Quotessence
Home / Authors / Marcel Yabili

Marcel Yabili Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllCongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateBelgian CongoRdcAdam HochschildLumumbaAfriqueCongo BelgeCongo RdcFake NewsMarcel YabiliMissionariesSlaverySwahiliAfricaAfrikaColonialismLeopold Ii Of BelgiumLeopold S Ghost

Famous Marcel Yabili Quotes

“The anti-clericalism of some Belgians falsified history by attributing the low level of education to "the racism of the missionaries", while it was they who provided education and educated the African elite with the first university priest Stefano Kaoze in 1917”

EducationRacismColonialismCongoBelgiumBelgian CongoBelgiansMissionaries
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“In Belgium, secularism manifested itself in anticlericalism allied to the Freemasons. This led to the establishment of a secular university in Lubumbashi to counter the launch of the Catholic University, Lovanium, in Kinshasa. The first university courses were taught during the Second World War; this event is cut from the history of the country because it was the initiative of Catholic missionaries. For the same reasons, Jef Van Bilsen and the Manifesto of African Conscience of 30 June 1956 are cited as precursors of independence, without any mention of the Catholic bishops who had previously taken some distance from the Colony by calling for the political emancipation of Blacks and by condemning racism in all its forms. Such political rebellion by missionaries were common in Africa and it is still perpetuated within episcopal conferences.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateBelgian Congo
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“Scholarly studies have made missionaries the "pillars" of Belgian colonization, while, at least, evangelization and freedom of religion were compulsory programs of the Treaty of Berlin in 1885. Anticlericalism was thus militant and reductive, and falsified many aspects of history. It linked the low level, although widespread and free, of education to the racism of missionaries who would not have believed in the intellectual capacities of Blacks, even though they had started by training black priests or pastors’ counterparts.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateMissionariesAnticlericism
Author:Marcel Yabili
Create image

“It was put in the books that Thomas Kanza was the first university graduate, but he was a secular and a Congolese from Belgium (1956). The very first graduate was Paul Panda Farnana, an agronomist trained in Belgium (1907). But considering post-secondary education, it is father Stefano Kaoze (1917) who is the first graduate trained in Congo.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateBelgian CongoPaul Panda
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“The obsession with seeking in Africa's colonial past the causes of all its miseries today is the work of people intimately convinced that Africa is doomed, that it is unable to take care of itself today, and that, finally, the fate of the Black will only improve if the White comes back to repair what he has done wrong: these “hidden Afro- pessimists “ are hiding, under gratuitous accusations, anger, or demand for reparation, their own disarray. This explains why their words are sterile, never accompanied by proposals for solutions to the problems they evoke. They are doing a lot of harm to Africa because they divert issues that have worth.”

ColonialismAfricaCongoAnti ColonialismMarcel Yabili
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“This heroism was also that of the first missionaries. They had a life expectancy of about 5 years in Congo, and some were given extremely anointing at the time of their journey to Africa. There were many young idealists. Their graves are still lined up in the Mpala locality, which overlooks Lake Tanganyika. The Catholic mission was a fort where people who fled slavers and brutality took refuge.”

AfricaCongoMissionariesCatholic MissionLake Tanganyika
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“Ludo De Witte states that Lumumba was the only intelligent and respectable Congolese and that all the others were only children and puppets of whites. Only a white man, even subordinated to Blacks, is an adult, conscious and responsible. These are true little racist opinions.”

CongoLumumbaLudo De Witte
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“Adam Hochschild caused a stir with 10 million people killed in the Leopold Holocaust. He clearly says in the introduction of his book that he had learned on a plane, the estimated population of Congo in 1880 and that he had subsequently discovered, in a library, that the figure had diminished after the red rubber episode. But he then invented and maintained the intangible toll of 10 million disappeared people by a simple calculation of subtraction between two uncertain and changing censuses.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam Hochschild
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“Millions of dead' appears nowhere in the rich oral tradition of my ancestors, nor in Lumumba's speeches. Nor does it appear with Mobutu, who was born and raised in the Equator province, where the ABIR and the Anversoise exploited rubber.”

CongoRubberLeopold IiCongo Free StateBelgian CongoLumumbaMobutu Sese SekoAnversoiseAbirPatrive Lumumba
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“The much-criticised rubber regime of Leopold II had only a brief heyday and disappeared from the tables of Congolese resources shortly after 1900 in favour of palm oil and palm nuts. The production tables also show that the population increased from 1890 onwards and was not exterminated. In 1888, And revenue from the 'red' rubber largely went to the Free State for public expenditure, including road construction and the army. These budgets, too, are never cited by the narrators, ever. Ditto for the rubber tables, which show that far more rubber arrived in Antwerp from French Congo and Angola than from the Free State in the early period. Rubber from Congo Free State accounted for barely 10 per cent of world production. The big supplier was the Amazon with 70%.”

CongoRubberLeopold IiCongo Free StateBelgian CongoRed Rubber
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“Demographer Jean-Paul Sanderson, estimated the decline of the Congolese population during the reign of Leopold II and after, between 1885 and 1920 at several hundred thousand, and there were several reasons for this: diseases, malnutrition (including because men worked in the rubber harvest rather than farming), fewer births. Professor Anatole Romaniuk of the University of Alberta in Canada wrote a study on this, showing that almost half of the women in Congo in the second half of the 19th century suffered from Afro-Arab slavery and did not give birth to a single living child because of 'une stérilité massive pathologique d'origine vénérienne', i.e. because of massive infertility due to venereal disease. This factor trumped all other causes.”

