Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) co-authored a chapter on the Kongo Kingdom for a Belgian 4th grade secondary school textbook (Dutch) on the history of the 16th century. In an accompanying video he explains in Dutch how scholars reconstruct ancient African history and how they rely on language sources for this endeavor.
Peter Coutros (BantUGent, BantuFirst project) has just returned from an archaeological field mission in the DRC. Between August 16 and September 29, Dr. Coutros and Prof. Igor Matonda Sakala (UniKin & BantUgent associate) returned with their team to the Kwilu and Kasai Rivers for continued research and community outreach. This year, they were conducting survey of new areas as well as returning for more intensive investigations at locations identified during the 2021 mission. More than 50 new sites were identified – dating from the Middle Stone Age through the Early Iron Age – and excavations were conducted at numerous sites along the two rivers.
From September 13 until October 4, 2022, Prof. Jean-Pierre Donzo (ISP-Gombe, Kinshasa & BantUGent) & Marie-Faustine Beloko (ISP-Gombe, Kinshasa) carry out a BantuFirst fieldwork mission amongst several Batwa or Pygmy communities in the Lomela territory of DRC’s Sankuru Province. They aim at inventorizing and mapping the different Batwa languages in that part of the DRC and collecting audo recordings of basic lexical and grammatical data in those Bantu languages. It is an exploratory mission to prepare a more in-depth documentation project.
On 6 September 2022, Mandela Kaumba Mazanga successfully defended in Brussels her PhD thesis titled Production et circulation de la céramique des trois derniers siècles dans l’aire kongo : une approche combinée des données ethnographiques, muséales et archéologiques. Her joint UGent-ULB PhD project co-supervised by Koen Bostoen (BantUGent), Pierre de Maret (ULB) and Olivier Gosselain (ULB) started as part of the ERC-funded KongoKing project. Following her successful defense, Mandela Kaumba Mazanga resumed her professional activities at the Department of Historical Sciences of Lubumbashi University (DRC).
At the 23rd Biennial International Conference of The African Languages Association of Southern Africa, which takes place at the University of the Western Cape September 21-24, Hilde Gunnink (BantUGent), Natalia Chousou-Polydouri (University of Zürich) & Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) will give a talk titled “The population history of Southern Africa: insights from linguistic subclassification“. The full draft program is available here.
On August 29, 2022, Sara Pacchiarotti (BantUGent) and Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) were invited at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de la Gombe in Kinshasa to talk about BantUGent research on the Bantu Expansion. Their talk was titled “L’occupation ancienne de l’Afrique centrale par les Bantouphones: recherches linguistiques et archéologiques“. Prof. Jean-Pierre Donzo (ISP-Gombe & BantUGent associate) animated the talk and the lively debate that followed.
From August 6 until August 30, 2022, Sara Pacchiarotti & Koen Bostoen are on a BantuFirst mission in the DRC. They mainly stay with Prof. Joseph Koni Muluwa (ISP Kikwit & BantUGent associate) in Kikwit where they are doing linguistic fieldwork on several West-Coastal Bantu languages, most notably Eastern and Western Ngwi (B861). They also teach classes in Methods in Linguistic Research (Sara) and Comparative Bantu Linguistics (Koen) at the MA1 students of the English and African Cultures program at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Kikwit. In Kinshasa they work with Prof. Jean-Pierre Donzo Yugia (ISP-Gombe & BantUGent associate) on other West-Coastal Bantu languages, mainly Northern Boma (B82).
In the morning of Monday August 15, 2022, Prof. Timothée Mukash Kalel (1946-2022) passed away at the Munkole hospital in Kinshasa at the age of 75. He was a lecturer at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique of Kikwit and Kikwit University (UNIKIK) before leaving for Paris, where he obtained his PhD degree in Linguistics at Université Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1982. Later on he became a professor in African Linguistics at the University of Kinshasa (UNIKIN), where he mainly taught and did research on the syntax of Bantu languages. He is well-known for the research he did on his first language Kanyok on which he published several works, amongst others Dictionnaire kanyòk-français (2012) and Essai de grammaire kanyòk, L32 : phonologie, morphologie, syntaxe (2013). Between 1995 and 2005 he was the Permanent Secretary of the Congolese Observatory of Languages and since 2006 he had been the General Commissioner of the African Languages Festival in the DRC. On April 22, 2022, we were happy to welcome him as an online external assessor during the PhD defense of Michel Onokoko at Ghent University. BantUGent deeply regrets his passing and expresses heartfelt condolences to Prof. Mukash Kalel’s family on their loss.
Prof. Georges Kamba Muzenga (1942-2022) passed away on August 5, 2022, in Brussels at the age of 80. The field of Bantu Studies loses a great historical-comparative linguist. After having graduated in classical philology at the Catholic University of Louvain, Georges Kamba Muzenga obtained a PhD in African linguistics at the University of Brussels (ULB) in 1978. He was a professor at the Institut Supérieur de Lubumbashi, where he served for a while as General Academic Secretary. He also taught at Lubumbashi University (UNILU). Apart from numerous articles on different topics in Bantu historical-comparative linguistics, he wrote several books such as Esquisse de grammaire kete (1980), Les formes verbales négatives dans les langues bantoues (1981), Substitutifs et possessifs en bantou (2003). In 2018 he participated in the International Conference on Reconstructing Proto-Bantu Grammar at Ghent University. His talk on Proto-Bantu substitutives and possessives can be relistened here. BantUGent expresses heartfelt condolences to Prof. Kamba Muzenga’s family on their loss.
At Euralex 2022, Minah Nabirye (BantUGent) and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (BantUGent) present the first monitor corpus for a Bantu language, and show how it can be used to detect neologisms (both new words and new meanings) in Lusoga. The recording is available here.
