13 CONGO Warning: Please Always Quote the Source Below When Using
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
13 CONGO Warning: Please always quote the source below when using this information. Source: Antoon De Baets, Censorship of Historical Thought: A World Guide 1945–2000 (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, © 2002), 136–39 [Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.] Note: Passages marked in yellow are updates added between 1 January 2002 (publication date of the book) and 1 March 2005. After 1970, it was apparently very difficult for Zairese (Congolese) historians to write on postindependence history, especially political contemporary history. President Mobutu Sese Sekos official policy of authenticity and return to the roots notwithstanding, freedom of speech restrictions reportedly made it impossible to develop any historical reflections that started from the present. The situation appeared to have worsened after the April 1990 political reforms. Belgian Congo 1951 A bulaam (wise person or local community historian) of the Bushong, the ruling Kuba people, was possibly poisoned by the Bushong king for relating traditions to the European district commissioner that were reportedly harmful to the royal interest. 1953 In October another bulaam, Shep Mathias, was possibly poisoned on orders of the king with acid from a car battery, reportedly because he had told historian Vansina [q.v. 1971] “too many secrets”. Congo 1967 In April Lumumba Patrice: Les cinquante derniers jours de sa vie (Brussels/Paris 1966), a book by G. Heinz and H[enri] Donnay (pseudonyms for the Belgian scholars Jules Gérard-Libois and Jacques Brassinne) about the house arrest, escape, imprisonment, transfer to Katanga, and assassination on 17 January 1961 of Congos first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba (1925–61), was confiscated by the security services one day after its distribution and successful sale, including sale at the Parliament. The book, originally meant to be an element in an official campaign to rehabilitate Lumumba, suggested that some government members were implicated in the assassination and came at a moment when Mobutu (ruled 1965–98) wanted to abolish all political parties, including the one founded by Lumumba (and of which Mobutu had been a member before). Zaire 1971 In June three history students (names unknown) “disappeared” when Lovanium University, Kinshasa, was closed. In protest, historian Jan Vansina (1929–), professor at the universities of Madison, Wisconsin, United States (1960–94) and Lovanium, resigned in the fall by taking a “leave of undetermined length”. He was told that he could not return to Zaire anymore. Lovanium was nationalized and later merged with the universities of Kisangani and Lubumbashi into the National University of Zaire. In November the history department was transferred to Lubumbashi. Twenty years later it became known that two of the “disappeared” students had been sent to Ekafera concentration camp in the rain forests but had survived. The third student had not been heard from or seen since the abduction. Vansina resided in Congo (1954–56, 1966-67, 1971), Rwanda and Burundi (1953–54, 1957– 60), Congo-Brazzaville (1963–64), Libya (1978) and Gabon (1980). 1981– Philosopher, historian, and writer Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (1941–), professor at the National University of Zaire (1975–81), fled to the United States to avoid punishment after refusing to enter the Central Committee of the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (Popular Revolutionary Movement; the only political party legally allowed), to which he had been named by presidential decree. He was appointed a professor of comparative literature and anthropology at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and later a professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. In December 1981 Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba (1942–), Zairese history and philosophy lecturer at Dar-es-Salaam University, Tanzania (1980–), was arrested when he entered Zaire for a visit to his parents and for research on opposition movements from 1963 to 1969. His travel documents were confiscated and he was searched. The Military Intelligence and Security Service G2 found some student papers, an incomplete manuscript, and his notes from a Washington conference. He was held incommunicado for more than a month and beaten at the OAU-2 prison. He was accused of possessing subversive documents and of having links with opposition movements. In 1971 he had resigned his post 14 as a cabinet director in the ministry of social welfare, labor and housing, to protest the repression of the students at the closure of Lovanium, and gone into exile in the United States and Tanzania. In 1971–80 he studied and lectured at Boston College and Brandeis University, among other venues. He had been involved with a group of Zairese exile academics who had published commentaries on the developments in Zaire. At the time of his arrest, he was returning from a tour in the United States where he had participated in a conference organized by Zairese scholars in Washington, D.C.. After an international protest campaign, including an intervention from Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, he was released from prison without trial in January 1982. He had to report to the state security offices every other day until he was definitively released in October. He was forbidden to return to Zaire until 1992, when he was invited by the Sovereign National Conference to participate in its scientific group. He was the author, with historian Jacques Depelchin, of the African Declaration against Genocide (1997). In 1997 he was the president of the Conseil pour le Développement de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales en Afrique (Codesria; Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) at Dakar, Senegal. From 1998 he has been a leader of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD; Congolese Rally for Democracy), engaged in a rebellion against the government of Presidents Laurent- Désiré Kabila and Joseph Kabila. 1984 In [May] some official archives were reportedly burned in Lubumbashi. Congo 2000 On 26 July BBC television producer Caroline Parr was detained in Kinshasa by the security services, along with her assistant and Jonas Munkamba, whom she was interviewing about the 1961 assassination of Lumumba. Also see Belgium (1940s: Congo Free State archives; 1959–: Boelaert; 1975–: Marchal; 1986: Vangroenweghe). Sources Africa©s Who©s Who (London 1991) 1182 (Mudimbe). Amnesty International, Report (London) 1982: 95; 1983: 96. Boyd, K. ed., Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (London/Chicago 1999) 1252–53. Boele van Hensbroek, P., personal communication, July 1999. Brown, S., D. Collinson, & R. Wilkinson eds., Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers (London/New York 1996) 551–52. De Witte, L., De moord op Lumumba (Leuven 1999) 398. Duffy, J., M. Frey, & M. Sins eds., International Directory of Scholars and Specialists in African Studies (Waltham, Mass. 1978) 300. Index on Censorship, 1/82: 48; 2/82: 48; 4/82: 48; 5/82: 49–50; 1/83: 48; 5/00: 96. Jewsiewicki, B. & D. Newbury eds., African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa? (Londen/Beverly Hills 1986). Mbata Mangu Bétukumesu, A., “Zaire: Academic Freedom under Siege”, in: Codesria, The State of Academic Freedom in Africa 1995 (Dakar 1996) 155. Mwa Bawele, M., “Authenticité, Histoire et Développement”, Authenticité et Développement (Kinshasa/Dakar 1982) 186–87. —, “LIvolution de lHistoriographie en Afrique Centrale: Le Cas du Zaïre”, Storia della Storiografia, 1991, no.19: 100, 105–6. —, & Sabakinu Kivilu, “Historical Research in Zaire: Present Status and Future Perspectives”, in: Jewsiewicki & Newbury eds. 1986: 227, 229. Slater, H., “Dar es Salaam and the Postnationalist Historiography of Africa”, in: Jewsiewicki & Newbury eds. 1986: 257–58. Vansina, J., Living with Africa (Madison 1994) 17–18, 154, 164–66, 219, 259–60, 285. —, personal communication, August 1999. Vinck, H., personal communication, July 1999. “Wamba Dia Wamba, Historien Zairois: Les Intellectuels Ont Contribué au Maintien du Régime de Mobutu”, Le Jour, 27 March 1997 (WWW-text). Willame, J.-C., Patrice Lumumba: La Crise Congolaise Revisitée (Paris 1990) 477–79. Woolf, D.R. ed., A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (New York/London 1998) 915–16..