Copyright Societies and Musicians in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Enduring Infrastructures in Times of Decolonization?

1 The Earlier History of Intellectual Property Rights

During the colonial period, the government of Congo was a consultative committee with limited powers, in addition to the authority exercised by the Ministry of the Colonies in Belgium. Limitations on the circulation of Congolese people, censorship of the press, and repression of religious groups considered by the authorities to be seditious were enforced (Depage 1955, 34; Rempe 2015, 240–41). During the 1950s an election system for the organization of communal elections in a few large cities was tested (Stengers 2017). The regime of ownership was restrictive for the colonized, who could only become landowners under specific conditions. A small number of Congolese enjoyed a distinct status, defined in the sources as rights and duties similar to those of the Europeans in Congo, and were called the immatriculés (“registered”). Because it created contradictions with the customary rules and laws, and because most requests for immatriculation were turned down by the colonial review council, most Congolese found the status to be of little relevance. Eventually in 1955 reforms to the regime of immatriculation aimed to give the Congolese the right to acquire landed property (Depage 1955, 33−34).

Belgium transplanted its system of intellectual property rights to the colony of Congo (Ncube 2016, 3). From 1886, the Berne Union stipulated the reciprocity of rights between member countries. Congo was not a member as such but became part of the Union as a colony of Belgium, which was one of the earliest members of the Berne system. At the time of the Brussels conference revising the Berne Convention, in 1948, Congo had arguably the most complete system of intellectual property rights in sub-Saharan Africa, although France had also made substantial imports in its colonies, as suggested for instance in the activity of the Algiers-based Bureau Africain du Droit d’Auteur (Simon 2009). Today, as shown by Ncube (2016, 54), information on intellectual policy formulation is incomplete in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, as we will see for the domain of copyright, systems are currently being reformed.

During the colonial era, the legislator chose to pursue legal consistency between the metropole and the colony. The Francophone colonial legislative powers tended to favor a harmonization of intellectual property systems between the two. Other colonial powers opted for greater legal pluralism, such as in the African colonies under the rule of the British Empire (Ncube 2016, 77).

The Belgian colonial legislator applied legal pluralism in a distinct realm: that is, to frame and understand the systems and traditions of customary rights, which generated important tensions in the local communities. From the interwar period onward, the colonial administration thus set to the task of organizing the customary courts and translating and publishing key texts and case law for those courts. The colony thus aimed for a coexistence of two systems of law, which aligned Belgium more closely with the British form of indirect rule (Ncube 2016, 77). The colonizer aimed to differentiate the problems that went to the customary courts from those that went to the colonial tribunals (Moris, Bodart, and Lejeune 1936). Systems of customary law in Congo included techniques of strategic sharing of knowledge, for example defining how artisanal expertise in making musical instruments was disseminated to certain members of the community. The line of conduct adopted by the Belgian authority was to allow customary law to remain in place as long as it did not present divergences with the colonial order for the colonial subjects that would endanger their lives. Many ritual practices were therefore accepted, with exceptions for those considered harmful – by the colonizer, which was also challenging to define.

The colonial system of intellectual property was thus superimposed upon preceding norms (Ncube 2018, 411). The concept of copyright was imported to Congo and aligned with the principle stated in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886, which guaranteed that all members would receive similar treatment and enjoy reciprocity with other members. As explained above, Congo was not among the signatories, but Belgium was one of the earlier members of the Convention and exported its law to its colonies. In the absence of citizenship rights for the colonized, access to authors’ rights poses the question of whether culture was, in such a case, taking the place of politics (Gamso 2019, 60–79).

Critical voices, such as the Belgian jurist Henri Depage, warned that the understanding of property was different in Belgium and Congo (Depage 1955). The overlapping of different systems of culture and law could bring to light multiple incompatibilities, and incompatible definitions of creativity and authorship (Bemba 1984, 26–28; Ncube 2018, 430). A significant number of musicians, craftsmen, and craftswomen who operated within the realm of custom were left out of reach of the colonial legal framework and, thus, of collection management societies, in this case, the Congolese branch of Belgian SABAM. Some of their productions were the subject of protective regulations drawn up by specialized associations – especially, in the case of Congo, the Belgian COPAMI (Commission pour la Protection des Arts et des Métiers Indigènes), founded in 1934, and, from 1945 onwards, UNESCO (Macmillan 2021, 62–63; Van Beurden 2015). Belgium was late to sign the UNESCO Copyright Convention, in 1960, just after Congo’s independence.

