Two South African venues have cancelled concerts by Congolese singer Koffi Olomide, who was recently convicted of the statutory rape of one of his former dancers when she was 15.
Olomide, 62, whose real name is Antoine Agbepa Mumba, had been due to play the Gallagher Convention Centre outside Johannesburg on June 28 and the Shimmy Beach Club in Cape Town two days later.
But protesters launched a social media campaign to stop the concerts due to his conviction.
“Kindly be advised the Koffi Olomide show … will not be taking place,” Gallagher Convention Centre chief executive Charles Wilson said in a statement on Wednesday.
Shimmy Beach “made the decision last week not to host the Koffi Olomide event that was being run by an outside promoter,” the club said on Twitter on Tuesday.
The shows were cancelled following protests by a group known as Stop Koffi Olomide, which insisted on barring the musician from performing in South Africa.
In March, a French court handed down a two-year suspended prison sentence to Olomide after a trial that he did not attend.
But it acquitted him of assault and kidnapping charges and the sexual assault of three other women at his house near Paris between 2002 and 2006.
Olomide was briefly jailed in DR Congo in 2016 for kicking one of his dancers, and was given a suspended three-month prison sentence in 2012 for striking his producer.
He is also being sought by Zambian police for striking a Rwandan photojournalist in Lusaka in 2012.
Over the years, Olomide has faced many controversies and run-ins with the law.
CONCERT
In 2008, he faced an accusation of assaulting a television cameraman at a concert in Kinshasa, DR Congo. The two later settled the matter out of court.
In 2012, the musician received a suspended three-month jail sentence for assaulting his producer in Kinshasa.
He was arrested and deported from Kenya in 2016 after he was caught on camera assaulting one of his female dancers at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
In 2018, an arrest warrant was issued against him in Zambia when he was accused of assaulting a photojournalist from Rwanda in 2012.
