Of Fools and False Pastors: Tricksters in Kinshasa's Television Fiction

Abstract

Sub-Saharan African public spheres have increasingly transformed following the Pentecostalist wave that is sweeping over the continent since two decades ago. This is also the case for Kinshasa, where this new type of Christianity dominates both the urban soundscape and the media world. A Christian popular culture flourishes with its own music, dance forms, TV shows and celebrities. This article focuses on local TV serials, that, disregarding the profile of the channels on which these are broadcast, are embedded in the spread of an apocalyptic interpretation of life, as professed by these new churches. The TV serials are approached as narratives that, just like traditional epic tales, depict spiritual and social transgression. Two main characters, the fool and the false pastor (pasteur), will be studied through the lens of the trickster, a longstanding figure in the study of traditional storytelling.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The dissertation research upon which this article is based was supported by the Faculties of Psychology and Paedagogical Sciences and of Social Sciences, both at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where I acted as a teaching and research assistant. The article was prepared for publication while I was a Newton International Fellow at the Centre of West African Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). I am much obliged to Filip De Boeck and Peter Crossman, who have made invaluable comments. I also thank the anonymous reviewer and Paul Hockings for their feedback. My deepest gratitude goes to Kinshasa's TV actors, in particular the CINARC group and the members of the ATITP organisation, and the Kongo family for their hospitality and assistance during fieldwork.

Notes

The translations of the scenes are my own, and for certain key concepts I have decided to give the Lingala and/or French word between brackets.

At times the troupe's pastor chooses the screen name for a new actor or actress. This is often the result of discord between the band's leader and the pastor, who takes recourse to divine inspiration when imposing the screen name.

Nevertheless, in his own discussion of Kaguru tricksters (characters in the oral literature of a central Tanzanian group), Beidelman includes a “group of characters that everyone may not agree to call tricksters, but which exemplify certain forms of supposed disorder and mischief, sometimes even malevolence, though ultimately commenting on morality and order by their play with boundaries and ambiguities of these key concepts” [Beidelman 1980: 28]. For Beidelman as well, the key features of tricksters and the like are the play with order and disorder and the ambiguity of “bad” and “good” behavior.

The use of the concept of “ballet traditionnel” indicates a psychological distance of the young actors toward the stories they perform. The stories are, of course, urbanized and brought closer to the living experiences of the young.

Comhaire-Sylvain also observed that older people were better narrators than younger ones, and old Kongo women had the reputation of being the best storytellers [Comhaire-Sylvain 1968: 33]. This emphasis on the esteem for older Kongo women is striking, since my informants mentioned that in their memories men were the main speakers. My own observations however confirm that it is principally the women who narrate the stories.

The same stories were repeated several times throughout my stay, which shows that even today narrators have a limited stock of tales that are told and retold. Two important observations can be made concerning this storytelling: first, the act of narrating has been feminized (if one accepts Comhaire-Sylvain's observation that older baKongo women were the best narrators, then this “feminization” of the storytelling is questionable), probably because the target group consists of children who remain under the care of women. Second, the origin—and thus the kind of tales—differed along with the age of the narrator: the oldest woman (48 years old) of the Lemba compound where I sojourned often told animal tales to two young girls (4 and 5 years old) living with another family residing in the same compound. She said that her grandfather had told her these stories while she was a child in the village. Her daughter (24 years old), by contrast, would always be recounting for these girls, on other evenings or even during the day, episodes of Western films such as the Disney production The Lion King, locally known as “the story of Simba.”

