to organise large or Africa wide or global events in Zaire.
A very famous famous example of this is the rumble in the jungle, the famous, you know, boxing match.
Another example is this is the meeting of, you know, Africa in Kinshasa.
But a cultural example is that he invited the International Art Critics Association to hold their 1973 conference in Kinshasa,
and it was the very first time that this association has met outside of the West.
And it was also the first international cultural event organised by Mobutu,
simultaneously creating an international audience in Zaire and local and a national audience from a ruthless international role.
So this conference was important for several reasons. First, because he uses it to draw attention to his politics of restitution,
his demand for restitution of these collections from from Belgium, he actually gives a speech there,
which is sort of a practise speech for the one that he gives at the United Nations a couple of months later,
which, amongst other things, discusses this topic of restitution.
Second, it's also the occasion of a big exhibition both of historical art and of modern art in Kinshasa.
So it ventured into the area of slavery and modern art. The exhibition was a lot less elaborately produced than the historical art exhibition.
Most of the participants belonged either to the Art Academy in Kinshasa or its counterparts in Magashi.
It wasn't received with a lot of enthusiasm by the foreign press.
But a closer look at the way in which modern art was defined and received nonetheless
reveals much about how national heritage was perceived and valued in the early 1970s,
and under what circumstances modern art could be defined as authentic. Could it fulfil the same functions historical Zaire and art was forced into?
Or was it a more resistance category? So there is a colonial history to this emergence of this modernism that I'm not going to focus on here.
But in the 1950s in particular, you sort of see a movement which is led by part of the white elite in Kinshasa,
particular to create this modern African arts whereby you whereby students of the academy were allowed to practise Western art forms like painting.
But their work had to remain inspired by what was called the Bantu spirit.
So that is sort of the the genealogy of what we are seeing in the nineteen seventies.
There is it. We don't have images of the exhibition anymore, but there was a catalogue and this was the catalogue.
The cover shows a red painting by painter Cheng Barghouti, which was one of the Shinji brothers from Lubumbashi.
Two of the artists from the Bashi. His official name is Barnaby, but here he calls himself Sensibility,
in which the lanky figure of a quote unquote traditional African kneels beside what looks like a glowing statue while extending a supplicating has.
Right inside the cover is a picture of Mobutu and the image of a statue entitled.
Mm hmm. So the militants buy the sculpture Leonel.
The statue depicts a male African figure striding forward while clutching a burning torch with the arms stretched upward.
Very masculine imagery. These few images encapsulated much of the spirit in which modern art was presented at the conference.
Seemingly inspired by a certain interpretation of tradition, combative of its advocacy of so-called authenticity,
and associated with the new states which paid for the catalogue, the organisation of the exhibition and has commissioned the militants the statue.
So authentic modern art was grounded in the traditional while attempting to circumvent colonialism.
However, state sanctioned modern as a year in art ended up with a philosophy that could be traced back to the late colonial era,
promoting art of a modern or western form, but with an authentic inspiration.
However, there was very little in this art that impressed the foreign press at this exhibition.
The reviewer for art African Wear regretted the quote insufficiencies and contradictions.
The Negro artists seemed to have a lot of trouble escaping a certain totemic exoticism,
or the attraction of elongated figures circa nineteen five or even more so an expression of garish colours or else a faint, abstract painting style.
What to say to these artists? They have to find their own painting style beyond imitation and quotes,
and that is very much the way in which for a long time they were regarded in art historical.
These African art, these African modern isms were described in art historical material.
The New York Times wrote that the exhibit contained a quote Toe the line imitation of European and American Modernism and greeting Card Africanism.
So in response to this criticism, a group of artists united under the name of the avant garde, etc. in their manifesto.
And I'm going to put it up here. I'm not going to read all of it, but you can underline some important parts of it.
They called for the country's ancestral heritage to serve as a solid basis for the creation of an arts quote,
blessed with a young and animated with a youngbloods and animated by magic spirits.
We wish to have our art recover its autonomy and its intrinsic personality
through a brutal disposition of all stereotypical formulas of foreign origin.
