At the (Lion's) Club

At the beginning of the week, my dissertation student invited me to a Lion’s Club banquet at the Grand Hotel, the largest hotel in Kinshasa. The food was unimpressive (salad, roast beef with potato and tomato, and a pastry) if somewhat offset by the open bar and some mediocre Portuguese wine. There were a couple of speeches and a bunch of reporters on hand (I caught a segment on the evening news later in the week). It was a nice program, but the room was less than half full as a result of late invitations.

The event was quite luxurious for the stereotypical graduate student, which my student definitely is not. When he is not writing his dissertation, he serves in Parliament and is preparing to run for Senator in next year’s election. During the first couple of years of Laurent Kabila’s presidency, he was a cabinet minister. Now, during the day, he is at the Parliament debating whether or not to grant amnesty to war criminals. (He opposes the amnesty proposal, believing it sends a dangerous message heading into elections.) Then, between 1 am and 4 am he writes a dissertation about the image of the Congo is novels by Conrad, Greene, Naipaul, and Kingsolver. Politically, he supports the Constitution that comes up for referendum later this month and tells me that it will definitely pass (contradicting what I was told by an enthusiastic opposition Senator who I met at friend’s house last week).

As I mentioned in a previous blog, my student was a Fulbright junior scholar in the US in the mid-1980s. As he tells it, he was led to believe that he would be going for a Ph.D., but instead was only funded for a Master’s degree, which he received at NYU. (It was his second MA; he earned an MA in linguistics in England a few years earlier.) As the Mobutu government was increasingly isolated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were few opportunities for Congolese people to study abroad. Remarkably, he has continued to pursue his degree, which for him has pretty minimal financial or professional rewards. At 60 years of age, he heads the English department at the women’s teacher’s college in Kinshasa, serves in Parliament, and owns a house which he rents out. Plus, it is very difficult to get a Ph.D. at the universities here. This may be beginning to change. I just finished reading a dissertation, Perception of Poetic Discourse, a very good study of the difficulties that English students in Kinshasa have with poetry and some pedagogic suggestions. This student is scheduled to defend the week before Christmas and will be the UniKin English department’s first doctorate, and perhaps the first ever English Ph.D. granted by one of the country’s universities