2 The Hybridity of the Music Business in Congo

Against this backdrop, the musical genres that became a field of experiment with intellectual property rights in Congo were hybrid genres that mixed Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic–Cuban, and traditional influences. They became known as African jazz and rumba, the latter further divided into types of rumba such as kwassa kwassa, ndombolo, and soukous (Goffin 1944; Stein 2011). Congolese musicians also played religious and classical music. Instruments as well as genres were mixed, and modern ones such as guitars were also produced in Congo. Listeners enjoyed jazz, classical music, and rumba alike, so how would music fit into the intellectual property systems in Congo?

Rumba gained visibility during the late years of the colonial period in large cities such as Kinshasa (then Léopoldville) and Lubumbashi (then Elisabethville), and smaller centers as well (Grabli 2019, 9–45). This history is linked to small and medium-sized businesses that played a supporting role in financing the early jazz and rumba recordings. Those firms started as side projects of commercial firms in the late colonial Congo and included famous labels such as Ngoma, Opika, Loningisa, Auditorium, and Compagnie d’Enregistrements Folkloriques Africains, which were owned and operated as small firms or as divisions of larger firms. These labels featured music by rumba and African Jazz pioneers who included Joseph Kabasele, De Wayon, Augustin “Roitelet” Moniama, Jean Bosco Mwenda, Wendo Kolosoy, and in smaller numbers, women stars such as Martha Badibala and Lucie Eyenga (Antippas 2021, 157–67).

Many of these firms were owned by families of Greek merchants, often from Cyprus or Rhodes, who had migrated to Congo to run small to medium-sized firms in labor-intensive branches of business activity such as industrial bakeries, retail groceries, textiles, and tailoring shops. Their interests in the emerging music industry were, in most cases, complementary to their main diasporic business. During the postwar era, the colony of Congo experienced a relative consumption boom. In such a context, these diasporic firms were looking for opportunities to advertise their products. The most important medium in the colony at that point was radio, with a reach that went beyond complete control by the colonizing authorities (Engels 1939, 89; Pauwels-Boon 1979, 200). Even though the number of radio receivers remained limited, practices of public audience from loudspeakers contributed to the reach of radio (Grabli 2019, 11, 23–26). It was first and foremost to advertise their products on Congolese radio that entrepreneurs began to invest in Congolese music. Besides the firms managed by the Greek diaspora (and by other so-called “Europeans” – the generic name for all the non-Congolese, non-Belgian members of the colonial economy, including Greek, Indian, and Lebanese settlers), other firms in the Congo music business were divisions of large music multinationals, including RCA and Pathé (see Table 1).

Table 1, which systematically presents the data from the administrative sources for Congo for the first time, confirms the international character of the music firms in Congo. A further point of note in this data concerns the chronology of the firms’ development, with a generation of pioneer diasporic settlers followed by the gradual entry of larger music multinationals from France, the USA, the UK, and Germany into the Congo music market. This confirms the dynamics observed by music historians such as Gary Stewart, who wrote that the small diasporic firms developed a local music business that larger international players sought to enter after the discovery of emerging Congolese talents. The industry grew in Kinshasa especially, with several studios and pressing facilities in the industrial banlieue of Limete (Stewart 2000, 95).

3 The Role of the Collective Management Societies in the Emerging Hybrid Music Industry of Congo

In Western countries, the emergence of collecting societies for musicians dates back to the foundation of French SACEM (Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique), established in 1851 (Boncompain 2013). These cooperative societies collected copyright dues from concert venues and radios and redistributed them to the artists. SABAM (Société des Auteurs Belges – Belgisch Auteurs Maatschappij) was founded in Brussels in 1922 and opened a branch in Kinshasa in 1949.^[1] SABAM enjoyed a quasi-monopoly on the management of rights in music and theatre and expanded its activities in the realm of the visual arts.

SABAM also managed the revenues that Belgian artists received from the distribution of their works on the domestic market and abroad (Ossinonde 2018, 2020). The rights of reproduction from records, also called in the professional vocabulary the “mechanical rights” (droits de reproduction mécanique) were managed in Belgium and Congo by SONDREM (Société Nationale des Droits de Reproduction Mécanique), a branch society of SABAM, which was also a cooperative. When SABAM was established in Congo in 1949, its director, Charles Albert Le Jeune, received from SONDREM the power to represent its interests over mechanical rights in Congo.^[2] The Kinshasa office of SABAM continued to function for a few years after Congo’s independence. After that, numerous Congolese musicians kept an affiliation with SABAM to retain their rights over previous works. Since French was a business and official language in both countries, it made sense for Congolese artists to keep working with SABAM.