The group included the sculptor Leo, also trained in Austria and at the academy and recruited by Mobutu to teach at the academy.
The sculptor Tumba and then the painter Schlemmer Hussein Mavhinga and the ceramicist von and on bass.
And they have the support of the head of the Siberian Art Critic Association,
Silverstone Buddy Banga named winner who becomes an important figure here with the exception of Buddy Banga.
All of these artists have spent time at the academy at some point in their careers, and many of them became teachers there.
I'm going to show you just a couple of images and I apologise for the bad quality of the photos,
but they're often photos of photos or, you know, photos of scans because a lot of these original works are difficult to locate.
It's different. I'll just speak of a visual language that united the work of these artists,
most of their work in this period was heavily figurative, but influenced by a language of abstraction,
sculpture, painting and mosaics, and appear to be influenced by early European avant garde in their use of flat,
angular areas in the portrayal of bodies.
Many of the artists I spoke with do not see their adoption of such European modernist language as appropriation on their part,
since African sculpture was a source of inspiration for this visual language to begin with.
So they essentially sort of claim to be the origin sort of the original practise, the practitioners of this, this kind of art.
So where, according to the artist, did authenticity reside?
This question often elicits vague answers about inspiration, but there are some clear patterns in the themes and subjects of the work.
Lanky male figures with generic quote unquote traditional attributes like spear spears and shields figure strongly,
as does the opposite female forms at times abstracted often in rural settings or engaged in activities and considered OK.
I can do that to be female, so markets are dancing, which, as I said, was also a trove of these authenticity performances, right?
There are very few pieces that, Oh, I love this picture, by the way.
So this is a slightly older picture. This is legal in his updo.
He's probably the most successful of these artists in the long term.
And he actually died just just two weeks ago, and there was this huge event in Kinshasa for for his for his burial.
So he's somebody considered to be very important.
But very of the few of these pieces are actually, can you make clear connexions to certain pieces of historical art?
This is one of the few ones that I know of the torso, and it's connected or it's inspired by the,
I guess, a sculpture and the guess they glorification. And you can see this is so this is the his sculpture.
This is a sculpture in his living room, so actually hasn't been yet. This sculpture in his living room was a bad picture.
So. So I give you an example of a picture that's a little bit clearer.
So that's the kind of statue it was inspired by. He's not not and then gets it.
So there's there's not a connexion there. So one of the impediments to deeper envelop development of their philosophy and
artistic process might have been the institutionalisation that they underwent.
Their movement fizzled by 1977. Some members left notably,
notably Bamba and others regrouped under the name of love actually and continued to work along the same lines as they had before,
although it resulted in financial and professional success for some.
The process of state appropriation that occurred appears to have stifled artistic expression and evolution.
And I want to take a closer look at that sort of process of appropriation,
which was which was at times a mutual process and the way in which they become embedded in sort of state representations.
This is bulma. This is an example of the kind of ceramics that he produced.
He also didn't say so this is at the Department of Water in Kinshasa, it's still there one.
So there a particular ways in which they become established.
There is their role in the museum collection that I'm going to talk about a little bit.
There is their sort of role in a Siberian written canon on modern art.
There is their role in the arts academy and in sort of their role in the public space.
The museum gets a department of modern art. It's led by Buddy Buddy Binga, the arts critic, and it starts collecting modern art.
What it collects is almost exclusively the work of these modernists.
By this time, however, there is another sort of art movement popular art movement in Congo that most of us are much more more familiar
with those very colourful paintings by the popular painters as they're often called or the or the urban painters,
as some call them. Surely somebody is one of the famous examples right here, and they were also,
you know, it's a movement that was very clearly visible on the copper belt as well.
They are seen as sort of outside the state,
sort of pushing these modernist sort of in response in part to these popular artists because
they're gaining traction out in the exterior sort of outside of the country as true Syrian artists.
And this this sort of the state moves to sort of combat that.
And so the museum actually only collects the modernist.
As I said, they're not allowed to collect the popular painters, which as a consequence means that the museum organises all these exhibitions abroad.
What gets exhibited abroad are these modernist, at least by by the museum.
