Bambi Ceuppens

As far as the unfinished conversations in Congo is concerned, I mentioned that very little history has been done on the Belgian involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, but what is even more striking is that no research has been in Congo or anywhere else. about the transatlantic slave trade in Congo, whereas we know that, if I’m not mistaken, up to 800,000 people were shipped from Boma, which was the capital of the Congo Free State under Leopold II. And so that’s why, because BOMA… formed part of the Congo Kingdom, whose capital was in Angola, and indeed most research relating to the transatlantic slave trade and the Congo kingdom focuses upon Angola and not on the Democratic Republic of Congo or the Republic of Kongo. And so one of the things that we wanted to do… when we started the unfinished conversations was see whether there were still memories of the transatlantic slave trade in the region of the Congo Kingdom in the DRC. And it turned out indeed that there were, which means that there is a huge potential to actually do more research on that. For practical reasons, we had to limit our research to Kinshasa, which is situated in the region of the Congo Kingdom, but which is also the capital of the RC, with some 13 million people, and the advantage is that you get people there who come from… all parts of the country, so on the one hand we really wanted to focus on people who live in the region of the Congo Kingdom to see whether they still had memories of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, whereas when considering the colonial period we wanted to extend it and to include people from other regions as well. and this was something that was possible in Kinshasa.