13

The Comings and Goings of Key Scenarios

TV Fiction, Culture, and Transnational Flows in Postcolonial Kinshasa

Katrien Pype

On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork with producers of TV serials in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (where such serials are also called maboke, théâtre populaire, and télédramatiques), this chapter aims at introducing one particular anthropological perspective on TV fiction: I will show how television fiction can be studied as an important site of cultural production. Central to my analysis is the concept of “key scenario,” one of a culture's most vital symbols (Ortner, 2002). Until now, no anthropological research on Kinshasa's visual media has been produced. As a relatively recent topic, the social and symbolic space of media has been researched only in the context of a limited set of other African societies. Anthropological research on visual media is especially focused on West Africa, often engaging the relationship of films and videos with religion (Hackett, 1998; Launay, 1997; Lyons, 1990; Lyons & Lyons, 1987; Meyer, 2003, 2004, 2006; Witte, 2005, 2008), with politics and the market (Lawuyi, 1997), or with the construction of local modernities (Armbrust, 1996; Larkin, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2008; Shipley, 2004; Werner, 2006).

My studies of the cultural production of TV fiction in Kinshasa have been made possible by two epistemological changes within the discipline of anthropology. First, contemporary anthropologists began to approach “culture” as something that is historical and constructed; and, second, anthropologists began to consider global flows of signs, symbols, and narratives as significant sites of analysis. These changes foreground the “anthropological turn toward the screen” that I present in the first section. This will be followed by an exploration of the concept of “key scenarios” and by a diachronic analysis of the various key scenarios that have been promoted in and through Kinshasa's TV series since their inception. These “key scenarios” are the outcome of a fascinating interplay of local and global flows of power, people, and beliefs. Therefore the final part of this chapter offers a theoretical exploration of anthropological analyses of global media flows.

Anthropologists Turning to the Screen

For far too long, anthropologists were blind to the presence of modern media technologies in the field – technologies often brought to the field by the researchers themselves.¹ A cultural pessimism, so well expressed in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer, is often given as an explanation for the fact that these technologies were radically absent from earlier ethnographic and anthropological accounts. Because of their implicit compliance with cultural imperialism, television, radio, and other mass media remained taboo for a long time. Media anthropology only really took off as a subdiscipline in the 1990s, when an open concept of culture was adopted (see below). At the same time, the fear of globalization made way for curiosity about the local experiences of modernity (Abu-Lughod, 1999; Ginsburg, 1994; Wright, 1998).

That is not to say, however, that anthropologists were not engaging with media before. An important example is Ruth Benedict's research on Japanese culture, published as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). This research was undertaken in the mid-1940s and deliberately deployed media texts, such as cinema and documentary films, as primary sites of information on Japanese society. The reason why Benedict engaged with these media texts was the impossibility of doing “traditional” fieldwork in Japan due to World War II. Others followed her example, and, based on novels and media texts, scholars such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson studied national cultures of France, Romania, England, and others. Their research practices differed very much from current media anthropology in that participant observation and long-term fieldwork were not part of their methodology, as the name of their project indicated: Anthropology at a Distance.²

More significant is the research of Hortense Powdermaker (1950), who studied the production of Hollywood films while focusing on the social impact of motion pictures. Her research in Hollywood gave a rather dark image of the culture industry, paralleling the cultural pessimism of the Frankfurt School. According to a later observer, Powdermaker understood the Hollywood factory as a “brutal industry thinly disguised as art that used its technological advantage to objectify viewers and impose on them politically numbing cultural formulae” (Askew, 2002, p. 5, commenting on Powdermaker). After this research, Powdermaker left for Rhodesia (the Zambian Copperbelt) to study the reception of American films among white and black communities in the mining region (Powdermaker, 1962). Along with the economic changes that she would identify as “modernization,” she took seriously the emergence of a leisure culture that evolved around radio, movies, social clubs, dance halls, and football. Powdermaker argued that participation in these activities symbolized a desire to enter into new social worlds and served as a mediator between the old and the new (in Peterson, 2005, p. 41). Her research in Zambia was set within a paradigm that studied how societies changed from one form to another. The entrance of the “new world” through media was a phase in the creation of a new society. Hence Powdermaker did not take the complexity and the concurrence of multiple modernities as her main focus, as most anthropologists do now. But, despite this dated theoretical approach, Powdermaker's research cannot be ignored by current media anthropologists. What visual media did and still do, in the Copperbelt and elsewhere, is to offer alternative worldviews – possibilities, as Arjun Appadurai (1996) calls them – that is, alternatives to local experiences. Media thus introduce the problem of social and cultural difference, create new “Others,” and enlarge the imaginary sources for the construction of identities and subjectivities.

In 1999 Lila Abu-Lughod writes:

A decade later, numerous ethnographic works on media production and reception have been produced. Since the start of my research in 2002, five important readers in media anthropology have been published (Askew & Wilk, 2002; Coman, 2003; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, & Larkin, 2002; Peterson, 2005; Rothenbuhler & Coman, 2005). In 2004 the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) also created a media anthropology network in order to group anthropologists working on written, aural, and visual mass media. The institutionalization of this subdiscipline is ongoing. Prolonged discussions on the most important themes, the most apt methodologies and the weight given to the technology itself reveal that, even today, the boundaries of the subdiscipline are still to be defined.

The major theoretical anthropological approaches toward visual media have two main strands. A first line of interest in media products follows the reflexive turn within anthropology and analyzes the “representation of the Other” in films, documentaries and other visual products. Second, research focuses on the social lives of media products (production, reception, and their social itineraries) in divergent localities. The main topics of these analyses are cultural activism, the construction of collective identities (national, ethnic, religious), and the role of the media in transnational contexts (see Ginsburg et al., 2002, pp. 11–18). I intend to contribute to this second line: the emphasis on religion, politics, and media will reveal the role of visual media in the construction of communities, and how visual texts relate to shifting power configurations in a central African capital city.

