In the morning of Monday August 15, 2022, Prof. Timothée Mukash Kalel (1946-2022) passed away at the Munkole hospital in Kinshasa at the age of 75. He was a lecturer at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique of Kikwit and Kikwit University (UNIKIK) before leaving for Paris, where he obtained his PhD degree in Linguistics at Université Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1982. Later on he became a professor in African Linguistics at the University of Kinshasa (UNIKIN), where he mainly taught and did research on the syntax of Bantu languages. He is well-known for the research he did on his first language Kanyok on which he published several works, amongst others Dictionnaire kanyòk-français (2012) and Essai de grammaire kanyòk, L32 : phonologie, morphologie, syntaxe (2013). Between 1995 and 2005 he was the Permanent Secretary of the Congolese Observatory of Languages and since 2006 he had been the General Commissioner of the African Languages Festival in the DRC. On April 22, 2022, we were happy to welcome him as an online external assessor during the PhD defense of Michel Onokoko at Ghent University. BantUGent deeply regrets his passing and expresses heartfelt condolences to Prof. Mukash Kalel’s family on their loss.
