1.

In January 1960 Brussels hosted a “Round Table” conference of Congolese and European leaders to negotiate the future of the Belgian Congo. Anticolonial resistance had surged across Africa over the previous decade; in the Congo the antagonism had reached its peak in 1959 after colonial authorities killed dozens—possibly hundreds—of protesters in the infamous Léopoldville riots. Looking to avoid the kind of protracted independence war that had engulfed Algeria, while also maneuvering to retain some control of the mineral-rich Congo in the coming decades, the Belgians agreed to organize a set of meetings with Congolese political leaders, who presented a united front in demanding formal independence. The conference, which lasted for weeks, was a high-stakes political bargaining session determining when and how power would be transferred. But it was also a kind of international theater, in which a new generation was announcing itself on the world stage.

Representing the Congo were not just the major players from different factions of the independence movement—Patrice Lumumba, Joseph Kasavubu, Moïse Tshombe, and dozens of others—but also members of two of the country’s most popular rival bands, African Jazz and O.K. Jazz, who joined the trip both to entertain the delegates and to prove that the Congo was, as the singer Joseph Kabasele later put it, “ready to enjoy its independence.” Among them was the electric guitarist Nicolas Kasanda, then twenty years old. It was almost certainly his first journey abroad. For the Belgians, he later remembered, “it was the first time they had seen an African guitarist.” Before the trip was over, he would pick up a nickname: Docteur Nico.

The musicians were a sensation in the metropole. They stayed longer than the delegates themselves, playing hotels, bars, and cafes for three months and touring France and Holland. Their popularity didn’t insulate them from flagrant racism; Belgians tried to rub the color off the musicians’ skin in disbelief, and audiences approached Nico at concerts to check if he was miming over a tape of someone else playing. (“Go ahead,” he told them.) But their skill was undeniable, and their music directly confronted the colonists. One of the songs they recorded there, “Indépendance Cha Cha,” would soon reach well beyond Brussels, becoming an early Pan-African independence anthem.

Much of the song’s power comes from Docteur Nico’s guitar solo, one of the signature passages in Congolese popular music. It begins with a four-note statement played twice in a row, followed by a rapid two-note tremolo. A series of repeated motifs unfolds, shifting in and out of step with the rhythm section’s basic cha-cha-cha beat. As they’re elaborated in a single fluid melodic line—without chordal embellishments or double stops—they delay and accelerate, growing in tension before sliding into the guitar’s upper register and doubling back on themselves.

The genius is in the phrasing, which jumps all around the bar line and generates its own rhythmic logic. The solo seems to spring away from the beat before letting gravity pull it back. With his eye on the finish line, Nico locks into a long counterpoint passage with the rhythm guitar, guiding the band to a final valedictory two-note flourish. The song was in a mixture of Lingala and French, and it extolled various Congolese independence leaders and political parties represented at the Round Table. But it was Nico’s guitar solo that seemed to perform the work of liberation, echoing the call of the delegates and crystallizing the anticipation of a nation on the brink of independence.

It also stood, alongside many of Nico’s records, among the most innovative contributions that anyone in the world had made by then on the electric guitar. Nico’s best material uses the distinctive capabilities of that amplified instrument to draw you inexorably inside the song. On exquisite tracks like “Mawonso Mpamba,” also recorded on that Brussels trip, he plays with an almost cantabile feeling, emulating a vocalist and outlining the harmony with a string of trills, mordents, and hammer-ons; the phrases rise and fall like breaths. But he also seems to be dancing with the guitar’s pickups, adjusting the position of his right hand to produce ever-subtler gradations in tone. It’s as if he is making electricity itself sing.

*

By the time of the Round Table, Nico had been playing professionally since his early teens and had already helped to establish the electric guitar in Congolese rumba, a hybrid form that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s and became one of the dominant styles of popular music in Africa. His deep connection to the instrument was anchored in this music and its exhilarating synthesis of African and Latin American rhythms. The Afro-Cuban son music that had such a central part in the development of Congolese rumba had itself evolved from the musical practices of central Africa, brought over to the Caribbean during the Atlantic slave trade. In the first half of the twentieth century these sounds returned to the African continent on commercially recorded 78rpm records, influencing many emerging forms of popular music there in turn. These records’ son clave rhythms—and variants like cha-cha-cha, mambo, merengue, and pachanga—would become foundational to Congolese rumba.

The electric guitar, too, would eventually come to define the sound of the music (sometimes known as rumba lingala or, a bit later, soukous). And yet when the instrument was introduced to Congolese studios in 1953, it was still relatively young in the world. Eddie Durham and Charlie Christian were spearheading its use in American jazz bands by 1940, but it was only beginning to secure its place in popular music. In its early days in America it would become associated with the skill and theatrical showmanship of artists like T-Bone Walker and Chuck Berry, as well as with the burgeoning technical explorations of artisan studio practitioners like Les Paul and Chet Atkins. It had a spirit of novelty, accommodating the mindset of the improvising virtuoso and the inventor-mechanic in equal measure.

