ABSTRACT

The term atalaku is said to have come from a Kikongo expression meaning “Look here, look at me”, and first appears in common parlance in Kinshasa (capital of former Zaire, today known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the early 1980s. The term is not only part of an expression associated with a popular music dance step from that period, but it has also come to be the primary term used to refer to the performing disc jockeys who sing and shout during the dance sequences which have come to stand for contemporary Congolese music.