Joseph Kasavubu (ca. 1913-1969) was the first president of the Republic of the Congo and provided a continuous focus of power through the struggles of the former Belgian colony to independence.

Joseph Kasavubu was born in the village of Kuma-Dizi in the Mayombe district of Lower Congo. Having lost his mother at age four, the boy was raised largely by his older brother, who sent him to a nearby Catholic mission, where he was baptized in 1925. After a few years of rudimentary schooling in the Kikongo language, Kasavubu attended a petit séminaire (1929-1936) and then a seminary in Kasai, from which he was dismissed in 1939 with the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in philosophy for reasons that were never made clear. He was nevertheless permitted to take a teacher's certificate and to work in mission schools but for such a meager pittance that the embittered Kasavubu...