ABSTRACT
Over the course of 1962-1967, the period when Willy and I did most of the research that we conducted in the context of the Centre de Recherches Sociologiques, I made five trips to the Congo—three of them during Christmas-New Year breaks in the academic calendar, one during the long academic summer vacation, and one for an entire sabbatical year (1964-1965). In addition, I spent some time during the summers of 1969 and 1972, and the 1976-1977 Christmas-New Year holiday interlude, in the Congo. Virtually all of these trips entailed more than pass-through visits to Belgium, or mere stopovers as I changed planes at the Brussels Zaventem airport to continue my flight onto Léopoldville/Kinshasa. In fact, I flew to the Congo for my short visit in 1976-1977 from my base in Belgium, where I was spending that academic year as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of Leuven and as a maître de cours in sociology at the University of Liège. Throughout this entire period, which spanned more than a decade, I was intensely absorbed in the Congo, while maintaining my relationship to Belgium.
