This audio work marks the final outcome of the residency project of Nombuso Mathibela & Naledi Chai during their Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee residency.

Hi! Congo is an ongoing four-part radio play centering the Democratic Republic of Congo. This project tells stories of the intangible ruins and consequences of colonial extractive economies through theories of home, dislocated diaries and displaced memories. The work references and derives its title from South African musician, guitarist and vocalist Dr. Philip Tabane and his band Malombo.

"We draw inspiration from the giant footprints of Malombo’s cultural tradition of song and the choral traditions that come out of the Congolese church movements. These extracts include collaged field recordings that have been merged with found sound in old communities in Johannesburg over our years living in this city. We sat down with two friends and collaborators, Boitumelo Pitso and Nomaswazi Kunene, to shape the vocal arrangements of these letters by sampling the choral unified styles of lamenting singing styles that we drew inspiration from. We were interested in the playful, innocent presence of childlike voices that do not register the fears, frustrations and precariousness that we often hear in the voices of Congolese children, who are inheritors of conflict, sitting in the middle of turmoil and being castrated from childhood. Much of this ongoing project is dedicated to a textual reading of the sonic space. We are interested in the textual potential of sound: letters that read and sound their way into meaning. We are working with a combination of sound materials – including original compositions, poems, dear diary reflective spillage – and experimenting with music, flipping it and opening it, to make room for our storytelling."

See related images and detailed information about the piece below.

The piece is split into the following sections:

1. Hi! Congo market plays (9:55)
2. Honey kola rice (0:36)
3. Everywhere nowhere but rooted (2:34)
4. Missa lubian malombo newsletter (1:09)
5. Hi! Congo noise (22:56)
6. Words with no language (2:06)
7. Father and Mother (4:52)

Credits:

Hi! Congo market plays: Philip Tabane and Malombo: Hi Congo off the album “Sangoma”, Yeoville Market Community and Vendors, Yeoville (South Africa), Excerpt from “Kinshasa, Septembre Noir (Black September in Kinshasa”, 1991 Dir. Kibushi Ndjate Wooto, field recording

Honey kola rice: Nomaswazi Kunene (voice) Boitumelo Pitso (voice) Nombuso Mathibela (voice) Naledi Chai (voice)

Everywhere nowhere but rooted: Nombuso Mathibela (voice)

Missa lubian malombo newsletter: Samples from Kyrie, Missa Luba, 1965 and Philip Tabane and Malombo live at The Market Theatre Johannesburg, 2010

Hi! Congo Transmission: BIMA Church Choir, Lorentzville, Naledi Chai (drum machine, feedback station, effects pedals), Excerpt from Franco Et TPOK Jazz ft Jolie Detta - Massu, 1994, conversation with Bibish

Words with no language: Nombuso Mathibela (voice)

Father and Mother: Nomaswazi Kunene (vocals) Boitumelo Pitso (vocals) Nombuso Mathibela (vocals) Naledi Chai (Vocals)

The letter opens with the song “Hi! Congo”, by Philip Tabane and Malombo. We used an advertising aesthetic to show the nature of the Yeoville Market, its people and the daily activities that produce Yeovill’s community. There are different types of people and things being sold in the market, from grains to poisons for vermin to fabrics. It's a busy environment with car horns, muffled and distorted music from old sound systems, laughter and exchange. We collaged field recordings, found sound and clips from a Congolese experimental film titled “Septembre Noir”. We are interested in a text that brings together cinematic audio sounds into other field recorded sound.

We were thinking through the games that we played as kids, and games that kids still play, shouting out words into the distance as they chase each other or hide from one another. The mindless innocence of hiding behind tree trunks or retreating into tall grass, folding your body underneath something in the yard, peeking through the corner walls of your home or running around your circular house until other little voices find you. The laughter or comic irritation that erupts, depending on who has won the game. These are the things that we do not take for granted. Kola, rice, honey – staple foods that are also found in Yeoville Market. National languages that become games. Games that are borderless, played in the streets of communities like Yeoville – ordinary, neglected communities of African immigrants in South Africa.

