When Armand Diangienda picks up an instrument that he has never played, he looks for its hidden rule. There is always a rule, just as in math: a principle that tells him that when he plays one note, or one chord, the next one naturally follows. His fingers mimic how he’s seen others handle the instrument, and then they find the patterns themselves, gaining assurance on the strings, or keys, or valves. “I thank God for that talent, because I can just look at someone playing and I can figure it out,” he said. That skill enabled Diangienda to learn piano, guitar, cello, trombone, and trumpet, and it was crucial twenty years ago, when he started the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra, in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
On a muggy recent evening, he walked to the orchestra’s practice room, a few steps from his office in the compound that contains his family home and the church he helps lead. Dozens of men and women, including young teen-agers and middle-aged mothers, sat in plastic chairs and shared music stands that held the score to the “Marseillaise.” In keeping with church tradition, everyone was barefoot, and Diangienda slipped off his sandals as he passed through the door. Wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt and beige pants, he settled on a stool facing the musicians and wiped sweat from his brow. “Are you listening to me?” he called out. Musicians leaned into one another, talking and exchanging tips; the sounds of horns and strings clashed as players warmed up. The space was cramped; an oblong yellow-and-beige room with plastic flowers adorning the walls, it had transparent doors that let in a weak breeze from a courtyard. A small crowd from the church was watching outside. “I want us to be very focussed,” Diangienda said. “If someone feels this is not going to work, just tell me, ‘Papa Armand, this is not going to work,’ and I’ll find something else to do, because I’m a realistic person.”
Outside the compound, Kinshasa is a city perpetually under construction and in motion. Many intersections have no traffic lights, and so Kinois, as the residents call themselves, cross first with a few tentative steps and then at a full sprint. Venders dodge cars and buses as they hawk Ya Mado and Ndombolo CDs; music stalls blast Congolese pop—springy, guitar-driven rhythms made for dancing. One day, on the congested Avenue Kitona, I watched a man in a pin-striped suit elegantly balancing a bass in the midday sun. Soon afterward, a kid leaped toward my car window to try to grab my phone.
The city is divided into moneyed enclaves like Gombe—where the well-off live and where many Kinois work—and the cité, where everyone else resides. In the cité, people live nearly on top of one another, in a noisy, sleep-defying maze of eateries, bars, hair salons, street venders, churches, and shops. Diangienda lives in a quarter called Ngiri-Ngiri, near a vast market that sells meat and vegetables alongside electrical and plumbing parts.
The orchestra used to practice in a hall in town, but that arrangement fell through, so Diangienda’s home has become a conservatory and a practice hall, a place where music and singing are always heard. Diangienda never attended music school, and most of his musical knowledge comes from his childhood church. But Héritier Mayimbi, the concertmaster, told me that he was tireless: “He works only for musicians and his orchestra. He does nothing else.”
Diangienda has the look of a favorite uncle: a broad, genial face, with close-cut hair, a slightly grayed mustache, and an attentive manner. At the podium, he put on a stern expression. “Food is not going to come from Heaven like it did for the children of Israel,” he said. “Do not expect such miracles. People are making and inventing things of many kinds; you and I have chosen music. What I can’t stand is people saying that I’m not going to rehearse; I’ll just come for the concert.” He reminded the musicians that the French Embassy had invited them to perform, during a week of events promoting French economic and cultural activity in Kinshasa. “The compositions we are playing are becoming more and more complicated,” he said. “When you come here, some may come on time, but they take too much time chatting with others, and take more time laughing instead of rehearsing.” Everyone erupted into laugher. Diangienda allowed himself to smile.
He called out to Mayimbi, “Héritier, will you gather the strings to rehearse?” Mayimbi, short and slender, with a lisp, was floating in the black suit that he sometimes wears to rehearsals. He nodded. Diangienda held up his baton, and they began to play.
Diangienda was born fifty-one years ago, on the same land he lives on now. His old house has been torn down, replaced with a renovated family home and church—a sprawling concrete building painted in the Kimbanguist colors of green and white and surrounded by a green metal fence. In the orchestra’s general office is a large portrait of Simon Kimbangu, the founder of the sect and Diangienda’s grandfather: full face, hefty build, serious but kind eyes. Kimbangu, who advocated a new African version of Christianity, was regarded by his followers as a prophet anointed by God. In 1921, the Belgians put him in prison, and thirty years later he died as a martyr there, but his movement only gained strength, and it now has about eight million adherents throughout central Africa.
