The king of Makossa music Manu Dibango has died. Bongani Madondo, who came of age as Dibango reached his funk peak, locates the icon’s genie in the Congo’s promise

Neither the sky wept nor did the sun break into a twist ’n shout the day Manu Dibango succumbed to Covid-19. The spine-tingly doof-doom-bah! you heard, followed by a pig squeal of electric guitar, was the sound of hipnicks dropping needles on their favourite Dibango “joint”. Habashwe.

Pan-African jivemeister Dibango was known for a repertoire of cow-hide-tight electro beats, scaffolding saxophone flights into alterrealms, polyphonic guitar sheets of Mary-don’t-you-weep cries that oft’ climaxed and split into micro, atomic sonic particles of gorgeous beauty, on record and in performance. The king is dead. Long live Manu Dibango!

I won’t waste your time telling you how Dibango succumbed to the mysterious, spiteful, calamitous coronavirus-induced Covid-19 at the age of 86 outside Paris, where he had lived for over 40 years.

I will sulk, but will not raise so much as a storm in a musicology tea-cup to call out instagrammatically mistaken critics who tell us Dibango was a “jazz” musician. As if every black artist over 50 needs to lowered into their grave via a jazz trope. Or die a pauper. Dibango died no such. He was neither a jazz musician nor poor.

He was as funky as the devil’s dance itself, and rich beyond comprehension. Rich with an African musician’s reward for lifelong toil.

This was largely due to a successful lawsuit brought against Michael Jackson and Rihanna. The two had, decades apart, sampled Dibango’s hit Soul

Makossa without authorisation.

But who exactly was he?

Born Emmanuel N’Djoke, his father’s namesake, on December 12 1933 to a Yaabasi-speaking father and Douala-speaking mother in the urban sprawl of Douala, Cameroon, young Manu grew up gifted, yet with a restless soul.

He was a city boy who attended a village school that taught in French. A boy already touched by the Négritude developed by revolutionaries in France’s colonies. Little wonder that Dibango grew up with a multicultural sensibility. The spirit of liberté coursed through his veins. Some have gone so far as to make the chronologically leaky argument that Dibango was the father of the nascent “Afropolitanism” cultural identity.

He was a city boy who attended a village school that taught in French. The spirit of

liberté coursed through his veins.

Gary Stewart, author of Rumba on the River, the history of the two Congos’ popular music, reminds us that Dibango was “a wayfarer from a young age”. He was shipped off to France at the age of 15 to study music, ending up in Belgium where, according to Stewart, “he took a job playing jazz standards in the house band of [the] Tabou night club”.

“It is in Brussels that he met the man, in 1960, arguably regarded as ‘the father of’ contemporary Congolese popular song tradition, Joseph Kabasele, going by the moniker Le Grande Kalle.”

Kabasele, who led the African Jazz dance orchestra, was “the grand duke” of Congolese popular music after independence, according to Graeme Ewens, the author of Congo Colossus: the

Life and Legacy of Franco, and Africa O-Ye!

Dibango eventually returned to Africa to settle in Kinshasa with his mentor’s dance orchestra. Among

Kabasele’s star protégés was a young man of huge girth and imposing height, also going by the name Kabasele. Pépé Kallé, born Kabasele Yampanya, would grow, physically and in popular stature, into a singer and guitarist of renown.

But not before Dibango scored his first hit, Twist

á Léo, with Le Grande Kalle’s ensemble, including the then fledgling Pépé Kallé.

The late 1950s were heady times in the Congo. The decade had gifted Africa with the rise of Patrice Lumumba, and then in 1961 immediately, cruelly, snatched his life away.

The Congo, in which the adventurous immigrant settled, was not without artistic rapture of its own — and Kinshasa and Brazzaville were about to ignite a global musical bonfire.

The Congolese rhumba, soukus, later renamed zouk, leapt like a flame from Africa, spread to European and the Antilles, capitals such as Paris, London and Brussels, and flourished for the next four decades.

We can only imagine how the young Trinidadian

Négritude inspired young people, high on the fall of European empires everywhere, to gaze inwards in search of their ancient folk roots

Rihanna would have been bewitched by the infectious Afropolitan sounds when she was kneehigh.

Back on the mother continent, the prevailing Négritude philosophy and lifestyle — a precursor to Black Consciousness in the Anglo-African polities — inspired young people, high on the fall of European empires everywhere, to gaze inwards in search of their ancient folk roots.

The young had their own ideas: in the quest for a new beginning, they fused Western pop with native roots, creating a new, weird assemblage of musical hedonism.

