As it has been argued in the short premise of the first section, this work aimed at the dual goal of understanding how music could have been used as an essential tool in establishing relations of power within Mobutu’s regime, and how this could be reflected in the analysis of Congolese musical production. It has not been an easy task, and in the process of researching and writing history, we may have ended up with even more questions than answers. In a regime that made of music a powerful instrument of propaganda to build consensus and project an (unrealistic) picture of political legitimacy, can hints of resistance be found in silence? If the veiled criticism found in some songs of the most well-known musician of Congo – Franco – turn out to be in service of the regime, what implications should follow from this? And how is all of this actually reflected in the musical production?
In some sense, trying to write about this kind of history can be similar to writing lyrics: The implication that a reader or a listener may find will potentially go even deeper and further than the author’s initial intentions. One thing that we can claim for sure is that the ambivalent peculiarity of the musical reality we have referred to many times can be traced in many songs and lyrics, even beyond those we analysed here.