From the Congo Basin to the world's stages.
Marius Billgobenson was born Marius Billy in Ingoumina, a village in the southern Republic of Congo, inside a Swedish Mission Station where his father directed the gospel choir. He learned guitar from the missionaries. He sang before he could frame what singing was for. Music was the atmosphere.
When the Congo Civil War came, he took refuge with the Forest People — the Aka and Babongo-Mbenga Pygmies of the Congo Basin. What saved him was not food or shelter alone. It was their music. The polyphonic singing tradition of the Forest People is a documented healing practice: layered voices, interlocking rhythms, sound as community medicine. He listened. He sang with them. His body and mind reorganised around it.
In 1997, he founded Afrique Profonde — the NGO dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage and human rights of the Forest People in the Congo Basin — an act of commitment to the people who had saved his life. He then carried that experience to Europe: earning a Master of Science in Research in Anthropology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, studying Cultural Diplomacy at the Institute of Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, completing the UNITAR certificate in Public Diplomacy in a Multipolar World in Geneva in 2013, and deepening his academic grounding with a Master of Arts at the Institution for Culture and Media at Umeå University in Sweden. Between 2003 and 2006, he served at the World Culture Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, and he went on to become Cultural Attaché for the Congolese Embassy in Sweden. Since 2011, he has been a member of the Princeton Global Network, a world-leading community of thinkers, leaders, and changemakers.
The keynote concert is the convergence of all of it. Not a speaker who plays guitar. Not a musician who also gives talks. A 45–60 minute experience in which live jazz — informed by two decades of professional performance, collaboration with double Grammy-winning producer Paul Brown, and a catalogue of songs that have reached 152 countries with 361% listener growth — and a first-person survival story work together as a single emotional technology. Because that is exactly what the Forest People were already doing.
