Author: Emmanuel Kisangani

Italian Week Unites Brazzaville Italophones On 17 October 2025 the Hilton Twin Towers hotel overlooking the Congo River became, for a day, a microcosm of Mediterranean culture. The Embassy of Italy gathered seasoned professionals, scholars and students to mark the twenty-fifth edition of the worldwide Settimana della Lingua Italiana nel Mondo. Beneath chandeliers and conference microphones, Ambassador Enrico Nunziata recalled that Dante’s idiom first reached Brazzaville with missionaries and oil engineers, and that it now underpins an increasingly dense web of people-to-people exchanges. The hybrid seminar, streamed to Pointe-Noire and Rome, revolved around the theme “Italian beyond borders – opportunity,…

A sudden dusk over a luminous career The message spread across Congolese social media on the evening of 8 October 2025 with the persistence of a drum pattern: Pierre Moutouari is no more. In a matter of hours, disbelief yielded to collective mourning. The 75-year-old singer, guitarist and songwriter died in Paris from illness, closing a chapter that had begun in Brazzaville at the tail end of the 1960s. The news, later confirmed by relatives, sent ripples through dance halls from Pointe-Noire to Dakar and nostalgic vinyl corners in the French capital. Moutouari’s passing deprives the Republic of Congo of…

A Sound at the Crossroads For seasoned listeners in Brazzaville, the memory of Pamela Mounka, Théo-Blaise Kounkou or Zao still resonates like a national soundtrack. Their melodies once travelled far beyond the banks of the Congo River, offering the Republic of the Congo a form of soft power that required little diplomatic protocol. Today, that resonance is fainter. Outside the fast-rising lane of so-called urban music—epitomised by the digital success of Tidiane Mario, Diesel Gucci, Sam Samouraï, Makhalba Malecheck and Afara Tsena—the broader Congolese catalogue rarely breaks into international charts, draws modest fan communities and appears sporadically on foreign airwaves.…

Franco-Congolese Rap as an Emerging Diplomatic Language When Tiakola, known for his crystalline melodic phrasing, joined forces with the more percussive Genezio for the EP “Fara Fara Gang”, the collaboration was immediately framed by industry observers as a commercial coup. Yet the release also deserves attention from diplomatic circles: it embodies a form of non-state soft power that operates at the intersection of the Congolese diaspora in France and a rejuvenated cultural scene in Brazzaville. Streaming data compiled by Spotify for Artists indicate that more than forty percent of the EP’s first-week plays originated from Central and West Africa, an…