Adolphine Misekabu was a sturdy, serious little girl with a childhood dream of becoming a teacher and a leader one day. She related how, as young as the age of seven, she would gather the neighbourhood children together to “play school”. “We would pretend we had a blackboard and that I was the teacher. But my beloved late father, Nkudimba, wanted me to become a journalist, just like his slain hero, the charismatic Patrice Lumumba, who was legally elected prime minister of the Congo after he helped win its independence from Belgium in June 1960.”

Adolphine was born on 24 February 1974 in Lubumbashi in the Shaba (originally Katanga) Province in the south-eastern part of what was then known as Zaire. Ever since she could remember, Nkudimba, a true humanitarian, was profoundly involved in the politics of his country and bitterly opposed to the Zairian president, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu – later known as Mobutu Sese Seko. Nkudimba and all his family from the Kasaian ethnic group (part of the Luba or Baluba group) were members of the UDPS.

From our first conversations it became clear that Adolphine had a very special place in her father's heart and that she loved to be with him and to talk to him. Her expression earnest, she told me that Nkudimba had explained to her that Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's leader who had become increasingly despotic as his rule progressed, had taken power in a coup d’état nine years before she was born, aided by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and support from what were then called the Western Bloc countries.

Although the politics of the day cast a shadow over their lives, Adolphine described her childhood as extremely happy and her hometown as bustling and highly populated by a busy community. “There were many beautiful houses where the very rich and the poor lived mixed together. People's homes were spaced well apart. The weather was mostly hot and humid and the countryside flat but quite green. A dam and a stream ran nearby.”

Her father had himself built the large, comfortable family home where she grew up. The external wall below the windows had a stuccoed finish while the plaster of the upper section under the asbestos roof was painted cream.