Nico, developing his style slightly later and on a different continent, blended these approaches as well as any of the instrument’s pioneers. He taught auto mechanics at a trade school in Léopoldville in the early 1960s, balancing the job with his music career, and his melodic gifts were clearly matched by an extensive technical mastery and a sense of wonder at the power of the machine. He was always tinkering with amps, vibrato effects, and tape delay, dialing in the perfect tone or making the guitar mimic another instrument. On “Bougie Ya Motema,” a mixture of tape delay and palm muting simulates a likembe (a type of Congolese mbira or thumb piano). On records like “Merengue Scoubidou” he may have used a German guitar with a feature called “Orgletone,” a volume swell knob controlled with the pinky of your strumming hand. He has such facility with the effect that it sounds a bit like he is playing a merengue accordion through a tremolo amp—or as if Pops Staples is playing with Johnny Ventura.

Nico, however, said that he could play without these effects and still achieve the same sounds. “I don’t need an echo, but if I have an echo, that’s great,” he told the historian Gary Stewart in 1985. He said that Django Reinhardt was his favorite musician, and he distinguished himself from players like Les Paul (whom he seems to have called by his wife’s name): “Mary Ford, he played the guitar very well. But his guitar was rigged.” He spoke of the guitar as full of “secrets”—secrets that in his early days he alone had to discover. He even claimed that Europeans had devised amplifier effects based on techniques he had first introduced with his fingers.

But it was in Africa that his music would prove most influential. Generations of players have traced their styles directly back to Nico, who toured extensively in West and East Africa and whose records were distributed across the continent. His playing left other musicians in awe; the legendary Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, an early bandmate of Nico’s, called him “the finest guitarist of the sixties in Africa.”¹ His songs, and Congolese rumba generally, were eagerly adopted in other liberation struggles. Rwandans sang “Indépendance Cha Cha” on the streets in 1962 after achieving their own independence from Belgium, and the Angolan writer Jorge Macedo said that hearing Nico’s records “inflamed our nationalist spirit.”²

Nico was one of the quintessential musicians of African modernity, and one of the great visionaries of the electric guitar and its possibilities. But unlike other trailblazers of the instrument, his name is not engraved on Gibsons across the world, and his records have never been sent to outer space. Some of his music has long been unavailable or poorly transferred; Nico died in 1985, at forty-six, just as a rapidly growing market for “world music” was vaulting his contemporaries Franco Luambo and Tabu Ley Rochereau to prominence as torchbearers for Congolese rumba in the West. Scholarship on his life and music is limited in English to a handful of indispensable sources, most notably a small discography by Alastair Johnston and Stewart’s exhaustive narrative history of Congolese rumba.³ Two excellent new authorized compilations of his work, Roger Izeidi Presents Vita Matata with African Fiesta and Docteur Nico Presents African Fiesta Sukisa 1966–1974, both released by the Belgian reissue label Planet Ilunga, clear the path considerably for new listeners, bringing dozens of previously un-reissued tracks from the middle of his career to light.

Around the time of independence, listeners in the Congo seemed to immediately understand the importance of Nico’s sound. After hearing “Indépendance Cha Cha” in a bar in Léopoldville, one listener was overheard saying, “It’s Nico’s revolution.” But Nico’s relationship to political events of the time is still unsettled, and Nico himself remains something of an enigma. Tracking his life through the many recordings he made with his three primary bands from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s—African Jazz, African Fiesta, and African Fiesta Sukisa—one senses the thrill of an artist attempting to radically expand African popular music, and the pain of someone on whom that attempt took a personal toll. His legacy lives chiefly in the sound of his instrument and its place in the music he pioneered, both of which seemed to allow a nation brutalized by colonial domination to access a richer and more joyous emotional life.

2.

Nico was born to Luba parents in 1939 at the Catholic mission of Mikalayi in the Belgian Congo. His father played the accordion and his mother sang traditional Luba music, but Nico would later tell Stewart that the string instruments he was exposed to when he was a child first inspired him to play the guitar.⁴ The village belonged to a relatively autonomous network of missionary stations in the Kasai province. Six hundred miles east of Léopoldville (modern-day Kinshasa), it operated as a “self-contained entity,” a kind of “state within the state,” according to the scholar Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, born in Mikalayi four years after Nico.

In the midst of territorial conflicts during the late nineteenth century, some Luba had sought protection in mission outposts like Mikalayi; by the 1940s they had developed a reputation for being well-educated and somewhat integrated into the colonial administrative apparatus. Nico’s immediate family may or may not have fit this mold, but other upheavals clearly shaped his childhood. His father’s early death left him, his sister, and his older brother, Charles Mwamba, in the care of their mother, who would later flee Mikalayi after she refused to marry her husband’s brother.

In the mid-1940s an uncle brought the two brothers to Léopoldville, where they were raised by their aunts in the native cité indigène district. Within that segregated section of the colonial city, the household was middle-class, and the family was initially reluctant when Nico expressed an interest in music; they pushed him to prioritize his education and join the ranks of the Congolese elite, or évolués. He attended a missionary school, and he would go on to graduate with a vocational degree from a technical institute in 1957 (a distinction noteworthy enough to be included on the back of some of his later records). Charles described the adolescent Nico as a bright student who “never insulted anyone, nor refused any service to a local senior citizen.” Fatefully, the brothers lived around the corner from a record shop, where they would have listened to the latest 78rpm phonograph records by some of the earliest popular Congolese recording artists—Wendo Kolosoy, Henri Bowane, Léon Bukasa.

