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On Friday May 23, 2025, the Africa Platform of Ghent University Association invited several professors and students working at UGent to meet three Congolese personalities:

• Danny Boss Singoma, director of the Centre National d’Appui au Développement et à la Participation populaire;
• Benjamin Diya Muabila, lawyer in Gombe, and active participant in campaigns in favor of respect for the fundamental rights and the rule of law;
• Pascal Tschiamala, hepato-gastro-enterologist and national coordinator of the Programme National de Lutte contre les Hépatites Virales.

UGent research group presentations were given by

• prof. dr. ir. Pascal Boeckx for of the UGent Congo Basin Centre of Excellence;
• dr. Heidi Goes for BantUGent, the UGent Centre for Bantu Studies;
• prof. dr. Koen Vlassenroot for the Conflict Research Group;
• prof. dr. Xavier Verhelst for the Hepato-Enterology Department of UZ Ghent.

The meet-and-greet ended with an interesting discussion and an exchange of ideas and presents.

The talk ‘Broken in Uganda’, which Gilles-Maurice de Schryver presented on August 15, 2023, at the ‘Third Biannual Conference of the Language Association of Eastern Africa’ in Kampala, is now available on YouTube. In this talk focusing on the Ugandan language Lusoga, he criticizes Uganda’s National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), an institution under the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoE&S) responsible for the development of educational curricula for Pre-primary, Primary, Secondary and Tertiary institutions in Uganda, for not taking indigenous Bantu languages seriously enough.

Op zondag 27 april van 10u tot 12u geeft Maud Devos (KMMA/BantUGent) een openbare lezing over het Swahili op uitnodiging van de gemeente Tervuren.

On April 18-19, 2025, the fourth meeting of the Princeton Phonology Forum (PɸF 2025) took place at Princeton University (New Jersey, USA). The theme for PɸF 2025 was Sound Patterns and Human History. The workshop brought together scholars whose research examines the connection between human history, events, and migration (as evidenced from oral history, archeology, genetics, etc.) and large-scale areal zones of sound system convergence. BantUGent was present with two talks:

• Koen Bostoen “West-Coastal Bantu diachronic phonology and deep-time population contact in the Lower Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo“
• Sara Pacchiarotti “The lexicon and phonology of Fulu: insights into the population history of a small-scale Central Sudanic language spoken in northwestern DR Congo“

Former rector at Scolasticat Père Laurent Nkongolo and the first rector of the Philosophat Saint Augustin in Kinshasa, Missionary of Scheut Father Damase Ndembe Nsasi (b. 1st of November 1936 in Bete di Niolo, Mayombe, DRC) sadly passed away at the Centre Médical Kinois (CMK), Kinshasa, on April 9, 2025. Three days of funeral program will be held after Easter (21-23 April), including several masses, a condolences book and time for testimonies.

Damase Ndembe Nsasi defended his doctoral dissertation in Leiden, the Netherlands, on the verb in Kiyombe, his mother tongue, under the supervision of Achiel Emiel Meeussen. His dissertation is one of the important Kiyombe sources cited in the doctoral dissertation of Heidi Goes (BantUGent) on the Kikongo Language Cluster.

In August 2021 Father Ndembe Nsasi celebrated 60 years since his ordination as a priest and only two years ago, in april 2023, a celebration was held on the occasion of the release of a book in Father Ndembe’s honour about the promotion of local languages. He spent his last years in Maison Symeon for elderly and chronically sick missionaries, close to the Fatima Mission house, where Heidi Goes and her Kiyombe-speaking partner visited him in the week before the book launch (see pictures). It was a pleasure having a conversation together in Flemish and Kiyombe. Father Ndembe Nsasi will be remembered in and outside of Congo. May he rest in peace! Muelaku u vundila mu ndembama!

In a rebuttal to the Padilla-Iglesias et al. (2024) paper published in the Nature Human Behaviour journal, the BantUGent scholars Hilde Gunnink, Sara Pacchiarotti, Guy Kouarata, Paulin Baraka Bose and Koen Bostoen refute the claim that ten Central African Hunter-Gatherer communities share a history of genetic, cultural, and linguistic evolution, that started many millennia before the first food producers settled in the Congo basin. Padilla-Iglesias et al. (2024) base this claim on comparative evidence from musical instruments, foraging tools, specialized vocabulary and genome-wide data. Hilde Gunnink and colleagues consider the linguistic evidence for this hypothesis unsubstantiated because (1) the historical-linguistic methodology of Padilla-Iglesias et al. (2024) is flawed, and (2) much relevant data were overlooked. As Nature Human Behaviour has not published yet their rebuttal titled “Central African Hunter-Gatherer Music Lexicon Does Not Predate the Bantu Expansion” (submitted on June 26, 2024), Hilde Gunnink and colleagues published a pre-print on SocArXiv, the open archive of the social sciences.

On March 25, 2025, Prof. Charles Kumbatulu Sita Bangbasa (Kisangani University) honored BantUGent with a visit together with his assistant Brandy Ntumba Tshimanga (Kisangani University). Prof. Kumbatulu is on a short research stay in Belgium for the PhD defense of David Kopa wa Kopa at Brussels University (ULB).