In their much cited article “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference,” Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1992, p. 19) write that “mass media pose the clearest challenge to orthodox notions of culture.” The existence of a transnational public sphere emphasizes the fictitious character of the boundaries that enclose culture. Gupta and Ferguson point out that the concept of “culture” has been a difficult one for anthropologists ever since the early 1980s (p. 2). So, rather soon after the cultural turn – which began in the early 1970s with Clifford Geertz's influential monograph on The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) (among other things), and which imposed a “reading” of cultures – several anthropologists began to search for the “writers” of the cultural texts, as well as for the “writing conditions.” Visual texts and regimes emerged as important contributors to the creation and distribution of cultural meanings and symbols. As Faye D. Ginsburg, a pioneer of the anthropology of media, notes: “It was evident to me that we could no longer ignore the impact of [. . .] visual media on the production of culture and of collective memory, both inside and outside of the official channels” (Ginsburg, 1994, p. 8).

These studies are in line with recent anthropological approaches that understand “culture” as a constructed concept, historical, and dependent on various power relationships. It is now acknowledged that “culture” is a concept that is continuously being redefined by those who use it, and its boundaries are continuously renegotiated (see Bayart, 2005). In an interesting article published in 1998 in Anthropology Today, Susan Wright analyzes how the notion of “culture” shifted over time and how it was politicized. She discerns two sets of ideas about “culture” in anthropology: an older one, which equates “a culture” with “a people” that can be delineated through a boundary and a checklist of characteristics; and new meanings of “culture,” as not a “thing” but a political process of contestation over the power to define key concepts – including that of “culture” itself. Anthropologists, too, have been actively engaged in the “production of culture,” as Wright shows. They have drawn rigid boundaries between different groups to which they ascribed distinct cultures. These “cultures” were often perceived as being fixed and ahistorical, shared by a group of people and inspiring a coherent way of life.

Several authors (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Marcus & Fischer, 1986) have taken the critique of the “culture” concept a step further, and some have even proposed to dispose of it. Aware of the politicized use of the “culture” notion and disappointed in the homogenizing work it accomplishes, Abu-Lughod (1991), for example, prefers to “write against culture.” Only in that way can she do justice to “the complexity, the uncertainty, and contestations of everyday life and to the individuality of its members” (Abu-Lughod, 1999, pp. 13–14).

Furthermore, Abu-Lughod's research on the production and reception of television in both urban and rural Egypt has inspired her to think “about ‘culture’ not so much as a system of meaning or even a way of life but as something whose elements are produced, censored, paid for and broadcast across a nation, even across national boundaries” (p. 122). Consequently, she prefers to pay more attention to the particular configurations of power and to the social fields that are affected by certain hegemonies and produce “culture” and discourse about “culture.” Most media anthropologists agree that an analysis of the production of media texts can shed light on the production and transformation of “culture” itself (Mahon, 2000, p. 469). Or, as Ginsburg writes (1994, p. 14), “[w]e [. . .] are challenged to comprehend the multiple ways that media operate as a site where culture is produced, contested, mediated, and continually re-imagined.”

These discussions about the definition of “culture” and how it is constructed belong to the current direction that social analysis is taking, what Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (1999) have called “beyond the cultural turn.” It is, however, questionable how far social analysts who embrace a practice-related and constructive understanding of the concept of “culture” have really moved away from the so-called cultural turn. Awareness of the epistemological and ontological complexities in the discourse about “culture” or “cultures” does not keep most researchers from subscribing to Geertz' classic definition of “culture” as the webs of meaning within which people live (1973, p. 5). Indeed, complemented by the acknowledgement of the plurality of symbolic systems, of meaning makers, and of issues of power and domination, the concept of “culture” has still an important part in anthropological research (see Ortner, 1999, p. 4). As Sherry Ortner writes:

Evolving Key Scenarios in Kinois Media

Within interpretative anthropology, “culture” is constituted of symbols that can be manifest in local TV production. I argue that a diachronic symbolic study of Kinshasa's TV production unravels the various ideas of “culture” that have emerged throughout Zairian/Congolese history. In particular, I have found Ortner's study of a culture's key symbols (published in 1973 and reprinted in 2002) extremely helpful for situating local TV production within the larger political and social Congolese context.

In Ortner's (2002) analysis of “key symbols,” symbols of the kind she calls “elaborating” sort out complex and undifferentiated feelings and ideas and make them comprehensible to the individual, communicable to others, and translatable into orderly action (p. 161). For example, they are well organized and logical, and therefore they occupy a central status in a culture. Ortner identified two kinds of “elaborating symbols”: “root metaphors” and “key scenarios.” For our discussion, only the “key scenario” is important. She formulates the American key scenario – best known as “the American dream” – like this: A poor boy of low status, but with total faith in the American system, works very hard and ultimately becomes rich and powerful (p. 162). This key scenario offers a clear-cut mode of action, which is appropriate for a correct and successful living in America. More abstract key scenarios formulate local definitions of the good life and of social success and key cultural strategies to attain them.

In the course of Kinshasa's media history,³ Congolese dramatic artists have increasingly appropriated Western aesthetics and communication systems to broadcast distinctive ideologies and key scenarios. The kind of media imperialism associated with the colonial encounter changed during the reign of former President Mobutu Sese Seko (1965–1997). In 1989, for example, Mobutu allowed two local television channels to broadcast alongside national channels. In 1996, he further liberalized media spaces, creating an opening for commercial and religious media. Pentecostal–Charismatic Christianity, already popular in Kinshasa soon after independence (1960), came to conquer both the city and the mass media. Religious dramas that had been performed in missionary-run schools and youth groups and produced through colonial radio and films now moved to the postcolonial sphere of TV fiction (Pype, 2009b, pp. 134–139). Indigenous youth who once produced the sketches now began to write screenplays and to appear in local productions. As converted and schooled subjects, they regarded themselves as les évolués, literally “the advanced ones.”