SlaveryGenocideCongoLeopold IiFake NewsCongo Free StateArab SlaveryRuvver
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“Jules Marchal, Adam Hochschild, Lucas Catherine and Daniel Vangroenweghe deliberately did not publish reliable figures and did not read the 1905 investigation report, set by Leopold II. They are spreaders of fake news.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateAdam HochschildLeopold S Ghost
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“Il y a un très grave problème qui se pose au Congo. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de la violence dans l’Est, du viol des femmes. Il y a en cause, pour le moment, l’avenir même du Congo, parce que les Congolais ne lisent pas les livres. Et un peuple qui ne lit pas les livres n’a pas d’histoire, il n’a pas de mémoire collective. C’est un peuple qui est voué à la disparition. Donc, c’est cela ma grande préoccupation…”

CongoMarcel YabiliCongolaise
Author:Marcel Yabili
Create image

“L'Américain Adam Hochschild, sans aucune connaissance solide de l'Afrique, a propagé le livre d'horreur Le fantôme du roi Léopold, 1998, à partir du carnet de voyage en anglais de Stanley, et Ben Affleck pousse encore plus loin le mensonge, basé sur les affabulations de Hochschild, dans un film qui sortira bientôt.”

CongoLeopold IiAdam HochschildCongo Belge
Book:Le roi génial et bâtisseur de Lumumba: un exercice de critique historique sur le plus grand fake news
Create image

“White American, Adam Hochschild, with no solid Africa knowledge, purveyed the horror book King Leopold's ghost, 1998, from Stanley's English-language travelogue, and Ben Affleck further presses the lie, based on Hochschild's fabrications, in a film soon to be released.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateBelgian CongoAdam HochschildBen Affleck
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“Stanley raamde met wat hij zag langs de Congostroom en zijrivieren het bewonersaantal van het bekken op 40 miljoen, een cijfer dat hij in de Franse vertaling halveerde, en die gefantaseerde bevolkingsberg is medio de twintigste eeuw, door ernstig demografisch onderzoek, geslonken tot 10 à 15 miljoen.”

CongoLeopold IiHenry Morton Stanley
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“Nergens zijn er aan de Evenaar onder Leopold II, of zijn Belgische opvolgers na 1908, volkerenslachtingen geweest à la de zieke heersers Hitler, Stalin of Pol Pot. Wel hebben Lucas Catherine, Jules Marchal en Daniel Groenweghe het bestrijden van het imperialisme — of het wegschrijven van hun ontgoochelingen in Afrika — gezien als de overtreffende trap van het antikapitalisme. En auteurs als Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle en Hugo Claus hebben met een bloeiende verbeelding en de insteek van Don Quichote, een potpourri gemaakt van Congo Vrijstaat en zijn stichter.”

CongoLeopold IiAfrika
Book:Mijn ‘waarheid’ over Leopold II: Nepnieuws ontkracht
Create image

“Le swahili n’est pas une langue de vauriens. Par contre, il fait partie des dix grandes langues au monde. Et quand on considère les autres langues comme le Français ou l’Anglais, il y a des auteurs qui publient des ouvrages dans ces langues, des dictionnaires mis à jour, il existe même des académies. Maintenant, les Congolais doivent apprendre à parler et à écrire correctement le swahili en respectant les règles”

CongoSwahiliAfriqueRdcCongo RdcAfrique Central
Author:Marcel Yabili
Create image

“Il y a quand même des objets du patrimoine qui parlent de l’histoire, qui parlent du passé. Et le passé permet de voir l’évolution du pays. Il donne aussi une perspective de l’avenir. Quand on a un monument aux morts, on doit prendre conscience que ce pays a connu des guerres. On a en ce monument des problèmes avec le Rwanda. Mais vous savez qu’avec ce monument, on allait se rappeler les victoires du Congo sur le Rwanda. Le Congo avait gagné la guerre, occupé le Rwanda, le Burundi et même Tabora qui était la capitale des Allemands”

CongoRwandaAllemandsForce PubliqueTabora
Author:Marcel Yabili
Create image

“Lumumba praised Leopold as a genius and builder of the Congo; in his fierce speech of June 30, 1960, he denounced 9 forms of violence, but the "severed hands" and the "chicotte" (whip) were not among them. The chicotte was part of the sharia and the Arab slave traders, but it was banned in the law that was introduced by Leopold after 1885 for Congolese citizens.”

SlaveryCongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateShariaPatrice LumumbaLumumba
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image

“It was only in 1926, long after Leopold II, that the whip was introduced in local courts with Congolese chieftains and dignitaries as judges. In 1959 the use had completely disappeared, but Laurent Kabila reintroduced it in 1997 and now the whip is a common torture of the police.”

CongoLeopold IiCongo Free StateBelgian CongoWhipLaurent Kabila
Book:The Greatest Fake News of All Time: Leopold II, The Genius and Builder King of Lumumba
Create image