The SABAM office in Kinshasa remained under the oversight of the Belgian head office. It aimed to collect and redistribute rights to musicians in Congo after a thriving industry of small recording firms, along with a significant number of bands and orchestras – which played in the capital and numerous secondary cities – started developing there. In Kinshasa, SABAM settled its headquarters in a prestigious venue, the first skyscraper ever built in Congo. The Forescom building was completed in 1945 after the plans of French architect R. Fostier. Its ten floors were constructed in a flatiron shape, with a restaurant and a dance hall on the top floors. The SABAM thus chose headquarters oozing with modernity, prestige, and visibility (Ossinonde 2018; Stewart 2000; White 2008a, 2008b, 42–47).

Soon after the opening of the Kinshasa branch of SABAM, it became apparent that recording firm owners were discouraging the Congolese musicians from affiliating with SABAM, presupposing that this would mean a loss of finances and of the control they had previously had over the musicians’ work (Ossinonde 2018). The difficult relationship between the Kinshasa office of SABAM and the musicians of Congo changed as a result of the efforts of the small team running the SABAM office, consisting of a Belgian director, Ector Fraink Courtain, a secretary-dactylographer, Joseph Tshamala Kabasele – who was an important rumba musician under the stage name Grand Kallé – and several other employees. Kabasele’s musical influence extended way beyond the Congo, pushing musicians in turn to adopt Afro-Cuban style. He toured abundantly in Africa and Europe and fostered numerous talents (Dibango and Rouard, 1989, 62–67). Kabasele enrolled another star, guitar player Augustin ‘Roitelet’ Moniama, to help convince newer Congolese musicians to join the SABAM ranks (Ossinonde 2020). The redistribution of dues offered a welcome source of revenue that musicians preferred to the one-time fees for recordings that the Greek music firms distributed to the Congolese artists during the colonial period. Thus, if we keep with Prescod’s analysis of black art/white institutions, the Kinshasa SABAM office contributed to blurring the lines, since it hired Congolese and sided with the Congolese artists against the so-called European music editors, at least for a transformative period (Prescod [1985] 2022, 61–65).

This state of affairs contributed to keeping the colonial model of management in place, and the economic model of SABAM also contributed to this situation. SABAM fees were calculated on the same baremic scale for the dues distributed in Belgium and in Congo or even higher, while at the same time, the Congolese technicians enjoyed lower salaries than the Belgians for similar posts in similar firms. Rights for music thus introduced a more egalitarian payment policy for the Congolese, who could not participate in the franchise and did not enjoy salary equality. This dual effect of copyright on law and payments was an exception. The financial advantage would dwindle when the Congolese franc no longer enjoyed parity with the Belgian franc in the postcolonial period, with gradual devaluations of the Congolese franc, and also because, under the presidency of Mobutu Sese Seko, the national collective management SONECA modified the baremic scale that had previously been the prerogative of SABAM (Anon. 1969, 57).

Even when they received payments for intellectual property rights in Congo, Congolese musicians were usually not listed as full members (sociétaires) of SABAM. Membership was organized in a hierarchy. New entrants to SABAM first became stagiaires. After a few years, they could apply to become full members (sociétaires), which required an examination pass in music. The lists of sociétaires reflected neither the ongoing changes in the payment of dues in the colony nor the role that the society could play in fostering the emerging record industry in Congo.^[3]

Collectors required the bars, cafes, clubs, hotels, and restaurants in Kinshasa and the provincial towns to pay their dues to SABAM. On arrival, the collectors sometimes met with reluctance (Ossinonde 2018).^[4] The territories of the Belgian colony, which included Congo as well as the mandates over Rwanda and Burundi that remained under Belgian rule until 1962, composed an extensive area. In the absence of systematic archiving of such data, it remains difficult to know exactly how systematic was the collection of dues over such a significant territory.

4 SABAM Goes to the Colonial Courts

The case law for the late colonial period provides a glimpse into the question of the enforcement of the collection of dues in the colony. The colonial authority published case law, as well as cases issued from the customary courts of Congo, in series arranged in chronological order. The language of publication was usually French, with occasional accompanying translations into Dutch (for generalities in the colonial courts), and some customary law cases were published in French and in one of the several dozens of languages of Congo. A few cases were about intellectual property litigations, often labeled as “authors’ rights.” From 1949 until the end of the colonial era most of these cases were about music; more precisely, about dues owed to SABAM. Three of them are summarized below.

