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knew she had the crowd's attention. She sang loudly, calling out to the sky, shaking her arms in a
way that left no doubt that the origins of American popular dance lay in this continent. One strap
of her red tank top fell down her shoulder. She didn't touch it, danced harder, the boys keeping up,
sweating now. The other strap began to slip. She smiled, her pretty face lifted to the sky, the sun
flashing on the metal hoops in her ears, a single green plastic bead in each one. The other strap fell,
and the rest of the girls kept glancing over.
I looked around. Everyone's eyes kept darting to the four white stripes above each of her breasts,
which were now solely responsible for holding up her tank top. The Congolese are largely modest
people and don't go bare-chested, and it was hard not to wonder what she was up to.
A bent, very old woman shuffled from the crowd. I hadn't seen her until now, her face wrinkled,
mouth scrunched up, hair in a few large gray corn-rows. She grabbed the girl's arm with one hand
and pointed at her breasts with the other. The girl pulled her arm free and with a shrug flipped the
straps back into place and kept dancing, chin lifted, eyes to the sky.
There's a saying, “The Congo makes Africa dance”—a reference to how often its songs are
heard throughout neighboring countries. But in the Congo, music is the great communicator, on
par with religion, the rock stars and preachers at the culture's helm. It appears to be the medium
through which all people most easily find expression, whether of joy, sadness, or futility. Gérard
Prunier's meticulous account,
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making
of a Continental Catastrophe
, describes how, even when Kinshasa appeared as if it would fall in
the Second Congo War, many night clubs picked up a new song called “Titanic”: “In spite of the
growing threat of AIDS casual love affairs flourished. There was a kind of defiant despair in the air,
as if tomorrow would never happen. If people were going to go down, at least they would go down
singing.”
Even in Yetee, when the supplies were brought from the boats and BCI's Mbandaka staff joined
us—efficiently setting up the camp and giving the trackers batteries and new equipment—one of
them brought his laptop. Saved on it were hours of music videos from Kinshasa, and each evening,
while the generator ran and we all charged our various batteries, a crowd formed outside the next
hut over. Thirty, at times forty youths watched images of Congolese luxury, buxom women dancing
in rhythm near new cars, shaking their breasts and bottoms, men dancing and laughing and eating.
The rhythmic music reminded me of Caribbean dances or Jamaican rap with a slower cadence, the
country music version of rap, as if sung to people who would be line dancing, as the Congolese
often appeared to be doing in Kinshasa and Mbandaka clubs.
Singing is at the core of Congolese culture in a way it is not in the West. Though Westerners
listen to music, few of us break into song while walking or fishing or doing work. The Congolese
sing often, sometimes softly to themselves, at others in unison, or for the arrival of guests. Their
relationship to song reminded me of how Westerners express good or bad news. If I call a friend to
tell him about a success or failure, I often notice that I'm repeating myself long after I've conveyed
the information. We tend to talk something out in the same way that a singer repeats a chorus. We
share our good news five times with the same person, with a few variations in how we describe it,
often because we're self-conscious, afraid to be repeating ourselves. And even if our conversation
changes topics, we loop back, interjecting our contentment, the way a song constantly returns to its
central theme, until we've exhausted the impulse to talk.
Early in BCI's development, when they used music to raise awareness about bonobos and rein-
force existing cultural taboos against hunting, Jean-Marie Benishay approached Werrason, one of
