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I was saddened today to learn of the death of our colleague Francois Bontinck at the age of 85. I never met Father Bontinck face to face, but we corresponded over 25 years, mostly about the Kingdom of Kongo. He is one of the few scholars who agreed to read and comment on every paper I wrote, and often found errors and embarassaments that I was spared. Bontinck was one of the last of a group of missionary historians who dealt with the history of the Kingdom of Kongo, a group that included Jean Cuvelier, Louis Jadin, Olivier de Bouveignes, and Joseph de Munck in Belgium and Teobaldi Filsei in Italy. Not only was Bontinck an excellent source editor /translator (he produced editions/translations of the work of Luca da Caltanisetta and Giovanni Francesco da Roma) but he contributed a number of seminal articles to our field. He was one of a relatively small number of historians of Kongo who also had great fluency in Kikongo, and much of his work towards the end of his life was in Kongo onomastics. More than that he was widely known as a very generous scholar whose library was the refuge of many a scholar in Congo/Zaire. He resided in Congo even when political troubles and difficulty of life made it very hard to stay there. I will miss him very much, and still regularly remember his little proverb every time we disagreed about some matter, "Du choc des idees jaillait la lumiere."
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