The other thing that happens is that I said, there's sort of a canon in the art historical canon created often by these avant garde, these themselves.
But Dibango becomes a prolific writer and actually as well, he writes on sort of the history of these avant garde.
Just as well as I said, this art gets used in exhibitions.
I'm going to skip ahead a little bit because I don't want to run out of time to talk about the copper belt,
so state and presidential patronage played a crucial role in the development of these artists.
The article, to me is very important.
As I had said before, almost all of them become appointed as teachers and they have, you know, and continue to play for a long time.
A baby girl at the academy, there's numerous art historical publications,
and another important outlet for state patronage was its use of the politics of
this place and space in the monumental ization of the work of these artists.
As I said, one of the things that the military regime had done was the removal of these colonial monuments.
Several of them are replaced with works. So this is one of the.
I'm going to skip this. This is one of the examples of this, again, is a statue created by earlier,
and it's put in place of where the Stanley statue was in Kinshasa, Iwo Jima, which is sort of an interesting side of itself in the city.
But so their presence in very public spaces, on squares, their work on squares in the city of Kinshasa,
but also on a lot of new buildings that are built in this period.
Almost all of these buildings built by the state or affiliated organisations and institutions are built by foreign architects.
But you almost always see these modernists being asked to sort of almost paint cover that up as sort of, you know, create this decoration on these,
on these buildings that africanised these buildings or that sort of stimulated the process of zero zation of these buildings.
I think you have another example. Yeah, this is one of Yola outside the door to a theatre.
This is another one. And it's not just a state that does this.
Other institutions, as I said, sort of start to do this as well in emulation.
This is a statue at the entrance of the bank commerciales it was which was commissioned from the from early also as well by the bank to be put there.
So we get this policy sort of.
The state patronage is emulated by the Siberian elites and I don't have time for anecdotes, but interesting anecdotes since we can call.
Or have you heard of Cintiq and the Hall of Fame is he's one of the most famous.
One of the things he's famous for is is as a contemporary art collector on the African continent.
His father, who was the director of the movie movement as bank as it said,
actually started collecting art in this period and started also with the modernists and then went on to art historical arts.
So that theme and began the collection has its origins here in this time period.
Actually, then there is, and this is very important, and I don't have a whole lot of time to talk about this.
But then there is cultural diplomacy.
These are the artists that get on the aeroplane that are invited to get on the aeroplane with Mobutu when he goes to China, for example.
And the interesting thing is that this this has some real effects, and this tells us a lot about how we write about these African modernism.
So because we look at how they circulate in the global north, we we don't look at how they circulate in the global south because, for example,
some of these artists have commissions in China and continue to have commissions in China for quite for for many decades, actually.
So our sort of view is skewed there as well.
But it is through sort of this accompanying of Mobutu on these visits that they are able to sort of broaden their audience that way.
OK, so let's talk about of authenticity of the cover, but these are the Shenmue brothers.
They're actually call. Their name is Becca.
Their mother was a local woman from Albertville at the time, and their father was a may be former missionary,
very eccentric figure, but who did sort of occupy himself with sort of the fate of his, of his children.
And they are sent through these connexions with another missionary, Mark Orlando, who was the director of the Art Academy in Kinshasa.
So their sense of Kinshasa to the academy, they're so they're educated,
they're in the 1950s, so they're contemporaries of many of these avant garde artists.
And although they were never part of the movement, they played a central role in the reach of her Buddhist cultural politics into the mining belt.
Although early in their career, they benefited from the support of a number of missionaries as well as French ex-pats.
They distanced themselves from them as soon as soon after independence.
I could talk about their work a little bit. I'm going to skip that part, but you can.
You can look at it. Despite encouragement of the presidential office to relocate their workshops to Kinshasa in the early 1970s,
they maintained a certain level of political and financial independence by remaining in Lubumbashi,
although they did benefit from the state patronage and cultural diplomacy of the Mobutu regime,
thanks to carefully maintained gallery presence and a network in the capital that opened their own gallery in the capital.