This was probably Nico’s first exposure to a phonograph culture that by this point had already begun to transform popular music and social life in the colony. The scholar Michael Denning argues that, from the late 1920s on, the boom in international circulation of vernacular music on 78s spurred a “decolonization of the ear” that began to make the “decolonization of the territory” imaginable. A cultural revolution, in other words, prefigured a political one.⁵

“The anticolonial meaning of a record,” Denning writes, “often lay neither in the politics of the musician nor of its lyrics, but in the way its very sound disrupted the hierarchical orders and patterns of deference” under colonialism. The kinds of music that Denning identifies—jazz, hula, tango, beguine, West African palm-wine, the son records exported to Central Africa on the famous HMV G.V. series—were still evolving into the 1940s and 1950s. They were wildly popular in urban Léopoldville (and its neighbor Brazzaville, under French control), and they were certainly among the mix of records Nico heard growing up.

Companies began recording local popular music in Léopoldville in earnest in the late 1940s, when migration to the city increased rapidly following the war and artists began to merge these styles with elements of European popular songs and regional Congolese music. In the first few years the industry was only a thin layer of ramshackle businesses operating as both recording studios and labels. But the music produced in this early period was exceptionally diverse, and within these makeshift commercial arrangements something new was taking shape.⁶ The revolution was coming to Léopoldville—and Nico was about to enlist as a foot soldier.

*

Charles was the first of the brothers to learn guitar, running away from home to apprentice with a popular guitarist who played under the name “Jhimmy the Hawaiian.” Recording at the newly founded Opika studios, Charles developed his playing to the point where he picked up the nickname “Déchaud,” or “hot one.” Influenced by Jhimmy, he started refining a style of accompaniment based on a slightly altered tuning known as the mi-composé, in which the normal D string is tuned one octave higher by replacing it with a high E string, the mi pitch in solfège. This would become a typical rhythm guitar tuning in Congolese rumba, and the placement of a doubled high pitch in the middle of the string set would give instrumental passages some of their characteristic sense of multiplying countermelodies.

Meanwhile, Nico, a mechanic from the start, had started playing a guitar homemade from scrap wood. Déchaud said that when he started giving Nico lessons, likely on an acoustic guitar he’d picked up playing with Jhimmy, Nico “quickly mastered” the instrument. He began playing with Jhimmy, and later claimed to have met other older musicians around this time, like the fingerstyle guitarist Jean Bosco Mwenda. Opika had taken notice and given Nico his own guitar and bike, and they invited him to sing backup on a handful of sessions. His recording debut as an acoustic guitarist was around 1952 with “Para Fifi,” supporting Kabasele, an up-and-comer who would soon become known as Le Grand Kallé.

The song was a hit, and Nico began to be appreciated as a musician with prodigious skill and (even more impressively) a subtle touch on the instrument. His short solo on “Para Fifi” is extremely confident, kicking into gear halfway through with a brisk ascending run, and landing with an off-kilter stutter between the final two notes. “All the guitar players, we wanted to know how Nico managed to play that guitar solo,” said the guitarist Simaro Lutumba in The Rumba Kings, a 2021 documentary about Congolese rumba by the filmmaker Alan Brain. But Nico also knew exactly what he was doing throughout the rest of the song, intuiting the ways his guitar could fit between the harmony vocal phrases and peppering the arrangement with lively scalar fills. It’s incredible to imagine that in these years Opika was sending a car to pick him up after school. He was thirteen years old.

The burgeoning recording industry was also one of the rare places in the colony that fostered informal contact between Europeans and Congolese. A number of Greek entrepreneurs and a few expat Belgian jazz musicians had come to Léopoldville by the early 1950s, often as label owners or A&R scouts. There was a jazz saxophonist named Fud Candrix who played on early Congolese rumba sessions, and a keyboardist and A&R rep named Gilbert Warnant who popped up on some songs (including “Para Fifi”), honking out riffs on a Hammond Solovox organ. The musicianship on the sessions was uniformly tight and disciplined, but a sense of spontaneity and even goofiness seemed to indicate a particular, newfound delight in the potential of imported instruments.  

The electric guitar was introduced to Congolese studios in 1953 by Bill Alexandre, a Belgian guitarist who had played with Django Reinhardt; the guitarist Armando Brazzos remembers in The Rumba Kings that musicians at first called the instrument a “talking guitar.” Kabasele had started to form a small working band at Opika with Nico, Déchaud, and their cousin Tino Baroza, and the electric guitar soon replaced the acoustic guitar as a cornerstone of their sound. As the band grew, the combo often consisted of a couple of electric guitars, congas, claves, string bass, horns that would sometimes solo or double a guitar’s melody line, and harmony vocals—a novel palette that would become the standard sound of Congolese rumba, with many variations.

They began calling themselves African Jazz, inspired, Nico later said, by the “gentlemen of American jazz.” Louis Armstrong visited Ghana in 1956, by which point the band may have already adopted the name; Nico later claimed, suggestively, that he and his fellow musicians understood jazz as music “directed toward Africa.” Jazz records circulated in Léopoldville, and it’s likely that the musicians were aware of the American jazz artists beginning to visit the African continent under the pretense of cultural diplomacy. But they were drawn more to the word “jazz”—jazzeur was slang at the time for someone with elegance and sophistication—than to reproducing the sound of jazz music itself.

