Scripting Kinshasa's Teleserials: Reflections on Authorship, Creativity, and Ownership

This chapter introduces Congolese approaches toward authorship in the context of local television serials. Film production is rare in Kinshasa, capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Instead, Kinshasa's drama groups exclusively and continuously produce "serials," in which one story is told over a number of episodes with a finite beginning and end. This chapter explores how authorship works in this setting. It begins with a brief discussion of the notion of "the author," as the "maker" of the scripts, and extends it to a discussion of "the artist," although they are not the same. Next, it describes how the teleserials' narratives are plotted in order to unravel the most important authorial voices co-constituting Kinshasa's television serials. Then, the chapter moves on to the religious context that adds another - layer of meaning and authorship to Kinshasa's teleserials. The final parts of the chapter engage with "ownership."