"Congolese" Musical Idioms As Expressions of Belgian National Identity

Francis de Bourguignon’s “reportage musical” Congo, premiered as part of a concert of Belgian radio works in April 1936. Assigning “authentic black music” to the people of West Africa, de Bourguignon’s work tells a familiar story of the conquest and “civilization” of the Congo region by Europeans from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The piece met with mixed reviews at the time, but what is missing from the 1936 critiques, was commentary on the imperial and nationalist implications of the work.

 Congo is one of a handful of works written in Belgium between 1909, when the Belgian Congo was officially established as a colony, and 1960, when the colony achieved independence. This paper argues that de Bourguignon’s work and its reception are representative of a musical trend to express Belgian national identity through imperial ambitions. Such a trend was fraught with contradiction as the nation established competing concepts of its future in which imperial ambitions often clashed with visions of a democratic social welfare state. Musically, the fashion of using “Congolese” musical idioms was tied up with cross-relations between emerging ethnography and the ongoing struggle to define a distinctly Belgian compositional style in the face of cosmopolitan tastes. In political terms, Belgian colonial ambitions, characterized by the ruthless exploitation of African populations and of natural resources, conflicted with the World War I myth of the “gallant little Belgium” that stood up against the impossible odds of German oppression.