Rumba rock in the Congo
Congo was the place to be in the late 1940s. On both sides of the Congo River, in Leopoldville (later renamed as Kinshasa) and Brazzaville, Congolese musicians began to develop a distinctive popular music based on their own tribal rhythms, Cuban music (popular at the time throughout Central and Western Africa), and Western jazz and pop. The music they developed was called rumba and in the…