We are also thinking here with Sarah Lubala’s beautiful "A History of Disappearance".

These words are collected from different news outlets reporting on the genocidal conflict in Congo. These are words of a wailing mother, disillusioned youth often angered into taking up guns. Some of these collaged words come from the complicit causal links to this conflict: newsletters that reek of bias; news in South Africa that refuses to acknowledge the root causes – the reasons, institutions, structures and ecosystems at the forefront of this conflict. Congo becomes a vague story that is everywhere and nowhere, rooted only in the survival instincts, refusal and thriving pockets of Congolese communities in countries like South Africa. This reading was collaged to produce a sense of being beneath the ground, with moving earth parts and roots. This was done by distorting field recordings of the forest. The images are sourced from a short 1991 Congolese film titled “Le Crapaud Chez Ses Beaux-Parents”.

We were thinking about a jingle that traces back to their roots these letters, or a sounding opening line that repeats across the different threads of this letter. This extract is a container of the possibility of this repetition. It is a collaged distortion of vinyl recording of Missa Luba and a live recording of Philip Tabane and Malombo. Malombo's drums and the choral voices of Missa are organising points of this jingle.

This part of the letter is inspired and drawn from the sonic language of Congolese church hymns. Although we were unable to understand what was being said during the sermon, we did manage to connect to a frequency that kept landing on “Amens”, which eventually created a repeated chorus. Repetition is all over our process, and this has a lot to do with the sort of rituals and behaviours that people around us organise their lives around. We used this song together with pieces that Naledi composed electronically using effects pedals, drum machines and a feedback station to create a sense of haunting and anticipation. The images attached to this piece are visual representations of field recordings taken in Lorentzville – recorded and generated through a mobile software application.

In this extract we were concerned with what it might look like to establish remembering and forgetting as practices of looking at the present through the past. Memories of home that are distant blurs, things that people do not want to remember, places that no longer register as home. This was incited by our conversations with a group of Congolese aunties in Johannesburg who do not want to go back to Kinshasa. They wish to forget that city. Ideas of home live in their memories, in the food items that sit on shelves, next to TV screens that repeat news of catastrophes about places like Congo, an informational barrage that often desensitises us from how these conflicts feel on a person’s skin.

Here we were thinking with Chimurenga’s "On Circulations and the African Imagination of a Borderless World": “Unify us, dont defy us” is a chant, a lament of four voices distorted into a masculine anti-border war cry. Four voices, four children, four wishes, four hopes, four revolutions – our hopes that the maths of African life making might lead to taking back control over the conditions of liberation, peace and self determination.

Nombuso Mathibela is a cultural worker, educator, writer, and vinyl selector based in Johannesburg, working through sound, focusing on anti-colonial liberation histories and cultural ecological behaviours in Africa. She is the founder of Jewel Scents & Song, a Pan-African research space thinking through metal and jewelry production. Mathibela is an associate at Nawi Collective and an archivist at the Centre for the Study of Race, Class and Gender at the University of Johannesburg. She is a co-resident at the Ways of Repairs artistic research residency. Mathibela works with and responds to sound archives, including music, vinyl, cassettes, CDs, field recordings, audio interviews, voices, noise and silence as cultural texts.

Naledi Chai is an interdisciplinary artist working in filmmaking, collage, design, and sculpture. Chai holds Bachelor's Degree of Arts in cinematography, sound design, film editing and scriptwriting. Her work explores object displacement and space, and repurposes discarded materials. Chai is interested in methods, approaches and ideas that centre Sub-Saharan African art practices. She has collaborated with Boiler Room TV and co-curated and contributed to the sound artist-led Drone Day 2023. Chai participated in the Waste Not Want Not exhibition, the Brixton Light Festival and Art After Baby, and was recently part of Bauhaus.Listening.Workshop at the Goethe-Institut. She also curated International Drone Day 2024 in Johannesburg.