When Diangienda was born, his father had retired from civil administration for the colonial government and was helping to lead the church. His mother took care of the family’s seven children and ran a small business selling spices, doughnuts, and other goods. They were middle class, not rich but stable, and the church provided an enveloping community; Kimbanguists follow strict rules, which forbid alcohol, tobacco, visiting night clubs, and other licentious entertainment. Even while his parents were away, travelling the country’s horrible roads to visit branches of the church, there were always adults around—relatives, family friends, church members that his parents took in when they fell on hard times.
Shy and introverted, Diangienda clung to his older brother Samuel, who had learned to play piano by watching their father play. Diangienda started the piano, and then the guitar, picking out church songs. It was an unsettled time in Congo. After the country gained independence, in 1960, a promising leader, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated with the complicity of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Joseph Mobutu, who had helped plan the coup, soon took power. He banned all political parties and installed a kleptocracy, in which he and his cronies stole so shamelessly that the country’s public infrastructure began to collapse.
When Diangienda was fourteen, his parents sent him and Samuel to study at a Christian boarding school in Belgium; some of his siblings had already settled in Brussels. “It was difficult to leave my parents’ home,” he said. “There was the joy of discovering something new, but we were also afraid, because we were wondering, What if we have no money, what are we going to do?” At school, they lived, studied, and ate in the same building; it was “like a small prison,” he said.
Diangienda understood that one day it would be his duty to serve the church. But, for now, he was interested mostly in flying. “The first time I conjugated a verb in the future tense in French, I said, ‘I will become a pilot,’ ” he recalled. When he graduated, he wanted to go to flight school in the United States, but his father refused. “Sometimes he said yes to things, but we knew him so well that we knew yes was a no for him,” he said, laughing. So he moved in with his older sister in Brussels and enrolled in a flight school there, attending class when he could afford it. In his free time, he played drums in a reggae group called Burning Ashes, and toured around the country, once opening for UB40 in Brussels. “Most of our songs were just spreading our message, which was peace, love, brotherhood,” Diangienda said. Bena Nsilu, a pastor who knew him at the time, said that Diangienda has always been driven, even when it came to spreading peace and love.
At twenty-six, he got his father’s approval to study at a flight school in Florida. What he liked most about being up in the air was the sense of control, and the discipline. Everyone was serious—otherwise you would end up on the ground. He enjoyed Florida, but after he got a commercial license he moved back to Kinshasa. “I had more chances of finding a job here, and I knew my country needed me,” he said. He married a childhood love and began piloting planes for TAZ airlines. The runways in the region were little more than strips of dirt, so he flew DC-3s, which could land anywhere. “It wasn’t the United States, but it was fun,” he told me.
In 1991, rioting soldiers destroyed TAZ’s offices and hangars, and Diangienda lost his job. He got a new one at Scibe Airlift, and then the brakes of a plane he was co-piloting failed on the runway and he barely escaped crashing. Later, another pilot, flying a plane that Diangienda normally flew, crashed near the eastern city of Goma, killing everyone on board. Diangienda, with no plane to fly, lost his job again, and he couldn’t find any more work as a pilot.
The orchestra began almost as a fluke. Diangienda, unemployed, was devoting his time to the church, and, as he thought of ways to make things better, he sat in his cramped but cozy home office, listening to CDs of classical music which he had brought home from the United States. Music has always been central to Kimbanguist worship. The church’s founder was an amateur flutist, and he and his followers believed that songs came to them through divine inspiration. They also had a repertory of songs from outside. During the colonial era, Catholic seminaries and missionary schools had taught European church music, translating choral hymns into Kikongo, the language of the Bas-Congo region, where most Kimbanguists come from. In one collaboration between a Belgian friar and Congolese musicians, the Latin Mass became the Missa Luba. Kimbanguist services were set to the soundtrack of flute-and-drum groups and brass ensembles, big-sounding bands meant to be heard from miles away.