These political and religious transformations heavily impacted the design of local television serials, demonstrating not only the continuous interweaving of national and Western cultural values, but also the multiple forms and meanings that media imperialism can take. Kinshasa's mass-mediatized dramas have promoted different “key scenarios” and models for Kinshasa's people in the postcolonial period – people such as its citizens and its class of évolués.⁴ Importantly, not only did these model characters stage social ideals, but their producers belonged in their categories, too.

Citizens in TV Fiction and Nationalism

The first national television station RTNC1 (Radio–Télévision Nationale du Congo) began in 1965. It explicitly addressed its viewers as citizens freed from colonial rule. In 1967, Mobutu nationalized the press and the Catholic television channel (Téléstar). The latter belonged to the Belgian Catholic missionaries (the Scheut Fathers). It broadcast cultural and educational programs, mainly from the Belgian metropolis, although locally produced programs also started gradually to be screened. Téléstar showed films produced by fellow missionaries in particular. As had already been the case for cinema, television served as a handmaiden in the missionaries' civilizing and Christianizing endeavors. The imagined viewing audience consisted of the white missionaries who used the station to communicate with other missionaries, and also of the Congolese population as potential converts. Téléstar's name changed to RTNC2. In 1971 the national broadcasting system was called La Voix du Zaïre (The Voice of Zaire), and the name changed again in 1981 to Office Zaïrois de Radiodiffusion et Télévision (OZRT).

In this unified system, Mobutu's regime favored the production of television serials that would support his nationalization efforts.⁵ Local dramatic performers (actors, musicians, and dancers) were commissioned to screen folkloric dance spectacles and theater plays based on Congo's cultural richness. These were part of the animation culturelle (cultural animation, propaganda) that characterized Mobutu's early politics. In 1972, following their leader's will, the program directors of RTNC1 copied the format and title of a French television show (Au théâtre ce soir) that had showed in Kinshasa. In the latter program, the Frenchman Pierre Sabbagh hosted and aired images of plays staged in Parisian theaters. Interviewees who remembered the program told me that the viewers perceived the realities in those European plays as too far removed from their own lives. Yet, they said, Kinshasa's intellectual elite (the évolués) was eager to view these plays.⁶ To shorten the cultural distance between the Western-based plays and local television viewers, RTNC1 followed a state-inspired initiative to make a Zairian copy of the French program.

The new format was named “Theater from here” (“Théâtre de chez nous”) and broadcast “local” plays. The name emphasized the embedding of the narratives in local realities. Tshitenge Tsana, who coordinated this show, invited actors to interpret plays written by Congolese dramaturges such as Guy Menga and other African writers, in particular Léopold Sédar Senghor. These plays were performed in a studio, in one setting that imitated the illusion of the theater stage. Performances of the Zairian National Theater were also aired in the same program. Zairian actors now performed classical plays like Mundele Ndombe (based on Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) , Les Fiançailles tragiques (Ernest Daudet), and Le Cid (Corneille) for the television screen. The latter performances were local adaptations of European classic plays; some remained rather close to the original while others translated it to an African context, still evoking foreign imaginary settings, unknown characters, and Western tragic experiences. In the early days of Mobutu, classic plays showing a Western notion of the Enlightenment aired side by side on television with indigenous writers' presentations of an African world. Even if these stories appeared in different narratives and evoked different worlds, they still did not reflect the totality of Kinshasa's urban experience.

It is important to draw attention to the fact that nous (“we”) in the program's name, “Théâtre de chez nous,” suggested national unity, but it also hinted at the “African” identity of the plays in contrast to the foreign culture of the former colonizer. The origin of the screened dramas thus flirted with pan-Africanism. The initial shows portrayed an “African culture,” only to narrow it, a few years later, to a national Zairian identity. Gradually, theater became domesticated, brought closer to the lived realities of Kinshasa's population.

Televised theater became fully adapted to the local urban context when the producer and writer Tshitenge Tsana faced difficulties in broadcasting a new play each week. In 1974 he gathered together local actors, several of them from the group Artistes Africains Associés, and created the drama company Groupe Salongo. The group became a national sensation. Many Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) remember that streets in town were deserted as people gathered in front of television sets on Thursday evenings to see the Salongo shows.⁷ It is said that these evenings were the only times when “the town was silent.” For a long time the Salongo group monopolized televised drama, facing some competition in the 1980s from two other troupes: Troupe Nzoi and Ngadiadia. Between 1985 and 1990 about 85% of Kinshasa's inhabitants followed the Salongo serials (Convents, 2006, p. 306). These programs created national stars like Ebale Mondial, Kwedy, Mopepe, Bomengo, and Masumu Debrindet. The group still exists today, although the artists have changed and some of the original actors started their own troupes.

The group's name, “Salongo,” derived from the first play that the troupe staged, and it could best be translated as “collective work,” which became a key concept in Mobutu's nationalizing campaign. Although the concept preceded the postcolonial period,⁸ its exact origins remain a mystery. Gustaaf Hulstaert (1971, pp. 205–206), a Belgian missionary who worked with the Mongo people, writes that the word derives from “Is' a longo,” meaning “father of the hoe.” He notes that, in the equatorial province of Boteko, between 1927 and 1933, pupils sang: “Is' a longo, mondele maso alingi mosala, na nsima akomi biso kolongola hé hé” (“The father of the hoe, the white man, the mason, he likes [us to] work, and afterwards, he will chase us away”). The lyrics refer to a particular colonial officer who used to be a mason but punished his prisoners with a hoe. During Mobutu's regime, the term salongo evoked the unity of the Zairian nation and the need to work collectively for the country's progress.

