Margot Luyckfasseel is Junior Research Professor in Modern African History at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She specializes in Congolese history from below (late 19th century to present), with a thematic focus on urban dynamics, language ideologies, and (post)colonial power relations. Additionally, she is developing an interest in socio-economic themes such as slavery and trade.
Luyckfasseel obtained a PhD in African Studies at Ghent University in 2021, with an award-winning dissertation on the history of ‘Kongo’ presence in Kinshasa. She worked at the same university as a postdoctoral researcher for the ERC project The Aftermath of Slavery in East Africa (2022-2023). In autumn 2022, she was a visiting professor at the Université de Kisangani. From 2023 to 2024 she was a FED-tWIN researcher, working part time at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and part time at the Belgian State Archives. Luyckfasseel was also a member of the expert group appointed by the Brussels Region to research traces of the colonial past in public space (2020-2022). Together with Felicitas Becker, Clélia Coret and Jonathon Glassman, she is the editor of The Aftermaths of Slavery in East Africa, a forthcoming double volume with Palgrave.
MIASA Project: ‘They Came from Elsewhere': Slavery, Displacement and Land Conflict in and around Kisangani, Democratic Republic of Congo
Luyckfasseel’s MIASA project investigates how the legacy of slavery, and the forced displacement it entailed, influences ongoing land conflict in the region of Kisangani in the D. R. Congo. In the second half of the 19th century, so-called Arab-Swahili traders penetrated the region to the west of Lake Tanganyika in search of ivory and captives. Their interventions led to the displacement of numerous men and women, who settled permanently in new territories when Congo Free State troops dispersed their Arab-Swahili leaders in the 1890s. During the colonial period, these former dependents, locally known as Arabisés or Bangwana, collaborated closely with the colonial state, but after independence their privileged position waned. Drawing on archival and oral records, the project traces the trajectories of these displaced Arabisé communities, exploring how their settlement patterns and interactions relate to present-day land disputes, which have become salient due to climate change and growing population density.
Selected publications
Luyckfasseel, M., Meeuwis, M., & Castillo, J. (2025). Lingala only? A History of the DR Congo’s Ideologies and Counter-Ideologies of Monolingualism. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (online prepublication). https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2024-0034
Luyckfasseel, M. (2025). More Than Meets the Eye: Colonial Violence and Spatial Imaginaries of Power in South-Ubangi, DR Congo. In: Bernault, Florence, Benoît Henriet & Emery Kalema (eds), Textures of Power: Central and Equatorial Africa in the Long 20th Century, Leuven University Press, 181-193.
van der Aa, Jan and Margot Luyckfasseel. (2025) “Between Movement and Containment: Forminière, Biopolitics, and Labour in Kasaï, Belgian Congo (1910-1940)”. Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History 22 (2), 31-57. https://doi.org/10.52024/ehx07e49
Luyckfasseel, M. (2023). “How will God Hear us?”: Sonic and Linguistic Difference among Kinshasa’s Églises des Noirs. Africa, 93(3), 351-370. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972023000542.
De Coene, P., Luyckfasseel, M., & Mathys, G. (2022). Voices from Exile: The Mpadist Mission des Noirs in Oshwe’s Prison Camps in the Belgian Congo (1940-1960). International Journal of African Historical Studies, 55(1), 89-114.
Luyckfasseel, M. (2019). ‘Still so many Illusions to cast off!’: The Territorial Unification of the Ngbaka (Belgian Congo) in the 1920s. African Studies, 78(1), 126-143.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2018.1519330
Luyckfasseel, M., & Meeuwis, M. (2018). Ethnicity and Language in the Run-up to Congolese Independence in the 1950s: Ba (Ki) Kongo and Ba (Li) Ngala. Language Matters, 49(3), 86-104. https://doi.org/10.1080/10228195.2018.1496133