In a case taking place in Lubumbashi (then Elisabethville) in 1955, SABAM sued the record store TEKA, situated in the Avenue de l’Etoile, for non-payment of dues. The minutes of the lawsuit mention that the store owner was Henri C., a European man. Since he played records, notably of works by Robert Schumann and Camille Saint-Saëns, in the store, SABAM had asked him to fill in a form in three copies to be authorized to disseminate entire records to the public and to pay to SABAM a contractual sum amounting to 3,300 francs per year. A SABAM employee visited the store several times, but Henri C. always refused to pay his dues. After sending three reminder letters to Henri C., SABAM sent a letter to the chief administrator of the white population of the Elisabethville district to explain the situation. Henri C. replied that he wanted to find an agreement with SABAM, but he did not follow up, so eventually SABAM went to the courts. In his defense, Henri C. explained that he had to play the records for the clients who wanted to buy them. He argued that the records were not played in public; the door of his store was closed, there were no loudspeakers outside, and the record player was in the back of the shop. The case was eventually closed owing to SABAM’s difficulty in proving that the records had been played entirely and not at the demand of a client before buying them. The case’s conclusions, however, emphasized that dues were to be paid in the case of public dissemination and that dues on the work of Saint-Saëns would be paid by SABAM to the French SACEM on behalf of the composer.^[5]

Another case involved K., a hotel owner in Gisenyi, today in Rwanda (then called Kisenyi, in Ruanda-Urundi), who had played music in his facilities without paying dues to SABAM. During the lawsuit, which took place in the court of Bujumbura (then Usumbura) in 1957, the hotel owner’s defense argued that he had not signed a contract with SABAM. SABAM won the case on the grounds that, following the decree of June 12, 1948, the hotelier had engaged in the illicit use of works, for which he had therefore to pay reparation.^[6]

In a similar case, also from 1957, and this time in the region of Kinshasa (then Léopoldville), Mazungu, the owner of a dancing bar had to pay damages and the owed fees that were late, in addition to dues to SABAM. In this case, a contract between the owner and the collecting society stipulated that the bar owner had to list the songs played and pay a fee, which had not been done despite several reminders. In this case, SABAM was again the winner in the courts.^[7]

These examples are representative of the case law on the recovery of dues owed to SABAM. They show that, during the colonial era, SABAM delegates went to collect rights in different regions and pursued infringers who had not paid their dues on time and despite several reminders, including in remote territories. The number of cases available remains too limited to assess whether the law was applied more severely to some inhabitants of the colony than others. The owner of the record store in Lubumbashi was a European, while this information is unknown about the hotel owner. Such cases confirm that the law in colonial Congo was implemented from the metropole without any adaptations to the local context and that the system of collection that brought revenues to the musicians of Congo was enforced rigorously, including in districts distant from the capital.

5 Collecting Dues in the Late Colonial Period

During the 1950s the amounts SABAM collected grew from 96,498,582 Belgian francs in 1956 to 129,136,000 francs in 1957. The SABAM administrators considered that this was the result of the exploitation of rights for mechanical reproduction.^[8] During that period, SABAM was considered to be among the most effective collecting societies internationally, although the French SACEM had a much longer history of enforcing diligent collection of dues (Nesheim 2024).^[9] Table 2, however, shows that the sums collected in Congo fell in 1958. This was due to music publishers’ reaction to the new rule passed on January 1, 1958 by SABAM’s Léopoldville branch of the Belgian SABAM limiting to 50 % the share that publishers could receive from authors’ rights (Ossinonde 2020).^[10] The publishers argued that they already paid the composers and interpreters of indigenous origin, and at first refused to pay SABAM for the entire sums required. The affiliated local musicians and SABAM worked together and pressed their case until they received their dues again, some of which were calculated in 1959. SABAM administrators noted that the situation of the office in Congo had been particularly difficult in 1959. Independence was nearing, but in the case of Congo, the soon-to-be-former colonizers had particularly neglected to prepare for the transmission of power, and sporadic riots created concern in the country (Rempe 2015, 235–37).