In the years leading up to independence African Jazz became one of the most popular bands in Léopoldville. They shared that distinction with an ascendant competitor, O.K. Jazz, and the two groups came to represent different schools within the music. According to the scholar Bob W. White, O.K. Jazz was considered “dirty,” “emanating from the gut,” and more “traditionalist,” in contrast to the “modernist” and “clean-cut” style of African Jazz. These differences mapped onto class distinctions in the colonial city. The guitarist Léon Bholen said that African Jazz was considered “for the évolués…kind of academic, for the intellectuals” and O.K. Jazz was considered “for people of the lower classes.”⁷ Kabasele’s smooth singing was influenced strongly by the popular Corsican balladeer Tino Rossi; the band dressed sharply and regularly played in the white ville district.

The two guitarists—the refined and educated Nico with African Jazz, the charismatic and streetwise school dropout Franco with O.K. Jazz—did much to shape the bands’ respective sounds. There were other important players on the scene (Papa Noël, Brazzos, De La Lune), but the competition between Nico and Franco would affect the rest of their careers and drive them to new artistic heights. Bholen told White that the difference between the groups “was all in the guitar: Franco’s guitar was barbaric and Nico’s was sentimental.”

It’s true that Nico’s touch on his instrument often seems gentler than Franco’s, his tone brighter and cleaner. Later in his life he would apparently say, “I’m a small man. I don’t fight the guitar.”⁸ He was agile and poised on stage, and he told Stewart that he tried never to “force” anything when he played. He noted that he didn’t use a capo to transpose around the neck, and he said that his touchstones were wind instruments like the saxophone and especially the flute, from which he took a range of high arpeggios and other glissando effects. It’s easy to see his claims as veiled digs at Franco, who cut a large imposing figure onstage, regularly played with a capo, and preferred the guitar’s middle registers, often attacking the strings with bold sixths and percussive overdriven staccato bursts.

But Nico once reportedly sat in with O.K. Jazz for a night and was able to play Franco’s entire repertoire, and in listening to both groups’ recordings today it’s clear that the two players had some similar and perhaps mutually reinforcing instincts in their early days: a dazzling facility with double stops, an interest in tremolo effects, an ability to share intricate lead lines with horns and reeds. Their differences seem like tendencies more than rigid divisions. It’s more notable that many listeners seemed to have a heightened awareness of the distinctions between the two men; they identified strongly with either Nico’s or Franco’s school, and social positions began to be imagined and understood through subtle contrasts in the tone of an electric guitar.

*

The defining feature of both groups’ sound—and that of nearly all their peers—was the way it incorporated and recast the music of Latin America. This phenomenon was immensely generative musically and politically—a kind of transcontinental feedback loop across the Black Atlantic, a centuries-spanning diasporic echo. Nico himself was voluble about the relationship, telling Stewart that “music doesn’t have a border…There are Cuban songs that resemble African songs. There are African songs that resemble Cuban songs…There are American songs that resemble African songs…Caribbean songs sound a bit like Congolese songs. It’s difficult to say who is copying whom.”

Nico was one of the chief agents of this musical connection, and he seemed intent on inverting the assumption—occasionally amplified in the Congolese press after independence—that African musicians were “copying” Latin rhythms. But on the ground these lines of influence did often operate through artists studying specific Latin American 78s that thrilled and obsessed them. Nico and other pioneers of Congolese rumba interpolated those records’ rhythms, imitated their Spanish, and picked up certain riffs and chromatic flourishes from artists like Trío Matamoros and Arsenio Rodríguez. Young Congolese musicians had some affinities in this respect with other members of the postwar generation around the world who were using the recorded popular music of the recent past as a kind of archive in its own right, out of which they forged new synthetic forms: rock and roll, bossa nova, soul.⁹

These connections had a particular force in Léopoldville, where Congolese rumba was becoming central to the city’s booming nightlife as a new urban identity started to cohere. Patrons would often buck Belgian curfews to listen, dance, and drink at one of the city’s over three hundred bars where, according to the writer Ken Braun, they began to think of themselves as “people of [Léopoldville]…as much as and maybe more than Bakongo, Bamongo, Baluba or any other traditional tribe.”¹⁰ Musicians became some of the first modern Congolese celebrities, and for younger listeners Nico became a kind of teenage guitar hero. In a recent conversation his eldest daughter, Liliane Kasanda, recalled to me that he said students would secretly sing his records in school.

In this changing environment, songs like Adou Elenga’s 1954 “Ata Ndele,” which implicitly called for decolonization, were quickly banned. But Congolese rumba was becoming broadly linked to the évolué associations incubating the independence struggle and to the city’s growing spirit of liberation, proving that there was an energized social base for the kind of nationalist political movement Patrice Lumumba would soon start to build. In the late 1950s, when Lumumba briefly worked as a sales manager for Polar beer, he began amassing his political following in the bars where rumba orchestras regularly played, and he developed close connections with musicians. Manu Dibango would later claim that the Congo was a place that “hummed to the single beat of music and politics. Everything was worked out in the bars. Stars were an integral part of public life.” This was especially true during the struggle for independence and the critical period after decolonization.

