Une ancienne chambre noire de photographie avec caméra et clichets

This photo camera fixed on an old tree table is from the colonial period. This device was turned manually and could contain a multitude of slides with images and short films in the Democratic Republic of The Congo. Such material is part of the colonial heritatge of the Museum of Documentation at the Centre de Recherche en Sciences Naturelles of Lwiro in the South-Kivu.
After the unexpected departure of Belgian colonial researchers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960), the colonial photography museum at Lwiro has never been maintained by the Congolese state. There are only few remains of the original materials such as this phorography room. That deserves to be saved for historical reasons, for educative illustration, or for the transfer of this knowledge to the future generation. Like this abandoned room, many other archival objects at Lwiro did not have opportunity to be maintained after the leave of the colonizers. The Belgian colonial power constituted also the first researcher team and administrators at the CRSN. The table of the working room is made of very particular tree species (Libuyu and Mufula) collected from the National Parc Kahuzi-Biega, in Bunyakiri in the Kivu, eastern of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.