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(2018) The Palgrave handbook of media and communication research in Africa, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
One Sunday at around noon one day in 2014, Maman Thérèse (a fictive name) arrived in the compound where I live when I carry out fieldwork. She often dropped by to greet my host mother. That day, I noticed that she was carrying a DVD, which, as I learned, she had received from one of her girlfriends at church. She wanted to hear my host brother's opinion about the content. This married woman with four children is in her late thirties and works as a nanny in the school that one of her daughters attends. Since I first met her in 2003, I have always known her to visit the Church of the Awakening (a type of Pentecostal-charismatic church). With a smile that seemed to beg for apologies, Maman Thérèse told me that the DVD contained a clip in which some of Fally Ipupa's music video clips—he is one of Congo's most successful rumba musicians—are interpreted as "genre Illuminati," a secret society in the imagination of Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) intimately connected with the world of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. I had already noticed various posts on my Congolese friends' Facebook walls about the possible connections between Congolese musicians and this secret society. Now I was shown that these accusations also circulate on other media carriers and among people who do not remediate such messages on their Facebook accounts.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-70443-2_14
Full citation:
Pype, K. (2018)., "The devil is in the rumba text." commenting on digital depth, in B. Mutsvairo (ed.), The Palgrave handbook of media and communication research in Africa, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 245-262.
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