3.

In the convulsive three years between 1958 and 1961, Lumumba cofounded the Congolese nationalist party (MNC), petitioned for independence at the Round Table, consolidated electoral power, and briefly served as prime minister of the newly independent nation. The US State Department had recruited jazz musicians as cultural ambassadors in Africa during this time, but the musicians didn’t grasp the extent of Washington’s more pernicious strategic goals; Louis Armstrong was still on his second tour of the continent when Lumumba was assassinated in a CIA-backed plot. This chapter in the Cold War has recently received greater attention (notably in the 2024 documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat). But the intimate connections between Congolese popular musicians and the emerging nation’s formal political sphere remain underexplored.

As Congolese rumba entered a period of expansive creativity in the late 1950s, tensions had been simmering among the power brokers of independence; in her memoir, reissued last year, the activist Andrée Blouin describes Léopoldville in this era as “swarming with self-appointed ethnic ‘leaders.’” By 1960 a deep rift had emerged in the MNC between supporters of Lumumba and supporters of Albert Kalonji, a legislator from Nico’s home province of Kasai. Kalonji was a federalist Luba leader who had been a delegate in Brussels; Kabasele sang his name in “Indépendance Cha Cha” right after Lumumba’s. But Lumumba, ideologically oriented towards national unity and Pan-African solidarity, had frozen out Kalonji’s coalition from the government he was forming. After independence, with support from Belgian mining interests, Kalonji declared South Kasai an autonomous secessionist state, and Lumumba authorized a violent military intervention there in August 1960; thousands died or were displaced near Nico’s hometown of Mikalayi. Divisions like these signaled a coming era of extreme civil turmoil in the country.

African Jazz was closely aligned with Lumumba, who gave Kabasele a post as Secretary of Information in his new government. The singer Tabu Ley Rochereau, the newest member of the group, remembered driving Kabasele and Lumumba around Léopoldville, and Lumumba’s press agent Jean Lema even claimed that Kabasele narrowly escaped murder in these years for his prominent association with the prime minister.¹¹ But between Nico, Déchaud, and Baroza, the orchestra had a strong Luba contingent, and despite their connection to the spirit and social world of the independence movement, it may have been difficult for them to forgive Lumumba’s invasion of Kasai. In September 1960, just after the invasion, Nico and Déchaud left African Jazz.

It’s not quite clear what to make of this split. Liliane told me that Nico’s family’s ties to Luba politics ran deeper than have been previously reported: Kalonji, she said, was one of Nico’s uncles, frequently spending time at the house where Nico grew up. There is newsreel footage of Nico with Kalonji in Brussels during the Round Table, and according to Liliane one of Nico’s aunts—mindful of this family connection—often tried to steer the young guitarist away from aspects of African Jazz’s political agenda. Liliane suggested that Nico may have even intentionally sabotaged some recording sessions: “When Grand Kallé sang about being involved in politics, Nico played very, very badly so the song wouldn’t get out.” Tabu Ley’s biographer Jean Mpisi goes further, claiming that Kalonji was actively attempting to conscript African Jazz as a state orchestra for South Kasai.¹²

The dynamic was exacerbated by Kabasele’s relaxed approach to the band’s finances, which also likely had a part in Nico’s decision to leave. But in the press Kabasele accused Nico and Déchaud of being aggravated by “tribal excitements,” and newspapers interpreted the breakup in terms of the nation’s fracture. On April 12, 1961, Kalonji declared himself king, or mulopwe, of the Luba people; three days later the Léopoldville publication Actualités Africaines wrote that they hoped Kabasele’s Nico-less wing of African Jazz would “capture the attention of our leaders (especially the secessionists who later became kings), still on the eve of the great Round Table for national reconciliation.”

In June 1961 a committee of sixty-five government figures and other officials was, incredibly, convened to broker a reunion between Nico and Kabasele. (Even the minister of agriculture was there.) The band got back together, albeit only temporarily. The fact that such a committee was invested in African Jazz’s reunion in the first place illustrates the high stakes of the group’s dispute: Lumumba had been assassinated a few months earlier, Kalonji’s movement was shedding support, and senior political figures evidently felt that the group’s music had a central position in the project of holding the state together at a time of intense factionalism. Actualités Africaines said that the rapprochement between Nico and Kabasele “should serve as a lesson to all those who prefer secession to unity.” But Kabasele knew that the band wouldn’t have lasted much longer for purely musical reasons. Without Nico, he had earlier admitted, “African Jazz would be lifeless.”

*

The history of Congolese rumba is full of these extraordinarily complex defections, intra-band conflicts, rivalries, and détentes. At least some of the labyrinthine dissensions were directly linked to state conflict and ethnic division. But often the immediate catalysts were disputes over money. Kabasele had started his own label, one of the first to be run by a Congolese musician in the newly independent country, and the second phase of African Jazz saw the band’s popularity growing across West Africa. Musicians began to resent the contracts he arranged, which sometimes forced them to record fifty songs per week in Brussels for minimal pay. By this time Nico, who was still teaching auto mechanics, also had a family to support. He had married Alphonsine Desouza, who grew up in his neighborhood, and the couple seems to have confronted the bon vivant Kabasele about his handling of the band’s finances. Most of the core musicians of African Jazz, including Nico, left for good in 1963.

