Papa Wemba

Jules Shungu Wembadio Pene Kikumba was born on the fourteenth of June 1949 at Lubefu in the Kasai-Oriental Province of the Belgian Congo, the son of Joseph Shungu Wembadio — a Tetela royal-court drummer who served the local Tetela paramountcy — and Marie-Rose Kabuya, a professional mourner whose role at the village funerals had given her son his earliest musical exposure. The family moved to Léopoldville in 1955. His father died when he was twelve; his mother continued as a professional mourner at the funerals of the Léopoldville urban Tetela diaspora.

He attended the Catholic minor seminary at Mwenze through his sixteenth year, intending to enter the priesthood, and left the seminary in 1965 on the death of his mother. He joined the Léopoldville-Kinshasa choir of Saint Joseph's Cathedral the same year as a tenor.

He co-founded the Zaïko Langa Langa orchestra in 1969 at twenty alongside the singers Nyoka Longo and Manuaku Waku — the founding moment of the third generation of Congolese rumba after the OK Jazz of Franco Luambo Makiadi (placed in this archive) and the Afrisa of Tabu Ley Rochereau (placed in this archive). Zaïko Langa Langa under his eight-year membership pioneered the rapid-tempo soukous-rumba synthesis that would across the late 1970s and 1980s dominate the urban dance-floors of central Africa.

He split from Zaïko Langa Langa in 1977 to found the Viva la Musica orchestra at his Kinshasa Matonge residence — known to his fans as the Village Molokai, a Kinshasa-Lingala play on the geographic name. He directed the orchestra for the following thirty-nine years.

His decisive cultural-aesthetic contribution was the founding of the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes — the SAPE movement — that combined the Congolese popular-music economy with an explicit anti-colonial aesthetic of elaborate European luxury-couture self-presentation. The sapeurs of Kinshasa and Brazzaville have across the following four decades constituted one of the principal continuous cultural phenomena of central Africa.

He collapsed on stage at the Festival des Musiques Urbaines d'Anoumabo at Abidjan on the twenty-fourth of April 2016 during the performance and died at the venue. He was sixty-six.

He is honored here as the founder of la sape.