Djino Alolo Sabin (1990) sits there, relaxed, in the morning at the hotel in Brussels. The night before, he performed his solo Piki Piki danced, which will also be shown at Theatre Frascati during the Holland Festival. The performance touches on many intense themes, but is anything but melodramatic. Rather, it expresses a relentless optimism. Piki Piki is the name of broken bus, which he played with in his childhood in Kisangani.
Why did you name your show after a broken bus?
'As a child, I spent a lot of time playing in the streets. My father, like so many fathers, drank. We only came home to eat and sleep. One day, with some other kids, we thought of pushing that old bus through the streets. It became a game that lasted for days, in which everyone participated. When I returned home to my neighbourhood after starting my dancing career, I realised that the same people, with whom I had experienced that Piki-Piki adventure, were still there. That nothing had really moved. That old bus is a symbol of Congo, and the youth that needs to get things moving.'
What is your family's relationship with the bloody past, the Belgian colonial regime, Mobutu, the civil wars and uprisings?
'After the murder of Lumumba my grandfather said to his wife one fine day: take care of the children, I will continue the fight with other supporters. He never returned, surely also killed. All those men disappeared, with nothing left of them. Lumumba is not the only one not buried, every trace of my grandfather is also missing. Now if you Lumumba's letter to his wife Pauline reads, from prison just before he was murdered, then you understand that he was 50 years too early, that my generation is the generation that needs to rise up and change something. That letter is a kind of prophecy. It speaks of an enormous desire to do things differently. That is why I am starting my solo with it.'
The end of the performance contains a text about the lack of graves, of places where the dead can be commemorated.
'That, of course, is the afterthought. My grandfather never returned, but my mother worked for the Red Cross for years, between 2000 and 2006, burying dead people. New battles flared up constantly as the old Kabila brought in the Rwandans and Ugandans to oust Mobutu. The solo is an attempt at a monument, but is also about the need for change.'
You also talk about feminism, and the role of women in Congo.
'The relationship with my parental home is ambiguous. Even when I went to visit my mother last year to make the video, I still had fear of entering my parental home. I also asked her: the fact that you buried victims as a professional, did that make you also bury us as a family? She didn't understand.'
You mean she did nothing about your father's violence?
'The fact that she let us grow up with that man, for years, was something like burying us. Congolese law states that the husband is the head of the family and must protect his wife, and she owes him in return, obéissance, is owed. It is that word that kept ringing in my head. Through my mother's history, I want to question the position of women in Congo, and in Africa.'
Is it about lack of resistance? About passivity, lack of perspective? What should your mother have done?
'To me, it is mainly about dignity. Congolese women need to come out of that position of obedience. They are conditioned, the girls, the women, the mothers. I don't pretend to change the whole of Congo, but I question that system, the logic.'
That goes up for your own generation too?
'You can come across a director of a company in Congo, i.e. a big boss, who still sees himself as the inferior of men. I now live in Europe, where men and women are treated quasi equally. But in Congo, women are considered inferior. And that is dangerous, also for men, for society as a whole. It is a patriarchal structure, which came with colonisation and still runs very deep.'
'Congo is a ruined country, at all levels, politically, economically, but also in terms of mentality. We have inherited nothing but ruins from colonisation, including in human terms. Everything has to be rebuilt again, because everything still revolves around those old norms. That's also why, at the beginning of the solo, I don't get out of place for a very long time, keep everything very repetitive, because it's something that revolves within itself, doesn't get out of place in any way, doesn't make any progress or change.'
Have you ever talked to your mother about these things?
'No. She died in June last year. Since then, I dream about her a lot. We were very close, but we never talked about political or personal things. With the solo, I want to give a voice to the women from the neighbourhood where I grew up, but also hold them accountable, why they don't stand up to their men.'
They did the housework, brought in the money, raised the children and ...
'... did the shopping, prepared the food, put it on the table, their husbands eat, drink and hit it. A recurring humiliation that everyone lived with. Which stemmed from another humiliation, of course. My father grew up without a father; he was seven when his father left. He grew up without any orientation. 'I don't want to make it too political, I don't like the hate, but I do need a space where I can retreat.'