Two program directors of the national television channels during the 1970s recalled the origins of Groupe Salongo in the following way, in a personal interview from the fieldwork:

According to the two former program directors, Mobutu ordered the film to be shown on national television and asked Tsana to write a play on the same topic. He created a regular theater play, which was broadcast on television and was called Esprit de Salongo (The Spirit of Salongo). Using the slogan that would become a maxim of Mobutu's labor policy, “Salongo, Congo elingi mosala” (“Salongo, Congo likes to work”), the ruler and the actors tried to convince the Congolese population to cooperate in the national development. After the Salongo play, Tsana wrote several other scripts that were inscribed in Mobutu's nationalist project. They portrayed a modern version of the subject: the individual citizen immersed in a national community headed by Mobutu.

The program Mwana Nsoso marked a turning point for Groupe Salongo, which then began producing teleserials. During the first seven years, Groupe Salongo produced dramatic stories weekly in its studio. In 1981 the producers left the studio confines to shoot outside, and they stretched the new story over several episodes. Entitled Small Chicken (Mwana Nsoso), this story was the first real serial in Congo. It dealt with the love affair between a married woman and a younger man – a phenomenon called mario, meaning “gigolo.” This theme has recurred in popular culture and is present in the current discourses of sexuality (Pype, 2012). Focused on kinship, sociability in the work space, and gendered encounters in the urban setting, Salongo's teleserials tried to enlighten people about their (mis)behaviors. For example, the serial The Difficulties of Finding Work (Pasi ya Kozwa Mosala) portrayed a young man who, after various misfortunes, becomes an accountant at a prominent company. The main message of the story was that, through virtue, honesty, and hard work, individuals earn not only wealth, but also dignity. Such dignity, the story implies, contributes to the nation's prosperity.

The serials produced during the Mobutu era reveal a total absence of reference to divine intervention. Rather, the Salongo protagonists were represented either as cunning people or as victims of other citizens. The endings confirmed that good and bad behavior would be rewarded or punished, but not by invisible agents like God or the devil. They stressed morality in a social world where human rationality and the social effects of one's deeds should precede action. The agency of an invisible power on this world was not denied, but it was not depicted as determining all the actions and experiences either. This, however, changed drastically by the end of the millennium and in the post-Mobutu period (1997–2006), when Pentecostal–Charismatic churches became prominent players in the construction of communities and increasingly central to the process of making sense of urban life.

Born-Again Christianity and TV Fiction

The liberalization of the media system in Kinshasa accompanied the growing popularity of Pentecostal religion, and this prompted a new key scenario in media production. In the mid-1990s Mobutu's power had declined. Kinois citizens began to listen to born-again Christian leaders, both in public spaces and through radio and television. These new leaders started to attack the hedonistic leisure for which Kinshasa was well known, offering conversion and exorcism as a new route to the attainment of wealth, health, and social success. The new Christian churches became a refuge for many, because they seemed to offer scripts for the future that appealed to many Kinois. At the same time, Kinshasa's media opened radically to a privately run system, which led to a boom in indigenous media. Today it takes only USD $25,000 and permission from the authorities to create a private television channel in Kinshasa.

As a result, Kinshasa's local media world is a highly dynamic terrain. Wealthy families and commercial entrepreneurs operate stations (RAGA-TV and TROPICANA-TV respectively). Others are owned by political leaders for propaganda. Several channels are explicitly linked to a prophet or a church group. New local and international channels are added regularly, though the government may suspend or withdraw licenses to channel owners. International channels like TV5 (French) and DRTV (Congo-Brazzaville) also air in the city. Some of the programming comes from diasporic Congolese communities in Brussels, Paris, and Johannesburg. Several channels have permanent or semi-permanent technical staff and hosts sojourning in the diasporic communities; they report weekly about activities among the Congolese abroad, frequently showing successful Kinois and Kinois cultures abroad. In 2003 the city's population could watch 25 television channels, of which 22 were locally based. In 2010 the number of available television stations had increased to 48, of which 39 were local. These figures are significant by comparison with the total number of television channels in Congo: researchers for the Parisian Panos Institute counted 52 television channels in 2004.¹⁰

The most popular programs on all TV channels air Congolese music, local television serials, and shows featuring music and serial stars. Religious stations feature biblical stories and Christian music. Both religious and commercial channels broadcast Nigerian and Ivorian serials and talk shows in which former witches and “pagans” testify about their faith. All of Kinshasa's television channels screen American films both from Hollywood and from Christian production companies; soap operas such as Top Models; series like Friends; Chinese martial arts films; and Walloon talk shows such as Ça va se savoir (a Belgian show inspired by Jerry Springer). Liberalization sparked the production of local teleserials, designed to serve the sudden demand for content. Many established dramatic artists set up their own theater production companies. In their wake, young people created their own drama groups and introduced themselves to television channels. Now all local TV stations have several theater companies working with them. Each company produces one episode of a serial each week.

Independently of whether the sponsoring channel is government-run or private, commercial or religious, all teleserials are framed within a Pentecostalist ideology. Some theater companies have an explicit evangelizing profile; such are the Cinarc Troupe, Les Évangélistes, La Trompette, and Les Lévites. The other kind of groups, the so-called troupes ya mokili (secular theater), also tend toward Christian themes. The proliferation of Pentecostal–Charismatic churches in the city during the 1990s changed the design of teleserials. Morality in the TV serials became increasingly a religious matter. Even if the serials' producers remained committed to national progress (Pype, 2009a), the main difference introduced by teleserials stems from the proposal of a new moral order, which is inscribed in an apocalyptic postcolonial experience, as some of the titles suggest: Le Quartier maudit (The Cursed Township), Le Tombeau ouvert (The Open Tomb), Le Cartel de l'obscurité (The Alliance of Darkness), Kinshasa ou sodomie 18 (Kinshasa or Sodomy 18). Although the Salongo serials had used special effects to visualize witchcraft, occult and invisible forces came to the fore in the second half of the 1990s, becoming part and parcel of almost every serial (Pype, 2012). Stock characters in the dramas include le pasteur (the pastor), the witch, and the fool. In the finales, the witch either confesses his or her “bad” deeds, accepting Jesus and being “saved,” or stubbornly refuses the power of the Christian God, which result in his or her death. Most of Kinshasa's drama groups are counseled by one or more spiritual advisors. In each of their programs, they thank Jésus de Nazareth, a range of spiritual advisors, and their affiliated church and they give the names of the leaders of the troupe and the church. Often the actors also invite their audience to their prayer gatherings.