These shakeups hardly diminished Nico’s playing. He and Tabu Ley formed a new group with the enterprising singer Roger Izeidi called African Fiesta, and this period (partially represented on Vita Matata with African Fiesta) was one of vigorous experimentation for Nico, who was extending his harmonic concepts and further exploring the range of amplified guitar. In “Mobembo Eleki Tata” he adopts a resonant overdrive effect; in “Sabrosito” the instrument starts to resemble something almost like a timbale; in “Angola Siempre,” a song seemingly supporting Angolan independence, his solo is filled with altered harmonies and chromaticisms. He was never more activated than on “Nella Negrita,” a lush four-minute bolero with a burning tone, elastic phrasing, and a wealth of irrepressible melodic ideas.

Nico also began to introduce the Hawaiian lap steel guitar to Congolese rumba in songs like “N’daya Paradis,” “Mama Egée,” “Mambo Hawaiiene,” and many others. He was clearly enthralled with the new harmonic registers made possible by the instrument’s open tuning, and with the otherworldly zips and zings that could be achieved playing with a slide. But in a country where procuring Western factory-made instruments was a major ordeal for bandleaders, there was also an element of pride involved in the acquisition of the Hawaiian guitar. Its debut was advertised as a hype-worthy spectacle in itself; in a testimonial included in African Fiesta Sukisa 1966-1974, the singer Sam Mangwana remembers the band unpacking the instrument in front of a live audience. The lap steel became so associated with Nico that an image of the instrument was engraved on his tombstone.

After two fruitful years, African Fiesta split up. Again the causes are difficult to parse. Ethnic tensions played a part; Izeidi and Tabu Ley were cousins from the Bandundu province, and Izeidi told Stewart that for Nico “it was a tribal thing…the Baluba split up the orchestra.” Tabu Ley called Nico a “veritable secessionist” in the press, and later told Stewart that Nico wanted to play with “people from Kasai, from his own region.” Liliane told me that there was a physical confrontation between Nico and Izeidi’s family, and that Tabu Ley was pressured into separating with Nico. Tabu Ley himself later expressed some regret over the breakup, telling Stewart that it “could have been avoided.”

But there were also evident conflicts between the three musicians over foreign distribution deals, and Nico was likely frustrated with sharing power as a bandleader. In 1966 he formed a new group with Déchaud called African Fiesta Sukisa. Tabu Ley and Izeidi formed another group without Nico that soon came to be known as African Fiesta National, the name perhaps implying a more nationally inclusive posture. Nico’s sukisa struck a different, more biting tone; he told Stewart that the word in Lingala meant “to end it—to put an end to the enemy.” Some of the new band’s songs were punctuated by shouts of the word, which may have been above all a claim to musical supremacy. But the name was fitting in another way: African Fiesta Sukisa would be the last great band of Nico’s career.

4.

In his reminiscence in the liner notes to African Fiesta Sukisa 1966-1974, the singer Paul Mizele claims that Nico “never broke a guitar string in his life.” Nico’s gentle touch suffuses the entire ambience of the Fiesta Sukisa recordings in a way that he had never quite achieved in any of his other groups. He carefully orchestrated all of the band’s songs, and the guitars often seem held in suspension over the rhythm section; they tend to have a graceful and diffuse quality, operating in sync and colored by ample delay effects. Compared to those of African Jazz and African Fiesta, the songs are organized less around Nico’s discrete transcendent guitar solos than around collective instrumental textures.

Fiesta Sukisa usually featured three guitars—Nico on lead, Déchaud on rhythm, and a third guitar between them that played an accompaniment called the mi-solo. Delicate interlaced passages between the three musicians give the songs much of their atmosphere and momentum, and the accompanists’ patterns were somewhat related to the arpeggiated ostinatos known in Cuban music as guajeos or montunos. But these guitar passages, long known as sebene sections, are distinctive to Congolese popular music. Nico seems to have surrendered himself to their intricacies in these years, embedding his melodic ideas deeper in them and structuring them to absolute precision. In songs like “Doris” and “Aruna,” it sometimes feels like there are ghost melodies inside the accompanists’ syncopated rhythms—or as if their guitars were prisms refracting the white light of Nico’s lines into dispersions of color.

The rhythmic character of Congolese popular music was changing too in the late 1960s and early 1970s. O.K. Jazz began using funk beats, and Fiesta Sukisa made a few wild forays in this direction (“I Got the Feelin’”). Nico often peppered his arrangements with a variety of rhythms and harmonic devices, particularly in the intros to his songs: a swing beat in “Mobali Nakobala,” a tritone substitution at the start of “Bolongo.” The band also remained deep in conversation with Latin American music; some of the songs on African Fiesta Sukisa 1966-1974 are directly based on Johnny Pacheco numbers, and most of the group’s various rhythms are still founded on an underlying son clave pattern.