Actually, in their self-representation,
they lean heavily on the evolution of their branding from the brothers as they call themselves originally to the brothers Shinji,
which was the name of their grandfather on their mother's side. In Canuto Shaniya's autobiography, The Story of Their Name changed just told us.
Following inspecting their work in 1968 on a 1968 visit to Lumumba, Mobutu, misled by their European name,
enquired why he was not being shown the work of Congolese artists, as Canuto tells it.
This was a bit of a watershed moment, and upon reflection, they changed their name.
So this story does just. This started this a couple of things.
One, it has the brothers participating in authenticity well before it becomes a state ideology too.
It does associates them with a spirit of authenticity without associating it with its face as an ultimately repressive state ideology.
Three.
Mobutu is in there origin story, but in reality, I was able to find that they don't actually change their name and since 1973, when they have to.
So this is sort of a story that the story tells us about their pragmatism when it came to politics.
But the fact that they were still telling it in the mid 2000s also tells us something about their allegiance to a certain idea of authenticity.
Like many of these artists, actually, they benefit, so they benefit from this culture complex.
They participate in a lot of these exhibitions that the that the museum organises.
They're in the museum collection they teach at the academy, but in Lubumbashi, not in Kinshasa, they're in the national collection.
What they're less active in is sort of these public pieces.
They don't do as much of these public commissions as the others do. They have a much broader feel, though they do sculpture.
They do these sort of copper beaten copper sculptures, if you will.
That's that you see emerging around in around the 1970s and a little bit earlier in the copper belt.
So they sort of range a little bit more, and that also makes them earn more money.
They had quite a large workshop.
So in many ways, the Mabuti state had refurbished the structures of the colonial state spatially, culturally and politically,
although it sought to construct the impression of a rupture with a colonial past through the ideology of automaticity.
This intersected with an intellectual and arts on artistic impetus that was present in Silurian intellectual and artistic circles.
Avant garde movements elsewhere produce models for rupture in the production of modernism.
But in the case of Zaire,
the dual promotional and politically constraining frameworks provided by the regime resulted in an appropriation and narrowing of their efforts.
Authenticity This appeal existed mostly in the first half of the 1970s.
By the middle of the decade, the corrupt and authoritarian nature of the Mabuti regime was fully appearance,
and the marginalisation of the Ministry of Culture and Arts led to a lack of resources for cultural institutions.
The brutal regime launched the ideology of Mobutu ism, which largely supplanted at the earlier focus on culture with a focus on the figure of Mobutu.
And if if talking to these artists sort of, you know, indeed, from about 2016 to today,
they talk with a lot of nostalgia about this earlier period and about the promise that they saw in authenticity.
But they also talk about their great disappointment in that it was much more narrow than they were imagining.
And it was it was sort of the statelet effort and they were given not given a whole lot of space to sort of do with it what they wanted to do with it.
While this idea in modernist strive to comply with Western notions of artistic authenticity as the product of a creative singularity,
they were doomed to fail in the eyes of most foreigners. Had it not been for the support of the state, there would have been swallowed by history.
The publication's monuments and their presence in the museum collection and the at the academy kept them from sinking into obscurity.
While for Western modernism, the appropriation of African art and and its authenticity have been crucial.
Almost any adaptation of so-called Western techniques or topics by African artists
was considered inauthentic or an inferior mimicry of European artistic traditions,
despite their limited international acclaim. These modernists gained a permanence on their artistic scene in Zaire through their
dominance in the official art historical record and the National Museum Collection.
Their work's presence in public spaces and their powerful positions at the Art Academy sort of have some longevity.
Although their legacy at the academy has been very contested since the late 1990s, there's been a lot of sort of generational conflicts there.
The traces of their presence are still visible in the city and have even been renewed in some cases.
For example, Leela made monuments for the city and for the states until his death a number of weeks ago,
and Bomba chronicles the history of the artist wistfully recalling the quote Political
Revolutionary Art of the Buddhist Revolution until his death two years ago.
The centralisation of the academic art scene around the academy in Kinshasa continues to this day.
However, like the Shinji brothers,
artists from Katanga and elsewhere need to circulate in artistic circles in Kinshasa in order to gain national and international traction.
Thank you.