Hugo Daems
The author lived seven years in the Congo as a servant of the Belgian government. He fostered deep bonds with the primitive Sonde tribe and gained the full confidence of Kianza, their illiterate tribal chirf, who inspired this book.
The deep knowledge of the earliest African life is lost forever because those who knew it could not write and those who had learned to write never knew it. Primitive African life is now overshadowed by a brand new "Africa in transition". This development took less than 75 years.
Original tribal life in Africa is covered with a handful of stories as told by the chief and his father. The social hierarchy of the tribe, their laws and enforcement, worship and witchcraft, slavery and the role of ghosts, initiation processses into manhood and various secret societies get to the glue that secured the social order of a tribe that was only one step beyond the original hunter-gatherer's way of life.
Hugo Daems was exposed to Congolese culture from a very early age. His parents went to the Belgian Congo in 1921, shortly after WWI. His father was the harbor master of Matatdi and helped establish MANU-CONGO, (later called OTRACO), a railroad system between Matadi and Kinshasa. Some of the young natives hired by his parents grew up and found employment on passenger ships commuting between Matadi and Antwerp. They visited his parents in Antwerp regularly and soon Hugo learned to speak Kikongo, one of the principal languages in Congo.
His father died a short time after Hugo graduated from high school. The author worked his way through college as a dock worker in Antwerp. After graduating from both the Business and Political Science programs at the Colonial University of Antwerp, he was drafted in the Belgian Air Force, where he became a Lieutenant. As soon as he was discharged, he married and left for the Congo where he served in the Administration for the Belgian Government.
In 1961, after Congo had become independent, he emigrated to the USA with his wife and daughter. He worked at first as an assembly line worker for Hewlett Packard, graduated from UC Berkeley in 1965 with an MBA degree, and found employment in international finance departments with several major US companies. In 1980 he started his own management consulting company and obtained important assignments for projects in every continent.
Besides articles in professional magazines he also published a book entitled BUSINESS PLANNING AND FINANCING to help bridge the education gap between engineering and accounting curricula.
Reviewer Mwasha Bukeni (Seattle)
I own over a thousand books on a wide range of subjects regarding Africa. This is THE BEST book in plain English about what life is like in a Central African tribe from the perspective of an African.
I have also traveled to the Congo and other countries for research. This book gets it right, helping to create a cohesive picture of life there without a bunch of anthropological, high institutional speak. A must, must read.
