Its Youtube version bears all the feel and touch
of age;antiquity.At a go,you feel it is
old with heavy markings of the best the technology of music production of those times could offer yet it is not until after 1979 when Pierre Moutouari moved from DRC to Paris to launch his solo career in music that Missengue got composed,produced and released amongst his many other hits.
It makes you think of an antique world that bears this aura of the mystic yet the song isn't that old.It
triggers in the mind a fleeting imagination of a world that existed momentarily back in time and then slipped away to give way to the neo-man
of new and fresh and ‘exotic’ impressions and expressions that, due to human’s
clamour for the new ,subdued to the chambers of relics this tune as if at no time the world melted with reverence when the sun
of its calm and breezy civilization
reigned high with an intoxicating arrangement,smoothness of its rhythmic poetry,the saxophone... that saw music lovers dance themselves
lame whenever it got played—I presume it did.
I am talking about Pierre Moutouari’s “Missengue”.
Until a few minutes ago, I didn’t know the title of this tune nor Pierre Moutouari,the Congolese Soukous artist that rendered it to the world and conquered hearts when it was still hot and the talk of town.I don’t know at what particular point in my life I got to hear it but one thing I know is that it was one of those popular songs played on KBC Idhaa Ya Taifa in the 80s and the 90s(the time of my childhood) when KBC,Kenya’s state owned radio station ,was still the only radio station around in this part of the world I call home. I am certain that at no particular point I got to follow the song since I was still a baby and the affairs of the radio looked mysterious as the adults we saw around who looked distant and detached from our child-life of play and less worries about life.KBC sounded misty and dark and radios weren’t easy to come by.My father had a radio and so we treated it with great awe and so the music and the voices we never got to see that it spewed whenever it was healthy and alive with new Eveready Paka Power batteries.
Until a few minutes ago, I didn’t know the title of this tune nor Pierre Moutouari,the Congolese Soukous artist that rendered it to the world and conquered hearts when it was still hot and the talk of town.I don’t know at what particular point in my life I got to hear it but one thing I know is that it was one of those popular songs played on KBC Idhaa Ya Taifa in the 80s and the 90s(the time of my childhood) when KBC,Kenya’s state owned radio station ,was still the only radio station around in this part of the world I call home. I am certain that at no particular point I got to follow the song since I was still a baby and the affairs of the radio looked mysterious as the adults we saw around who looked distant and detached from our child-life of play and less worries about life.KBC sounded misty and dark and radios weren’t easy to come by.My father had a radio and so we treated it with great awe and so the music and the voices we never got to see that it spewed whenever it was healthy and alive with new Eveready Paka Power batteries.
The likes of Ali Salim Manga,Khadija
Ali,Elizabeth Obege...were kings and queens of the airwaves and through
programmes such as ‘Salamu za Vijana’ and music programmes that were aired mid
morning and at dusk played a lot of Congolese music alongside local sounds from
Kenya and the rest of Africa.It is here
that I believe I got to hear about Missengue but never thought that almost 25
years it will become the symbol of the
desire for things alien and foreign yet so attractive to my toddling curiosity
that would become the basis of my construction of the definition of the
mysteries of life that needed to be unraveled.
Once in a while, Missengue has been passing by; playing in my heart like song riding on the
wind over the vales and trees and disappearing with the same winds ,arousing nostalgic memories of time
and a world that looked so great to conquer and I wished to know so that I couldn’t wait
to grow fast enough to be part of but which had disappeared into the thick folds
of the emerging worlds that we never got to feel and think its potent magic the
way I had dreamt I would think and feel when I eventually came of age in the
new millennium.
When it plays through in my heart, I think of that life that was and the sun that
shown the way it did then unlike it does
now and happiness was ripe and a little tender that it seems now.
This is one of those things that one never chooses
to cherish but gets imbedded in your subconscious thus becoming a part of you that you never obviously know to be in you and surfaces only momentarily to haunt life,in its wake a trail of memories that bloom wild and unsteady
like forest flowers in flash rains.
When Pierre Moutuari’s Missengue plays,masked worlds emerge before me and I
feel a hushed frustration at my failure
to having taken a look at that world when it was what it was then so that I
remember it as it was then and to understand it as it was then through the
lenses of Missengue.
It is a huge hidden wisdom for me why this song
is big to my heart despite the fact that it has never been one of my love affairs in my most(though sometimes flippant)
conscious moments. Yet I still love it and it feels great to know that I love it and
that now I have it in my player to play it loud as if it is new. Maybe the ages it
has defied and the raw image of Moutouari I never got know till today might
unravel the mysteries of the world that happened and I missed when my eyes were still child.
Wait...I...I think it the point where I
have to yield to the song and dance my all.See you on the other side of fleeing moment when the song is
done.
To download the song follow the link: www.emp3z.ws/mp3/missengue-pierre-moutouari-in-lingala.html
or listen to it on Youtube via the link :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekVc4kFJQGw
