While his album
QALF
- released on September 18 - breaks listening records around the world, Damso returned to the Democratic Republic of Congo, to his homeland of Kinshasa, which he left at the age of 9 to join Belgium.
Followed by
Liberation
, William Kalubi Mwamba of his real name, took the opportunity to take stock of the cultural state of his country, but also on the recent controversies that have surrounded certain actors of rap.
Read also: With his new album, Damso breaks online listening records
In early September, Roméo Elvis, a Brussels resident like Damso, was accused of sexual assault by a young woman.
Facts that the singer's brother Angèle has not disputed and for which he has publicly apologized on social networks.
Damso, who was to collaborate on his next album, does not hear it that way.
“I'm not in line with that.
And the problem is, it taints the music too.
I will tell everyone I approach: do the right thing in your life because otherwise it will piss me off
,
”
explains the interpreter of
Macarena
.
If he has never soaked in dark stories of the genre, "Dems", as he is nicknamed, has already had to fight against the image of a misogynistic and sexist rapper because of certain texts.
"When I speak of women, these are my personal stories, I never do generalities,"
he defended himself in
Le Parisien at the
end of 2018. A few months earlier, this image had prevented him from making the Belgian anthem for the FIFA World Cup in Russia.
“
A woman who feels respected is a self-respecting world.
There, little by little, I saw the division, with on the one hand, the men and some women who take feminists for hysterics, and on the other, women and some men who take others for executioners.
», Underlines Damso in
Liberation
.
An
“educational problem”
, according to the 28-year-old rapper who calls for the creation of
“mutual respect”
.
To read also: Damso: "I am not misogynist, I even found myself a feminist on certain points"
Regarding his trip, Damso believes that Africa
"comes last for everything"
.
"
I came to talk to partners, artists, the Ministry of Culture, to understand the reality on the ground," he
explains, without claiming to be able to change things
"like a colonist"
.