“Their members would many times just play on the street for weddings, baptisms, or other religious ceremonies,” Kasongo Kapanga, a professor of Francophone studies at the University of Richmond, who grew up in Congo, told me. “They would parade in the cité. They became part of the musical landscape, and they added an ethical dimension to it, because music is part of their worship and discipline.”
Diangienda admired Handel, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, and didn’t see why he couldn’t get the musicians he knew to play that same stirring music. With an accompanying choir, an orchestra could be a new means of fulfilling his spiritual mission. “At the beginning, the intention was religious,” he said. “The orchestra was the best way for me to do what my father always wanted me to do, which is to gather people together.” He also wanted to elevate the profile of his church. He knew that an orchestra would be impressive: Congolese had never seen their countrymen playing this music on this scale.
He recruited musicians from the church’s flute and guitar groups and from its band, and organized those who knew the rudiments of music to teach novices. Although Diangienda declared the orchestra open to anyone, nearly all the members came from the church. “When you start such a project, you need to be with people who share the same beliefs, because such projects require a lot of resources,” he said. “I found those people within our community.”
It wasn’t hard for Diangienda to attract people to the cause. His parishioners see him as a teacher and a counsellor, part of the key to their salvation. In any case, they listened mostly to devotional music, and for many of them Handel seemed less foreign than the music spilling out of the city’s bars. Diangienda welcomed to the orchestra ushers, members of the church Scout groups, security guards, whoever was interested.
“We mainly considered it Western music, but we thought it was a good idea that he was bringing something new from his time living abroad,” Seth Matumona, the secretary-general of the orchestra, said. Matumona, a forty-nine-year-old who works as a program assistant at the Swedish Embassy, had practiced English with Diangienda after he moved back from Florida, and the two were close. The idea of an orchestra seemed a little strange; no one had an orchestra. But if they were doing it for fun, without any expectations, why not?
Diangienda’s mornings are reserved for his “normal life,” apart from music. His children run into his bedroom for blessings, he visits with his wife and other relatives, and sometimes he watches science and history documentaries. In his office, where he works for the church, heavy dusk-colored curtains face a desk crammed with markers, pens, CDs of operas and classical music, a laptop, Bibles, a framed photograph of his father, and stacks of papers from parishioners—résumés, plans for projects—that they have asked him to bless. In 2002, the church underwent a leadership dispute, and Diangienda, along with sixteen of Kimbangu’s other grandchildren, formed an independent branch, taking with them several thousand followers. It’s part of his “inheritance” to pray for people who have come to tell him their problems, and give advice and encouragement. “We live in a tough country,” he said. “People sometimes need strength to continue living and not lose hope, and we’re here for that.”
Congo, a vast place that is home to some eighty million people, suffered centuries of exploitation by traders from East Africa and Portugal, Belgium’s King Leopold II, and the Belgian government—a succession of predators looking for slaves, ivory, and rubber. After independence, the Congolese struggled to build a functioning nation. During Mobutu’s tenure, a common joke imagined a constitutional provision—Article 15—that gave officials the right to solicit bribes and to steal. People in the church try to forget those years. Seth Matumona used to work for Mobutu’s extravagant, brutal shell of a government, but he claims to have forgotten exactly what he was assigned to do, and no one asks.
Mobutu was ousted in 1997, at the beginning of a series of conflicts with neighboring states that have raged intermittently for two decades, devastating millions of lives. Mobutu, seeking to prevent internal uprisings, kept state institutions powerless; successive leaders have done little to rebuild them, leaving Congolese to fend for themselves. The current President, Joseph Kabila, leads a weak administration, which has effectively ceded control of much of eastern Congo to militias. The government routinely tortures political dissidents. Recently, as the nation began preparing for Presidential elections next year, Kabila tried to extend his stay in office by pushing a bill in Parliament that required a national census before the next vote—a daunting feat in a huge country with rudimentary roads. Thousands of young Congolese took to the streets for four days in January to protest. Before the bill was abandoned, security forces killed dozens of protesters and arrested others.
