An amazing musical discovery — a group of mostly paraplegic musicians who live in and around the zoo in Kinshasa — mixing vocals, guitar, and acoustic rhythms with a very unique one-stringed electric lute! The sound is undeniably soulful — a rich blend of the older vocalists with the energy of the younger rhythm players — all working here in a style that hints at older African roots, but which comes up with a really fresh approach overall
Tracklist:
1. Moto Moindo [Black Man]
2. Polio
3. Je T'Aime
4. Sala Keba
5. Moziki
6. Sala Mosala
7. Avramandole
8. Tonkara [Cardboard]
9. Marguerite
10. Staff Benda Bilili
11. Mwana
Staff Benda Bilili are like nothing you have ever seen or heard before. A group of paraplegic street musicians who live around the grounds of the zoo in Kinshasa, Congo, they make music of astonishing power and beauty. The band's mesmerising rumba-rooted grooves, overlaid with vibrant vocals, remind you at times of Cuban nonchalance, at other times of the Godfather of Soul himself. You can hear echoes of old-school rhythm and blues, then reggae, then no-holds barred funk...
Four senior singer/guitarists sitting on tricycles, occasionally dancing on the floor of the stage, arms raised in joyful supplication, are the core or the band, backed by a younger, all-acoustic rhythm section pounding out tight beats. Over the top of this are weird, infectious guitar-like solos performed by a 17 year-old prodigy on a one-string electric lute he designed and built himself out of a tin can.
Please welcome the utterly soulful and mesmerising sound of Staff Benda Bilili !
It is said that Kinshasa hosts more than 40000 abandoned street kids, or sheges. The name supposedly hints at the Che-Guevaresque child soldiers who seized the capital in 1997, but the story might have been forged later as a reminder of Laurent Désiré Kabila’s connection with Che Guevara in the Sixties. Fleeing poverty in the suburbs and family violence, sheges can be seen everywhere in centre ville, waxing shoes, guarding vehicles in parking lots, selling pills, cola nuts and roasted crickets, slaloming on the boulevard between brand new SUVs, U.N armored vehicles, battered taxis, and customized tricycles driven by intrepid paraplegic pilots.
When handicapés (disabled people) were exempted from customs tax in the Seventies, many turned their vehicles into pickups and used them to make a living transporting goods across the river between Kinshasa and its sister capital Brazzaville. Handicapés form the second most important group among the street outcasts of centre ville. Regrouped since colonial times around a hostel near the general hospital, they have a reputation for being loud, fearless, well-educated, and well-organised in a powerful syndicate called Plateforme. Many sheges benefit from their protection and advice.
Staff Benda Bilili were introduced to the British and US musicians who came to visit Kinshasa as part of the Africa Express trip in Nov. 2007, and won the hearts of the likes of Massive Attack and Damon Albarn, with whom they played together. Here's an account of that meeting, as published in UK daily newspaper The Independent:
It was a perfect moment, symbolising the purpose of the Africa Express trip to the Congo: some of the most celebrated musicians in Africa and the West playing with members of Staff Benda Bilili, a group formed by homeless and disabled polio victims living in the grounds of Kinshasa Zoo. It was unrehearsed, teetered on the edge of disaster, yet inspirational. (…) The band swayed in time in their antiquated wheelchairs, while a couple of kids danced around. It was achingly lovely music, created out of the most terrible adversity. ‘That was beautiful,’ said [Massive Attack's] Robert del Naja at the end, visibly moved. ‘It was worth coming all this way just to hear that’.
The debut album by Staff Benda Bilili was produced by Vincent Kenis, already responsible for introducing and producing Konono N°1, Kasaï Allstars and the Congotronics series. The songs were recorded out in the open, mainly in the zoological garden near centre ville, using a dozen microphones, a MacBook laptop and a 100m mains cable fraudulously connected to a deserted refreshment bar nearby.
Staff Benda Bilili consider themselves as the real journalists of Kinshasa: they document events of everyday life in their songs, while giving all kinds of recommendations to their fellow citizens. As an example, one of the songs strongly advocates the vaccination of all children against poliomyelitis; another one states that the only real handicaps are not in the body, but in the mind.
Benda Bilili means «look beyond appearances»
— literally: put forward what is hidden.
