Location: Saintry-Sur-Seine, France
(a banlieue of Paris).
I got here by bus from London on Wednesday, April 6th. The journey took more than 8 hours, but it was a beautiful road trip complete with the awesome cliffs of Dover at the edge of England.
On the Ferry
Cliffs of Dover
In a banlieue of Paris, I am now interviewing and filming my uncle Laurent. He is the patriarch of the family and knows our entire genealogy tree as well as our traditional Luba customs.
Uncle Laurent
I am getting educated about my own family: “What?! My great-grand father was a chief?” I have family members from Canada all the way down to Australia. Some of the people have died; others have emerged out of thin air… It seems that I have more siblings than I was aware of.
I learned that we, the Luba people, are one of the largest societies in the Congo. The reason is simple: men can marry several wives. The number of women a man has shows how wealthy he is. It is quite common to find wealthy Luba men to have even 45 children. Now I understand my aunt Rose, who tried to play matchmaker for me and proposed that I marry a certain Congolese man: “he only has 2 children,” she said.
This trip is already full of surprises… and I haven’t even landed in Congo yet.