Musicians and artists, like most of Congo’s citizens, receive little support from the country’s institutions; in Kinshasa, it is impossible to get a bank loan to open a small business, let alone a cultural venue. Congolese create anyway, despite the difficulties of living in a broken state. Yoka Lye, the director of the National Institute of the Arts, told me, “Art and music in our country are another way of breathing for people—another way of resisting.” The Congolese have long invented spaces in which they take refuge from the trials of their lives: exorbitant rent, overstretched public transport, no jobs, negligible social services. Many older people find their breathing room in the church. Younger ones distract themselves by taking part in sports leagues or in subcultures like la sape, in which men adopt dandyish clothes and aristocratic manners, parading through the streets in outlandish but immaculately tended suits.
Nathalie Bahati, who has been playing flute in Diangienda’s orchestra for nineteen years, told me, “When I pick up my instrument and start playing, I forget everything. It takes away all my difficulties.” A soft-spoken single mother of two, she works as a seamstress. Other players in the orchestra are teachers, market venders, electricians, doctors, or nurses; some are students. Most originally saw the orchestra as something to do along with other church activities but came to appreciate the music on its own merits. Mananga Ndudi, a music teacher who plays the French horn, said that performing “makes me pure.”
Membership in the orchestra has spread through families. In the early days, Diangienda enlisted Albert Matubanza, a science teacher and a church guitar player, to play in the orchestra and to instruct rookie musicians. Matubanza taught himself the violin, and then the bass. Looking for other players, he turned to his wife, Josephine Mpongo. “He asked me, ‘Why don’t you learn to play an instrument?’ ” she recalled. Mpongo, an animated, open woman, with her hair pulled back in a bright scrunchie, told me that she had grown up singing in the church choir. “I thought, Why not, let’s give it a try,” she said. She selected the cello and fell for it quickly. She quit her job as a nurse and started a business that gave her more time to refine her playing; her shop sells curtains, clothes, cosmetics, and home goods. During my visit, her family was staying at a cousin’s house, having been forced to move because of an increase in the rent. But she had made sure that her son—a thirteen-year-old named Armand, after Diangienda—had strings for his violin.
When the orchestra started, instruments were scarce. Most musicians got them from abroad, by a circuitous route. When Congolese asked relatives in Europe for money, sometimes the relatives instead shipped over valuable objects that they had around the house—which might include a castoff violin or clarinet. “People had them at home, not knowing what to do with them,” Matumona said. When they heard about the orchestra, they brought the instruments to sell to the new players. “It was very tough finding instruments’ spare parts, so we would manufacture them on our own,” Mpongo said. String players went to the National Institute of the Arts and collected discarded bows. Some musicians made their own instruments; Matubanza, the bassist, took his bass apart to see how it was made, and then cut out patterns from paper, which he laid on sheets of wood as a guide in cutting. When the percussionists needed chimes, they tested pieces of scrap metal until they found that the wheel rims from a minibus produced a pure-sounding D natural.
Sometimes the players shared instruments, taking shifts during rehearsals. Once, Mpongo told me, an alternate violin player took a rival’s bow and hid it in his shirt before a performance. When the violinist who was supposed to perform opened his case and saw that the bow was missing, he got up to look for it—and the alternate slipped into his seat, said, “Oh, I can play,” and pulled the bow out of his shirt.
After six months of individual training, then another six of rehearsal, the orchestra gave its first concert, at the Palais du Peuple, the pale, columned Parliament building in downtown Kinshasa. Diangienda played the cello, which he had just learned, and Matumona played the flute, with about sixty other amateur musicians. “Several choirs were singing, and we were the surprise—no one expected us,” Diangienda told me. They played church songs, a piece by Joaquín Rodrigo, Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” The audience watched with curiosity, and then with approval. “I remember, after playing the first song, the reaction of the audience was encouraging,” Diangienda told me. In the best seats, officials from Mobutu’s government listened attentively; behind them sat church members and choral-music fans. “It was a great evening,” he said. “People told me that this was what was missing in the church.”