Kinshasa's teleserials profess a Christian key scenario, which could be summarized as follows. Life in Kinshasa is hazardous because of the workings of the devil and his demons. They invade the domestic sphere with the help of witches. They threaten collective and individual health physically and socially. Through prayer, however, and by listening closely to the advice of pastors Christians can arm themselves against evil. Conversion to Pentecostal Christianity, confessions, and deliverance rituals are identified as important turning points in the unfolding of the plot. Christian rituals are represented as effective means of purifying society and promoting Jesus' path. This key scenario offers success and inspires individuals to be good. Significantly, it is also expressed in the churches and in other evangelization practices (ibid.).

Transnational Flows

Kinshasa's television serials are the outcome of transnational flows of beliefs, technologies, and people. Kinshasa's media has, from its earliest days, connected the local to the global and vice versa, although in varying manners. During the colonial regime, when French television programs were broadcast in the colonies, the West was represented before local realities could be “imagined” through the imagination or the screen image. During Mobutu's reign, the ruler ordered program directors to broadcast Chinese film reflecting his political aversion for the West and his leanings toward other Third World countries. The national adjustment of imported theater and Western communication technologies fits well in the cultural extraversion of Kinshasa's society as a whole. Jean-François Bayart (2005, p. 71) defines “cultural extraversion” as “espousing foreign cultural elements and putting them in the service of autochthonous objectives.” Apart from the Western and Asian influences discussed above, West African films have also impacted local TV serials. For a decade now, while a Pentecostal-inspired Christianity has gradually monopolized the city's public culture and social life, Nigerian witchcraft films have dominated television screens. Their influence even altered the design of locally produced television serials.

Nigerian Witchcraft Films

Nigerian witchcraft films constitute a subgenre of Nigerian films; they were shown in Kinshasa's new churches beginning in 1998 and broadcast on Kinshasa television soon after. Nigerian witchcraft films have become an essential part of the viewing experiences of Kinshasa's population, although they are only one among the various “foreign” serial and film narratives that make up Kinshasa's television programming. Most of these films emphasize the workings of the occult in daily life. They are notorious for their staging of “demonic rituals” of human sacrifices (see Okwori, 2003).

Nigeria's witchcraft films inspire serials producers in Kinshasa to the extent that local actors translate Nigerian scripts into Kinois terms. In 2005, for example, during the weeks preceding the annual Mwana Mboka Trophées (Child of the Nation Awards), when sports figures, politicians, charitable organizations, musicians, and theater groups receive awards, people asked whether the Muyombe Gauche theater group would be disqualified or not, since its latest teleserial was a copy of a Nigerian film. In addition, the only film that the Cinarc troupe has produced thus far is called Kalaonga, a title that resembles very much that of the most popular Nigerian film in Kinshasa, Karichika.

The arrival of the films du Nigéria is linked to the Congolese imaginary about Nigeria and to the male migration to this country, which has become increasingly important since the 1990s. Appadurai (1996, p. 3) has already remarked that media and migratory flows are interconnected. The influence of the Nigerian video films on Kinshasa's teleserials concretely depicts how mass-mediatized imaginary landscapes are not always rooted in Western hegemonic image systems, but sometimes also in alternative transnational circuits (see Larkin, 1997). Since the 1990s, the film industry in Lagos¹¹ has boomed and spread films all over sub-Saharan Africa. More importantly, Nigeria occupies an important place in the Kinois imagination, although only a small number of Kinois have actually visited the West African country. On the basis of Nigerian films and of the stories of returned migrants, Kinois perceive Nigeria as a nation of plenty, where access to commodities is easier than in their hometown. Young men consider Nigeria to be an attractive place for economic trade. Christianity, and especially evangelization, is also an important attraction, though religious and economic reasons frequently comingle.

These intertwined issues are reflected in witchcraft films produced in Nigeria but popularized in Congo. According to many Christian Kinois, Nigeria is the front line of a spiritual battle between God and the devil. One of my informants, Nene, told me that her aunt, who had stayed some time in Lagos, was surprised to observe people there saying incantations on beaches or in parks. She found it equally strange that magical objects could easily be purchased in markets. Conversely, many Kinois appreciate Nigerian Christian leaders for their ardent battle against the devil. Nigerian prophets are often invited to Kinshasa to perform healing sessions, and many of Kinshasa's spiritual leaders are eager to learn from Nigerian prophets. Often, when Congolese spiritual leaders return from Nigeria, they represent themselves as des prophètes nigériens (“Nigerian prophets”). As a result, the attribute “Nigerian” has become a quality label that guarantees strong spiritual powers and capacities. These narratives of Nigeria as a nation with “God” and with “much evil” are confirmed when Kinois watch Nigerian witchcraft films.

