The Commonwealth, that peculiar club of former imperial outposts and a few opportunistic joiners, has once again proven its knack for theatrical irrelevance. This week, the organisation saw fit to bestow a major honour upon Fally Ipupa, the Congolese soukous singer, celebrating his ‘contribution to cultural ties’. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief in Marlborough House: finally, a news cycle that does not involve queries about the organisation’s actual purpose.
Let us be clear: I have no quarrel with Mr Ipupa’s music. His rhythms are infectious, his stage presence electric. The man can fill stadiums from Kinshasa to Paris. But to frame this award as a milestone in ‘cultural diplomacy’ is to confuse a pop concert with a state funeral. The Commonwealth, a body that has struggled for decades to justify its existence beyond tea and commemorative photographs, now clutches at the hem of a Congolese celebrity as if he were a diplomatic Rosetta Stone.
The irony is thick enough to spread on scones. The Congo, a nation ravaged by what historians will call the great resource wars of the 21st century, has been a member of this Commonwealth for only a year. Its inclusion was a bureaucratic formality, a nod to the Francophone world’s slow crawl into the Anglosphere’s orbit. Now, the Commonwealth pretends that a singer’s honour is a step toward ‘strengthening cultural ties’ between Britain and a country where British diplomacy has been, at best, absent, and at worst, complicit in resource extraction.
But this is the modern way: replace hard power with soft fluff. Where once the British Empire spread its influence through gunboats and governors, today’s Commonwealth deploys gongs and galas. Fally Ipupa becomes a symbol of this shift: a charming, harmless icon whose award costs nothing, risks nothing, and achieves nothing. It is a gesture so empty that it echoes.
One thinks of the Victorians, who understood that cultural exchange was a byproduct of commerce and conquest, not a substitute for it. When the Royal Society sent naturalists to the colonies, they did so alongside surveyors and soldiers. Today’s Commonwealth sends… a plaque. It is the intellectual decadence of an era that has mistaken PR for policy, iconography for influence.
And what of the Congo itself? The country remains a cauldron of instability, its eastern provinces prey to militias, its minerals feeding the world’s smartphones. Will Mr Ipupa’s award stabilise the region? Will it bring justice to the victims of exploitation? Of course not. But it will generate headlines, provide a momentary glow of multicultural bonhomie, and allow Commonwealth bureaucrats to tick a box marked ‘relevance’.
This is not to disparage Mr Ipupa’s artistry. He is a genuine talent, a man whose voice carries the pain and joy of his people. But to conflate his personal success with a geopolitical organisation’s cultural reach is to commit a category error of staggering proportions. The Commonwealth promotes cultural ties in the same way a museum promotes taxidermy: it preserves, it displays, but it does not breathe life.
Perhaps this is the fate of post-imperial bodies: to become curators of nostalgia, handing out baubles to musicians while the real work of diplomacy lies abandoned. The Fall of Rome, after all, was preceded by a flourishing of circuses. We have our own circuses now: pop stars, awards, carefully staged photographs. The barbarians are at the gate, but at least the band is playing.
So let us congratulate Fally Ipupa. He deserves his moment. But let us not pretend that his honour is anything more than a cheap patch on a tattered institutional garment. The Commonwealth, like a fading aristocrat, throws a party to forget its own irrelevance. The music is loud, the champagne is flowing, but the house is crumbling.