In the beginning, only a fifth of the audience at the concerts was black, and some Congolese complained that classical music put them to sleep. Mayimbi, the violinist, said, “They used to tell us it’s not African music, it’s not our culture.” Mayimbi rejected that idea. What was Congolese music, anyway? Even Congo’s best-known music, its effervescent version of rumba, incorporated influences from the Caribbean, Europe, and the rest of Africa.
The music that the orchestra was playing had a complex legacy in Kinshasa. Under colonialism, knowing the classics was a way to present yourself as évolué—of adhering to a system of behaviors that the Belgians considered “evolved.” The évolué colonial citizen spoke perfect French, knew the right fork to use at dinner, dressed in European fashions, and refrained from dancing expressively or listening to Congolese music in public: he disguised nearly everything that made him Congolese.
After Mobutu took power, he enforced a policy of “authenticity”—a rejection of colonial values that obligated his citizens to embrace local cultures. (When Mobutu’s soldiers grew angry during periods of no pay, he sent a band to play Congolese rumba for them.) Western pop was discouraged, but classical music lingered, mostly in the church. For decades, the main radio station in the country, run by the government, played classical and church songs after public figures died. When Mobutu’s wife died, the station kept up a musical elegy—Beethoven, Verdi, Mozart—for days.
Serge Bango-Bango, an interpreter and an occasional musician, told me that some Kinois were initially skeptical of the orchestra: they saw it as church music, not as something you’d listen to for pleasure. Many early performances took place at churches, weddings, anniversaries, and events held by nonprofits and by foreign embassies. Diangienda called the venues concert halls, but they were really just rooms, whose acoustics weren’t intended for instrumental music. The musicians held free concerts outdoors, begging dance clubs nearby to turn down their music during performances. Still, they were excited. They had taught themselves and were already teaching others. People in the audience were often astonished, less by the sound of the music than by the ambition of the orchestra: Congolese performing in a difficult, exclusive genre. “Classical orchestras have always been considered music of a certain social class, which requires lots of training and a lot of money,” Diangienda told me. “And we have proven that we could do it.”
In 2008, Diangienda, Mayimbi, and the principal violist were invited for an internship at a conservatory in Evry, in the southern suburbs of Paris. They were nervous and curious; they wanted to compare themselves with French musicians, and to learn. After German filmmakers made a documentary about the orchestra, “Kinshasa Symphony,” a few of the musicians went to Germany for a screening and a performance, and German musicians came to Kinshasa to give workshops. More European tours came, and they went to California, playing at a TED conference and with Peter Gabriel at a private concert in Malibu. “People are surprised because we’re all black,” Matumona said. “If there was one white guy as a maestro or musician, they would say, ‘O.K., it’s because that white guy is there—that’s where it all comes from.’ ”
The orchestra developed a pre-tour ritual, in which the members all head to a rambling farm that Diangienda’s family maintains outside Kinshasa. For a week, they eat, pray, and rehearse in an intense boot camp, sometimes taking breaks to work on construction projects and feed the livestock. In 2014, they travelled to the U.K. to perform with several ensembles, including the BBC Concert Orchestra, in a tour of English cities. “When we went to London, they just looked at us,” Mpongo recalled. The Congolese musicians settled in awkwardly next to their English counterparts. They thought that the two groups would be practicing together, but instead the English gave them a piece to play, in order to judge their abilities. “We were almost a hundred black orchestra members, and they really wanted to see what our level was,” she said. “When we played, they were satisfied.” During the tour, the Congolese musicians received guidance, and occasionally instruments, from their European colleagues. One of the Congolese, Johnny Balongi, told me, “As a self-taught bassoonist, I wanted to see what a professional musician could do. I was jealous of their training, because in Congo there are no other bassoonists outside of the orchestra.” As they played in the commingled groups, some of them nodded and smiled, as if to say, “So this is how the piece should sound.”
Mpongo viewed the European players’ skill with equanimity. “They started very young, from childhood,” she said. “Here, I wake up at four, I take the kids to school around five, I go to the boutique around six or seven, and the whole day I spend in business, and then in the evening I go to rehearsal, so my head is loaded with so many things. Abroad, they only play music from morning to evening. Of course the performances cannot be the same. But we have improved a lot.”
