Abstract
“To Africa for the voices, to Europe for the documents”. Unfortunately, this colonial cliché about the supposed dichotomy between African orality and European literacy still affects many of the research practices of scholars engaging with the history of empire. As Director of Physical and Digital Archiving at INACO in Kinshasa, NGALO MASUA Neré is in a good position to redress this imbalance and shed light on the wealth of historical archives preserved in the DRC. In this seminar, he will provide an overview of the contemporary archival sector in Congo, including INACO’s position within it, its objectives, and the challenges facing the archival institution. He will subsequently reflect on the possibilities for research into Congo’s colonial and postcolonial histories, and on how these collections relate to colonial archives held in Belgium. The presentation will be given in French.
Attendance is free, but we kindly ask you to register in advance via shoc@vub.be.