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Trashy tunes to raise awareness

Paul Lorgerie | Lukas Lottersberger
June 18, 2024

DRC band Kin'Gongolo Kiniata make music out of discarded objects they find on the streets. Their aim with these unique instruments is to raise awareness about the massive problem of litter and waste pollution in Kinshasa and across the country.

https://p.dw.com/p/4guBC

With more than 15 million inhabitants, DRC's capital Kinshasa produces some 10,000 tonnes of waste a day. The city is drowing in pollution.
Local band Kin'Gongolo Kiniata are doing their bit to reduce it, and making something unique in the process. The musicians turn things they find on the streets of the megacity into instruments.
Plastic bottles are repurposed as a xylophone, a tin can into a single-string guitar and the carcass of an old TV serves as a bass drum.
They see themselves as part of a wider movement of creative activists.
"We're musicians, but there are also visual artists who make costumes out of trash, cans collected on the streets, in the rivers," says guitarist Julien Ekutshu Sambu, aka "Bébé Ninge". "It's a kind of appeal, an ecological message, telling people not to throw cans and so on into the gutters, because it can clog them. You can do something with them!" 
These electrofunksters and master upcyclers hope to raise awareness about the massive problem of litter and waste pollution in Kinshasa and across the country, and prove that with a little imagination, anything can be recycledand given a second life.