But Fiesta Sukisa may have been best known for a dance called the kiri-kiri. In the Congo, Nico claimed, “we invent a new dance style every day,” and many bands had dance crazes associated with them—the mambenga, the yéké yéké, the jobs, even one called the Apollo 11. (Nico later told Stewart he wanted to invent a dance “based on Star Wars.”) Fiesta Sukisa’s kiri-kiri records were structured around a simple step loosely based on the Western dance known as the “jerk,” and they featured a fast opening chorus followed by a slower sebene signaling it was time to dance. A reviewer at the time called the kiri-kiri a “concealed rhythm,” and listening to songs like “Nalingi Yo Na Motema” and “Baoulé,” there’s something uncanny to the rhythmic shift that occurs at the midpoint; it feels like stepping through a mirror.

*

Fiesta Sukisa’s existence overlapped with the early years in power of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, later known as Mobutu Sese Seko, who had consolidated his authority in the Congo in a military coup in 1965. This kicked off a busy period in the Congolese music industry, as Mobutu frequently used musicians to sustain popular support for his regime. Franco was particularly close to power in these years, writing songs celebrating Mobutu, often warming up crowds before his speeches, and even accompanying him on a propaganda tour of the country. Tabu Ley also enjoyed access to the regime—although both musicians, it should be noted, occasionally ran afoul of Mobutu during their careers, and Tabu Ley later claimed that he cooperated with Mobutu “sporadically.”¹³

As one of the country’s best-known musicians, Nico was undoubtedly subject to pressure from above and had to publicly negotiate the regime’s whims. In 1966 Mobutu cynically proclaimed Patrice Lumumba a national hero; that same year Fiesta Sukisa recorded the tribute “Hommage à Lumumba Patrice,” perhaps at Mobutu’s direction. Nico embraced elements of the regime’s cultural policy of authenticité, which mobilized various precolonial Congolese customs to legitimize Mobutu’s rule; he told Congo magazine in 1970 that he was “eager to introduce traditional instruments in African Fiesta Sukisa,” and he went on to release songs like “Exhibition Show” and “Kamulangu,” which featured traditional balafons. At least one of Fiesta Sukisa’s songs, “Historique du Zaire,” is filled with the language of authenticité and references Mobutu and the country’s ruling party.  

But Nico’s retreat from visibility in the Congolese music industry aligns with the rise of the state’s more coercive musical policies, and Nico never went as far as Franco in serving as a direct mouthpiece for Mobutu or participating in the country’s ubiquitous animation politique propaganda performances. A journalist alleged to the author Gilbert Aonga Ebolu that “Mobutu didn’t like Nico,”¹⁴ and Bob White claimed that Kabasele and Nico both “saw their musical careers seriously threatened by their association with the former prime minister Patrice Lumumba.” Nico had, after all, spent his formative years playing with the Lumumbist Kabasele, and Mobutu had been complicit in the prime minister’s assassination. But in Nico’s case, devotion to Lumumba was probably less decisive than artistic pride. Liliane understood her father as someone determined to make “music for music’s sake,” and this position—always under some form of constraint—was becoming decidedly less tenable as Mobutu tightened his hold on power.

By the mid-1970s the music industry had begun to struggle as Mobutu nationalized the country’s economy. Mobutu rewarded Franco with ownership of a pressing plant and a nightclub, but Nico seemingly received little assistance in these years and never reaped the spoils of loyalty. It’s possible that there was an ethnic dimension to Nico’s marginalization; the Luba people, who were often reputed for their financial savvy, faced some popular resentment during the country’s growing economic crises. According to the historian Bogumil Jewsiewicki, they were “removed from political circles” and “relatively easily eliminated from the national scene in the 1970s, expelled gradually as ‘undesirables.’”¹⁵

But there had also been considerable turbulence inside Fiesta Sukisa, whose membership was constantly reshuffling. Nico was something of a disciplinarian; Liliane told me that he once even briefly suspended his older brother after he showed up late to a rehearsal. A few members of Fiesta Sukisa accused Nico of underpaying them or taking credit for songs they’d composed, and Nico had a particularly damaging falling-out with his remarkable and highly popular tenor singer Chantal Kazadi. His relationship with the (Mobutu-aligned) press grew increasingly contentious; in 1973 he gave a combative interview to the newspaper Salongo, which subsequently published a long response alleging that he had alienated his younger band members and come across as a “colonialist.” Nico’s position with respect to the regime may have heightened his vulnerability to charges like these in a country where the language of political crisis inevitably filtered into musical discourse. But it’s clear that he was growing more isolated from the musicians in his band, and his goodwill in public life was diminishing.

Fiesta Sukisa disbanded around 1974. Nico would make halting attempts to relaunch his career afterwards, but little that he recorded in the last decade of his life would rival his previous artistic or commercial success. He started facing increasing personal challenges: his marriage to Desouza—whom Liliane describes as the love of his life and instrumental in his career—had fallen apart, and stories circulated of his alcoholism and financial struggles. The general perception was epitomized in a 1984 short story called “Le Sexe du Matonge” by the Congolese novelist Sony Lab’ou Tansi, in which Nico fleetingly appears as a ghostly presence sitting alone at a bar: “His wife had been taken from him. He never stopped suffering from it.”

