Ghandi Alimasi Djuna, popularly known as Gims
As you read this, in the French capital of Paris, Congolese musicians are accomplishing something few, if any musicians have ever accomplished, primarily because the accomplishment runs contrary to the very nature of music itself.
From Plato, to Shakespeare, Martin Luther, to almost every contemporary example anyone could name, music has brought people together, united cultures. Music is said to be the language of love, expressing emotions that words cannot. Even Shakespeare, preferred to let the music speak of love, rather than find the words for it. “If music be the food of love, play on,” pleads the lovesick Duke Orsino, wistfully, in Twelfth Night.
In The Republic, Plato, spoke of music’s “moral power.” He argued that music could not only unite citizens and bring about a “harmonious society,” but that it could shape an individual’s soul and character.
The reformer Martin Luther used music to bring congregations together and believed that it could unite people in worship and community. “Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world” he declared.
In a contrast, startling enough to be an abomination, Congolese singer and rapper, Ghandi Alimasi Djuna, popularly known as Gims, manages to turn music into a vehicle for disseminating hate. In lending his talent to the state sponsored genocidal persecution and murders, now raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the singer has become the troubadour of hate.
The rapper first shocked his fans, who up until now had included the targets and victims of the genocidal ideology he now spreads in song, with a song suggesting how best to kill Tutsi.
Then perhaps even more shocking, in another first, he and his supporters, organised a concert that was to be held on a Monday. When has a concert ever been held on a Monday? The answer is almost certainly never, if your intent is to share music. Gims and friends however, had quite a different objective in mind.
Music was not to soothe the heart, but to wound it. Under the pretext of showing “Solidarity with Congo,” and raising money to support Congo’s children in need, the organisers of the concert, intended to rub salt in the wounds of the survivors of the 1994 Genocide Against Tutsi, in Rwanda.
The organisers of the concert had chosen to hold it on Monday, 7th April, a day designated by the United Nations, as the Internationl Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi.
On this day, a hundred days of commemoration and remembrance begins in Rwanda. It is a sacred moment at which the world joins Rwanda, to remember the over a million men, women and children, who were murdered in a hundred days, between 7th April, and 4th July, when the forces of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), defeated the genocidal forces, and halted the genocide.
Angelique Kidjo
Among the headline performers would have been Benin singer, Angelique Kidjo. Her participation at such an event, would have been at odds with her decades’ long dedication to peace, and belief in the power of music, including her own, to build bridges among people. It is not clear whether she agreed to perform at the concert, without an understanding of its real intent.
The concert was halted, following protests from the Rwandan community in France. The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, called it “ill-chosen,” and requested the police to intervene, if the organisers insisted on it taking place on the 7th. It was postponed to today, 22nd, at the request of the Paris Prefect of Police.
Joining Gims and other performers is renowned rapper, Youssoupha Mabiki. He was promoted by the organisers, as performing at the concert to show solidarity with “Bantu.”
This is in reference to discredited colonial anthropological race theories, which sought to divide Africans into so called Hamitic, Nilotic and Bantu groups.
While the theories have no scientific basis and are dismissed by serious academics, they have nonetheless had lasting effect. Some Africans have internalised them, or in emulating European colonisers, have sought to manipulate them to gain power, by dividing societies.
Youssoupha Mabiki
The planners and perpetrators of the Genocide Against Tutsi, and their Western leaders and supporters, within the Catholic Church in particular, peddled these theories.
It is little wonder that Gims and his semi-literate fellow performers have adopted the theories. After their defeat, in 1994, Rwanda’s genocidal forces found safe harbour in Zaire, as the DRC was then known. They were not just given protection.
They not only continued to be armed and supported, by the international community through successive Congo’s heads of state, starting with the venal, murderous Mobutu, but their ideology was also embraced by the Congolese state.
With the genocidal forces’ arrival, the persecution of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese quickly took a genocidal turn, leading to the targeted communities taking up arms in self defence. Thirty years later, the struggle continues, as the ideology has seeped deeper into Congolese society, so much so, that Congolese musicians hold concerts to perpetuate the ideology.
The result is the extraordinary spectacle where in the DRC, human beings are burned alive and cannibalised, because of their ethnicity, while in Paris, dubbed the City of Love, popular musicians perform in support of the ideology that underpins such horrors.
At 30 euros a ticket, the concert is a betrayal of everything for which music is supposed to stand. How appropriate that the price should be 30 pieces of coin.
