EDITORIAL
Navigating Constraint with Dignity: Lessons from Kinshasa’s “Positive Fatalism”

 
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EDITORIAL
Navigating Constraint with Dignity: Lessons from Kinshasa’s “Positive Fatalism”

Lukas Pairon, Professor and Founder of Chair Jonet, University of Ghent, Belgium; Founder of the scholarly network SIMM; Founder of the Music Fund philanthropy; Co-founder of the contemporary music ensemble Ictus.

06-04-2025

What can we learn from people who live in one of the most constrained urban environments in the world—and still find ways to make life possible?

This is the central question of my postdoctoral research in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. My inquiry builds on over a decade of engagement, including my earlier work on social music projects where young people—some accused of witchcraft, others former gang members—found new pathways through musical mastery.

In Kinshasa, poverty is omnipresent. Public services are largely absent, and corruption is normalized. Yet, amidst these realities, music continues. People share resources, improvise survival, and express themselves creatively. I have come to call this way of being positive fatalism: a paradoxical capacity to accept structural limits without resignation, and to act meaningfully within them.

Lukas Pairon

This art of navigating constraint is not about glorifying suffering or promoting passive resilience. On the contrary, it involves an acute awareness of what cannot be changed, coupled with ingenuity, community solidarity, and quiet forms of resistance. Whether through informal participatory savings, the spiritual comfort of faith, or the joy of playing music even when it doesn’t pay, people in Kinshasa cultivate a form of life anchored in the present, while refusing to surrender hope for the future.

For those of us working in other cultural contexts—whether in social art practice, pedagogy, or policy—Kinshasa invites us to rethink our assumptions. Instead of valorizing individual grit or economic outcomes, this research suggests that we might consider: How do we accompany people artistically and socially in ways that reinforce agency? What can we do to support long-term engagements with music and art? And how do we recognize resilience not as adaptation to injustice, but also as resistance to it?

Kinshasa’s young musicians remind us that making art can be both a discipline and a refuge, a practice of the self and a commitment to others. Even in the most unforgiving conditions, the pleasure of playing remains.

This research does not offer models to replicate, but rather invites dialogue. If the Kinois can sustain artistic identity without external validation, if they can cultivate beauty in a broken system—then perhaps we, too, can learn to inhabit our constraints more creatively.

Of course, no single paragraph—and certainly no outsider—can offer universal guidance on how to reinforce agency or support resilience in situations as complex and diverse as those found in Kinshasa and similar places. Realities are always specific, layered, and historically situated. This is precisely why I have committed so much time to listening and studying before writing more extensively. Rather than prescribing solutions, my focus is on offering and amplifying the voices of Kinshasa’s young musicians themselves—their reflections, contradictions, and strategies for making life possible through music. I believe their stories speak far more powerfully than any abstract framework ever could.

One of the young musicians I work with in Kinshasa, Claudel Essabe Ideke from the ensemble Beta Mbonda, once told me: “When I play music, even if I haven’t eaten or drunk, I forget everything. Standing in front of the instrument, nothing else matters—not even money. I can play without being paid; it doesn’t change a thing. What matters is the feeling of playing. Without music, I might have abandoned my struggle a long time ago.”

Others speak in similar terms: how music momentarily lifts them out of the heaviness of life—the loss, the daily uncertainty, the inability to support family or protect loved ones. These burdens return once the music ends, because the act of making music doesn’t fix reality. But during the music, they experience a kind of suspension—a pocket of time during which they are defined not by hardship but by presence, creation, and joy. This is not a logic of survival or success. It is something else: a form of insistence on being alive.

And this is not unique to Kinshasa. Even in places where the material conditions are vastly different, I’ve often wondered why so many musicians continue to dedicate themselves to music despite the odds. Perhaps it is because, wherever we are, music allows us to inhabit life with intensity—if only for a moment.

Lukas Pairon’s forthcoming book, BBC radio feature, and accompanying podcast series will feature the voices of the young musicians of Kinshasa. During the upcoming World Congress of the Glenn Gould Foundation (Toronto, 7-10 October 2025), Professor Pairon will propose and moderate sessions during which research will be presented by Canadian scholars on the possible Social Impacts of Music-Making (SIMM). ( www.lukas-pairon.eu)

African Urbanism, Art And Agency, Art In Crisis, artistic expression, Beta Mbonda, Claudel Essabe Ideke, Community Solidarity, Creativity, cultural identity, Democratic Republic Of Congo, Ethnomusicology, Glenn Gould Foundation, Informal Economy, June 2025, Kinshasa, Listening As Research, Lukas Pairon, Music, Music And Policy, Music And Survival, Music As Refuge, Music Education, Participatory Art, Positive Fatalism, Postcolonial Studies, Resistance, SIMM, Social Impact of Music, Social Practice, Social Resilience, Urban Poverty, Youth Empowerment

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