In the 1950s, John Jacobs, a Belgian philologist, was appointed by the colonial research institute IRSAC to conduct linguistic research in the Sankuru region of the DRC. With the assistance of a team of Tetela experts, he documented a vast body of oral traditions—including vocabulary, riddles, proverbs, and epic narratives—in different Tetela varieties and related languages. He also collected a range of cultural objects. While Jacobs’s research at the time served a colonial agenda aimed at linguistic unification, as part of a broader competition for scientific “discoveries,” these collections, assembled 75 years ago, now constitute a remarkable repository of cultural heritage.
However, the materials are scattered across different locations and institutions:
Most of this “dormant” material is multilingual (Tetela and related languages, French, and Dutch), has not yet been digitized, and remains inaccessible to the wider Tetela-speaking public. To date, only researchers have had some access to Jacobs’s publications. Tetela scholars are keen to gain access to the collections in their entirety, while a broader, non-specialist audience is actively interested in engaging with this cultural heritage.
TETELA, a collaboration between the KMMA, UGent, and the Université Notre Dame de Tshumbe, recontextualizes these colonial collections in order to achieve a sustainable and multifaceted restitution of intangible Tetela cultural heritage. The project’s first objective is therefore to create a multilingual, jointly managed online database that will make this heritage accessible both to scholars and to the general public in the region. The project’s second objective is to organize events in Belgium and the DRC that will create spaces where people can (re)connect with the heritage that was documented in these collections.