Tabu Ley Rochereau

Pascal Emmanuel Sinamoyi Tabu was born on the thirteenth of November 1940 at Bagata in the Bandundu Province of the Belgian Congo, the son of Ferdinand Tabu — a Bandundu colonial-administration clerk — and Marie-Madeleine Tabu, a homemaker. He took the nickname Rochereau at his Léopoldville secondary school in honour of the French colonial military officer Pierre Philippe Denfert-Rochereau, the subject of an examination question he had answered with notable success. The nickname remained his stage name through his career.

He attended the Saint Joseph College at Léopoldville and the Sint-Joost-ten-Node Lycée at Brussels from 1955 to 1959 — among the very few Congolese students at a Belgian metropolitan lycée under colonial education policy. He returned to Léopoldville at the close of his Brussels studies in 1959 and joined the African Jazz orchestra of Joseph Kabasélé — the same ensemble that had recently included Manu Dibango (placed in this archive).

He split from African Jazz in 1963 to found with Dr. Nico Kasanda the African Fiesta orchestra. He split again from Kasanda in 1965 to found African Fiesta National, which he renamed in 1970 the Orchestre Afrisa International. The Afrisa orchestra under his thirty-year direction recorded over fifty studio albums and toured continuously across central Africa, Europe, Japan and North America.

His decisive musical contribution was the soukous synthesis of the late 1960s — the rhythmic acceleration of Franco Luambo Makiadi's (placed in this archive) interlocking-guitar Congolese rumba into the dance-floor tempo and the introduction of multi-part female vocal harmonies that would characterise the genre across the following two decades.

He became an early member of the People's Movement for the Revolution under Mobutu in the late 1960s and held parliamentary positions in the post-Mobutu government of Laurent-Désiré Kabila in 1998 and the transitional government of Joseph Kabila in 2003.

He died of complications of a stroke at Brussels on the thirtieth of November 2013, at seventy-three.

He is honored here as the founder of Orchestre Afrisa International.