Book Review of "Rumba Rules: the politics of dance music in Mobutu’s Zaire" by B. W. White, Duke University Press, Durham, NC

Abstract

[Extract] What an enchanting ethnographic study! This book deserves to be widely read. I say this as a reviewer who is a complete outsider to African studies. As I have little first-hand knowledge concerning the ethnography or even the music of this part of the world, my comments on this book are based on my understanding of its significance in terms of the contribution it makes to debates within the field of cultural anthropology, in particular the anthropology of performance, the anthropological study of music, political anthropology and the anthropology of popular culture. My particular interest is in its contribution to the comparative study of links between power and performance, as the main aim of the ethnography is to explore ‘the links, both material and symbolic, between the performance of popular dance music and the emergence of a particular type of political culture in Mobutu’s Zaire’ (p. 24).