6 Collecting Dues in the Early Years of the First Republic of the Congo

Despite the uncertainty about the political situation voiced by members of SABAM, it registered record-high revenues from sales, performance, and radio in 1960 in Congo, amounting to 5,303,000 Belgian francs. Those numbers for Congo were modest in comparison with the total SABAM collection that year (154,800,000 francs), but music in Congo yielded higher sums than the collection by SABAM of dues from literary dramatic works in Belgium, for example (4,089,000 francs).^[11]

Over the next months, the recording industry was affected by the general context of political instability in the new Republic. Several recording and editing firms stopped their activity during the 1960s as a direct consequence of economic and political uncertainty. In the following months, this trend was aggravated by the number of Europeans leaving the colony.^[12]

Collections were halted for a few months right after June 1960 and, just as with the crisis it had gone through in 1958, SABAM worked to go back to normality despite the political instability in the capital and elsewhere in the country. In October, however, the director of the Kinshasa office of the SABAM traveled back to Belgium, where he was invited to give a complete report on the situation in Congo, after which the office was put under the watch of a surveillance manager.^[13]

During those months in 1960, Belgium ratified the Convention of the UNESCO on copyright.^[14] The SABAM office remained the main organization managing intellectual property rights in the subsequent years in Congo. Its activity, not unlikely that of most firms, prolonged a state of interdependency from colonial time into the postcolonial era (Wallerstein 2017, 9, 39). In 1962, as Table 3 shows, the dues collected by SABAM were negative. Some money was collected in that year, but the funds were frozen and reported in 1963s figures, showing a brief economic recovery.^[15]

The results that SABAM continued to publish after independence show that the revenue situation for Congo did not improve. Under the Mobutu regime, SONECA’s administration argued that SABAM’s activity had focused on the superficial aspects of collection, without preparing the Congolese for the beginning of a new system of collection for the independent nation (Anon. 1969, 3). This assessment diverges from the generally positive assessment of the SABAM system of collection by historian Stewart (2000). The political instability during the 1960s should not be underestimated in such an analysis in terms of its impact on the collection of revenues and their redistribution to composers, authors, and performers. At the same time, the music publishing business was threatened by larger international firms, as visible in Table 1 in this article, and discussed in its further consequences by Irvine and Smith in this forum.

Seemingly ignored by the critics mentioned above, a group of Congolese musicians and administrators founded SACO (Société de Droits d’Auteur au Congo) in 1959, the first Congolese intellectual property society (Anon. 1969, 3). Among the SACO founding members were around thirty Congolese artists including Joseph Kabasele, Augustin Moniama, Wendo Kolosoy, and De Wayon, but no women artists.^[16] This new collecting organization worked from the outset with SABAM musicians, and unions also played a role in these dynamics, but the Belgian Ministry of the Colonies was very critical to this expression of a specifically Congolese public sphere. Their role (detailed in Stewart 2000; Ossinonde 2020) would take us outside of the scope of this article. SACO was active in distributing the revenue of authors’ rights resulting from radio performances in Congo and Burundi; sources from SABAM papers mention the revenue that SACO collected in Burundi, but I have found no trace of similar revenues from Rwanda. In 1969 SONECA replaced SACO (see below), with a focus on the revenues made by the music business in Congo.

7 From the Belgian to the French Collecting Management Society

Gradually musicians from Congo sought a double affiliation, usually with the collecting society in Congo and with a society based in Europe, creating an international elite (Dibango and Rouard, 1989). Several prominent musicians, such as the Cameroonian Manu Dibango, a figure involved in the beginning of jazz in Congo, and the Congolese Jean Essous, sought affiliation with the French SACEM as soon as the early 1960s, and they eventually transferred the management of their dues from the Belgian SABAM to the French SACEM.^[17] The SACEM papers offer a few accounts of such transfers operated by prominent Congolese musicians who sought the affiliation that could best protect their rights internationally:

M. Manu Dibango, a member of the Belgian society and permanently settled in Cameroon, would like to be admitted as a member (“sociétaire”) of the SACEM. Please find hereby enclosed: copy of the letter of the SABAM of 13 February to M. Dibango, copy of the letter of 21 February from M. Dibango to the SABAM, requiring his radiation from the Belgian society. It might be helpful, as you have done already for the Congolese society member M. Jean Essous, that our Society intervenes directly with the SABAM in order to obtain its agreement on M. Dibango’s demand.^[18]

In Dibango’s case, it took several years for him to reach the status of full member (sociétaire) of SACEM, which he achieved in 1974.^[19] One can, in this manner, follow artists who often kept a career going between Congo, several other African countries, such as Cameroon, and European countries such as France and Belgium. The affiliation to a variety of collective rights societies was a means of organizing the administration of music revenue in a way that was as efficient as possible. The trajectories of musicians as members of authors’ rights societies after the independence of Congo were, for the most successful artists, quite international. Over the longer term, their trajectories also show a concern for recovering authors’ rights sometimes lost for decades after the edition of their works, as in the case of the heirs of Joseph Kabasele, who wrote one of the most important songs for independence, but who struggled to get dues paid for decades (Stewart 2000, 296–99).

