where she served as musical director. We attended family reunions every two years and she was the director for the big family choir. My mom passed on September 12, 2018. KIAZI: My mother is Norma Jean Ishman-Brown. She was one of three, all girls. She was a middle child, and the only one that had children. She was an engineer who graduated from Stanford with a degree in Human Biology. The only connection I had to her side were her two sisters and her parents. My grandfather is from Mississippi, and my grandmother, Texas, Arkansas. They moved to Southern California, then Vegas, then back to Southern California. I was pretty close to that side of the family until my mom passed on November 21, 1998. On Growing Up KIAZI: [I grew up in] East Palo Alto. We have different moms, and spent weekends and vaca- tions [together]. We have a very intricate family web. We took trips together. We have a lot of the same memories and expe- riences even though it wasn’t a 24/7 situation. MUISI-KONGO: I grew up between East Palo Alto and Oakland. I have two older sis- ters, Halili and RaShida from my mom’s first marriage. I spent a couple of years, from [age] 7 to 9 in France living with our dad’s younger sister. A strategy to make sure we were linked
get home from rehearsal and people would come over and we had dinner at like midnight. You’d go to bed, get woken up at 1:00 in the morning to get up and come eat because rehearsal ended at 11. KIAZI: Let me jump in right here. So they get woken up to eat but I got woken up to make the fufu before y’all got there. MUISI-KONGO: The dance was the central activity, really. But community was also an activity. We do this thing together, and it creates this energy beyond the dance and drumming. It wasn’t always people that were involved in the dance. He was a magnet for people in general. KIAZI: He was super good at building people. I didn’t get this from him because sometimes I get tired of being around people, but he never did. Our house was open. Just community always. He was super instrumental in build-
of that. Other times, I would come back to Oakland to live with our dad. Even though we were splitting our time between our moms’ households and his, it’s not disjointed in my mind.
KIAZI: We used to call on the phone, and after the first six months, she had a French accent. It was hella funny.
MUISI-KONGO: People!! Immersion! I grew up doing a lot of musical stuff. My mom, my two older sisters, and I would perform during Kwanzaa, songs by Sweet Honey in the Rock and other revolutionary Black things. I spent a lot of that time lip syncing because it was terrifying to be up there singing. People still come up to me, making fun of me about lip syncing. KIAZI: I lived with my mom, and my two younger sisters. I have another younger sister from my mother’s marriage. We lived in East Menlo Park. I played a lot of basketball.
ing a community based in that culture and bringing a lot of artists to grow the cul- ture here, even people who were not Con- golese, who were not artists, he [got] them involved, to learn something in the arts, to be able to increase how the art was being presented. We have several aunties and
THE MOVEMENT AND THE ENERGY AROUND WHAT WE WERE DOING, WHAT WE GREW UP IN, WAS SO STRONG THAT OUR FRIENDS ENDED UP BECOMING A PART OF WHAT WE WERE DOING.
uncles who were teachers, dancers, drummers, singers, art- ists, musicians. A number of people outside of him and our greater family circle who were involved in arts and influ- ence and guide our artistic journey. MUISI-KONGO: The movement and the energy around what we were doing, what we grew up in, was so strong that our friends ended up becoming a part of what we were doing. The friends that we grew up with, became family and were also involved in the art form. That ave- nue served multiple purposes. I probably started actu- ally liking dance for myself around 12, where it no lon- ger felt like a chore. You couldn’t just not participate. When I didn’t want to dance, I drummed a little bit with Diata Diata. But it was clear, I had to do something. [My father] would push but with limits. You weren’t just gonna sit with your arms folded and not be a part of what was happening. When he started the youth com- pany, Ballet Kizingu, and got our peers involved, that’s when I felt myself blossom. I had spent most of my apprenticeship learning alongside adults. When we got together with our peers, that unlocked the joy. On Going to the Congo MUISI-KONGO: 1988. [We were] very excited. KIAZI: We definitely were. Lungusu cried for a good period of time. Boueta wasn’t born yet. Muisi and I just
I performed with Pops. But, he would always make sure that the arts weren’t impacting school. My mother passed at 16, then I moved up to Oakland full time and was commuting (to school), until I graduated. On life with Malonga MUISI-KONGO: A message we always heard from my father is, there’s no such thing as a half sibling. There’s no confusion around the fact that we’re siblings. We grew up in different households partially as an extension of each other. But in the mind, he’s not my half brother because that’s not a thing. That’s not how we grew up. That’s not like the mindset that we were given. KIAZI: Pops used to have us at the [Diata Diata] rehears- als on Sundays. I’m like, dude, can I just go home? When I was younger, I used to hate to be the token African boy that would drum at Black History Month in school. I’m trying to play ball, you know? As I got older, reflecting on the fact that I come from parents who saw the importance of being rooted in art. Pops would always tell us to always master and learn your art because it will take you places and put you in rooms with people who otherwise you wouldn’t be connected with, and if you need them, you have a plethora of a community that you can lean into.
MUISI-KONGO: My mom is Dr. Faye McNair-Knox. Her mother, Sarah Lee Williams McNair was from Augusta, GA and her father, Rev. Elisha Bonaparte McNair was from Bassfield, Mississippi. I think both of our moms’ families have roots in Mississippi before migrating West. My mom was a preacher’s kid. She was a brilliant scholar who studied and taught at Stanford, a super revolution- ary, Pan-Africanist. We attended African-centered schools and grew up in the same CME church she grew up in,
to our family and had a common language to communi- cate with. My mom was a military brat similar to our dad. Okay. Our dad’s father was part of an African infantry unit known as ‘Les tirailleurs Sénégalais’ in World War II. I lived in a few different places. My mom was a scholar…a college professor and linguist, but she kept up the pattern of fre- quent movement from her upbringing in a military family throughout her academic career. A couple of years in Vir- ginia, in Miami, in New Jersey. I was with her for some
MUISI-KONGO: Our dad cooked a lot. People are always coming over. People were always living with us. We’d
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