In Thursday’s (5/9) Guardian (London), Andy Morgan writes, “Nathalie, Josephine, Papy and Josef are adepts of the Congolese art of débrouillardise, a French word that means ‘making ends meet’ or ‘surviving’. For most of the day, they do whatever they must to hustle their daily bread in the Congolese capital Kinshasa, one of the biggest, noisiest and most dysfunctional cities on earth. In the early evening, they set out on a journey that often takes several hours to rehearse with the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste de Kinshasa (OSK), the only all-black symphony orchestra in the world. … ‘They come because they’re passionate about music,’ says Armand Diangienda, the man who founded the OSK almost 20 years ago. … If the musicians in the OSK are masters of individual survival, the orchestra itself is an epic example of débrouillardise, of thinking the impossible and then just doing it. … In the early days, instruments had to be borrowed or made from scratch by reverse engineering. … Diangienda is now on his way to London to become an honorary member of the Royal Philharmonic Society, an accolade previously granted to the likes of Mendelssohn, Rossini, Wagner, Brahms and Stravinsky. ‘The day I was told, I had tears in my eyes,’ he says.”
Posted May 10, 2013
