Off to Kasai
This will be last blog posting for about two weeks. Tomorrow morning I will be traveling to Kasai Occidental, a province east of Kinshasa, in the central part of DRC. During my stay there, I will probably not have internet access. Kananga, the region’s largest city, does not have electricity. (But, then again, given Congolese ingenuity, I would not be shocked to find some cybercafes…)
I will be traveling with a group of “missionary kids,” American Presbyterians who were born in Congo in the 1950s to missionary parents. They all grew up in the 1960s at the mission stations that were founded by William Henry Sheppard, an African American from Virginia, and his colleagues beginning in 1891. For the first twenty years, the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (of the otherwise segregated southern Presbyterian Church US) was a majority black and racially integrated mission based at Luebo. The Belgian authorities considered African Americans to be at best bad role models and at worst politically dangerous, so the mission stopped appointing blacks. Before, during, and after his service, Sheppard was a well-known figure in the US through his speeches and writings, and my research documents his importance as a conduit through which Americans learned about the Central Africa.
The group that I will be accompanying is all white. None of them have been back in more than 35 years. They do continue to collaborate on some projects, mainly health care. I think they will be given quite a homecoming. The opportunity to visit these places is fortuitous for me since they are mostly inaccessible by road or rail. (We will be traveling mostly by small aircraft.)
Hopefully my experiences in Kasai will provide enough good material for the blog to compensate for the two-week wait. If you are looking for a fix of reading material, I heard that the Congo made the cover of Time magazine this week. I have not seen it yet myself and am duly skeptical of its content but I will be interested to hear what it has to report.
When I return, it is possible that the university will be shut down. It almost certainly will close during the election period (too much students militancy) though the dates have not yet been fixed. I will miss a few other things while I am away:
I will be traveling with a group of “missionary kids,” American Presbyterians who were born in Congo in the 1950s to missionary parents. They all grew up in the 1960s at the mission stations that were founded by William Henry Sheppard, an African American from Virginia, and his colleagues beginning in 1891. For the first twenty years, the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (of the otherwise segregated southern Presbyterian Church US) was a majority black and racially integrated mission based at Luebo. The Belgian authorities considered African Americans to be at best bad role models and at worst politically dangerous, so the mission stopped appointing blacks. Before, during, and after his service, Sheppard was a well-known figure in the US through his speeches and writings, and my research documents his importance as a conduit through which Americans learned about the Central Africa.
The group that I will be accompanying is all white. None of them have been back in more than 35 years. They do continue to collaborate on some projects, mainly health care. I think they will be given quite a homecoming. The opportunity to visit these places is fortuitous for me since they are mostly inaccessible by road or rail. (We will be traveling mostly by small aircraft.)
Hopefully my experiences in Kasai will provide enough good material for the blog to compensate for the two-week wait. If you are looking for a fix of reading material, I heard that the Congo made the cover of Time magazine this week. I have not seen it yet myself and am duly skeptical of its content but I will be interested to hear what it has to report.
When I return, it is possible that the university will be shut down. It almost certainly will close during the election period (too much students militancy) though the dates have not yet been fixed. I will miss a few other things while I am away:
- President Kabila’s wedding this weekend (though I was not invited).
- The opening World Cup matches (including the tantalizing opening round game between Angola and Portugal. Go Angola!)
posted by irad at 9:33 AM
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