Dumbo Kirundo or the Baobab

Emmanuel Dumbo Kirundo was the first black man to be employed at the Institute for Scientific Research in Central Africa in Lwiro, currently the Lwiro Natural Science Research Center in South Kivu, created by the Belgian colonial power at the time in 1947. Of Rega ethnicity, born in Kigulube in the territory of Shabunda province of South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo on December 25, 1930, Dumbo was married with 7 children.

. The young scientist Dumbo was only 23 years old when he joined the team of the Institute in September 1953 at the Department of Botanical Biology where he had been introduced to the different techniques for collecting, preparing and assembling herbariums. He took advantage of the arrival in 1955 of Dr. George Troupin to perfect his skills.

In 1960, the date of accession of the Democratic Republic of Congo to independence, followed by the hasty departure of the colonizers without preparing the next generation of scientists , Dumbo then served as the interim head of the Herbarium from 1962-1979 and for 15 years assumed the function of Station Manager of Irangi in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park.

He had greatly regretted the abrupt rupture of the Belgian cooperation which plunged the institution into a crisis from which the institution is currently struggling to get out of it.
For his passion for the taxonomy of plants and the knowledge traditional, Dumbo refuses to take a pension until his death in 2020. It is also thanks to his encouragement that the Kivu Ethnobotanical Garden was born in 2019.

Each conversation with him was an opportunity to document the knowledge on traditional, endemic, threatened or neglected tree species to be protected in this post-conflict zone of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Dumbo Kirundo has made it possible to preserve and popularize the traditional and modern taxonomy of the Flora of Central Africa. Always anxious to document as many species as possible, he always carried his pen with him, his register with the names of the plants in order to ensure that all the scientific and vernacular names of the species are well written.

Thanks to him, the Herbarium of Lwiro in Mountainous Kivu now houses over 15,000 specimens. The Herbarium's furniture and the Center's building were built in 1947 from rare and endangered arboreal species, including: Libuyu (in Mashi, Rega and Kitembo), Entandrophragma excelsum (Meliaceae), and Muvula or Milicia excelsa (Moraceae) collected in Walikale.

In addition, his contribution to research on Muridae and endemic plants in the mountainous areas of the Albertine Rift led him to Rwanda where he collaborated with Prof. Dr. Fisher in the Nyungwe Forest. In 2019, Dumbo the scholar, baobab tree looked increasingly tired under the weight of age. He passed away in September 2020 at his home in Lwiro at the age of 90. Many researchers rightly called him the Plant Library or baobab of Central African Flora.