It’s not the last song, but when you hear it you know the album is almost coming to an end. You expect it to finish as a rumba, like Daddet, but unexpectedly Bill comes in and then suddenly boom Burkina Faso starts the sebene. I wish Burkina Faso had played on at least three albums with Wenge Maison Mère. I often wonder how À La Que Leu Leu would have sounded if he had still been around and whether his presence might have pushed Flamme to give even more. We’ll never know
When hearing the chorus and the sebene, you know that the CD is about to end. I always thought the sebene was played by Didace le Prof, because I after saw him play it once during a concert on a VHS that saw more than 30 years ago. Only recently did I discover that it was actually Felly Tyson who played on this song. Felly often used to play the last part of the sebene, when Koffi would request a sebene after performing a rumba during the late 1990s
The way Lebou Kabuya played here feels as if he wanted to leave the studio, while Sam, Mboshi and the others were asking him to stay, and he eventually gave in and said, “Alright then.” But this really is the last song. Even the way Bouro starts the song makes it seem like he was a bit tired and fed up, yet still giving everything he had.
The last seconds are a part of sebene played by Felly at Zenith de Paris, when Depitcho did his solo dance. It’s a crime against humanity that Koffi never released an official VHS of that show. I once saw on instagram a woman in Brazzaville saying that she manages the archives of Télé Congo. My dream is that a passionate fan of Congolese music contacts her to ask whether they still have the footage they filmed of Koffi’s Zénith de Paris concert in 1998 and pays her to put it on youtube.
When hearing the sebene of Nyandja, you realize that the CD is about to end. It's a shame there was no Droit de Veto tour, as Quartier Latin split shortly after the release of that album. The way Sam Tshintu sings the loudest “yembelaka mokonzi ndenge nini yoyo,” in the last minutes during the sebene is funny, when knowing that he would become the one who Koffi would hate the most only a few months later.
I remember many Christians not being happy with that cri, as they saw it as blasphemy. In the cassettes Les Assises de Koffi Olomide, there was also a man complaining that Koffi replaced the name of God with “Che” (one of his nicknames) in Rond Point. For those who don't know it, a part of Rond Point comes from a song called Dominique, which was written by a Belgian nun.
But Koffi didn’t care and, the following year, he let CNN animate the cri “Seigneur/Ah Mon Dieu" in Attentat, which comes from a gospel song by Marie Misamu. He also used the cri “Mweni” coming from the gospel band Pesa Munu Passage, mixing it with the text "Tozangi Mayi Solo" that Wendo sang in Tokufa Pona Congo. In reality, it was Mboshi who used to animate this cri, but CNN took it over after Mboshi left. Mboshi would only animate “Mweni” in Academia’s Sanction, mixing it with a traditional Tshiluba song that Eric Tutsi used to sing during rehearsals when preparing Number One, while “Seigneur” was only animated in concerts.However, neither of these cris originally came from Mboshi. It was Atalaku Bizima Kondos who first started animating them during concerts of Wenge El Paris, which created a lot of controversy at the time. Some pastors even talked about it on television. Marie Misamu herself confronted Bizima about it in private