Solo Kinshasa is a blog exploring the remarkable Central African city of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo and home to perhaps 9 million people (nobody knows the real number).
Although written by an expatriate resident, this blog will endeavour to navigate beyond Gombe, in response to Congolese writer Vincent Lombune Kalimasi‘s suggestion that:
“There are such streams of energy running through this city and we have not yet sufficiently explored them… There is a hiatus somewhere, a void, and this void needs to be filled. It has to be filled by us, the inhabitants of this city, the initiated, the shege, the expatriates, the multitudes of people that make up this city. The city belongs to all of them. And they all have to constantly reinvent their own myths, their own stories of the street, to keep going and to offer themselves a semblance of direction for this world that keeps slipping through their fingers. The city is indeed a never-ending construction.”
Roughly translated, the title means ‘truly Kinshasa’ (Kinshasa ya solo would be more correct) or alternatively ‘the smell of Kinshasa’ (solo ya Kinshasa). It’s also a nod to a Antoine Moundanda’s rumba lyric from the era of Kin-la-Belle: “Poto-poto mboka monene, solo Kinshasa poto moyindo” (rough translation: “A big melting-pot, truly Kinshasa’s a black Europe”). Finally, for speakers of Latin languages, ‘Solo Kinshasa’ means ‘only Kinshasa’.
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