"They want the forest to be happy"

Q. What aspects of the music did not prompt a universal response? 

A. We looked at whether the music evoked happy/joyful or sad/scary feelings, and got a positive/negative rating. We used music from three films: the melancholy theme from Schindler's List, the scary shower scene from Psycho and the upbeat Cantina scene tune from Star Wars. The Canadians reacted as you might expect.  The Mbenzélé...found all the music negative.

Q. Why might the Mbenzélé not like the Western music? 

A. All the pygmies' own music is highly arousing and positive. They feel negative emotions disrupt the harmony of the forest and they depend on the forest and so they want it to be happy.

from an interview with Stephen McAdams regarding his research into universals in music.

Mbenzélé music is mostly vocal, McAdams explains, with some clapping and beating on log drums. But is "of a sophistication comparable to Western symphonic music, with extraordinary polyphonies and polyrhythms."

For the Mbenzélé, music is functional. "They don't sit around and consume it. Music accompanies various kinds of activities."

I wrote briefly about the music of Mbenzélé (Babenzele) on page 128 of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings.

Six insights on Congo

Martin Shaw summarizes Gérard Prunier:

* the Rwandan genocide was a decisive moment in modern African history;

* most of the states that became involved did so because of limited, local interests;

* the partial nature of most states' interests, combined with their restricted mobilising capacities..., explain why this was not really "Africa's great war", but rather a messy, episodic conflict across but some areas of the vast DRC;

* the Hutu Power forces in Rwanda in 1994 were unique in organising a large-scale, nationwide campaign of genocide. But genocidal violence (massacres, rape, expulsions) has remained intermittent throughout the conflicts in the DRC in the subsequent decade and a half, and been employed by many of the parties;

* the Rwandan...government of Paul Kagame was unique in having a sustained interest in continuing the Congo wars, and determined to use the west's guilt at failing to stop the 1994 genocide to produce impunity for itself;

* many western governments and NGOs were (most of the time) duly blinded by their guilt to acknowledge the hardship Rwanda's campaign was inflicting on the DR Congo's population, or to raise their voices against it.

Complex conflicts across northeastern Africa, centred on Sudan "still cast a long shadow that reaches into the DRC."

You must read this

Adam Hochschild on the rape of the Congo.

What is man

Families offer shelter to victims of Congo war.

P.S. 8 Dec: A report on violence spreading to neighbouring CAR.

Jean Pierre Bemba is to be prosecuted by the ICC, which -- of course -- George W. Bush and his fellows refused to allow the U.S. to join. Earth to United States, will you join us now?

Congo, China, the West

A short analysis. Comment by Paul Collier

We have a problem

The Spanish general has handed in his resignation to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General to Congo, Alan Doss:

His main reasons were that the mission lacked of a clear vision and was doomed to fail.

King Leopold's cell phone

Umicore has roots in actual mining. In the late 1800s, during the reign of King Leopold II, the firm mined copper in the African Congo and shipped it to a riverside smelter near Antwerp. Today the same property houses a sprawling, state-of-the-art $2 billion smelter and refinery. Here, metals are recovered and processed. Then they are sold, sometimes to Asia, where they are used to manufacture brand-new electronics. It’s a reshuffling of the colonial arrangement: an abundant resource is sent from richer countries to poorer ones, made into goods, then sent back.

-- from Jon Mooallem on The Afterlife of Cellphones.

An undeveloping country

In Kibombo he meets a stationmaster who diligently turns up for work every morning even though no train has reached the town in six years.

-- from Rory Maclean's review of Blood River by Tim Butcher.