Life in the DRC – An Inspiration

Again, we watched Al-Jazeera over breakfast.  This time, there was a documentary on life in Kinshasa.  The Democratic Republic of Congo has not been a peaceful country of late; and Kinshasa is infamous—for crime, deteriorating (or non-existent) infrastructure, and poverty.  Yet this program, part of a series called Witness, wonderfully conveyed the power of the human spirit, even within the crushing realities of daily life there.  The centerpiece of the story was a shared attempt to create a symphony orchestra.  The conductor, an unemployed pilot, had no formal musical training.  One saxophone player was a single mother, abandoned by her lover, making her own way in the world and playing the saxophone in her ‘spare time’, with her young son at her side.  She hoped he would become a musician.  Another choir member lived in a crowded room with another woman who preferred watching television to listening to the singer practice.  Many of the stringed instruments were hand-made.  The craftsman had disassembled one of his prized instruments to learn how they were put together.  He found wood at the local lumber mill, had it sawed into reasonable sizes, and then created a cello, by whittling and planing, as needed.  Other instruments were also cannibalized or created from junk.

Kinshasa’s realities were the backdrop for these stories.  One scene showed the conductor selecting a place to perform:  a dusty soccer field, surrounded by dance parlours.  He spoke of the need to negotiate with the dance hall owners to lower the volume while the orchestra performed.  The saxophone player sought a more peaceful place to live with her son.  A dirty, two room house, with crumbling walls and no furniture, was offered, with apologies from the agent for its condition.  He explained that people were pouring into Kinshasa from all over the nation, all seeking housing.  The $40/month and one year’s rent in advance seemed prohibitive in that economy. 

There were street scenes, showing the dilapidated housing, the pot-holed streets with huge puddles, mini-floods, interfering with traffic.  Other scenes showed colorfully dressed women carrying even more colorful buckets of water, indicative of the lack of sewage or piped water.  The saxophone player bathed her son with a sponge, moistened from a bucket.  There were conversations in over-crowded public transport.  The faces of the orchestra members looked exhausted, as they listened to their conductor’s exhortations to practice more.

I have not been to DRC, but I have been to neighbouring Cameroon repeatedly, and seen the difficult lives of people living in cities there.  The lack of piped water, the poor condition of housing, the complications added to daily life by the crumbling infrastructure and poor transportation systems.  I marveled at the willingness, and the strength, of these people to come practice—over and over again—for an orchestral performance, after the frustrations and difficulties working and living in such an environment.  Two singers struggled over the German language in the songs they were to sing in the performance.  Tears came to my eyes as I heard the singer explain, with joy on her face, how she was transported to another place while she was singing, coming back to Kinshasa only when the song ended.

I also felt amazement at the ability of the conductor to persuade these people to sit quietly together and work on a shared effort in this way.  In Cameroon, I encountered what seemed to be a very individualistic approach to work and something of an unwillingness or disinterest in working together to accomplish a common goal (though I wonder too if this might have been that we were trying to work on my goal, not theirs!).  Other anthropologists, with longer experience there than I, have written of ‘acephalous societies’ (communities without effective leaders or heads) in Central Africa, and what I saw in Cameroon confirmed this characterization.  This kind of social structure would seem to render even more difficult such a complex endeavour as making a symphony orchestra work well—yet the conductor was determined, patient, persistent in his efforts and apparently somewhat successful.

The program was a wonderful testament to the human spirit, to the joys people can feel in their work and in beauty, to their willingness to strive even under such difficult conditions to create beauty and meaning.

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1 Response to Life in the DRC – An Inspiration

  1. Richard says:

    What a nice description!

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