Pascal Bollon

Category: Day-to-day Life in Katanga

How day to day life must have felt like in Cameroon and Katanga, Congo, in the years from 1914 to 1958, from souvenirs, memories and letters.

Day of Victory - 1945 - Jadotville (now Likasi), Congo - V-Day celebration ceremony with Force Publique troops

Day of Victory

The fascination with the Second World War does not wane. In Europe, we are still finding the bombs, grenades, weapons, helmets, tanks, trucks, planes,… in swamps, in lakes, in the ground, under houses or in the sea. It is still beneath our feet. Walk around our cities, try and spot the...

Saluting the Sister Ship | E6 high sea meet with CMB Gouverneur Galopin 1949

Saluting the Sister Ship

We are in March 1949, on deck of the Albertville. The captain’s voice, laced with feedback, sweeps across the windswept decks : “Get ready to salute our sister ship the Gouverneur Galopin. She will pass port-side”. We must be somewhere midway through the trip, then. The Azores and Tenerife. Land ahoy!...

The Line Crossing Ceremony

The Line-Crossing Ceremony

Sail through the Equator, and Neptune himself will welcome you to the seafaring community! Become one of us salty seadogs. Harr. Or something. A short interview by the assembled jury of Neptune, his wife, kid, and the confirmed members of the nautical fraternity. There will be of course a few...

Aboard a Steam Ocean Liner, 1949 - Albertville in Tenerife

Aboard a Steam Ocean Liner

Very little seemed more of an out-of-body experience than listening to my mother, her sisters and their mother talking about “Taking the Boat”. It was never this or that ship, this or that year. Just “On the Boat”. Practically speaking, any of it seemed that special to me. After all,...

Core sampling

Core Sampling

We take for granted the copper of our electrical lines, the iron in our concrete, the rare metals that allowed us to engineer mobile phones that fit in a suit pocket. But all of it starts with finding the ore. True enough, digging up ore is a millennia old activity....

1947 - Jadotville, Panda Likasi, Congo - De Gaulle in the living room

Frenchcore

If you wish to know yourself better, there will always be people to tell you what you are. Now, it is also true that it is up to you to consider or dismiss what they say, but even if it is totally off, you know at least what people think....

Creepy Crawling Maggots

Now, don’t be squeamish. Maggots are back in fashion. Maggot therapy is even at the cutting edge of wound treatments in establishments such as the Chester and Westminster hospital. We put green-bottle fly maggots in wounds to cleanse necrotized tissue. And it is faster and better than usual dressings. Would you believe...

You never go back | 1931 May 24 - Africa - Tanzania - Dar Es Salam - Departure of the MV LlandGibby Castle (later Juno LSI)

You Never Go Back

“You never enter the same river twice”  ~ Heraclitus the Obscure aka Heraclitus of Smyrna  That was tradition. It was their tradition. Theirs. They just knew each other’s exact thoughts as they happened: glimpses of Zanzibar, Dar-Es-Salam, Conakry… So many harbours, so many colours, so many times. They were standing side...

Mwami Msiri, King of Bunkeya

The massive red brick church on screen was one of the traditional cues of The Old Movies. It was the kick-off of memory, the bravura moment of the retelling of ‘what-we-did-in-Congo’. A breeze of sighs, dreamy smiles and fleeting nods. Nostalgia started oozing from the walls. Smiles we did not...

Mine de l’Étoile, Star Mine of Congo, Lubumbashi mine, Kalukuluku

A Malachite Genesis

Diamonds, copper, cobalt, uranium, … Name it, and Congo is likely to have it. The country, shrugging off civil war, regains its rank of second biggest producer of copper. Congo produces 2 thirds of the world’s cobalt today. Yes, that metal, for lithium batteries et alii. The metal of the 21st century. ...