8 From SABAM to SOCODA

When Mobutu Sese Seko consolidated his power as head of state of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1965, the system of authors’ rights collecting societies was modified once again. Mobutu launched a series of economic, political, and cultural policies that aimed to cement his dictatorship by using the argument of authenticity. He built a cultural repertoire based on a partly reimagined pre-colonial past, under which he changed the name of the country, of the currency, and of the river Congo to Zaïre in 1971. With the support of the USA, Mobutu remained in power until 1997, when he was eventually demised by internal opposition. Mobutu rewarded musicians who were loyal to his regime with subventions and made music an important part of the propaganda for his rule (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2013). In such a context, musicians were increasingly divided between critical diasporas traveling between Congo and Paris, Brussels, or Montreal, while those who stayed had to compose with a careful eye to the arbitrariness of the regime (White 2012).

This political history is a looming presence in the remarkable book by Bob White, who undertook a close study of the music milieus in Kinshasa during the last years of Mobutu’s rule. White delivers an in-depth examination of Congolese bands and their functioning. He describes how bands were funded – often by one-time payments for gigs – and the important roles of band leaders in dividing gains but also in extending protection and economic help to band members. Members of the audience and patrons gave money to band members directly on stage, either in Zaïres or in Francs congolais, the value of which declined considerably under Mobutu’s rule and later on. Showering band members with low-value money still came with fans’ expectations that their names would be mentioned during the concert (White 2008a, 2008b, 84, 173). The practice of direct sponsorship was widespread, from the president himself to any fan paying the right amount. For example, Mobutu Sese Seko and his wife Bobi Ladawa were named in Abeti Masikini’s song “Zaïre Oyé!,” although Masikini herself was not uncritical of the injustices of Mobutu’s regime (Stewart 2000, 192–93).

The Ordonnance-loi numéro 69-064 of December 6, 1969 authorized the creation of a new national society of editors, composers, and authors, the Société Nationale des Editeurs, Compositeurs et Auteurs (SONECA), to replace SACO (Anon. 1969, 3). During the Second Republic of Congo, the management of SONECA was adapted to the new era. Its incorporation papers show greater political control over the association, with Mobutu Sese Seko becoming its official leader. Mobutu’s regime used music as an important vehicle of propaganda, often under the label of the animation politique, a case that can be paralleled with other examples, such as Zimbabwe’s (Thram 2006, 75–88). Musicians from the opposition worked both in Congo and in the diasporic communities abroad, but many prominent musicians remained close to the regime, even as it became increasingly dictatorial (Van Reybrouck 2012, 378–79; White 2008a, 2008b, 225–52).

In the present, demands for new forms of ownership result from overlapping systems of property that attempted to juxtapose inheritances from the Belgian system with the Congolese one. Intellectual property scholars such as Rosemary Coombe and Caroline Ncube have analyzed the opportunities that can be created by the superposition of Western-imposed systems of intellectual property onto customary laws (Coombe 1998, 27; Ncube 2018, 413). Further changes have occurred again over the past decade, although an attachment has remained throughout this history to the Berne Convention and an international regime of property rights defined as the moral right of the author. A decade ago, SONECA changed its name to SOCODA (Société de Gestion des Droits d’Auteurs et des Droits Voisins pour la République Démocratique du Congo). Political instability has been a challenge for the advancement of recording societies in the Democratic Republic of Congo, another example of this is discussed, about the postwar Soviet regime, in Zbigniew Wojnowski’s and Michel Abesser’s article in this forum. The music industry is flourishing, partly in a diasporic manner, where most money is made through concerts and copyrights. Important musicians deplore the rampant piracy via CDs, cassettes, USB keys, and ringtones (White 2008a, 2008b, 226–40). Most recently, part of the Congolese industry has criticized the mismanagement of the SOCODA. Actors have started considering founding a new authors’ rights society that proposes a newer model.^[20]

9 Intellectual Property Rights and the Music Industry in the Present Day

In 2021, UNESCO included the Congolese rumba on the list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The hybrid history of rumba goes back to the interwar period, with musicians crisscrossing the Atlantic between Cuba, New York, several African cities, including Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and, in Europe, Paris and Brussels (Goffin 1944; Grabli 2020, 161). Rumba developed into a flourishing recording industry during the last decades of the colonial period. Museums in the colony and the former colonizer state have acknowledged this heritage with sections dedicated to the musical instruments of Congo in the Musée National de la République Démocratique du Congo (MNRDC) in Kinshasa and a room dedicated to the history of Congolese rumba at the Africa Museum in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels. The MNRDC was opened in 2019 and the Africa Museum in Tervuren reopened in 2018 after a reorganization aiming to address the ongoing debates on decolonization in museums and heritage (Kim 2020, 25–59; Stanard 2023, 262).

