I am a social historian of the African Great Lakes region. I started my research in the borderlands of the eastern Kivu-provinces of the DRCongo and Rwandan when I was a PhD, supervised by Baz Lecocq. While I have published on this research before, I am glad that a mere ten years after I finished the PhD in 2014 —mere is intended ironically here ofcourse– it will be published as Fractured Pasts in Lake Kivu’s Borderlands. Conflicts, Connections and Mobility in Central Africa. with the African Studies Series of Cambridge University Press.
Drawing on cross-border oral history research and a wealth of archival material, Fractured Pasts embraces a new and powerful perspective on Lake Kivu's borderlands, which have often been defined by scholars in terms of conflict, violence, and separation. In contrast, my book explores histories of continuities and connections across the borderland. I use an integrated historical perspective to trace long-term processes in the region, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century and reaching to the present day. In doing so I reshape historical understandings of mobility, conflict, identity formation and historical narration in and across state and ecological borders while also deconstructing reductive historical myths that have continued to underpin justifications for violence in the region.
During the ten years it took me to finish this book, I had the pleasure to work with amazing colleagues on other projects. As a post-doc I worked on land conflicts in eastern Congo (at Radboud University Nijmegen, under the supervision of Mathijs Van Leeuwen and together with Lotje De Vries and Gemma van der Haar). I also started a project on a longue-durée perspective of violent conflicts in both Kivu-provinces in the 1960s, funded by the FWO-Research Foundation Flanders on which I have never published anything, but still plan to.
In 2020-2021 I was involved as one of ten experts in the Belgian Parliamentary Commission on Belgium's colonial past, responsible for writing a preliminary report that would function as a contextual framework for their activities. Some of my thoughts on this can be found in two articles I have written together with Sarah Van Beurden.
In 2022 I won an ERC-Starting Grant for my project Violence Work. Creating and contesting colonial authority on the ground in Africa through everyday violence, focusing on Rwanda, Congo and Burundi. Its main argument is that we do not understand colonial violence all that well. We understand it well in its more structural and 'spectacular' dimensions, but less so how it functions in daily contexts, and especially in rural areas. The aim of my project is to understand how the 'dirty work' of empire functions in everyday settings, and what kind of 'violence workers' remain in the shadows if we only look at colonial violence through more conventional methods. As is the case for all my work, it will combine local bottom-up research with more top-down institutional research, although this time I will be working with a much larger team.
I finally landed a permanent job after travelling a somewhat bumpy and not very straight road. Luckily, I have always been surrounded by wonderfully supportive colleagues, some of whom I have published with. It are these colleagues and friends who have made the difference in me finding academic stability. I genuinely believe in a more caring academic environment, and i hope I will be able to pay forward the kindness I have received from others.