In 1976 Nico told Salongo that he was still planning to come back and make music that was “‘Revolutionary Kasanda’…renewed, redirected, actualized.” To a certain extent, he succeeded. In the 1980s there was a short-lived reunion with Tabu Ley, some fruitful recording sessions in Paris, and a bit of increased public recognition. A Cotonou newspaper reported that “despite his age”—he was only in his early forties—Nico had “lost nothing of his mastery of the guitar and his vivacity.” He was, Liliane said, planning to have her manage his career as he continued this second act.

But Liliane remembers “mysterious, mystical illnesses” in these years. Nico had apparently lived with a blood disorder since the 1960s that he called “intoxication” (perhaps a euphemism), and in early 1985 he traveled to Washington, D.C., to seek medical treatment. The procedures seemed to help, and he also made a deal there to release an album and launch a US tour. But back in Kinshasa that summer his health declined again. Mobutu funded medical trips abroad for some Congolese musicians, and eventually he was prevailed upon to send Nico to Brussels for another round of treatments. Nico died there in September 1985.

*

“You’ll know who Docteur Nico is,” Nico told Liliane shortly before his death. Over forty years later, we’re still trying to gain a fuller picture of who he was, and the terms on which he wanted to be understood. One of the few documents of him speaking at length is the three-and-a-half hour interview he recorded with Stewart in the US near the end of his life, and he is a rich and fascinating character—generous and prickly in equal measure, excitable, proud, a bit guarded. He riffs on an unplugged electric guitar as he speaks, narrating his artistic development and his contributions to Congolese rumba, eager to declare his awesome creative powers. “If I find a guitarist who can do better than what I’ve done,” he said, “then I’m putting down the guitar.” He claims that he couldn’t play a song the same way twice. His competitive fire still burns: “I’m here, waiting for everyone, the Francos, the Rochereaus. I’m on the pitch.”

He mentions that he has a large record collection, and he speaks of his admiration for Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Duke Ellington. He plays blues licks and claims that he drew melodies from Mozart and Beethoven, mixing them with the “folklore of my country” to create something new. His music, he says at various points, came “from my head,” “from the bottom of my heart,” and “from somewhere people don’t understand.”

If Nico was in a retrospective mood, he didn’t sound like a man preparing to die: when he returned from America, he told Stewart, he was planning to do “something else…even the Americans won’t understand where I got the idea.” He seemed to view himself both as a master of the guitar and as an artist engaged in a deliberate process of national modernization, intent on developing a Congolese popular music that could stand parallel to Western creations: “If the Americans invent, what do you call them, rockets? We also invent rockets.”¹⁶

And yet, for a musician who had rung the opening bell for Congolese independence, he was slightly out of step with the trajectory of the nation he helped inaugurate. “I’ve made the Congo known everywhere,” he told Liliane. But one also senses, at times, the subtle pain of an ambitious musician in a relentlessly plundered country. He lamented to Stewart his “lack of resources,” his inability to pay for the instruments he wanted, the absence of suitable studios or record pressing plants in the Congo, and the industry’s uneven support of artists. He said that he “could have gone much farther” and suggested that he had never achieved his real goal of creating “one of the great bands of Africa.” He had, of course, created three of them by his thirties. But he remained discontent, restless, somewhat aggrieved. “The struggle continues,” he said.

In the West, perhaps one of Nico’s most legible contributions was staking his claim to a kind of virtuosity—a discipline, control, and technical precision—that audiences had rarely associated with African music. “It’s because of my work, my profession—that’s why they call me doctor,” he told Stewart. “I don’t make mistakes on the guitar. I’m like the machine we saw today at the hospital, what do you call it? A computer.”

But his work contained deeper mysteries; there was a ghost in the machine. In 1984 he recorded a song named after Mikalayi, the mission village where he spent his childhood. It’s likely that he was marked by his Luba background and his early days in that town—that “self-contained entity,” that “state within the state”—in ways we will never fully understand. “Most of the melodic themes I create have their source in my traditional past,” he once said. “When I’m in the process of creating on stage, I am no longer with my band, I’m spiritually in my village.” As he electrified a continent and decolonized the ears of a nation, his music also bore the traces of a deeper interiority—a sense of dream-like retreat into a sonic landscape that could never be entirely contained by the state.

In Nico’s early teens, fellow musicians christened him Nico mobali, or “the real man.” Under Mobutu, he adopted the name Kasanda wa Mikalay, in tribute to his hometown. But he acquired his most enduring moniker around the time of the Round Table in Brussels in 1960, when a Belgian radio DJ, in Stewart’s words, “was so taken with his playing she called him a doctor of his craft.” In retrospect there was a certain irony in the fact that Nico, at the twilight of formal colonialism, picked up this particular nickname from an admirer in the metropole. That gesture seems like a symbolic yet unfulfilled transfer of power, emerging from the same atmosphere of negotiation—the same halls, the same hotels—that was setting the terms of the Congo’s independence in those pivotal weeks.

“Listen carefully,” they said after hearing “Indépendance Cha Cha” in the Léopoldville bars. “Nico is operating on the sick in Belgium.” There were profound complications after the operation. But no one could underestimate the significance of his name. For decades before independence, Congolese could only serve as subordinate medical auxiliaries in a paternalistic Belgian health system. Even colonial subjects trained in medicine could not hold the title of docteur.