Westport Civic Trust will host a talk by Conall O’Cuinn on

Tuesday 11th November at 8pm in the Plaza hotel. Admission

is free to members, otherwise €5 on the night.

Conall O’Cuinn, former Jesuit who lives in Westport offers us

an illustrated retrospective on his time in Africa where he

worked in three countries, Zambia, Cotes d’Ivoire, and the

Democratic Republic of the Congo. He reflects on aspects of

the history of colonialism as he experienced it in these

countries - from the 1885 Berlin Conference, which carved

Africa up among the Western colonising countries, with no

African input whatsoever. The colonization of the Congo basin,

which is the size of Western Europe, led to a brutal regime

under King Leopold of Belgium. Roger Casement exposed its

injustices which resulted in a partial reform.

Conall will talk about his time in Lubumbashi, former

Elizabethville, where he encountered traces of the Irish UN

peace-keeping mission in the region attempting to supress the

secession of the Katanga region from the newly independent

Congo. Later while living in Kinshasa, a city of five million

people on the banks of the Congo River, he witnessed the last

days of the Mobutu dictatorship, just before the city was taken

over by a boy army led by warlord and later president Laurent

Kabila I.

In his presentation, Conall will reflect on what it was like coming

from a country that had a long experience of being colonised to

a continent that is still emerging from colonization. Africa since

the days of independence in the early 60’s has undergone

recurring coups, often dictated by the politics of the Cold War,

where the proxy civil wars between countries were fought by

the Eastern and Western superpowers . And during all this time

those arbitrary borders set down by Berlin Conference continue

to generate wars and disputes to this day.

Conall’s GP father moved often with his family - from Aranmore

Island in Donegal, to Carna in Connemara, Athenry and finally

to Dublin in 1973. He studied biochemistry in UCD, philosophy

in Munich, theology in Dublin, and anthropology in Abidjan,

West Africa. He has also worked in Chicago, New York and

Boston. He left the Jesuits in 2014 to get married and now lives

with his wife, Mary, in Westport. As a result of his travels,

Conall speaks English, Irish, German, French, and some Tonga

(a major language of Zambia).