Lokua Kanza

Pascal Lokua Kanza (born April 1958), known professionally as Lokua Kanza, is a Congolese singer, songwriter, arranger, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. He is known for his soulful, folksy sound, which is atypical of the dancefloor-friendly African rumba music that is common in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His proficiency in blending different musical styles and cultural influences has made him a celebrated artist, admired for his distinctive and evocative musical creations. He sings in French, Swahili, Lingala, Portuguese, English, and Wolof. He was a coach in The Voice Afrique Francophone in 2016 and 2017.

Lokua Kanza was born Pascal Lokua Kanza in Bukavu in the South Kivu Province, in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is the eldest of eight children, with a Mongo father and a Tutsi mother from Rwanda. In 1964, the family went to live in Kinshasa in a middle class area, until the day when Pascal's father, a ship's captain, died. His mother then moved to a much poorer area of the city, and Pascal had to work to feed the family as well as singing in churches.

Throughout his life in Kinshasa, Kanza received his education under his father's guidance at the National Institute of Arts (l'Institut National des Arts), which served as a hub for nurturing and training performance artists in Kinshasa, where he honed his skills. In 1977, musicologists Gerhard Kubik and Donald Kachamba visited him and his classmate, Magongo Sanga, at the institute. They learned that Pascal's father had amassed a collection of 78 rpm records since 1948, which greatly influenced Kanza's dexterity on the guitar and his vocal harmonies in the local ecclesiastical chorales.