ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1999 I co-organised a conference called Belgium’s Africa. Speakers there included Johannes Fabian and Bogumil Jewsiwiecki; both of them spoke on aspects of the work of Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, a popular painter from Lubumbashi.1 During a conversation with Jewsiwiecki after his lecture, I expressed my interest in grassroots literacy and talked about the lives of Julien. A few weeks later I received a parcel from Jewsiwiecki. It contained a pack of school essays written by pupils in Kinshasa in 1997 (very interesting and rare materials). But it also contained a spectacular document: a copy of a handwritten text by Tshibumba. The text was 73 pages long, written in French in a cheap copybook (a so-called cahier de brouillon) and carrying the title:
L histoire du Zaïre Ecrit par un ZAÏROIS aux années 1980 et cela au ZAÏRE dans la Region du SHABA à LUBUMBASHI. (TSHIBUMBA-K.M.).
