HISTORY: AFRICAN HEROES - PAPA WEMBA..

    A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF PAPA WEMBA . 

  One of Africa's most famous musicians and an international style icon, Congolese singer Papa Wemba, died suddenly during a performance early Sunday at age 66. He died after collapsing onstage in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast; the show was being broadcast live.

  Wemba's death was
confirmed by the Culture Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Baudouin Banta Mubarak. According to reports obtained by Reuters from the Ivory Coast morgue that received Wemba's body, he died between his collapse and his arrival at a local hospital.

  Papa Wemba was born in 1949 inLubefu, in the Central African nation known then as the Belgian Congo, Later as Zaire and now as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). His birth name was Shungu Wembadio Pele Kikumba, but as the eldest son in his family, he was nicknamed "Papa." His mother was a professional mourner; he grew up steeped in the sounds of her music and blessed with a singularly keening tenor. 

  But other circumstances also made Wemba's emergence as an artist particularly fortuitous. He grew up during a golden age of Congolese music. During the 1950s and 1960s, his country was the epicenter of a brilliant new kind of dance music variously called Congolese rumba, lingala and soukous. This new style borrowed heavily from the sound — and particularly rhythms — of Cuban big bands, but put in an African context. Artists like Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau became idols all over the continent, and to the young Papa Wemba as well.

  Papa Wemba's smooth, easy sound and extraordinary voice reached the ears of some very famous European and American artists as well. He settled in Paris in the 1980s, and became one of the best-known — and most well-connected — musicians from Africa. He sang with Stevie Wonder and opened for Peter Gabriel, before going on to record for Gabriel's Real World label.

  At home, and across sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora, Papa Wemba will be remembered not just for his voice and for his musical innovations, but his legendary sense of fashion style. As I noted just last month on Latitudes, the singer was celebrated as "Le Pape (The Pope) de LA Sape" — the undisputed king of the fashionable men known as sapeurs .

  That sobriquet is so well known in the French-speaking world that in a popular YouTube skit about dressing well and living large, a French comedy trio refers to their characters as "Papa Wemba's hidden sons."