By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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This week, Unesco entered Congolese rumba music in the list of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage of humanity.”

The application to add rumba to the list is one of the few productive things the two Congos — Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Republic of Congo (the one ruled by strongman Denis Sassou Nguesso) — have done together in recent years.

Many were pleased. DR Congo’s Minister for Communication Patrick Muyaya, said the news had been received “with great pride and emotion… It is a reference to history, to memory, to dignity. It is impressive to see how rumba has crossed history and the centuries.”

Unesco’s Director-General Audrey Azoulay delved deeper, declaring, "It is the history of slavery with this music leaving for America, for Cuba, and returning in the 1930s. This music became a vector of resistance. It accompanied African independence. This music is very present in both Congos, on the African continent and throughout the world.”

East Africans love their rumba, though many of us don’t understand its intricacies. We know it’s what greats like Franco, Papa Wemba, and the active artistes like woman-beater Koffi Olomide play. The easiest way to explain it at an East African beer pot is that rumba and soukous are identical twins, with rumba being the one that came first. Lingala is the nickname the neighbours gave the twins.

Lingala music is all the things Audrey Azoulay said and more. It’s a strange music which when we were kids, some could sing whole albums but didn’t understand a word.

It has a complex East African face, reflecting the successes and failures of our regional integration in surprising ways.

Locked behind the military curtain in Uganda’s Idi Amin, we thought every Lingala group was from the DRC (then Zaire). Turns out some of the most famous Lingala groups of the late 1970s and early 1980s like Simba Wanyika had been formed in Tanzania.

These bands played in a free-flowing cycle between integrated Tanzania and Kenya, until the first East African Community collapsed.

With Tanzania and Kenya locked in a cold war, movement became harder, so the musicians settled in Nairobi and span off groups like Simba Wanyika, and then Les Wanyika.

Economic difficulty and repression in Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko sent many of its top musicians to either live or record in Nairobi.

The majority of the music of the rumba greats, thus came out of Nairobi. One can read troubled integration, repression, and economic hardship in rumba.

But it was also the soundtrack of other social phenomena. It was a period when the East African airwaves were dominated by the international services of the Voice of Kenya and Radio Tanzania.

Broadcasting across borders, they set the cultural and political tone of the region. Voice of Kenya offered the bourgeois touch, airing the Safari Rally live, bringing soul and rock from around the round, and avantgarde rumba.

Radio Tanzania was pan-Africanist and internationalist, telling news of liberation movements and revolution, and offering radical black sound and purist rumba.

From wherever it came, though, the rumba they served was the butter with which two generations East Africans ate their world bread.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3