Kinshasa

"Regarding Kinshasa, our only contact, for a very long time now, is expressed in terms of troubles and misfortune, corruption and wars, Mobutu’s dictatorship or Kabila’s assassination. It is nonetheless in spite, or because of, these genuine tribulations, that the city is probably the most creative one on the African continent. Apart from the rumbas in Zaire, whose rhythms have danced their way over to us, we are as a rule ignorant about the cultural punch that reigns here, in every form. I was able to see this for myself for five months, 'driving and swinging around' in a rusty old taxi along 'extremely vibrant' avenues, meeting these ladies and gentlemen, these Congolese artists.

'This is the story of a failure'… This is how I could have introduced this work, in the guise of a preliminary warning, the way that Ernesto Che Guevara did for his narrative on his Congolese misadventures. Of the thousand music groups and the thousands of craftspeople, of the hundreds of painters and sculptors, actors, poets and writers, and as many boxers, fighters, wrestlers and football players, I will preserve the frustrated memory of merely brushing the surface of the genius of this immense African city and bringing back only a minuscule testimony."

Extract from Zoé Zoé, Femmes du mondes, 2007, Éditions Gallimard