In Congo, hip-hop gives youth a political voice

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo — On a rocky backstreet in this large eastern city, shirtless dancers fool around on a pockmarked concrete square — gyrating, jumping and periodically spinning on their heads as United Nations planes roar overhead.

Past the good pairs of high-top sneakers stowed under a shrub, another beat is pulsing hard. In a small, sweaty room a singer crouched atop a speaker is urging a crowd in backward caps bearing slogans like ‘DOPE’ and ‘USA’ to sing: “Yes, yes, tuko pamoja. Yes, yes, tuko pamoja … Everybody say: YES, YES, TUKO PAMOJA!!”

In Swahili the phrase connotes a deep sense of oneness, translating directly as “we are together,” but in a region wracked by decades of war the words don’t feel the least bit corny.

The devastating war in eastern Congo ended officially in 2003, but the legacy of that conflict continues to permeate. Today more than 30 different armed militias operate in remote parts of eastern Congo, where they randomly rape, pillage and hack people to death with machetes.

But within the barbed-wire confines of Yole!Africa, a youth cultural center in Goma, young Congolese are fighting to create a very different DRC. 

Through their songs, hip-hop artists at Yole call out the government's corruption and ineptitude while at monthly “baraza” sessions they sit down and dissect socio-political dynamics — such as what exactly President Joseph Kabila might be up to.

“For us, we feel that we are free to talk about sensitive things, that’s why we say that as soon as you join Yole you have joined another world,” Yole coordinator Ganza Buroko said. “When people are shut down we have to develop new strategies to rise up.”

This is the kind of talk that happens at Yole, and it's happening at a time when the freedom to speak out in Congo is shriveling up. As Kabila nears the end of his second term and a proposed 2016 election looms, undercurrents of political anxiety are winding through the country. The president is fueling much of the uncertainty himself by refusing to say whether he will step down when his term is up.

This January, after Kabila's government tried to tinker with the electoral laws in order to extend his rule, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets and were met with a vicious crackdown. In  Kinshasa, the capital, 38 people were shot dead by authorities. In Goma, five people were killed.

This year at least five people have been forcibly disappeared in DRC, while pro-democracy activists and musicians with political leanings have been targeted, arrested and detained in what rights groups describe as a pre-election crackdown.

In March, a group of activists, foreign journalists and an American diplomat were arrested at the Eloko Makasi music studio in Kinshasa after gathering for the launch of Filimbi, a new youth movement designed to encourage political engagement.

A day before, musicians had recorded a song based on Filimbi’s themes — youth, democracy, and a transparent electoral process for 2016. Six months later, two of the activists who were arrested have yet to be released.

These incidents have reverberated hundreds of miles away in Goma, where the response to them continues to manifest through music and activism.

Finishing up an afternoon jam session at Yole, Jobson “Jobs” Katondolo, a tall, somewhat gangly 27-year-old, says he's tired of a political system he sees as riddled with graft and hollow promises.

“When I look around at the situation, I feel bad that I don’t see any change,” says Katondolo. “Starting with politicians, it’s as if they don’t want things to change. If I start naming them all, I won’t have time.”

Raised in Goma close to the Rwandan border, Katondolo has seen crises unfold around him for as long as he can remember. First, at age seven, he watched thousands of Rwandan refugees flee the bloody genocide into his homeland, then known as Zaire.

Two years later, when he was nine, it was his turn to run. After Katondolo and his family were forcibly displaced from their home during the First Congo War in 1996, they spent days walking almost 300 kilometers along the dirt road from Goma to the northern city of Butembo. 

That war saw Zaire invaded by neighboring Rwanda, and Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko — famous for his cheetah cap — replaced by rebel leader Laurent-Desire Kabila. When Kabila was assassinated in 2001, his son Joseph was appointed to rule to resource-rich African country under its former name, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The war that followed, the Second Congo War, left in its wake a generation of former child soldiers and a society traumatized by mass rape, senseless killing, and humanitarian crises. Involving the armies and militias of nine African nations, the war claimed the lives of five million people. Many died from treatable conditions such as malnutrition and malaria.

Memories of those war torn years, Katondolo says, is what keeps him going. “As a citizen, as someone that has been fighting for hope, I have to hope that one day things will be better,” he says, “That’s why I am writing my songs.”

Since M23 withdrew from Goma, life has been relatively peaceful in the city, excepting a handful of incidents: fights, ATM hold-ups, the occasional night shooting or drunk officer throwing a grenade, and a June attack on the airport that left at least seven people dead.

The United Nations has one of its largest peacekeeping missions in the world in eastern DRC (known by its French acronym, MONUSCO). Armored vehicles and UN patrol troops in their sky-blue helmets are a fixture in Goma’s militarized landscape. Yet around town there is an underlying sense of flammability, a feeling amplified in rural areas, that war could erupt at any time.

Selling sugar cane at the market in Kibumba, some 25 kilometers north of Goma, Heshima Elizabeth laughs when asked about the security situation in the village. “What security?” she asks, “There is no security here because people are seriously dying. People are entering our houses at night and killing us.”

The town is reached by a dirt road that hugs the Rwandan border and has in the past been subject to regular ambushes.