Personal communication with Zana Aziza Etambala (a specialist in religious colonial history in the Congo), Honoré Vinck (former missionary among the Nkundo), John Janzen (medical anthropologist specialized on the baKongo), and Clémentine Madiya Nzujï-Faïk and Ngo Semzara Kabuta (both professors in African literature). Evans-Pritchard writes in his introduction to the Ture tales among the Zande: “A curious and ironic situation seems to have come about when these tales were printed to be used as school-books by C.M.S. (Church Missionary Society) missionaries. The only other reading for schoolboys was religious texts, and since the missionaries vouched for the authenticity of Bible stories they appear to have feared lest the Ture stories, by being printed, should also be regarded as having the same authenticity. So the Zande catechist (?) who wrote a foreword to the Gore collection of the Ture stories was at pains to warn the reader not to take them seriously, and above all not to liken them to those of the Holy Book. Ture is a cheat, a tempter who leads men astray, a liar, a thief, a murderer, etc. But these are not true stories. They are children's tales. Ture was the very opposite of Jesus Christ” [Evans-Pritchard 1967: 25].

In Kinshasa, griot is a recently adopted word to denote “traditional storyteller.” In 2003, the first festival of griots was organized in Kinshasa. The aim was to detect skilled storytellers among Kinshasa's youth who would be offered training. Comic writers are likewise called “urban griots” (“des griots urbains”).

This television channel occupies a special place in Kinshasa's media world. Although a prophet owns the channel, it has a “worldly” and commercial profile since it also screens video clips of “worldly musicians” and American films that do not emphasize a Christian way of life. Like on all other local TV stations, however, several Christian theater companies were offered space to transmit their serials, which fell under the category of Pentecostal melodramas.

The late Mathieu Matondo Mateya, better known as “Sans Soucis” (†2009), who starred in the serial MoniMambu, told me that the Congolese producer had decided on a title without providing the actors any explanation of its significance. Sans Soucis himself had no idea what title the story had been given until I informed him. I had found the DVD in a multi-media store in the Matonge section in Brussels and became intrigued by the reference to this Kongo trickster. When I asked him about the serial, Sans Soucis had difficulties recalling the story. At first, he did not know what story I meant; and he could only tell me about the scenes that he had shot but was unaware of the overall story line. This situation reflects the minimal power actors have over their work, and in particular over the cultural work that is produced for the diaspora. This sector is completely governed by Congolese producers who function as cultural go-betweens between Kinshasa and Congolese living abroad.

The role of kizengi is only performed by male actors. I have no explanation for this surprising gendered dimension of “la folie.”

Bekaert [2000: 265] and Lammers [2004: 227] have observed the same interpretation of madness among the rural Congolese Sakata and the Cameroonian Douala urbanites.

Busy roundabout in Lemba where a madman is often spotted wandering around. He wears dark, filthy clothes and looks disheveled. He walks barefoot, is very skinny, has a beard, and hardly talks. People do not engage in social relations with the madman either: he is part of the decor.

Bastian discusses the same phenomenon (“campus cultism”) in Nigeria [Bastian 2001: 76–81].

In contrast, limbs (arms, legs, feet, fingers) are assumed to be shared by witches and smaller demons during their nocturnal gatherings.

Meyer [2006: 310] describes a similar representation of madness in a Ghanaian film, Stolen Bible. The protagonist (Ken), who has visited a secret society to become rich, is transformed into a madman at the moment that Nora, the person he wants to sacrifice, resists because she is attached to God. This idea is very similar to Kinshasa's Christian logic, where his madness would be explained as the result of the divine law that returns all destructive power to its origin (“return to sender”). The film ends with a deliverance scene, performed by a pastor, who chases the evil spirit out of his body and heals Ken.

The theater companies are often invited by churches, schools and other groups to stage the plot of one serial. While The Open Tomb was shown on television, Cinarc was asked four times to give a performance of Apostasy, the serial that preceded this serial.

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Notes on contributors

Katrien Pype

KATRIEN PYPE earned her Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology (2008) with a dissertation on the production of evangelizing TV fiction in Kinshasa. She has published on the topic and on other aspects of Kinshasa's popular culture, such as martial arts and dance. Currently she is a Newton International Fellow at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, where she is working on a postdoctoral project that examines the interfaces of memory, media and politics in Kinshasa's early democracy.