We first saw him in 2005 in La Danse de Jupiter, a documentary by Florent de la Tullaye and Renau Barret, two creators from La Belle Kinoise Films, who made a name for themselves five years later when Staff Benda Bilili Band emerged. Following the steps of the singer and percussionist, we discovered another Kinshasa, home to tunes played out on makeshift oil drums and bottles, with reggae toasted in patois against a likembe backdrop, battered-out hip hop and customised rumba.

Margarita Jupiter Hôtel Univers (La Belle Kinoise) 2012 Listen

We got to know the leader of Okwess International, whose clear-cut, cutting words described a megacity verging on chaos. “Kinshasa is sound as it really is. It’s not a city that you see, it’s a city you listen to.” At the time, Jupiter Bokondji’s words didn’t always get the coverage they deserved, despite his perseverant quest to stand out in a scene dominated by powerful rumba bands and soukous singers. The man known locally as the rebel general because of his “way of reflecting on society, neither saying yes, nor taking charity” is a Don Quixotesque figure sporting a well-worn Russian military jacket with red epaulettes, probably dating from his former life in East Berlin, where his father worked as a diplomat.

Congolese sound patchwork

It was there, in the early seventies, that seven-year-old Jean-Pierre, who quickly renamed himself Jupiter, learned that he was different. “I used to cross the Wall twice a day to go to school. So I had a clear image of the two worlds.” He listened to James Brown and Jackson Five, Deep Purple and the Stones. As a teenager he set up his own rock band, Die Neger, producing a strange mix of percussion from his ethnic group, the Mongo, and saturated guitar work.

When he returned to his homeland in 1980, at the end of his father’s posting, he was “struck by traditional music”. The shock took him back to his roots, when as a young boy “his grandmother and mother used to heal the ill using sound and tam tams”. He quickly started finding out about all the ethnic groups, “450 without counting the sub-groups” that people the country. He plunged himself into the inner-most depths of the Congo, and emerged with his first formula: bofenia rock, “it was research music that I used to develop my experience abroad by confronting it with the country’s patchwork of sound”.

In 1983, at just twenty, he put it into practice with Bongo Folk. “But people told us that it was white people’s music. It took time to make them understand that it was Congolese music spiced up with outside influences so that everyone could swallow it.” Almost thirty years in fact! In between times, Jupiter carried on playing in Lemba Terminus, his zone, “Kinshasa’s ex Latin quarter, which is where most people who’ve run the country come from.” He earned his daily bread doing different jobs, including personal secretary for a minister for seven years to avoid falling into the trap of the country’s infamous Article 15: “Stand on your own two feet! We called it enforced begging.” He never dropped the music, and in 1990 he created Okwess, a group of Congolese sound adventurers, with which he produced tracks that never became anything. At least for a while.

Until the day that Jupiter’s path crossed that of Florent de la Tullaye and Renaud Barret, scouting out talent for La Belle Kinoise. “I was waiting for them, I knew that the time had come and that my fate was changing.” At last, the story started to speed up. “Some of my musicians went off to Europe. I’d done that though, and I wanted to stay put to fight out the fight. I could have left in 1985, but I preferred to stay here. It hasn’t always been easy, and some of my music talks about that: a man can’t cry. You have to fight to reach your goal.”

Hotel univers

© dr

In the summer of 2010, Jupiter recorded his "first" disk at nearly 50 years old. “It’s a new beginning!” Hotel Univers, a whole world. His own, earth-shatteringly urban, virulently African world. The sound is in the image of his band, a gamut of Congolese diversity. It reflects his own career, too: “The world is my planet!” he hammers out in Deutschland, a title he uses to talk of politics, love and education, “endemically wrong, working at two speeds” says the man who praises Ray Lema’s initiative to set up a music school in Kinshasa. “When he started, he was a hundred years ahead of time. No one understood it here. I’ve tried to take his one hundred years ahead and apply one hundred years of hindsight to make it work.”

Jupiter makes a point of remaining positive, and the word peppers his conversation: “I want to look ahead for our grandchildren’s generation. Our own has been sacrificed. There’s no room for regret, you have to devise the future and be positive. It’s the moment for reflection and making Africa dynamic. It’ll take time for it to all fall into place. But we’ve got everything it takes to make it work!”

Transaltion by: Anne-Marie Harper

Jupiter & Okwess International Hotel Univers (All Other Music/La Belle Kinoise) Forthcoming album.