'I could not live in Brussels. It would constantly remind me of the horrors, of the colonial system that robbed my grandfather and my father of their lives. The performance is about my family destroyed, torn apart by the colonial regime. I am the only one in that family who can now very gently work on some kind of recovery. Until now, from my grandfather's departure, we were buried. My son's name is Elikia, which means hope. You want to start history all over again.'
And does dance play a special role in that? You grew up as a hip-hopper and you now work as a dancer with choreographers such as Olivier Dubois, Magui Marin and Boris Charmatz.
'When I was growing up in Kisangani, Studios Kabako did not yet exist, there were no schools where you could study dance. Faustin Linyekula was still in Europe then. Kisangani was completely cut off from Kinshasa by the wars. It was horrific often, because of the bombings. Since making my own work, I sometimes allow those kinds of memories to return. But for a long time I buried them.'
'I was also quite religious. We camouflaged violence with religion. I was an altar boy, was proud to wear the cross during services, and wanted to become a priest. Until one fine day I saw a clip on television, Let me love you of Mario, and totally fell under the spell of choreography. I wanted to do exactly that with my friends. It became a huge success. We were not the first hip-hoppers in Kisangani, but we were the first generation to reach a large audience. The whole of Kisangani [now over a million and a half people live there] was upside down and we decided to continue as the Bad Boyz.'
'Faustin Linyekula saw us rehearsing behind a musician friend's house in 2008 and invited us to Studio Kabako. We didn't understand much of what he was proposing to us, la danse contemporaine??? It didn't sound tough at all, nor did we have a clue what he was talking about. But eventually I joined the five-year programme, which existed then, with training sessions and workshops. And that's how my official dance training started at Studios Kabako. Later, Olivier Dubois invited me to come to France with him, to work with him.'
Your first work of your own, with Christina Towle, at Studio Kabako, was a trio about the famous boxing match between Ali and Foreman, in Kinshasa in 1974, Debout - Se relever.
'I was impressed by what Ali has done for the struggle of black people in the United States. I love boxing, the mentality, the mental preparation it takes. I am a dancer, but I identify with boxing. I am also a fighter. That provides certain starting points. I wanted to dialogue with history not by reviving the boxing matches themselves, but by presenting with Ali's state of mind. How you hold your ground in a country that is trying to make you small.'
What made you decide to go solo with this new work, an autobiographical solo?
'My whole life feels a bit like a solo, from the very beginning. When I was young, there was no electricity in la Tschopo. Every day ended ultimately alone in the darkness, from my room. I think that Congo, today, the struggle we are in - if you look at it a bit more broadly, it needs us to develop an individualistic consciousness. That everyone, before they take a collective stand, makes an individual consideration, individual decision to resist or stand up. They often say that the masses have no soul. I have the Congo, my family, but in the end it's about what I, as an individual, can do.'
Is that a space few people dare to occupy, even for young, optimistic Congolese?
'Often when people talk about the collective, they just do something. It doesn't deliver much. The collective has been thought of for so long, but it always comes to the same point. I mean, let's not talk about Congolese politics of the past decades. It is a clique, working only for their own families. Think of the cobalt. Congo is among the richest countries in the world, but the profits from the gold, diamonds and cobalt do not reach the people, who live on an average of $1 a day.'
In Africa, is it necessary to cultivate the "luxury" of individualism?
It's like deciding to make a clean sweep in your own neighbourhood. If you keep at it, it really does get clean in that one place. And if enough people do that, regardless of what everyone else thinks, things will change, petit à petit. That's how I feel about it at the moment: doing small, personal things. Piki Piki is perhaps a small, personal story. But at the same time, it is 'the story of a whole generation, not just of my childhood in Kisangani, or of Congo, but of an entire continent or even humanity as a whole. We talk about global warming, ultimately it is our humanity that is at stake, the future. Then people, individually, have to take action if anything is to happen.'
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