Jean Cuvelier Jean Cuvelier ( 1882 – 1962 ) was a Belgian Redemptorist missionary and bishop of Matadi in Belgian Congo from the late 19th century until his death in 1962 . Cuvelier was notable for his interest in the history of the Kingdom of Kongo , which he saw as a route to evangelization in his time . By stressing the Christian nature of the old kingdom , he hoped to increase the attachment of Kongo parishioners to the Catholic Church as opposed to Protestantism or traditional religions . Cuvelier started the Kikongo language missionary newspaper " Kukiele " in 1928 with a mixture of missionary news , cultural articles and especially historical accounts of the old kingdom . In his articles , which initially bore the title " Lusansu " Cuvelier began writing a history of Kongo using oral traditions that he collected combined with increasingly detailed historical documentation . His inspiration appears to have come initially from reading a manuscript of one of the catechists of the mission , Mpetelo Boka , written in 1912 , for Cuvelier ' s manuscript , " Kongo een vroeger eeuw " ( Kongo in earlier centuries ) written in 1926 already incorporates much of Boka ' s writing as well as citations from well - known 17th - century writers such as Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo . In 1928 – 29 , Cuvelier took advantage of his position as inspector of schools to visit mission schools all over Congo , and gathered traditions , which he collected in small school notebooks . Typically he called this notebooks " Mvila " from the Kikongo term for a clan or its heraldic motto , the common stuff of Kongo oral tradition . All of this material went into his " Kukiele " articles , and then into his first French language summary of Kongo history and tradition , " Traditions Congolaises " published in 1930 . In 1934 Cuvelier published the first edition of " Nkutama a mvila za makanda " which was a catalogue of clan mottos and histories that he had collected , including information on some 500 clans . At the same time he continue further historical work in European archives , especially in Rome . His biography of King Afonso I entitled " L ' ancien Congo " was published in Dutch / Flemish in 1944 as " Het Oud Konigrijk Kongo " , and in French 1946 and became a standard interpretation of Kongo history , especially the ethnographic and political appendices and notes that described many aspects of the old kingdoms political and economic structure . Cuvelier continued his publication of source material with a French translation of the writing of Lorenzo da Lucca in 1953 , translations of crucial early documents from Roman archives in 1954 ( in collaboration with Louis Jadin a canon with the Belgian Institute historique Belge de Rome , and partial translations of the works of Marcellino d ' Atri , Luca da Caltanisetta and Girolamo da Montesarchio in the scientific - historical journal " Ngonge Kongo " in the 1960s . He also contributed many short biographies of Kongo kings and other personages to the colonial reference work " Biographie Coloniale Belge " in 1955 . Upon his death in 1962 , Cuvelier ' s papers including many unpublished manuscripts , book and article drafts , transcriptions and translations of documentation relevant to Kongo history , and his precious field notebooks went to the Redemptorist archive in Leuven , Belgium , and in 2000 were transferred to the Archives of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven .