On The
Rumba River
by Jacques Sarasin
First Run Icarus Films, New York, NY,
2006
DVD, 86 mins., col.
DVD Sales: $398.00; DVD rental: $125
Distributor’s
website: http://www.frif.com.
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg
jonathanzilberg@gmail.com
On the Rumba River is more significant
as a social documentary about the tragic
history of Zaire and the Democratic Republic
of Congo and the surrounding region than
as a film of Zairean Rumba music per se.
It conveys little of the dynamic sensual
passion and none of the energy for which
Zairean Rumba is best known and appears
to have been inspired by the vastly more
effective documentary about Cuban jazz,
The Buena Vista Social Club. Sarasin’s
film provides no hint of the immense continental
and transcontinental success of the tradition.
Instead, one is forced to witness the
disaster that is Papa Wenda’s and
the common person’s lot in Kinshasa
and Brazzaville on the lower reaches of
the Congo River. Above all, the
film is an account of a pitiful attempt
to revive this one man’s career and
the impossible dream of getting a gig
for his band in America so as to reclaim
a space for a musician who was one of
President Mobutu’s favored arriviste
cultural thugs——by his own account.
As recounted by Gary Stewart in Rumba
on the River (1999) and in Graeme
Ewens’ "Heart of Danceness" in World
Music (2000), African Rumba, its well
spring being Zaire, is not Rumba in its
West Indian sense but a complex combination
of Cuban inspired musical styles. After
Cuban Rumba took off in New York in the
1920s and in London in the 1930s, it was
transformed in the 1930s and 1940s and
thereafter into African Rumba known as
Soukous, the word being derived
from the French word secouer——to
shake. After African jazz emerged in the
1950s and the post-independence political
conflicts in the 1960s, Zairean musicians
began migrating to Uganda, Tanzania, and
Kenya where they continued to sing in
Lingala. In the 1980s the Rumba scene
took off in Paris and London as best represented
in Papa Wemba’s success there. Later,
in the 1990s, a fast paced even more intensely
sexual form known as Kwasa Kwasa
became so popular in Zimbabwe and South
Africa as to dominate local music when
musicians such as Pepe Kalle the Elephant
Man thundered onto the scene. In more
recent years in Zaire, the hyper-aggressive
sexuality of the latest form of Rumba
known as Ndombolo has been considered
by the Museveni government to be so obscene
as to have been deemed illegal. Naturally,
it subsequently became more popular than
ever——especially the frenzied
whistling and gyrating of the new dance——the
Bill Clinton.
If viewers of this film did not have this
background to go on, they would think
that there was no music to be had in Zaire,
never mind any joy or wealth such as best
expressed in the decades long fabulous
opulent expressive life of the sapeurs
whose competitive prestige depends on
their public displays of the latest and
most expensive European designer clothing
and Italian shoes. In contrast, there
is an intensely flat and depressive quality
to this film. In fact, in order to best
get a visual sense of the lack of energy
in this film, one should be sure to watch
the film Touki Bouki to understand
the sheer joie de vivre that can
be found in these ghettoes and thus something
of the jouissance that gives Rumba
its power.
Perhaps On the Rumba River is deliberately
designed in this way so as to convey the
dispirited nature of these unemployed
and relatively impoverished musicians.
In this, its real value is that of a social
documentary. The film very well provides
a vehicle for capturing peoples’
memories of the end of the colonial era,
the early years of independence as Mobutu
entrenched his grip on power, and the
gradual descent into the post-colonial
condition aptly portrayed here. And while
the film leaves one perhaps thinking that
things are calm, if going nowhere, the
final text on the screen notes that 4
million people have died in recent years.
In fact, three years later, in 2007, further
upriver in the Eastern DRC war, mass murder
and mass rape is the order of the day
as brought to our attention by the gender
activist Eve Elsner. The UN and others
are now working hard to bring this situation
to the international community’s
attention through V-day and the stop fistula
campaign and in this larger political
context, there is surely an uncomfortable
space here between the exaggerated male
sexual aggression in this dance form and
the codified defensive female postures
and the climate in which rape is so persistently
and wickedly used as an instrument of
war. But one would not get any sense of
any of this in this film as the Rumba
revived here is a slow and refined subtle
Africanized dance form more attuned to
middle class Cuban aesthetics of the early
decades of the 20th century.
Repeatedly the camera and the main figure
Papa Wenda return to the river from the
ragged broken poverty of the urban squalor
the musicians endure. There he sadly watches
the great brown river flowing by fast
as if mocking time itself while the lost
signs of the future, large metal transport
and passenger barges, one by one, rust
and sink into the turbid and turbulent
waters. For those who have read Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness and Naipaul’s
A Bend in the River by way of Achebe’s
objections, when you next dance to Rumba
in Paris and London, you may do so with
a certain edge——particularly
if you are aware of how the squalid daily
life depicted in this documentary is absolute
heaven compared to current conditions
upriver in the war torn Eastern DRC. One
should then perhaps keep in mind when
watching this calm and dispirited film
that foreign African armies and interests
have for a long time now been working
with competing local forces to extract
the wealth of the nation in some degrees
in ways every bit as appalling as the
Belgians before them. Thus, images referred
to in the media such as the triumphant
Rumba musician being carried through the
jubilant crowds in Kinshasa on the back
of a Zimbabwean tank remind us of the
larger context to which this film so morbidly
obsessed with a failed past, could only
point towards in closing with an epigraph.
If this film has one message it would
seem to be that greed and suffering are
as constant, as mighty and unforgiving
as the flow of this great river and time
itself. There is a quality of darkness
here in which explicit Conradian metaphors
are at work: the broken down steam ships
and the long dead engine gauges themselves
as modernity’s lingering and lurching
deferred failure, the river as all powerful
and timeless, greed and decrepitude, suffering
all around. Whither goes Africa you will
be forgiven for asking perhaps. But in
the meantime——shall we dance?
