ABSTRACT
This text was written by a woman from the Congo, who was arrested by the Belgian police on grounds of shoplifting. The text was written on official police stationery. In the Belgian legal system, everyone has the right to go on record with his/her own account. That means: one would be asked whether one ‘can write’, and if so, one would be invited to write one’s own account of the events. This document, then, becomes a legally consequential element in the criminal prosecution case: it is ‘the story of the accused’ and both the defence lawyer and the prosecution will refer to it as such. Observe that under Belgian law, suspects have the right to write in a language of their choice. In this case, the woman obviously confirmed that she ‘could write’, and she chose to write in Lingala, the lingua franca of Kinshasa and of the Congolese diaspora.
