Every Friday, The World Africa presents three new musical releases from or inspired by the continent. This week, it’s time for reissues straight from the 1970s and 1980s with gems from the two Congos, Gabon and… Trinidad and Tobago.
“Sungu Lubuka”, by Petelo Vicka & his Nzazi
On October 30, 1974, Kinshasa hosted the legendary fight between American boxers Mohamed Ali and George Foreman. But a month earlier, from September 22 to 24, the “Zaire 74” festival was already starting to increase the pressure, notably with the arrival of James Brown. A concert which left its mark on a whole generation of local musicians, pushing them to inject a good dose of funk into Congolese rumba.
It is this movement that the German label Analog Africa explores in fourteen pieces in the compilation Congo Funk !, to be released April 5 on vinyl, CD and digital. There we find well-known groups from Kinshasa and Brazzaville, such as the OK Jazz Orchestra and Les Bantous de la Capitale, but also more confidential artists, like Petelo Vicka, whose thunderous Sungu Lubuka opens the album.
“It’s So,” by Missema
If the Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko (1965-1997) was an ardent promoter of his country’s music, we are less well-known about the involvement of the Gabonese Omar Bongo (1967-2009). Himself married to a singer, Patience Dabany, he was at the origin, in the 1980s, of a well-established propaganda system: “female entertainment groups”, which brought together dozens of singers and dancers. whose repertoire sang the praises of the regime.
The French label Secousse has selected eleven of these pieces including, according to it, “some of the best soukous rhythms ever recorded”, to reissue them on vinyl and digital in the album Thank you Yaya Bongo, scheduled for March 29. Echoes of a bygone time, when Ali Bongo, who had inherited power on the death of his father, lost it thanks to a coup d’état on August 30, 2023.
« Were Oju Le (The Eyes Are Getting Red) », d’Oluko Imo
Caribbean Afrobeat? The British label Soundway Records reminds us that this did indeed exist through the figure of Oluko Imo, a multi-instrumentalist from Trinidad and Tobago, leader of the group Black Truth Rhythm Band, based in New York in the years 1980. It was at this time that he recorded Were Oju Le (Eyes Are Getting Red) in the company of the legend of the genre, the Nigerian Fela Kuti (1938-1997), and his son Femi.
A track of almost nine minutes, between afrobeat and calypso, which can be found on the disc Oduduwa, reissued on February 9 on vinyl and digital and whose name – that of the founder of the empire of Ife, in present-day Nigeria – recalls the Yoruba heritage of the island off the coast of Venezuela. Oluko Imo will repeat the experience in 2001 with another son of the “Black President”, Seun Kuti, in the song City of Gate.
Find all of the editorial staff’s musical favorites in the YouTube playlist of World Africa.