Congo is perhaps best known internationally for its flamboyant sapeurs, nightlife, ‘big men’ – the most infamous of whom being Mobutu – and of course, music. These tropes appear in much of the research about Congo, and it is in Breaking Rocks that they all seem to converge in an ethnography about local systems of clientelism. This book explores the intersecting dynamics of music, reputation and control over social reproduction in and between Europe and Kinshasa. It also presents readers with a detailed account of social relations in a city where the politics of exchange are governed and coloured by a particular set of principles.
Trapido boldly contributes to theoretical discussions about neopatrimonialism by exposing unbalanced, or what he calls ‘hateful’, patronage practices that produce and reproduce systems of ideology. Using a Marxist approach (largely through a deployment of terminology and language), the author draws on scholarship premised on money market analysis. Trapido acknowledges that social solidarity can always be found underneath the so-called capitalist system, and claims that in moments of state failure, such as the ‘epochal’ period he analyses in Congo between the 1970s and 1990s, people do not merely lapse into older systems of exchange, but they re-invent a new logic. He shows us that not only is there a logic of ‘wealth in people’ operating in the city, but also explains the ways in which certain individuals manage to generate enough aura to maintain their power to effectively control exchange (p. 223).
Bula Matari is Kikongo for ‘breaker of rocks’ – the book's namesake, but also a moniker given to traditional chiefs winning their titles on account of wealth and/or displays of aggressiveness. The term ‘breaking rocks’ serves as a leitmotif especially when Trapido extrapolates it to another concept – mabanga, the musician's practice of citing patrons, or ‘throwing stones’, in exchange for money. In this way, as other scholars before Trapido have shown, Congo's cultural industries become a vector for reinforcing the authority and power of individuals. Much like the orchestras’ ‘stone-throwers’ who are able to stand on the shoulders of giants through citation, Trapido's arguments would have been better served had he meaningfully engaged with the existing literature about Kinshasa's music industry (Lonoh Reference Lonoh1969; Bemba Reference Bemba1984; Nkashama Reference Nkashama, Quaghebeur and van Balberhe1992; Tchebwa Reference Tchebwa1996; Yoka Reference Yoka2001). As such, his discussions about citation systems in Congolese music, though well elaborated, are somewhat derivative.
The author provides original and insightful analysis about how class is organised in Kinshasa, showing how ‘patronage ties are often the medium through which class is realized’ (p. 107). Through the practice of gatekeeping, or controlling access to resources from abroad (specifically Europe), big men, like the figure of the président d'orchestre (band leader), can effectively control social reproduction and exploit the labour of subordinates. He argues that economic stagnation is not a result of patron-client relations per se, but rather the ineffective redistribution of wealth. Resources do not circulate in the local economy, instead they are funnelled offshore. The author stresses the imbalances between band presidents and ‘underlings’, but we are left to wonder what these underlings themselves say and feel about these relationships. His interlocutors are often buried in his analysis, which is a missed opportunity to show readers, rather than tell of the unfair aspects of new patron-client interactions. Gender and new patron-client arrangements specifically with regards to women's presence (mainly courtesans) as actors in nightlife are only considered in passing. Further, discussions about women do not extend beyond reiterating other research relating to the ways in which ‘affective and sexual relations involve transactions’ (p. 166). But to be fair, an expanded discussion about women and patronage in Congo might have made this book a bit more unwieldy.
Trapido repeatedly cautions us not to romanticise hierarchical systems of exchange simply on account of their being locally African, and he is careful not to present his findings through a lens of deep tradition. Scholarship set in Central Africa has indeed delved into themes of performance and presentation used in the service of creating and maintaining authority. One only needs to think of Mobutu's cultural and political policy of authenticité, which was intended to revalorise precolonial traditions of singing and dancing, but which clearly perverted and instrumentalised performance (White Reference White2006; Covington-Ward Reference Covington-Ward2016). Trapido attempts to offer another layer of complexity to existing scholarship by suggesting that people are enmeshed in the feelings of pleasure and joy that are generated by people in acts of imbuing patronage. He provides acoustic evidence of this in his analyses of lyrics; however the voices of Kinois people themselves could have been more audible, which would have provided more nuance to his argumentation. Discussions about ‘ideologies of love’ premised on snippets of song lyrics are not complemented by people speaking about what it means to be a ‘good’ patron and lover. Further, the author's explicit avoidance of ‘postmodern approaches that place researchers in the picture at every turn’, (p. 6) does away with the affective sides of the complex and unstable patronage relationships that he claims are different from what dependency-theorists have described.
Trapido's breadth of knowledge about Congolese history, politics and popular culture is remarkable and this book will no doubt be of interest to readers in African studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, political economy and comparative politics.
