Learn about the culture of Congo Kinshasa
Hi. My name is Gracias Matthew Manzongo]. I was born in Democratic Republic of the Congo and now I live in Phoenix, Arizona. So if you decide to visit Congo Kinshasa one place I would definitely recommend is the capital city Kinshasa. You know, it's a beautiful city, you know there's a lot of interesting things to do. That's where most the most important things happen in the country, but also just because of the culture. You know I spoke about the pubs and the music and the dressing, the styles, all of it just happens in Kinshasa. Well, not only in Kinshasa, but like it comes alive in Kinshasa, you know this big culture of pubs, people love pubs. It's almost everywhere in every corner of the streets of the city. You find pubs and drinking beers.
And of course, when you're big on beers, you know, like beer companies, they make a big deal. They have like festivals just dedicated to drinking and stuff. Something that I personally am not glad because I'm not glad or proud of because I don't drink. But yeah. Other things is like music. We're really big a music communities, people we love music. We love our music. You know, we, we mainly focus on this style of music called Rumba and that's what we listen to most of the time. Another thing is among Africans theres like an ongoing joke...If somebody Congolese in the room, you'll recognize them from the way they dress because usually Congolese people, mainly men, they dress in a very, uh, extravagant way, you know, hats, colors, and usually it's formal.
You know, we have this subculture, it's called sapologie, which I don't know the exact meaning of it, so I'm not even going to get into it, but it's basically about extravagant dressing, you know, it's about, it's like dandy-ism, you know, you dress really good just for the purpose of it, you know, and not because you're going to a special place or anything, just for the purpose of it. Usually if you visit the CDF Kinshasa, you see a lot of these young men that partake in the culture of sapologie. So this would be a typical Congolese, traditional attire. You know, we have a lot of these shirts, you know I don't know if you've heard of Mandela shirts. They basically regular shirts, you know, long sleeve, short sleeve, but they have a totem imprint on them. You know, like this imprint here, you have a lot of these styles here.
But this cut, this specific cut is not a very Congolese thing I would say it's more of a West African style that over time immigrated into the Congo. Why? Because we don't, our traditional style did not evolve to fit the modern style, you know? But when it comes to West Africa, the traditional style evolved a lot to fit the modern stuff. So now they get the say or they just, they dictate what people wear in terms of styles. But the print is very Congolese, really yellow, you know, you always have to be a bit showy, you know, an extravagant, so people notice you. It's just part of the culture. As you can see, this is a very festive attire. You know, the colors and everything. You can actually wear it to anywhere, you know, to weddings and birthdays, even funerals, sometimes you, you wear this.
I wouldn't recommend that you go to work because it's not exactly very comfortable. But you know, it's very festive though when you visit our cities, you know, people wear them all over the place. Basically. Everyone has one. I'm sure everyone has at least one at home. Um, now the interesting place to visit is the city where I grew up in Lubumbashi, which I'm very proud of. It's very calm. It's very quiet. It's different, it's different from Kinshasa because Kinshasa would be more of a New York type of place. And I guess Lubumbashi would be more like Seattle or Washington D.C. or I know Pittsburgh, something like that. You know, that's the difference between the two cities. And there's also interesting to other places to visit, other cities, I would say Goma, which is in the Northeast.
Gomez in the Northeast of the country. It's a, a very Rocky city, a lot of mountains in there. It's very beautiful. The, the ground is initially black, like black and this vegetation is just green and black and it's open to great lakes and stuff like that. So it's a pretty place to visit, you know, and if you'd visit Goma, you get to be taken to national parks where you get to see animals living in their natural habitat, which is an unbelievable experience. It's just nothing comparable to, you know, so definitely Kinshasa, Lubumbashi and Goma, those are three cities that I would definitely recommend. Anybody who's visiting the Congo to go visit.
Daily life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo Kinshasa. It's pretty easy, you know, it's not like a United States way. You constantly running, you know, after something you always have something to do, you have to go to work and, and other things. It's not like that back at home. There's more time for other things, you know? It's easier. The pace is not as fast, you know, it's constant. Everybody's slower than here, you know. Uh, I wouldn't say it's like one of those places where you have time for, you know, waking up in the morning to smell flowers or gardening or, you know, having your little garden sound like that. But it's definitely, so whether the United States, so what people usually do is, you know, like anywhere in the world, you wake up in the morning, you go to work. But we don't work long hours like here.
And it's not as, it's as demanding as United States. Cause you know, here, it's always like work, work, work, work, and you, after your work, you can make your money. After you make your money, you gotta spend it, you know, because that's the economy. That's how it works. It's just so fast. Everything is so fast. Whenever I receive guests from like back home, they always tell me, wow, you guys live so fast. Everything goes so fast. And he says if people don't sleep it at all, you know at nights you have hundreds of people driving, going places coming from work, going to work and all these things.
But at home it's not like that. At home it's much slower. You have your work, college, you know, from like morning to noon to I would say three, you know, even five some times. But after five, you know, the old city quiets down, you know you have time for other things.
Other things like family and spending time with friends, you know, spending time with your communities. A lot of church activities of volunteering and things like that. You have time for those things because you don't work after five, you know, late at night. You don't work in those hours.
One of the things that a lot of times when you go home, what you do is, you know, watch TV. That's a, that's a big thing back home and we don't have people watch TV. I know, I know United States people watch a lot of TV, but at home as well, we watched a lot of TV. We, that's how we ended up connecting with other cultures. I know since when I was a kid from back home, I'd watched a lot of American shows, you know, I mean that's basically anywhere in the world. A lot of people watch American movies, but not only the American ones.
We got to watch movies from other countries like France. We have a lot of channels that we actually get from France and Belgium and stuff like that. And also sometimes from other African countries like Nigeria and so on and so forth. Also soccer. Soccer is a big thing like anywhere else outside of the United States. We have a basically called like following when it comes to soccer, big fans that even in terms of the clubs, we recently had a African cup of nations, which is like the soccer tournament for the African countries. And each was big. Everybody was on it. Everybody was watching, everybody was talking about, it was all over the place, even on Twitter. So yeah, that's basically life in Africa, you know.
Oh, fun fact. Actually the capital city Kinshasa is the closest capital city to another capital city. So basically, Kinshasa from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Brazzaville from the Republic of the Congo. The closest capital cities in the world, you know, for anybody who's interested in fun facts. And also, The Congo is one of the few twin countries in the world, you know, with the Koreas. And I think there's like three twin countries in the world, only three, and then the Congo is one of them. So that's another fun fact.
-Gracias Matthew Manzongo