X-Nico

11 unusual facts about Zaire


Aie a Mwana

In 1975, Belgian record producer Michel Jaspar - who had been born in what was then the Belgian Congo - was contacted by Zairean singer Steve Banda Kalenga, who had formed a band with friends from Angola.

António Alva Rosa Coutinho

Coutinho defended the territorial integrity of Angola against the Zaire-backed Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, and openly distributed Portuguese arms and equipment to the MPLA.

Grey-headed Sunbird

The Grey-headed Sunbird (Deleornis axillaris) is a small passerine bird which breeds in mixed forest in Zaire, Uganda and Tanzania.

Hartlaub's Duck

Hartlaub's Duck is resident in equatorial West and Central Africa, from Guinea and Sierra Leone east through Nigeria to Sudan, and south to Gabon, Congo and Zaire.

James Smoot Coleman

From 1967 to 1978, while in Africa, Coleman was an associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation and served as its representative for East Africa and Zaire.

M. Crawford Young

Professor Young's primary contributions to political science have come from his work on the Zairian (and later, African) state and on the politics of cultural identity in the third world, which was theoretically innovative and presaged the contemporary "instrumentalist" and "constructivist" approaches to political identity.

He has held chairmanship of the UW–Madison political science department twice (1969–72; 1984–87), and was between 1973-75 Dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the Université Nationale du Zaire.

Ngbandi language

It is primarily spoken by the Ngbandi people, who included the dictator of what was then known as Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko.

Northern Black Flycatcher

This is an insectivorous species which is a resident breeder in tropical Africa from Senegal to Ethiopia and south to Zaire and Tanzania.

Patricia McMahon Hawkins

She subsequently served as Information Officer in Kinshasa, Zaire, as Public Affairs Officer in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, as Cultural Affairs Officer in Bogotá, Colombia, as Counselor for Public Affairs in Abidjan, Cộte d'Ivoire, where she also served briefly as Acting DCM and then for several months as Chargé d'affaires.

Streaky-headed Seedeater

humilis of the southwestern Cape has almost unstreaked upperparts, and S. g. reichardi, (southern Zaire to southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique) has a distinctly streaked breast even in adult plumage.


Alberto Angela

Once out of university he started working in the research field participating in paleoanthropologic digs in various places in the world, among which Zaire, Ishango, Tanzania, Olduvai and Laetoli, Sultanate of the Oman, Mongolia, and the desert of the Gobi.

Alvor Agreement

Holden Roberto, Agostinho Neto, and Jonas Savimbi met in Bukavu, Zaire in July and agreed to negotiate with the Portuguese as one political entity.

Antonov An-32

On 8 January 1996, an An-32 freighter crashed into a crowded marketplace in Kinshasa, Zaire, resulting in the deaths of approximately 237 people on the ground.

Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola

The First Military Region comprised the Zaire and Uíge Provinces, while the Second comprised the Cabinda enclave.

Banza

M'banza-Kongo, formerly known as São Salvador, the capital of Angola's northwestern Zaire Province

Congo Pedicle road

Under Mobutu, governance deteriorated and corruption flourished in Zaire, and he saw Katanga only as a cash cow and punished it for its separatist tendencies by neglecting its development.

Eastern Congolian swamp forests

Endemic amphibians and reptiles include a small frog (Cryptothylax minutus), a chameleon (Trioceros chapini), a wall lizard Gastropholis tropidopholis, the Zaire snake-eater Polemon robustus, and a worm lizard Zygaspis dolichomenta.

Epidemic Intelligence Service

Persons participating in the program, popularly called "disease detectives", are called "EIS Officers" by the CDC and have been dispatched to investigate possible epidemics, due to both natural and artificial causes, including anthrax, hantavirus, and West Nile virus in the United States and Ebola in Uganda and Zaire.

Eyralpenus meinhofi

Eyralpenus (Pareyralpenus) meinhofi (Bartel, 1903) is a polymorphic tiger-moth in the family Arctiidae from the East and Central Africa: Tanzania, Zambia Goodger, Watson, 1995, as meinhofi, Zambia, Angola, Zaire Goodger, Watson, 1995, as metaxantha; Malawi Goodger, Watson, 1995 and Dubatolov, 2009, as melanocera; Zaire Kiriakoff, 1965, as melanocera; Zimbabwe Dubatolov, 2011.

Franz Thomas Bruss

He held visiting positions at the Universities of University of Strathclyde, Zaire, University of Antwerp, Purdue University, and the Université Catholique de Louvain.

La Zaïroise

La Zaïroise by Joseph Lutumba (lyrics) and Simon-Pierre Boka Di Mpasi Londi (music) was the national anthem of Zaïre from 1971 to 1997.

Les Palabres de Mboloko

In 1965 it was censored by the President of Zaire, General Mobutu Sese Seko, who used the leopard as his emblem and who did not want people to watch films where the leopard was treated as a fool.

London Chest Hospital

Fabrice Muamba, the Zaire native who played for England's Bolton Wanderers, was taken here after suffering a cardiac arrest on the pitch on 17 March 2012; after going without a heartbeat for 78 minutes and being kept anesthetized so he could recover.

