Braun claims a space for dancers whose role, place and contribution to popular culture and music scholarship have not received adequate attention in African cultural studies. She does so through an innovative blend of ethnography and interviews with a wide spectrum of people across professions, positions and privileges. Congo’s Dancers explores the compelling yet complex life of a danseuse as a visible cultural participant and producer as she navigates the panoptic control and governmentality of the colonial and postcolonial state, religion and society while adhering ‘to various modes of respectability, which hinges on limiting one’s exposure’ (p. 4). The author shows how Congolese danseuses appropriate and adapt three interlocking cultural practices of survival and spontaneity within socio-economic circumstances of precarity while aspiring to upward social mobility and economic independence. These practices comprise the indigenous system of sponsorship that draws on the paternalistic idea of care and protection; discipline and containment; and, finally, the conscious culling and curating of contact to navigate the labyrinth of life in Kinshasa.
Chapter 1 historizes the genealogy of the negative perception of dance and danseuses in Congo. Braun opines that the contemporary stereotype of women lacking respectability markers in Kinshasa is rooted in the coloniality of Eurocentric conceptions of gender. She argues that European Victorian notions of gender roles and social organization stigmatized women who lived outside the normative construction of womanhood and family – specifically, single women who had limited formal education, were from low-income families, or worked in jobs considered inappropriate (such as dancers and barmaids). Additionally, women who were not bound to men in any of the ‘established forms of nuclear family arrangement of daughter, wife, mother, and roles that upheld in the European context’ were derided and marked with moral laxity (p. 32). The postcolonial government under Mobutu Sese Seko attempted to redeem ‘coopted, instrumentalized, and commercialized’ popular dance and danseuses as part of cultural nationalism and for political gain. Yet Mobutu’s and his patrons’ indecencies with danseuses – both rumoured and confirmed – further reinforced the image of dance as morally corrupt (p. 167). This chapter enriches our understanding of sartorial nationalism and dance as an extension of cultural nativity and as a tool for politically inept leaders to appear moral and Afrocentric.
Chapter 2 explores the overlapping ways in which space shapes perception, performance, expectation and socialization in dance. Although dancing happens in different places where people socialize, including concerts, clubs, churches and wakes – blurring the binary between private/public and sacred/secular – purpose and gaze produce varied interpretations. Importantly, the author shows how the mirror is an inseparable aesthetic feature of nightclubs, yet the politics of pleasure and dancing in view of the mirror is complicated in Kinshasa. According to Braun, the mirror is where dancers learn to manage and perform their femininity while remaining cautious of conflicting messages about sensuality, morality and pleasure; thus, the mirror ‘offers a different spectacle that introduces another kind of control and containment’ (p. 62). Chapter 3 links dance as a form of cultural expressivity to the global economy of culture, migration, mobility and African identity. Braun also explores the gendered nature of dance and popular music. Dancing and popular music in Kinshasa are undergirded by phallocratic paternalism and double standards that mean that female artists and dancers require men as encadrement (management) to attain success and visibility. Despite this reality, as Braun contends, there are outliers. In rare instances, such dancers, acting as band leaders, are able to perform masculinities to survive precarity and, through gendered self-presentation, such as using masculine attire and pronouns, to evade binary categorization.
Chapter 4 reveals how visual cultures linked the image of Mami Wata, a water spirit and deified figure in most of West Africa, to immorality, seduction, temptation, sorcery, ill-gotten fame and malevolence. Popular imagination, which linked rumours about Mami Wata with the danseuse, complicated the life of dancers specifically and women more broadly in Kinshasa. Chapter 5 shows how other lines of work outside dancing that also require visibility for women, such as journalism, politics and business, are caught within similar webs of stereotypes, stigmatization and anxieties.
Overall, Congo’s Dancers will be of interest to scholars from a range of fields, including cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, gender and women’s studies. The weaving together of different indigenous languages makes it a rich resource for language and cultural studies. Also, the analysis of postcolonial patriarchal Kinshasa as it relates to global capitalism, which makes women susceptible to transactional sex for economic independence, makes the book a useful text for classes that transcend cultural and expressive studies to examine history, politics and development. Finally, this book extends the research on how we think of the boom and doom of visibility for those expected to live behind the veil, heard but not seen.
