Sofie Boonen

M(g)r. De Hemptin(n)e, I Presume? Transforming Local Memory Through Toponymy in Colonial/Post-Colonial Lubumbashi, DR Congo

In 2010, the Congolese city of Lubumbashi celebrated the centennial of its foundation. Numerous activities were organised on the occasion, most of which celebrated rather than critically assessed the city’s colonial past. It was precisely during this year that Moise Katumbi Chapwe, the current provincial governor of Katanga and one of Congo’s rising political stars, decided to re-baptise one of the central avenues in Lubumbashi’s city centre, changing its name from Avenue de Tabora to Avenue Mgr. Jean-Felix de Hemptinne. Making a tribute to the head of the missionary congregation of the Benedictine fathers and a notorious figure of Lubumbashi’s colonial history was a rather remarkable decision, all the more so since this particular avenue had been the symbolic axis of Belgian colonial power during colonial times. One can wonder then to what extent Katumbi’s initiative was an act similar to what the prominent Africanist scholar Valentin Mudimbe, who was born and trained in Lubumbashi, described in his 1994 book Les corps glorieux des mots et des etres as the conscious transformation of (local) memory through a new colonial toponymic inscription in space.