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'Staff Benda Bilili are a group of paraplegic street musicians who live in the grounds of the zoo in Kinshasa, Congo’. Even amid the tales of gun-toting guerrilla factions or rapping child soldiers that often surround African music, the publicity behind this particular band grabs the attention.
More compelling still than their unusual back story is their debut album Très Très Fort, which mingles the classic Congolese sounds of rumba and soukous, the original 20th-century African dance music, with bursts of funk and melancholic reggae. Rousing choruses and call-and-response singing are underpinned by punchy rhythms, while the high-pitched inflections of a homemade single-string guitar, fashioned from a milk can and electrical wire, appear intermittently for hypnotic solos.
A contemporary African classic, recorded on the fly and outdoors in the Kinshasa Zoo, the album will appeal to fans of the blues or the Buena Vista Social Club, as much as followers of Fela Kuti or the cult Congolese act Konono No 1, the group which Staff Benda Bilili’s Belgian label, Crammed, released to much acclaim in 2005.
Congolese music incubated the spirit of Cuban rumba in the Forties and Fifties, to create an Africanised version of a genre which was itself indebted to the music of enslaved Africans who had been brought to the Caribbean. In the decades that followed, funk and reggae took root in Africa through international stars like James Brown and Bob Marley. This interplay between Africa, the Caribbean and the United States is what makes Très Très Fort such a special record.
Via email from Kinshasa, Ricky, the leader of the group, explains that the group’s enticing mix of styles came naturally to them. “We had always been listening to our Congolese fathers like Franco & OK Jazz, but when the American black music arrived here in the mid Sixties it was like a revelation.
“James Brown is a true inspiration and when he played in Kinshasa in 1974 all the musicians went crazy.” Like their musical heroes, Staff Benda Bilili – benda bilili means 'look beyond appearances’ –have the loose, easy confidence born of extensive practice. They have long relied on music to earn a living.
“Music has always been a job to us, it is not a hobby,” says Ricky. “We play outside the fancy restaurants, people give us money, we split it, we eat. We have many other jobs, but music is our favourite.”
The life-affirming qualities of the group’s music, heard on uplifting tunes like the driving Avramandole, are all the more surprising given their circumstances. At the group’s core are four singer/guitarists who have been handicapped since childhood by polio, a condition they talk about on the album in one doleful ballad. To free them from using crutches they all ride eye-catching customised tricycles. The one-string guitar which is key to their sound is played by Roger Landu, a 17-year-old shégé or street kid, who met the group when he was 12.
This unlikely alliance, between the older “handicapés” and the much younger shégé reflects the extraordinary solidarity that seems to exist among Kinshasa’s dispossessed. As well as offering memorable tunes, the album is a fascinating portrait of their lives on the margins of a city which is itself hardly acknowledged by the rest of the world.
“We don’t have a real home,” explains Ricky. “Like hundreds of thousands of people here, we live in the street, where we rehearse, do business, eat and sleep. We live among the street kids, the crooks, the whores, the bad cops, the refugees from the war in the east. So we have a good vision of what the Congo is today.” The album’s title (which in English means “very very strong”) is a kind of manifesto: “We have to find ways to survive, no matter how. Like all the people who live in the streets of Kinshasa, disabled or not, we have to be strong.”
Kinshasa-based French filmmakers Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye have been following Staff Benda Bilili since a chance encounter in the street five years ago, and have been instrumental in securing the group a record deal and promoting them on YouTube, where striking videos of the group’s members dancing furiously, using only their impressively muscular arms, first appeared last summer.
While their music contains echoes of the past, the story of Tres Tres Fort is resolutely contemporary: from a chaotic urban locale in the developing world, they have, with a little help, harnessed cheaply available technology and digital media to create a record with global appeal.
“Staff Benda Bilili are true survivors, nothing is impossible to them,” says Barret. “This is a message to the world. That’s why we started the movie.
“Being handicapped is not an issue – in Kinshasa everybody leads the same harsh life and the handicapped are well organised compared to the healthy.”
Like the resolute core of the band, who abandoned their crutches and adapted technology to give themselves independence, their record stands for itself. According to Barret the group’s disabilities are not the key to understanding them, however fascinating this aspect of their story may be.
“The daily burden of being handicapped in a manic and brutal city like Kinshasa has certainly framed their 'blues’,” he says. “But Staff Benda Bilili don’t define themselves as handicapped. They define themselves first as musicians.”
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