1998

8th edition

MALAKI MA KONGO

Special Return to Kongo Dia Ntotela, the Promised Land

Malaki ma Kongo 1998

Malaki ma Kongo 1998

It was planned that this edition would be held in a pilgrimage form.
Leaving from Kongo Dia Mfoa (Brazzaville), the festival should have moved to  Mbanza Kongo (ancient Kongo kingdom’s capital city) and Angola, passing through Kongo Dia Kinshasa.
But eventually the edition was held at the Mbongui Malaki Ma Kongo “Cultural centre for Africa and Pharaons reinassance”, sited by the Agricoltural High School Amilcar Cabral (LAAC) in Nganga Lingolo, because of war tearing North West Angola up.

Invited by the Brazzaville television, Masengo ma Mbongolo presented his excuses to the many pilgrimage list subscribers by these words:

“The pilgrimage to Kongo Dia Ntotela, the Promised Lans, is a universal duty and we could have discovered Yala Nkuwu, the blood lymphed baobab where God descended to transmit men the Kongo Dia Ntotela Promised Land cohabitation laws.
We could have touched by hand Kulumbimbi, a millenary house where this huge print is right by its entrance. We would have touched by hand God the Creator’s print, in that land region that is the richest in the world for its fauna, flora, with an annual temperature varying between 20 and 30 degrees, a land the undersoil of which is said to be a geological scandal, a land populated by a human kind unique in its sort… In two words Heaven, the true promised land donated by God to his people”.

The ceremony, simplified to the tam-tam rythm in the Kongo mode, was object of local and other inhabitants’ admiration. Once more, the goal had been riched: re-evaluating and teaching Kongo tradition to all those who had lost it because of the acculturation into which Congo particularly and Africa in general are entangled; an entaglement that’s more ill-fated than beneficial.

The august 9th 1998 festivities saw traditional groups participation, among which “Kiessa messo”, “Tassaleno ku Kongo”, The Box of Pharaons apprentices’ representation and the Kongo Dia Ntotela theatre from LAAC.

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