Moké and Congolese Popular Painting

Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi: The basis of this conversation is an extraordinary gift of three paintings by Moké to MoMA from the Jean Pigozzi collection: Kinshasa at Noon (1980), Long Live Utex Africa (1989) and Mitterrand and Mobutu (1989).

Kinshasa at Noon and Long Live Utex Africa have a signature Moké style, the way he looks at daily activities and quotidian experiences, whereas Mitterrand and Mobutu is more of a historical painting. Filip, let’s begin with your first encounter with Moké in Kinshasa. What was the context of that meeting?

Filip De Boeck: I don’t know about the first meeting, but I very clearly remember the last one, in May 2001. He died in September of that year. I visited him together with Marie-Françoise Plissart, a Belgian photographer I was working with at the time. I wanted a portrait of him to include in a book I was working on, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. At that point, he was making very large canvases with strong colors, yellow, pink, blue—women with huge boobs: Moké in his last phase of pin-ups.

He was relentlessly painting. He was not a man of many words so it was kind of hard to have a sustained conversation with him. He was so busy painting and just wanted to work.

USCN: The general story we hear is that he was from the Bandundu Province and he moved to Kinshasa in the 1960s. The ’60s was a very difficult but also exciting moment for the Congolese. It was the period they achieved political independence, but that was quickly followed by the assassination of [independence leader and first Prime Minister] Patrice Lumumba and the coming to power of Mobutu Sese Seko. It was in that moment that Moké arrives in Kinshasa. Do you think the political climate had any impact on Moké’s move from the Bandundu Province to Kinshasa?

FDB: It was not just because of the political context or Mobutu that he moved to Kinshasa. In the 1960s, the city grew enormously. 400,000 inhabitants in 1960, one million in 1970.... So, there was an influx of rural people who were attracted to city life and the urban context. Kinshasa—Leopoldville at the time—was a huge ball of attraction for many, regardless of the political context.

USCN: And so he did a painting in 1965 of Mobutu during the Independence Day parade. Mobutu became a recurring character in his work, as in Mitterrand and Mobutu.

That’s why in Moké’s paintings you so often see bars and dandies, because that was the new urban reality. He starts painting these new worlds that had not existed before in the city. Whereas Chéri Samba incorporates text and you see a kind of comic art, art that also makes critical commentaries.

They were both influenced by photography, by someone like Jean Depara, who was taking pictures of the musician Franco Luambo and nightlife in Kinshasa. The image that people for so long had of Kinshasa—even though perhaps today it’s no longer true—was formed through that photography and also these paintings by Moké.

USCN: Sammy, Moké is a different artistic generation from your own, but how do you think he was received locally in Congo and when did you hear of him first?

Sammy Baloji: I grew up in Lubumbashi, which actually is 2,000 kilometers from Kinshasa. I came across Moké through different bodies of works and writings, like the one that Filip and I did on Kinshasa [Suturing the City: Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds] and other texts by historians like Badi-Banga. Moké was like a mentor.

Popular paintings are about Kinshasa in different categories: politics, music, La Sape, which is a style of dress in the Congo. When I look at Moké’s work, I first recognize the events, because they are a part of a social memory. The second thing I was drawn to was Moké’s own style of painting, which is really humorous, and the way he used colors is really amazing.

USCN: Kinshasa at Noon depicts a major thoroughfare brimming with traffic congestion, where all kinds of daily economic activities recur. You look at that composition and you would think that it’s an image he painted from life, but that’s actually a fictive painting.

FDB: Yeah, but referencing real places in the city, real people that exist in the city. Everybody in Kinshasa can read these paintings and understand these codes. They know who the paintings and songs talk about or what situation is addressed because it’s part of what people in Congo call radio trottoir, radio sidewalk, the rumor mill of the city. It’s a specific kind of a conversation between these artists and the whole city.

USCN: Interesting. Utex describes the nightlife in Kinshasa and then Kinshasa at Noon references the everyday hustle activities to get by. On the other hand, Mitterrand and Mobutu depicts a historical event that actually happened in 1984, when François Mitterrand made a state visit to Congo.

With the exception of that work and a few others, Moké’s paintings aren’t often drawn to the political as much as they try to chronicle everyday experiences. He’s more interested in looking at human connections within Kinshasa. Would that be a fair way to describe his work?

FDB: Yes. You must understand the political context of the late ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, after Zaire’s reorganization, and really the rise of the Mobutu empire, the one-party system under Mobutu, certainly the state's control became a bit weaker and more criticized toward the late ’80s. But that was a kind of omnipresent political context that nobody in Zaire at the time could escape. Moké references Mobutu, the authoritarian, or the flag because those were the images that were on the radio and television...you couldn’t escape it.

But Moké never openly makes political statements. The visit of Mitterrand would have been an event that the whole town talked about in the same way that Moké made paintings about Muhammad Ali’s visit to Congo and the Rumble in the Jungle. But there’s not really an overt political commentary.

Most of the Black people who were going into the city were in contact with this modern life and went to those bars. They started to reproduce this way of painting. It’s a reappropriation of these towns that were built by the colonial system, to reimagine a new life where you actually have local Congolese living in the city center.

But there are also writers, like the philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe, who saw the missionaries’ influence on popular paintings. You have this morality that you find in popular painting that has a background within evangelizations coming from the missionaries.

USCN: So, how would you assess the position of Moké in the art history of Congo? Where would you place his work?

SB: It’s a generation that started to create their own work with this interest of relating the history and events, depicting what is going on in their life without any restrictions of what was imposed by the West into fine art schools. It’s not only personal but also a reappropriation of the space and stories of how to create modern forms of writing, painting, and talking about the history of the city.

USCN: The first time I saw Moké’s work I was doing preparatory research for the exhibition Feedback: Art, Africa and the 1980s, and what struck me about his work was the way he molded the human form with paint, which is totally different from Chéri Samba’s approach. Moké’s forms are almost sculptural. That was something that really, really spoke to me.

That and his emphasis on the celebration of life. I realized that he made no moralistic commitments in the way other popular painters did. What he did was provide snapshots of life in the city that you encounter that were so visceral. There’s a certain intensity about his painting, but there’s also a certain kind of truth to the way he depicted city life that I found quite fascinating.

FDB: And in a very unpretentious way.

USCN: One could say that part of the charm of Moké’s work, and by extension other popular painters, is that the average Congolese person can easily see themselves in those paintings.

It’s interesting that Moké, as well as his contemporaries, were able to actually achieve some of those ideas that Mobutu had of engendering a modernist milieu, without being very ideological about it. I think that’s one, if not the most, brilliant takeaway one gets when you’re looking at Moké’s work. You’re seeing the story of postcolonial DR Congo, of urban Kinshasa, warts and all, unfolding right in front of you in the painting.