Paul Lomami Tshibamba

Life and career

Tshibamba was born in Brazzaville from Congolese parents. The family returned in 1920 to Léopoldville (present-day Kinshasa) in the Belgian Congo.

He studied at the Minor Seminary of Mbata-Kiela, in the Mayumbe in Bas-Congo. Although the school was run by Belgian missionaries who encouraged their pupils to join the priesthood, he did not become a priest. Five years after leaving school he was struck by deafness, an illness from which he never fully recovered despite the good medical care that he received.

After various jobs including as a clerk with the "periodical for Christian natives," La Croix du Congo (The Cross of the Congo) published in Kinshasa and as a typist at the Direction of Aeronautics Works of Kalina, under the central government, he became a journalist with the Voix du Congolais (Voice of the Congolese). He published articles critical of Belgian colonization for which he is tortured and imprisoned by the colonial administration. He went into exile in Brazzaville from 1950 to 1959. There he became one of the main forces behind the magazine "Liaison".

At the same time he had success as a writer in Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo. In 1948 he was awarded in Brussels the first prize at the "Foire coloniale" (Colonial Fair) for his novella Ngando (Crocodile). The work, which in many ways marks the beginning of Congolese national literature in French, depicts traditional beliefs during the colonial period in a story set on the banks of the Congo River. Its themes of alienation and cultural conflict are further developed in his subsequent works. Lomami-Tshibamba returned to Congo-Zaire after independence and held several government posts. In 1962 he started a newspaper, Le Progrès (Progress), later known as Salongo.

He published further stories and novellas.

Throughout his work, Lomami Tshibamba remained faithful to the imagination of the African tradition. Lomami Tshibamba is considered a significant pioneer of contemporary Congolese literature.