Congo Vibes
Music => Congolese Music => Topic started by: Mfumu Vata on November 30, 2025, 22:57
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDeNtXrohHA
Oncle Bapius’ version of Zaiko’s 1988 split is different from the version Popolipo, JP Buse and Bebe Atalaku vavein their interviews. Also about the way how Ngossana came into Zaiko. According to Oncle Bapius, Ngossana became involved because he was a huge fan of Nyoka Longo, especially for his way of dancing. However, Bebe Atalaku stated in one of his interviews that Ngossana joined thanks to the late Likinga and the late Ilo Pablo, claiming that the two were doing business together and met him in Brussels, where they convinced him to sponsor the group.
The co-founders/leaders of Zaiko Familia Dei; Ilo Pablo, Bimi Ombale and Lengi Lenga, have all passed away. This means we will never hear their version of the events surrounding the 1988 split. In Oncle Bapius’ narrative, Ilo Pablo is portrayed as a bad person and held responsible for leaking information to the regular members about the money Ngossana was giving to the administration (Nyoka Longo, Zamuangana, Matima, Bapius, and Meridjo) or directly to Nyoka Longo himself. According to Oncle Bapius, this leak happened through Ngossana’s secretary, who allegedly preferred Ilo Pablo over Nyoka Longo.
However, when comparing Bapius’ version to those of JP Buse and Popolipo, especially regarding the growing dissatisfaction within the group about payments, copyrights of songs and situations such as the administration’s refusal to sign contracts with CBS (Sony), Bapius' version doesn't fully match.
Oncle Bapius also revealed that just before Lengi Lenga passed away in 1998, he was about to rejoin Zaiko and that they would present him once coming back from a tour in Kenya. But him sadly passing away. I was surprised to hear that. Because back in 2010/2009, there was an article written by Digitalcongo and the same article being spread to different journalistic sites, about Lengi Lenga, being said that he wrote a letter to Nyoka Longo to rejoin Zaiko, but that Nyoka Longo never responded until he passed away, which put him a bad light.
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This guy (Oncle Bapius), what was his role in Zaiko? I never really understood that.
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He had been Zaiko’s bass player since 1970. I’m not sure when he became part of the administration, because for example in 1975 you still had Manuaku, who was one of the first official members of Zaiko, and rhythm guitarist Teddy Sukami (RIP), who was the president. But in the 1980s he was among the members of the admin.
I believe Bapius became vice-president after Zamuangana passed away in 1992, but I might be mistaken. Because the remunerations from the European tours in the 1990s kept going wrong after the split and only got worse, Méridjo and Oncle Bapius proposed to Nyoka Longo that he should step down as president and let one of them take over to see if the financial management would improve. But he refused.
On top of that, there were other issues, including Nyoka Longo’s refusal to let the musicians rehearse Méridjo’s album, which was originally supposed to be recorded after Nous Y Sommes, since Nyoka Longo had already recorded his own solo project a few years earlier (Avis de Recherche). At some point, Nyoka Longo fired Oncle Bapius and Méridjo, which led them to create Zaiko Universal. They attempted to file a lawsuit against Nyoka Longo, because in their view their dismissal was invalid, but nothing came of it.
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There is one thing I am glad about: that Nyoka Longo didn't let the band to be licensed with Sony. If that was the case, today we couldn't find so many Zaiko songs so easily on Youtube, and all the huge music library of Zaiko would have been forgotten much faster. The business practices of those big companies doesn't do good for the heritage of bands stay in the mind of people.