Margot Luyckfasseel
University of Antwerp
Margot Luyckfasseel is a Junior Research Professor in Modern African History at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She obtained a PhD in African Studies from Ghent University, where she also was a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project “the aftermath of slavery in East Africa”. She was a visiting professor at the Université de Kisangani in 2022 and a MIASA fellow at the University of Ghana in 2025.
Luyckfasseel specializes in Congolese history from below (late 19th century to the present), with a thematic focus on urban-rural relations, language ideologies, and debates on “authenticity”. Additionally, she is developing an interest in socio-economic themes such as slavery, labor, and trade. She has conducted fieldwork in the cities of Kinshasa, Kisangani, and Gemena, and she prefers to combine oral history and archival sources.
Talk Information:
Oral history, memory, and the aftermath of slavery in Eastern Congo
June 5, 2026 | 9:00 AM
In this talk, Margot Luyckfasseel examines how the history of slavery is remembered in and around Kisangani in the Eastern Congo. Combining theories of travelling/prosthetic memory with insights from African historiography on oral tradition, Luyckfasseel shows that local narratives of enslavement are dynamic and creatively reassembled, but also strongly conditioned by missionary education, colonial abolitionist rhetoric, and circulating visual templates. Commonly repeated images (e.g. slave sticks, chained captives, slave ships) lead to the (re)production of anachronistic, transatlanticized understandings of slavery. At the same time, oral accounts preserve alternative histories of agency that challenge colonial victimhood scripts. They reveal stories about resistance, flight, negotiation, and collaboration, and how these shifted across time and space. Both detailed family narratives and more general, often distorted memories are analytically productive for understanding the aftermath of slavery in the Eastern Congo.