LuaLua

Lomana LuaLua - a Zaire-born footballer who plays for Turkish club Karabükspor.

Luke Piper

Luke Piper has travelled around the world to paint, including Nairobi via Western Sahara and Zaire in 1995, the Sahara desert in 1999 and 2000, Nepal and the Himalayas in 1998 and 2000–01, and Australia, New Zealand and Fiji in 2002–03.

Malagarasi River

According to Rosemary Lowe-McConnell, "the Malagarasi and the Rungwa River are assumed to be relict headwaters of the extended pre-rift Zaire system".

Millennium Star

The diamond was discovered in the Mbuji-Mayi district of Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1990 in alluvial deposits; uncut, it was 777 carats (155.4 g).

Monastery of St Odile

Established in Zaïre in 1990 by two members of St Ottilien Archabbey, the monastery was suppressed in 1996 during the First Congo War.

My Ishmael

Owens educated himself as much as he could, studying in Belgium, becoming a dual citizen of Zaire and Belgium, traveling to the United States, and attending Cornell University, where he met the daughter of Ishmael's benefactor and first human companion.

N'Yoka Longo

In 1977, Longo was chosen to perform with Zaire's National Orchestra at FESTAC in Lagos; this was a significant thrust to his popularity, that has been steadily growing since then.

Négritude

Novelist Norman Mailer used the term to describe boxer George Foreman's physical and psychological presence in his book The Fight, a journalistic treatment of the legendary Ali vs. Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" bout in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in October 1974.

OTRAG

In the face of doubts by Debus and von Braun, Kayser chose in 1975 to set up testing and launch facilities in Shaba, Zaire (now Katanga Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Patrick Kabongo

Watshidimba "Patrick" Kabongo (born June 27, 1979 in Kinshasa, Zaire) is a professional Canadian football offensive lineman with the BC Lions.

Permanent Peoples' Tribunal

The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal examined the cases of Tibet, Western Sahara, Argentina, Eritrea, Philippine, El Salvador, Afghanistan, East Timor, Zaïre, Guatemala, the Armenian Genocide or recently the Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka, the intervention of the United States in Nicaragua, Brazilian Amazon, etc.

Pierre Kalala Mukendi

Pierre Kalala Mukendi (born 22 November 1939 in Likasi) is a Congolese football forward who played for Zaire and also played for TP Engelbert called now TP Mazembe.

Plumed Guineafowl

G. p. schubotzi (Reichenow, 1912) - Schubotz's Plumed Guineafowl - northern Zaire to East African Rift and forests west of Lake Tanganyika

Poecilothrissa centralis

Poecilothrissa centralis, the Central Zaire pellonuline, is a very small fish of the herring family which is found only in Lake Tumba and the Ruki River as well as the Congo and Busira Rivers.

Ray Lema

He worked for the National Ballet of Zaire, as it was then called, and in 1979 was invited to the United States by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Republican Rally for Democracy in Rwanda

In the book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, author Philip Gourevitch argues that the RDR, founded in the refugee camps of exiled Hutus in Zaire after the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, is a shadow organization effectively run by former Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) commanders and génocidaires.

Roy Padrick

Padrick has covered some of the Navy's most important events, from the rescue of downed Air Force pilot Capt. Scott O'Grady, to the rescue of thousands of refugees in then-Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in what was called Operation Noble Obelisk.

Schistometopum

Schistometopum thomense is only known from two islands in the Bight of Benin, but has been reported from "Upper Zaïre".

Sheldon B. Vance

Sheldon Baird Vance (January 18, 1917 – November 12, 1995), born in Crookston, Minnesota, was the U.S. ambassador to Zaire from May 27, 1969 through March 26, 1974.

TAAG Angola Airlines

Portuguese news agency Lusa said the aircraft had taken off from the Angolan capital, Luanda, and was trying to land at M'banza-Kongo in the province of Zaire, which is in northern Angola near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

TPOK Jazz

The OK Jazz band was formed in 1956 in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), in what was at the time known as the Belgian Congo, later as Zaire and today as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Tyler Cowen

The Los Angeles Times has described Cowen as "a man who can talk about Haitian voodoo flags, Iranian cinema, Hong Kong cuisine, Abstract Expressionism, Zairian music and Mexican folk art with seemingly equal facility".

Večeras vas zabavljaju muzičari koji piju

Because of the lyrics "Grčki sverceri, arapski studenti, negativni elementi, maloletni delikventi i besni psi" ("Greek smugglers, Arabian students, negative elements, juvenile hooligans and mad dogs"), the embassies of three Arabian countries and Zaire protested, complaining that songwriter Bora Đorđević had equated foreign students and mad dogs.

Viva La Musica

Less than one year after their debut, the Elima newspaper awarded the band as "Best Orchestra" of Zaire, while Papa Wemba was declared "Best Singer" and one of their early hits, Mère Supérieure, was listed as Best Song.

Z with stroke

Ƶ was sometimes used instead of Z to represent the zaire, a former currency of the Democratic Republic of Congo.