Abstract
The capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kinshasa, sits on the south bank of the Congo River, some 240 miles from the Atlantic. It is a city with a short but tumultuous history. After Lagos, Nigeria, Kinshasa is the second largest city in Sub-Saharan Africa with a population estimated at 12 million (De Boeck 2011). Its lingua franca is French, but Kinois (residents of Kinshasa) mainly speak Lingala, a pidgin language that emerged from the trading relationships between different peoples of the Congo River. Lingala became the language of composition for much of the DRC’s renowned popular music, the dialect synonymous with the capital’s urban melting pot (Stewart 2004).
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Loftin, K. (2016). Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo: Cowboys, Cosmonauts and Frontiers of Capitalism. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54911-2_33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54911-2_33
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