Though these films are spoken in English, people watch them nonetheless.¹² Understanding the dialogues is not necessary, as the actors' body language and the special effects used speak for themselves. When these films are broadcast on Kinshasa's TV channels, they are dubbed into Kinois through their own translators. Translators are always male; they interpret all the roles – of men and women, children and adults – they explain the dramatic events, and they comment on them so as to bring these “foreign” narratives closer to Kinshasa's reality. Franck Baku Fuita and Godefroid Bwiti Lumisa (2005, p. 112), two Congolese journalists, noted that these interpreters are even granted the status of spiritual leaders who not only instruct but also heal the viewers. They describe how viewers, mostly women, contacted a translator, José de Jésus, asking him to cure their sterility and other illnesses of “mysterious” origins. They write: “One woman whom we met when visiting José de Jésus confirms to have been cured of her sterility thanks to an operation undoing the désenvoûtement [bewitchment] [sc. – an operation performed] by the famous television host whom she came to know through the Nigerian films” (author's translation, p. 112). This suggests, again, that, for Kinois, a close connection with the Nigerian Christian world is perceived as increasing one's spiritual power.

Nigerian films travel to Congo through migratory flows – both religious and economic. Local Pentecostal preachers are important cultural brokers of Nigerian films. Pasteur Kutinho, leader of the revival church L'Armée de Victoire (The Victory Army), screened Karichika on his own TV channel (de Boeck, 2004a, p. 186). It tells the story of a young girl (Karichika) who is sent by Lucifer to the world in order to destroy humanity. She uses her beauty as a weapon to sow death and despair, and she brings disorder into households. At the end of the film, the “real” Christians are saved thanks to their strong faith, while the sinners die, and Karichika returns to the world of the devil. Today the word karichika designates in Kinshasa this genre of West African films that depict the spiritual combat between God and the devil.

Nigerian films also found their way to Kinshasa through many commercial activities of the Kinois abroad. Young men who migrate between the Republic of Congo, South Africa, Angola, and Nigeria bring back home all kinds of commodities: soap, mattresses, radios, and clothes. At the age of 24, the president of the TV actors group Cinarc Bienvenu Toukebana was sent abroad by his mother. First he went to Angola for two years. Then he spent three years in South Africa, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria. In 1998 he returned to Kinshasa with a pile of Nigerian videos. With the help of his maternal cousin he sold the films in Kinshasa's streets and churches, as well as in his mother's hometown Matadi, in Lower Congo. Cassettes, video compact discs (VCDs), and digital versatile discs (DVDs) are still sold in the streets today by bashayeurs – boys aged between 15 and 18, who also sell local media and music. Nigerian tapes and DVDs circulate in compounds¹³ and among relatives, friends, and neighbors.

Aside from informal circuits, Nigerian video films are shown on Kinshasa's privately owned television stations. Through constant repetition, the films have become part of the town's cultural memory. Their aesthetics influence the way in which Kinois decorate their homes. According to a journalist, for example, “Kinois increasingly construct pillars and vaults in their houses as well as small gardens. The compound walls are more and more painted in orange, yellow, dark brown, and all kinds of red; thus these colors are replacing the ‘traditional’ ones of blue, white and color of pierre de France” (the “French stone,” in other words red brick) (Ne Kongo, 2007, author's translation, p. 4). In the domestic sphere, conversations often deal with the contents and characters of these films; several nicknames derive from fictional characters in the Nigerian films; and domestic chores are postponed when these films are broadcast.

Nigerian witchcraft films have attracted state attention, becoming the center of a vivid and passionate public debate over the merits of broadcasting them in relation to the country's development. In my four years of fieldwork (2002–2006) the national government outlawed the films twice, through the Haute autorité des médias (the governmental censorship board). Kinois actors, the Nigerian embassy, and the Congolese state fueled the protest against this immensely popular genre. Local actors felt threatened by the success of these films. The Nigerian ambassador requested banning the films, as he feared that they gave Nigeria a bad image. Furthermore, people blamed the films for the spreading phenomenon of witch hunt, which targeted child witches in particular (see de Boeck, 2004b). Other opponents articulated concerns about the role of the visual media in the construction of national identities. They discussed the threat that foreign media products posed to the preservation of local culture, and the need to regulate the educational value of television programs. State censors, however, did not put an end to the broadcasting of Nigerian films. By the end of 2006 several new television channels began, and their program schedules were almost exclusively dominated by Nigerian films.

Studying the Flows

In their introduction to Media Worlds, Ginsburg and colleagues (2002, p. 14) contend that “the dominant frameworks for thinking about media's transnational reach have been either globalization or cultural imperialism, which tend to privilege media originating from or dominant in the West, with less attention to other circuits.” The influence of Nigerian films on Kinshasa's public culture and media production concretely depicts how imaginary landscapes are not always rooted in Western hegemonic image systems, but sometimes also in alternative transnational circuits. The role of Nigerian films and the particular history of their arrival in Kinshasa therefore create a very interesting case for the scholar who wants to study the way in which moving images reconfigure public spheres and contribute to the circulation of alternative global master narratives.

Investigation into the meaning of Nigerian films and into their impact on Kinshasa's public culture is thus situated in a global world where people and media images move jointly. With the flow of consumer goods, money, and bodies, media aesthetics also travels. The social trajectories of the film tapes and DVDs, the sources of the identity formation processes that are at stake, the dynamics of signfication that these films provoke, and the legitimization and social control that the circulation of Nigerian films in Kinshasa induce are all properties of the framework of African media reception practices – which are themselves aspects of more encompassing economic and political flows. Of course, a South–South circulation of aesthetics is not a new phenomenon. What is new, however, is the revolution in communication and information technologies and its effect of reducing distance and of accelerating the flows. Indeed, the model of interconnectivity that is proposed by a globalization narrative represents only one phase in a global aesthetic system, in which for many centuries narratives and symbols have been circulating by means of imitation and of which the Nigerian film is only one example.¹⁴