Rumba has consolidated its place in the heritage of the Democratic Republic of Congo at a time when the music industry is undergoing a series of difficulties. Despite the continued popularity of the rumba genre in and outside of Congo, and the fact that its biggest stars are filling stadiums in the country, the same stars deplore that most of the music industry itself – publishing firms, record stores, instrument makers – has left the country, largely due to the instability of its politics and infrastructure.

During the 1940s and 1950s important recording, studio, and pressing activity took place in Congo, to a large extent conducted by the firms discussed above. These firms gradually closed their doors for a variety of reasons including political changes, increases in the studio activity of Congolese musicians overseas, and infrastructural challenges for Zaïre and, later on, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Most recently, the digitalization of the industry created additional difficulties, since some prominent platforms, such as YouTube, have chosen not to establish a presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. To be represented on the platform Congolese musicians need to be able to open an account with these platforms from another country, which creates difficulties for emerging talents and reduces the visibility of classics from before the digital era. A related question is the reorganization of the collection of composers’ and performers’ dues in the age of digitalization (Mondonga Moyama 2014).

Intellectual property rights are indeed an ongoing topic of debate in the music industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Regularly, cultural centers in the capital and secondary cities organize debates on intellectual property in which members of the industry, lawyers, media experts, and a public that includes numerous musicians participate. Locales for such events include the French Cultural Centre in Kinshasa; the Wallonia-Brussels Centre, another international cultural center in the country; secondary cities such as Lubumbashi and Goma; and neighboring Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo, where rumba has also been thriving. The use of the premises of cultural and diplomatic representations of European countries is one among numerous remaining interdependencies between the former colonized and colonizing nations (Wallerstein 2017, 39).

I attended one of these debates in Kinshasa on September 21, 2022. The debate was announced in the press and on social media as an event focusing on the state of intellectual property in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The purpose was also to help artists know their rights and to network with lawyers, administrators, and industry professionals issued from the cultural elite. The event took place at the French Cultural Centre in Kinshasa and was attended by around two hundred people.^[21] Journalists from, for example, the Democratic Republic of Congo Press Agency followed the event. The debate was followed by a question-and-answer session and by several performances on the theme of the artist and their rights. A business manager mediated the debate. Around the table were one senior administrator, one junior lawyer specializing in intellectual property, and two high-profile music entrepreneurs.

The conversation reflected on the challenges of intellectual property rights in post-colonial times. The topic central to the discussions was the purpose of collective management societies. Currently, two models are competing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The older collective management association is SOCODA, itself developed from SONECA, which had its historical origins in the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko (1965–97). SOCODA thus has a long heritage. Many in the industry consider that it benefited until recently from a monopoly over the management of authors’ rights in the Congo. Its headquarters are in the Gombé neighborhood of Kinshasa, near an end to the half-circle road that borders the Presidential palace. The association and its administrators have an aura of prestige that is reinforced by the presence of numerous stars of rumba and other popular genres.

The senior administrator represented the point of view of SOCODA and the memory of SONECA (Anon. 1969). The junior lawyer represented ADACO (Administration des Droits d’Auteur au Congo), the newest alternative to the old model of the national Congolese collective management society. The entrepreneurs represented music production, one of them having founded a new platform for Congolese artists aiming to integrate production and streaming.

The debate of September 2022 and conversations I had with lawyers and administrators in the business stressed that the new organization ADACO is currently challenging the authority of SOCODA. The newer association proposes a different model for the management of the intellectual property rights of artists in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which it plans to be an umbrella for several branch societies each dedicated to a form of art, whether it be music, dance, photography, and so on. These branches would then be responsible for the management of copyright, neighboring rights, and droit de suite (which is, in the case of the visual arts, a right perceived by the artist on the resale of their work, representing 15 % of its resale price). Members of this new association criticize the SOCODA model for being monopolistic.

This claim does not really hold if one considers that most Congolese artists have been, sometimes since the 1970s, members of two societies in two different countries and that this practice became the norm during the 2010s. ADACO, however, aims to attract the attention of all Congolese creators, not just musicians, and to offer a form of collective rights management updated from that characteristic of the long decolonization period and adapted to creativity in Congo. The discourses of the new entrants criticize the old – in this case, SOCODA, and to some extent, its history: during the debate in September 2022 several members of the public voiced critiques of SOCODA, and some artists in the room asked to have their money back from the fees they paid to have their IP dues managed.

