BOARD OF DIRECTORS
President
Jean-Paul Mbuya Mutombo
Professor Jean-Paul Mbuya Mutombo was born in Kolwezi in the current province of Lualaba. After secondary studies at the Lycée Jean XXIII in Kolwezi and the Collège Ima-Kafubu in Lubumbashi, he spent a year in science preparatory courses in Bukavu before starting studies in classical philology at the University of Lubumbashi.
A very committed activist against the Mobutu dictatorship, he was forced into exile in Tanzania in 1985. In 1986, elected head of the Kigwa refugee camp, with the UNHCR, he worked to empower refugees and make the camp a place to live together. It was also in this country that he met the two great Katangan names in contemporary Congolese politics, Mzee Laurent-Désiré Kabila and General Nathanaël Mbumba. In 1988, he flew to Canada and enrolled at Université Laval, where he obtained a doctoral degree in the statistical sociology of education.
In 1999, he was hired by the Quebec Ministry of Education where he was in charge of intercultural education and the internationalization of Quebec education. It was in this capacity that he collaborated in the establishment of the Table de concertation pour la lutte contre l'abandon scolaire en Outaouais. In 2003, he joined the University of Ottawa in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and teaches there to this day.
In 2005, he joined the Department of Health Canada where he directed research on Indigenous health, and in 2010 he joined the Department of Indigenous Services where he focused on issues of inequality. In the academic field, Professor Mbuya has published several articles and participated in collective works. He has also given several lectures.
His areas of interest are: the academic behaviour of minority students; minority identity, social movements, racist ideology as well as the construction and reconstruction of African nations in a racialized world. Very involved in his community in Canada, he was in turn president of the Congolese community of Quebec City and later president of the Katangan community of Ottawa-Gatineau.
In January 2021, he founded the Canada-United States Bloc Katangais with a few compatriots with the aim not only to contribute effectively to the integration of Katangans in their respective host countries, but also to lead to the creation of a Katangan network in North America. This networking of Katangans aims to pool energies and intelligence for the advancement of the Katangan region on the social, political, economic and cultural levels.