During the power cuts that hit Kinshasa in the 2000s, kerosene sellers walked the streets with fuel for people’s storm lamps, and their metal containers announced them with a clang: kingolo. Kin’Gongolo Kiniata took that sound for a name and added kiniata, to crush. The band translates the whole thing as “the crushing sound”, and the same streets supply its instruments, built from the metal and plastic the city throws away.
Bébé Mingé, born Julien Ekutshu Sambu, plays a kora made from a plastic fuel container and an electric guitar with a single string. Around him, Leebruno plays metal percussion and Ducap plastic percussion, Mille Baguettes keeps time on drums, and Djino plays a shortened two-string bass. Over the years the band has added a drum kit of corrugated iron, xylophones of plastic bottles and empty spray cans, and a length of plastic pipe that gives a synthesiser-like tone when twirled. All five sing, mostly in Lingala.
That kit travelled to Tallinn Music Week in April 2026. Bébé Mingé spoke in a hurry and through a translator, because delayed flights had squeezed the hours before the band’s Saturday showcase on the Africa NOW! stage at Paavli Culture Factory. That stage is the festival’s evening showcase for contemporary music from Africa and its diaspora, and that night Kin’Gongolo Kiniata shared it with the Tunisian duo JATHB and the Congolese-Canadian artist KIZABA. “I feel good. It’s my first time in Estonia, but I’ve already been to other places in Europe.”
Estonia was the newest stop on a run that began at TransMusicales in Rennes in 2022. In 2023 came tours of France, Belgium, Switzerland and Portugal and a WOMEX showcase in A Coruña, and since then the band has played in Sweden, Canada and the United States. “Bringing our music outside of home feels very good. We really enjoy it.”
The records followed the same road. The EP Moto came out in 2023. The debut album Kiniata followed on Helico Music in April 2025, with eleven tracks built on Congolese rumba rhythms played on metal and plastic. “The sound is fire. It’s hot, it’s strong.”
That sound was first put together at the Kinshasa home of Bebson de la Rue, born Jean-Claude Elemba, where the members met. Since around the turn of the millennium, Bebson has been making music from everyday objects, aiming at an original soundtrack for the city, and most of Kinshasa’s scrap-instrument groups have passed through his open-air workshop on Avenue Kato. Julien drummed in Bebson’s group Trionyx and learned there to build instruments from recycled material, and Leebruno has worked with Bebson too. “There are a few groups, our elders, who started doing this. First of all there’s Bebson de la Rue. He’s the initiator, the first to make this kind of music.”
Two of the best-known groups to come out of Bebson’s circle are Fulu Miziki and KOKOKO!. Fulu Miziki, whose name means music from the garbage in Lingala, is a collective from Kinshasa’s Ngwaka neighbourhood. It plays drums made from saucepans, vibraphones made from plastic, and a vocoder made from a radio and a garden hose. One of its members, Pisko, started out as a dancer and rapper in Trionyx, alongside Bebson. Most of the five Congolese artists who formed KOKOKO! had worked with Pisko. Their name means “knock knock knock” in Lingala, and they play bicycles, tin cans and typewriters, with the French producer Débruit shaping the electronics. Their debut album, Fongola, came out in 2019. “Then there’s KOKOKO!, Fulu Miziki, a lot of groups, and then there’s us.”
The elders he names also include Staff Benda Bilili, founded in Kinshasa by Ricky Likabu and Coco Ngambali with other musicians left paraplegic by polio. One of its members, Roger Landu, built the satongé from an empty fish can, a piece of wood and a guitar string, and the band’s debut, Très Très Fort, came out on Crammed Discs in 2009. “We also had our elders in Staff Benda Bilili.”
Kin’Gongolo Kiniata started out at neighbourhood parties and local dances in Kinshasa, and home is still its hardest audience. The city’s dancefloors belong to ndombolo, the fast Congolese dance music that grew out of rumba in the 1990s. It is played on electric guitars, drum kits and synthesisers, and its peak is the sebene, a stretch of looping guitar riffs over which the atalaku shouts out to the dancers. Its stars include Koffi Olomide, Werrason and Fally Ipupa. In Kinshasa and abroad, the band puts the city’s waste on stage, with plastic bottles, spray cans and fuel containers all working as instruments. “My message is eco-artistic. It’s ecological, but it’s also about going back to basics, rediscovering the soul music had at the beginning: its original meaning, the reason it exists, its function.”
Back in Tallinn, on the afternoon of the interview, the band was hours away from its first show in Estonia. “For those who don’t know us yet, it’s going to be a great experience to discover a group they’ve never seen before. Those who have already seen us will get a show very different from the others. We’ve worked hard and prepared ourselves in rehearsals to give something even better. We’re going to bring the heat, as we always have, but in a different way.”
Kiniata is out now on Helico Music, on CD, vinyl and digital and is available to stream and buy from Kin’Gongolo Kiniata’s Bandcamp page
Cover Image ©: Zakaria Latouri