Some critiques pertained to a lack of realism about the amounts to be paid to the artists. This question is amplified in the current era of platformization of the music industry, which has resulted in a greater concentration of revenues in the hands of the best-selling artists (Eriksson et al. 2019). An important challenge to SOCODA, which featured throughout the debate, was the obstacles that the collective management society experienced in collecting dues. Managers of cultural centers could not always understand why SOCODA visited them irregularly and then wanted to collect large amounts at once, sometimes retroactively for several years. As discussed above, similar challenges were experienced by SABAM.

How do Congolese musicians receive their dues today? SOCODA and ADACO coexist, their managers communicating with each other and with those of the older organizations such as SABAM and SACEM, which can be used not only by members of the Congolese diaspora but also by musicians who travel and tour more or less frequently. In addition, not all the platforms follow a Western model. Congolese music producers have started their own platforms, such as BAZIKS, that aim to offer skills in production and the management of dues to become a Congolese response to Spotify. Important challenges remain, however, due to weaknesses in the infrastructure of the Democratic Republic of Congo, such as power cuts and unreliable transportation systems (Mondonga Moyama 2014; White 2008a, 2008b).

Aside from their music, musicians can enjoy significant revenue from tours, festivals, subventions, and merchandise. In this broader context, the question of intellectual property remains salient in terms of the difficulties in collecting rights locally, in neighboring African countries, and on other continents (Erlmann 2022). In this respect, the cooperation between African countries in the development of copyright law and performing rights is an active agenda of numerous experts, with international congresses regularly held in a variety of African countries, for which national contact points play an important role in transnational exchanges. SOCODA remains important in cooperation in the management of dues between African nations (Mondonga Moyama 2014).

10 Conclusion

This article has examined the role of collecting societies as part of the infrastructure of the music industry of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country in which decolonization has taken a particularly complex and long-winded path. During the late colonial period and toward independence, the musicians of Congo had to navigate through various structures issued by colonial institutions as forms of support for their works (Prescod [1985] 2022, 61–62). The publishing firms were first and foremost a secondary source of revenue for international businesses in Congo and were often led by the Greek diaspora, which represented a dynamic business community in the country.

To the publishers were added, from 1949, the Congo office of the Belgian collective management society SABAM, a branch of a Belgian cooperative whose task was to support artists by collecting copyright dues and redistributing them to the artists. SABAM was already considered, before its establishment in Congo, to be a diligent collective management society. For this reason, and also because the baremic scale of rights in Congo was directly imported from Belgium, Congolese musicians soon recognized the results of SABAM in creating revenue for them. In addition, SABAM sided with the musicians in requiring music publishers to offer artists better contracts and higher payments. SABAM thus played an important role in fostering the emergent Congo music industry. Following the dichotomy between “black artists/white institutions” discussed by Prescod, one can note that the Europeans were divided and that Congolese stars including Joseph Kabasele, Augustin Moniama, and Wendo Kolosoy worked with SABAM.

During the upheavals of independence, SABAM managed to stay afloat for a few challenging years and extended the collection of dues to the neighboring mandate over Burundi. In 1959, the first Congolese collection society, SACO, partnered with SABAM. In 1969 SONECA took over the management of copyright dues. During the rest of Mobutu’s rule, collective management societies in Congo gradually shifted towards direct subventions, which challenged and replaced the work of collecting dues. Other forms of financing took over, particularly for the growing number of artists who split their time between Congo and Europe or North America. Those artists, then, were most often affiliated with SONECA (later renamed SOCODA) in Congo and with one collecting society in the North, increasingly often French SACEM because of the shared French language and because France represented a larger francophone market than Belgium.

Despite the difficulties experienced by numerous Congolese artists in collecting their dues, collective management societies remain one among several structures that support the music industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While most of the infrastructures – music publishers, studios, pressing manufacturers, and record stores – provided by the firms listed in Table 1 disappeared during the long decolonization, in the present day the copyright system existing in the Democratic Republic of Congo is still largely based on the colonial infrastructure. Most artists today record in Europe and North America. Live music, however, is still going strong, perhaps more now than ever before, with prominent rumba musicians regularly filling the largest stadium in the country, the Stade des Martyrs in Kinshasa, with 80,000 seats. This is consistent with a global movement in the music industry – pre-COVID-19 and now picking up again – toward making music profitable through live entertainment. In this context, collective management societies are still useful to Congolese musicians. This article has shown the continuities and ruptures in the management of these societies from the late colonial period through the long decolonization process until nowadays in the Democratic Republic of Congo.