These were Congo’s “New Africans”, and Manu Dibango, a Cameroonian, was smack-bang at the coalface.

There were other bands on the scene, like Los Nickelos and Thu Zahina, and pop star percussionist DVM. The biggest breakout stars stepping away from Kabasele’s staid African Jazz orchestra style of the 1950s was the ensemble Zaiko Langa Langa.

Dibango’s success in this scene was phenomenal. First, he was an émigré. Second, almost all of the bands springing up in Kinshasa’s urban cauldron played music dominated overwhelmingly by vocals and guitar. Yet he managed to distinguish himself as a “seeker” rather than as a “traditionalist.”

From the early 1960s, his music gestured towards, but was never moored in, Congolese roots. If anything, it distilled itself into a Congo’esque jive electro without a specific geo-locality. He was seeking a Congo sound as “a state of mind”: a Congo sound system sans frontières.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s Dibango merged his native Cameroonian folkloric sounds, like the Bikitsu, with classical music imbibed from European conservatories and mixed it with splodges of brothel jazz colour. His experimenting brings to mind Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti and

IV albums. It also evokes the ballooning cheeks of Be-Bop’s Dizzy and Bird emitting shrieks of nocturnal dreams and nightmares. Papa had a brand-new sound, and it was called funk.

Revellers from Abidjan, Accra, Addis, Bamako, Ouagadougou and Yaoundé caught the new wave.

Within this melting pot, Dibango’s powerful chug-along songs, like those of his contemporary, Fela Kuti, became 15- to 20-minute operatic melodramas. Sneering, snaking, sexual, sweaty, leery, leering, the sound of Manu Dibango, as US disco-lovers soon learnt, was funk alright, but not like yo momma taught you.

Dibango’s groove train chugged along at its own tempo with no art fucks to give. It was both sintomatic and symptomatic of the times: the European empire was crumbling bit by beat, from Algiers to Bandung.

By the time Dibango and his Soul Makossa troupe pulled into Joburg in the spring of 1993, the city was in flames. Street-fighting Inkatha impis and the ANC’s Umkhonto weSizwe cadres had turned the city on its filthy, nappy head.

I’ll never forget how we were corralled into a corner of Joubert Park and sprayed with hot lead, which sent us scuttling under fences. Some were left wounded, some were dead and others were scarred for life. This was Dibango’s welcome. He brought with him the rest of Africa and it has never quite left.

When Dibango arrived, continental African cultures weren’t a thing here, except to those of us who grew up in the Bantustan enclaves of Bophuthatswana and the Transkei alongside professional immigrants from all over Africa who piped their music from the local AM dial.

The Beaters, a South African band, had gone to Zimbabwe and came back renamed Harari. Local soul bands had toured as far as Malawi, and there was a cross-pollination of southern African music. Later on, Angélique Kidjo, with her smash Batonga, would help local music lovers address the African musical deficit.

Still, our musical tastes did not match the Pan African pride we declared. We sucked. Who could blame us? We were children of apartheid.

After arriving in Joburg, the bald-domed superstar played Soweto and the Mega Music hall in Newtown, ran a series of workshops, hung out with Hugh Masekela exchanging “war stories” and pulled a big fat zol right in the middle of a city at the start of its transition into an African metropole.

By the time Dibango and his Soul Makossa troupe pulled into Joburg in the spring of 1993, the city was in flames … He brought with him the rest of Africa and it has never quite left

I didn’t meet him then. I was busy contemplating dropping out of Bush university, where I read Marxism, English lit and public admin.

A year later I was a rookie at a national weekly, spouting expansive shit about music: jazz, kwela redux, kwaito and hip-hop.

World music’s development and my cub phase as a storyteller seemed to coincide.

In the spring of 1995, an executive in charge of the neglected African music distribution account at Gallo Records received a disc with instructions from a Paris-based label to pass it on me. I arrived at the apartment I was couch-squatting at as midnight struck and opened the envelope.

The album, Wakafrika, Dibango’s curated Pan African project, featured some of the continent’s biggest names — Tony Allen, King Sunny Adé, Yossou N’ Dour, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Geoffrey Oryema, Salif Keita and Angélique Kidjo. It restored my faith not only in Africa but in humanity too (though what self-respecting African space jam, slapped with a postage stamp and addressed to the moon, is complete without the nasal inflections of Congolese pop medium Papa Wemba?).

I arrived at that apartment opened the envelope, devoured the panoply of continental sound colors the CD came bearing, and lost my head.

And I'm still looking for it.