Peggy Mulongo recalls the challenges and joys of working with refugees and asylum seekers from the Democratic Republic of Congo on an oral archive and performance project.
As a Congolese woman managing a Congolese oral histories archive and performance project, I knew that there would be challenges from within my own community to the project I was proposing. In fact, my own heritage was in some ways a barrier at the start, with many community members challenging my credibility in a way that perhaps an outsider might not have experienced. But I knew that as hard a time as I was getting, I was still better placed to make headway with this challenging 16-month project. Once the community learned of my specialism as a cross-cultural mental health practitioner and that I was one of the founding members of NESTAC (a Rochdale charity supporting African communities), as well as a long-standing promoter of cultural events and projects in the community, I began to gain some respect as a professional and the walls started to come down.
The recordings came to represent for the speakers and myself personal memoirs of life, love and loss
Phase one of Lisapo: the Congolese Tales was to be delivered within the first six months of my appointment by Community Arts North West (CAN). The aim was to develop a permanent oral histories archive to share the stories of migrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) to Greater Manchester as part of our Exodus refugee arts programme. It was apparent that a great number of participants and artists involved in the programme, which has worked with refugees, asylum seekers and host communities since 2004, were from DR Congo. And as stories from home were told, the team realised that these personal histories could be lost within a couple of generations if they were not recorded.
When we think of history in this country we think of libraries full of books, but in DR Congo history is most often propagated through the spoken word. And as everyone knows, each time a tale is told, subtle changes are made, and within a few tellings it can bear little resemblance to what it once was. So considering the merits and drawbacks of this tradition, our proposal was to create a permanent oral histories archive with the aim of making it relevant to contemporary audiences. The idea was that this would be the first oral archive to document the stories of the communities that had settled in Greater Manchester in the last 20 years having fled conflict from their countries of origin. We are a National Portfolio Organisation of Arts Council England and a Manchester City Council cultural partner, and following a successful application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, phase one got underway with the recruitment of 25 Congolese people willing to share their stories and 11 volunteers to help with interviewing, transcription and translation. We recruited and recorded 29 voices. Among these were two church leaders, which I consider to be a real coup as they are powerful people within the community.
One thing I was not prepared for was the cathartic experience of the recordings themselves for both the participants and myself. These are the stories of people that have fled civil war and started a new life for themselves in Britain – a history I share. The recordings came to represent for the speakers and myself personal memoirs of life, love and loss – and a people’s history which I ended up getting very directly involved in. This in a way was a double-edged challenge! We had not anticipated that most people would feel more comfortable recording their stories either in Lingala, a main Congolese mother tongue, or French, the language of DR Congo’s colonial masters which is spoken by the majority of the population. This meant that I in particular and the few Lingala and French-speaking transcribers had to do all the detailed translations – very tricky to get right and to the standard needed for oral archiving. It took ages and many a weekend. However, listening and recording the stories connected me to my own community in a more profound way than I ever imagined, leading me to revisit DR Congo this summer, where I had not been for 13 years to reconnect to my roots.
Despite participants having agreed that their stories could be stored and publicly accessed at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Resource Centre at Manchester Central Library, there was some fear about sharing the full stories online due to the sensitive nature of the material. This brought up an interesting challenge, because although we wanted the stories to reach as wide an audience as possible, at the same time we needed to protect the privacy of the participants. We resolved this by creating short extracts of all 29 stories that are accessible on our internet-based archive with a link to where the full story can be physically accessed. We have already had requests from students all over the country. It feels right that you have to access the full stories in person and to make that personal effort, giving the respect to the intimate stories themselves which have been gifted to the general public and future learning.
With the oral histories completed, my next six months was spent pulling together a live show at Manchester’s Band on the Wall. Featuring professional artists working alongside community members, the show was conceived to bring to life some of the stories we had gathered through music, song and spoken word. Anyone in the audience or watching the livestream of the show would have noticed at once that at least two thirds of the performers in this celebration were not in fact Congolese. They were from Iran, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Trinidad, Somalia, Burma, Italy and the UK. The project’s original aim was to share Congolese culture and its oral narratives with wider communities and this it truly did. One comment from a Congolese audience member really summed it up: “It was so wonderful to see a large Iranian contingent in the chorus singing in Lingala.”
Despite the challenges, the project was definitely worthwhile and I have so many dreams for where the project could go next. We would like to collect more stories from the Congolese communities in London, and then around the UK. And why stop there? Next I would look to Belgium. We are also exploring similar work within other Greater Manchester migrant communities. I am delighted to be part of a team which is creating such valuable legacies for the coming generations.
Peggy Mulongo is Lisapo Project Manager at Community Arts North West.
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