Human's Rights, People's Rights: An African Perspective
A lecture by Emmanuel Dongala, PhD, chemist and novelist, & Richard B. Fisher, Chair in Natural Sciences, Simon's Rock College of Bard
TUESDAY, March 13 , 2007 @ 7:15 PM
Harriman Hall 111 Film Theater
Admission: Free
Emmanual Dongala,
PhD A
frican novelist Emmanuel Dongala and his family abandoned their home in Brazzaville, Congo Republic in the wake of civil war. "[It] was more horrible than I could have imagined as a novelist," he told a New York Times interviewer. Rival militias bombarded residential neighborhoods, reducing them to rubble, and shot civilians at random in the streets. 10,000 people were killed according to official estimates, but Dongala believes the number to be much higher. 120,000 of his countrymen fled to seek shelter in the equatorial rainforests.
Dongala, a professor of chemistry and dean of Brazzaville's university, was luckier. Educated in the United States and a frequent visitor to this country, Dongala had formed a friendship with, among others, novelist Philip Roth. Roth helped him secure a visiting professorship in chemistry at Simon's Rock College in Great Barrington, MA, where he relocated with his family.
In recognition of his literary work, Emmanuel Dongala was appointed a "Chevalier des Arts et des Lettre" by the French Ministry of Culture. Ironically, despite this high honor, the French government refused Dongala's application for a visa when he sought asylum for his family.
Dongala is always careful to stress in interviews that he is not a political exile, a fact that differentiates him from many other well-known African authors. "I did not suffer because I was a writer or an intellectual," he told the Times, "I suffered like everybody did [during the civil war] because the rockets we call 'Stalin's organs' kept firing on our house, because anarchy spread and children with machine guns took what they wanted. It was not ideological."
Dongola has received several degrees from various institutions:
- B.A.; Oberlin College;
- M.S., Rutgers University;
- Doctorat de Specialité, Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg (France);
- and Doctorat-es-Sciences, Université des Sciences et Tchniques, Montpellier (France)
Besides his novels, he has written and published several scientific papers:
- Synthese asymetrique de beta-hydroxyacides par condensation aldolique, Tetrahedron Letters (50) 4983-4986, 1973
- Syntehse de telomeres optiquement actifs, Tetrahedron Letters (49) 4315-4316, 1977
- Telomerisation par catalyse redox, European Polymer Journal Vol 13, 929-934, 1977
- Polyesterification of Halogen Containing Difunctional Compounds, Journal of Fluorine Chemistry, (17) 113-126, 1980
- Contribution a l'Etude des Micronutriments du manioc: les acides gras, Journal de la Societe Chimique de Tunisie, Vol II, number 8, December 1988
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