Much research has documented the interaction between media and migration in Africa. On the basis of long-term participatory fieldwork, Minou Fuglesang (1994) and Brian Larkin (1997) have studied how Hindu films guide young people – Lamu in Kenya and Hausa in Nigeria – in the construction of their individual identities, direct their aspirations toward their future spouses, or fashion gender relations among them. This research furthers Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding paradigm, which emphasizes the meaning-making of visual texts at its reception. In their attention to the social “effects” of the Hindu films, Fuglesang and Larkin demonstrate how the images, narratives, and even fictive characters resignify, at an abstract and imaginative level, the lives of the recipients and, more importantly, how these virtual realities are embodied in the young viewers' lives. The mass media signs and codes introduce into the private and public spheres a transformation that, as the authors succinctly point out, is much awaited and longed for by the Lamu and the Hausa youth. In Kinshasa, Didier Gondola (1997, pp. 307–317) and Filip de Boeck (2004a, pp. 36–39) have studied how Hollywood westerns and Hindi movies shown in colonial Léopoldville (Kinshasa's former name) shaped a colonial youth subculture that has received the name “Billism” – after Buffalo Bill and Pecos Bill, two protagonists in westerns. “Bills” or “Billies” imitated the clothing style and body language of American film heroes. They formed youth gangs endowed with their own hierarchy (e.g., “sheriffs”), initiation rituals, and language. These movements inspired a whole street culture, called le style des Yankees, and the yankee figure occupies a prominent place in the city's complex construction of masculinities (see Pype, 2007). These findings show that much of the literature on media and migration remains at the levels of media reception, the production of minority media, and their impact on the production of identities in diasporic publics.

Yet there are still several aspects of the interactions between media and migration that need careful analysis and theoretical elaboration in light of recent reflections on cultural globalization – such as those of Arjun Appadurai (1996), Jonathan Friedman (1994), and Ulf Hannerz (1992). First, the study of migration and media should not be limited to the social contexts in which media products are watched and consumed; it should also take into account the circulation of print magazines, audiotapes, and DVDs in various communities. This is not only because distributors occupy particular nodes in the chains of production, but also because social groups, entrepreneurs, and other individuals often commission the production, acquisition, and distribution of prints and broadcasts. It is important to understand how the dissemination of images and sounds runs along flows of money and other forms of capital. Only when we reconstruct the “social biographies” (to use a concept from Kopytoff, 1986) of the visual media can we begin to understand how the media impinge on identities. To illustrate this idea, I will mention that the spread of Nigerian films in Kinshasa is not controlled by the Nigerian traders (about 4,000, mostly Igbo) who reside in the city. Kinois people themselves, who move to Nigeria, return with these films and offer them to local TV patrons, sell them to the music and video shops in town, or give them to bashayeurs to sell them in the streets. This means that the local circulation and reception of Nigerian films are embedded in the migration practices of Kinois themselves, and thus cannot be credited to the presence of Nigerians in the city or to the merits of their skilled traders.

Second, anthropologists also need to look at how these media products are framed within larger narratives and audiences. As argued by Katz and Liebes (1991), local considerations determine the interpretations of televised narratives and images. Nigerian films' recuperation and integration into the new media landscape, as a constitutive aspect of adaptation and globalization, was only possible because of political and cultural changes in Kinshasa. From what I have discussed, it appears that the success of the Nigerian films does not reside in the mere specialization of a so-called genuine African film industry that can “speak back” to the metropole and counter the cultural imperialism brought forward via film. It is more the establishment of an African Christianity that accounts for the popularity of Nigerian films among Kinshasa's spectators. Three categories of media brokers can be identified in this cultural cirucit: the petty trader, the Christian pastor, and the dubber. It should be emphasized that these three categories are not strictly separated. Pastors also engage in petty trade, while traders also become dubbers; and dubbers at times also acquire the same charismatic capital as pastors (Pype, in press).

The arrival of Nigerian films in Kinshasa is largely shaped by a religious network, which acts above all to structure the product's meaning. Nigerian films are integrated and taken up in a set of transformational units that orchestrate its reframing within the context of local meanings. Nigerian films are part of Pentecostalist evangelizing practices, and they are culturally assimilated by its brokers – and also by its spectators. We could well argue that, for the current Kinois context, the imported Nigerian films have become embedded objects of charismatic Christianity. Such insertion in local viewing cultures is informed by local cultures of authority and power, in particular, by the new position of authority of charismatic pastors. Most of these new Christian leaders have received their new power position both from the appeal of charismatic Christianity and from their proximity to Nigerian Christian culture.

A final aspect that needs to be discussed is the blending of transnational narratives and signs with local symbols and values. “Foreign” stories and plotlines are constantly interwoven with locally rooted characters and scenarios. In the field of media anthropology, the confrontation, rejection, and/or embracement of transnational narratives and characters in local storylines can offer an interesting vantage point for a fuller comprehension of the production of key scenarios. In the context of post Mobutu television serials, it is important to identify traces of “ethnic narratives” that have become resignified through new values and belief systems, which have come to dominate the public culture.

For example, the traditional figure of MoniMambu from folklore and oral stories has become resignified through the theater troupes for teleserials. MoniMambu (whose name is Kikongo for “Seer of troubles”) is one of Kongo's many trickster figures,¹⁵ known to Kinois primarily through their elders and artists (Janzen, 1992, p. 258). Nowadays MoniMambu can be found in new cultural performances, including a theater company called Moni-Mambu, which broadcasts its serials on the privately owned channel NzondoTV. A temporary theater company called LesMdu Congo produced a serial entitled MoniMambu, which starred some of Kinshasa's most important actors. In addition, the names of some of the fictional characters in Cinarc's serials resonate with the name MoniMambu: Mambweni (“The things that I have seen”) and Mayimona (“The things that one sees”). Although few of the young Cinarc actors or other young informants seemed to be aware of the specific cultural significance of characters such as MoniMambu, one finds common ground between the “traditional” narratives and the urban teleserials. Both genres visualize social and spiritual transgression. Of utmost interest here is that the Pentecostal popular culture, itself the outcome of globalization, has resignified the protagonists of local ethnic stories while maintaining their fundamental meanings (Pype, 2010).

