Cho Cho Cho is the first song and music video produced and written by the youth of Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. created in a Beat Making Lab, the song was inspired by a popular call-and-response chant in Goma, and the video was filmed during Yole!Africa's SKIFF Festival dance competition.
my mother might have been born in Cape Town where my Belgian grandparents lived during WWII, but she subsequently grew up in the Belgian Congo for the first 15 years of her life, precisely in Bukavu (right next to Goma)... i myself grew up knowing it as Zaire, which was still relatively calm & much safer than it is now, well, as long as my parents were in business with Mobutu & if they didn't directly profit from his presidential reign, or should i say dictatorship, then their source of income was in some way feeding his incredible wealth as well... then the cold war ended, Mobutu fell & fled to the French Riviera with his billions of dollars, interpol came down on Mobutu's former profiteers & with that my father's business went down the toilet, such as everything else in Zaire, and the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo. fortunately by that time my parents had divorced & i was off to South America with my mom & my stepfather, for a much less tumultuous life that came with diplomatic immunity... anyway, all of this to say that somehow, in some way, the Congo will always have a special place in my heart. almost everyone in my mother's family lived there in colonial times & thanks to them i will one day inherit a lot of ivory & malachite for the house that i will one day be able to afford on my own (hey just keeping it superficial here, that's my thing). some of my relatives still travel to the Congo with the best interest of its people in mind & i hope i can too one day; it's the Belgian version of "white guilt" i suppose... so i'm always happy to see people get in there in spite of how dangerous & messy it has become. i love to see artists bring people together & into the light! SUPPORT BEAT MAKING LAB!