One evening in December, the orchestra celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a concert at the Béatrice Hotel, a towering structure of glass and taupe brick near the Gare Centrale, the site of a defunct train station and a fountain commemorating Congo’s independence. Inside, the musicians, dressed in black suits and dresses, set up their stands in a cavernous room with a deep-red carpet and a gaudy chandelier.
“Are you afraid?” Diangienda asked them from the podium. “Forget the audience; just pretend we’re playing by ourselves, for ourselves. Don’t look at the people, look at me.” He becomes so anxious before their performances that he has nightmares about an audience waiting impatiently as the orchestra scrambles to get ready, or about going to a concert and forgetting his suit.
The players were restless. “We were wondering whether the guests were going to be there, if it would be good—it was like planning a wedding,” Mpongo, the cellist, said. Diangienda and Matumona no longer allow the orchestra to play for free; they are trying to raise money for a music school they want to build. Tickets that night were a hundred dollars, and the banquet hall was almost full, with an audience that was more black than white. People sat in rows of straight-backed red-and-gold chairs; children in church clothes squirmed in their seats.
The orchestra’s success has inspired copycat groups. The other Kimbanguist church branch now has an orchestra of its own. “They’re not as good as us, though, so it would be difficult for us to play together,” Mpongo said. These days, the orchestra often supplements its programs with compositions by Diangienda, who describes his music as “classical with an African touch.” He knows that this kind of synthesis appeals to foreign audiences; when Peter Gabriel invited the orchestra members to play, it was at least partly because of the novelty of their origins. But, Diangienda said, “I cannot compose if I don’t bring something from my own identity.” Recently, at a funeral, he heard a band from the Tetela ethnic group, and he was attracted to the percussion, a two-note pin pin sound. Now he was tooling around with the keyboard on his iPad, trying to integrate it into a piece. “We have a lot of variety in Congolese music,” Diangienda told me. He mimicked the songs of the Luba people, undulating phrases built on a five-note scale—like the black keys of a piano but with pitches bent to suit the emotion of a phrase. “I’m trying to find out how to bring out the particularities of our cultures within the compositions. I believe the classical composers of Western music brought the influences of their environments into the music, and I’m wondering how I can follow the same path.”
A decade ago, in the traffic circle outside the Béatrice Hotel, Congo’s culture minister had erected a statue of King Leopold, suggesting that his countrymen temper their memories of the horror of the colonial era. There was an intense outcry against the celebration of a génocidaire, and, hours later, the government removed the statue; the minister said that it had been put up as a “trial to see if the concrete could support the weight.” Now, inside the hotel, Diangienda’s musicians saw a more natural blending of the Congolese and the European. Mayimbi, the violinist, told me, “Of course we have borrowed classical music from the Western cultures—but then what are we doing with it?” Mayimbi, who also composes for the orchestra, told me that when he listens to Beethoven he can hear a way to weave in Congolese rhythms.
The junior orchestra opened the program, and then the main group played, intently working its way through Schubert, Gounod, and Bizet. When Diangienda conducts in rehearsal, his feet lift off the floor, his knees dip and rise, and then the movement goes through his hips, ending in his hands. He sings the players’ parts aloud, snapping his fingers from side to side, swaying and clapping. During the performance, his face was serene, as he mouthed notes, sometimes slipping into a smile, eyes watchful. After each piece, the crowd applauded enthusiastically.
When the concert was over, the audience chanted, “Encore, encore!” The musicians turned and asked their fellow-players how they felt about the performance. People approached Diangienda to give praise, and he greeted them smiling and bowing his head. “Music has become, for me, a way of communicating,” he said later. “It’s a way of expression, sharing my wishes, my ideas, with other people, and an internal strength for me to continue moving forward.”
Since 2013, half a dozen musicians have left the orchestra: some won the U.S. visa lottery; others took on time-consuming jobs or had children. Now there are eighty performing musicians and a hundred and five singers in the choir. Rehearsals are not easy; the musicians can be unfocussed, because they are preoccupied with worries from their real jobs and their personal lives. But, Diangienda said, “without money, without making any false promises to people, without people understanding exactly where they are going, for them to be patient enough to be here after all these years”—he stopped, shaking his head. “And seeing what is happening—it is a great success.” ♦
