Ernest Wamba dia Wamba (1942-) was the leader of the Rally for Congolese Democracy during the Second Congo War.
Biography[]
Ernest Wamba dia Wamba was born in 1942 in Sundi-Lutete, Bas Congo, Belgian Congo. He studied in France and taught at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, marrying an African-American woman and being involved in the Civil Rights movement. Wamba dia Wamba joined pan-Africanist groups based in the United States, and in 1980 he became a professor at the Univeristy of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. In 1981, he was arrested by Joseph-Desire Mobutu's government of Zaire while visiting the home of his parents in the Congo and served a year in prison. He worked with President of Tanzania Julius Nyerere in ending the Burundian Civil War, and he became a leader of the Rally for Congolese Democracy, a Rwanda-backed rebel group that fought against Joseph Kabila's government. Wamba dia Wamba's group later dissolved due to the common belief that the rebels were all foreign-provoked, and he received several assassination attempts, even after the end of the Second Congo War.