Conclusion: TV Serials and Palimpsests of Culture

The anthropological turn toward “the production of culture” and “the broadcasting of culture” enables us to trace, through a diachronic and synchronic study of local TV fiction, the various power configurations that have shaped Kinshasa's public culture. It also helps us to explore the various kinds of social success and the most appropriate means to achieve it that have been represented in the space of TV fiction. “Key scenarios” and ideas of “culture” are not static; rather they change over time. The coming and going of “key scenarios” on local screens reflects and partakes in the political and social transformations that societies experience.

The anthropological perspective, which entails a constant move between content analysis and the social space in which these dominant narratives were/are produced, and also takes into account the appropriation of transnational signs and narratives and their confrontation with local values and protagonists, is extremely helpful in unraveling the various ways in which culture is produced. “Culture” is not something that “exists” beyond human beings. Rather, ideas about “culture” are produced, visualized, reflected upon, contested, watched at, enacted, and broadcast. And TV fiction does not stand outside this project of “making culture”; rather, as has been shown in the analysis of Congolese TV drama, media producers grant it a very central position within the imagination of selves, others, and society as a whole.

Given the different “foreign” influences that have shaped the design of the Congolese postcolonial teleserials, from Belgian colonial stimuli to Chinese film and Nigerian witchcraft films, it is questionable how far we can describe these visual texts as “local products.” Karin Barber (1997, pp. 358–359), reflecting on aesthetic genres and audiences in Africa, argues that the distinction between “local” and “imported” cultural forms becomes more and more dubious as a result of the hybrid nature of African cultures. The analysis has also shown that a society's key symbols are configurations of local and transnational narratives, protagonists, and motives. The postcolonial “key scenarios” that have been promoted via Kinshasa's TV screens have always been local products of “foreign” and Congolese/Zairian ideas and images, thus confirming that “cultures” are not closed systems; rather they continuously change, incorporating new signs and mixing them with more familiar themes. For an anthropologist, TV fiction is a palimpsestic space where the different layers of meaning-making and culture production can be explored.

NOTES

1 Askew (2002, p. 7) contends that it was not until the late 1980s, in the wake of the “crisis of representation” in the discipline, that the uses of technology in ethnographic research have begun to be questioned.

2 See Mead and Métraux (2000) for a discussion about the research motivations, methodologies, and publications of the project.

3 This overview is limited to the audiovisual media. The printed press constitutes another important sector of Congo's media landscape, with its own political imagination. Furthermore, other Congolese cities have, of course, their own local media history.

4 The évolués were a category created and set apart by colonial officers among the indigenous population. They received Western schooling, lived according to Western housing styles, accepted Christian faith and its codes of conduct, and were employed in the colonial economy. In his public and private life, an évolué had to display assimilation with Western style and values, with “civilization,” while “tradition” had to be abandoned. The ideal colonial subject was thus a converted, educated, and working man, an African bourgeois character. This category has a long and complex history. On the education of the évolué in Kinshasa, see Tshimanga (2001, pp. 133–146).

5 The following overview is largely based on a series of interviews with Hemedy Mwana Mboyo and Gabriel Pasi Samba, former program directors of the Zairian state television, and with Ndungi Mambimbi (screen name “Massumu Debrindet”), Kwedi Mayimputu (“Kwedi,” “Diallo”) and Mathieu Matondo (“Sans Soucis”), all important dramatic artists since the early years of Kinshasa's television serials.

6 A historical ethnography of the reception of these plays is needed in order to nuance present-day dismissals of these programs as meaningless.

7 There were 111,811 television sets for about 3,000,000 inhabitants in 1975 (Otten, 1984, p. 69). Informants told me that people would watch in their neighbours' houses if they did not own a TV set.

8 Ndaywel è Nziem (1998, p. 484) mentions that these lyrics had become very popular in the earliest urban music produced in Kinshasa in the 1950s.

9 I was unable to retrace the exact title of the documentary. According to Mwana Mboyo and Pasi Samba (2004), the Chinese word yukung means “collective work.” The content of the film, as they summarized it, recalls a well-known allegorical tale of “traditional China” used in Maoist propaganda. The tale “Old Fool Moves Mountains” was Mao's preferred fable and occurred in his “Little Red Book,” officially known as Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong. This book explained Mao's ideology and was distributed among the Chinese population during the cultural revolution (1966–1976). Convents' account (wich is based on Otten, 1984) of the origins of the serial The Spirit of Salongo is some-what different. He writes that Mobutu had visited a Chinese village called Yu Kong. “In order to build the village, the inhabitants had to move mountains. The Chinese film How Yu Kong Moved a Mountain narrates this event” (Convents, 2006, p. 298; my translation).

10 See Malu and DRIM (2004).

11 Also called Nollywood, although I have never heard this name used in Kinshasa.

12 The main languages in Kinshasa are Lingala, Kikongo, and, to a lesser extent, French.

13 A compound refers to a plot of land on which one or more houses are built. Usually, within one compound three to four families cohabit, each of them living in one house. The number of people living in one compound can reach up to 40.

14 One can think of the circulation of the water spirit Mami Wata as another example (Drewal, 2008).

15 Kongo refers here to the ethnic group of the Bakongo, who live in the province Lower Congo.

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FURTHER READING

Abu-Lughod, L. (2005). Dramas of nationhood: The politics of television in Egypt. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Fabian, J. (1998). Moments of freedom: Anthropology and popular culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

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Nyamnjoh, F. (2005). Africa's media: Democracy and the politics of belonging. London, UK: Zed Press.