QUEEN DIAMBI KABATUSUILA SHEDS A NEW LIGHT ON AFRICA

In 2016, before she became queen of the Bakwa Luntu people of the Dimbelenge territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Queen Diambi Kabatusuila was a 48-year-old therapist going through a difficult divorce, living in Boca Raton, Florida, and having a recurring dream about an old woman in an African village.

- ANNIE L. SCHOLL

That dream, which spanned years, sparked a yearning to learn about her ancestors, who were part of the Luba, one of the largest ethnic groups in the Congo. When she was making plans to visit the village in the Central Kasai region where her father was born, he told her she was named after her late great-grandmother-the first wife of the late king of the Bakwa Indu, which made her great-grandmother the queen.

"My brain just exploded," she recalls. "I said, 'What are you talking about?' He said, 'You are from the royal house-you and your sisters are princesses.' I was thrilled to find out I was a princess, but I wish he told me when I was 5 so I would have known that a girl who looks like me could be a princess. I remember watching all of the Disney movies where little Black girls were never represented as royalty."

CHILD OF A DIPLOMAT

Her father was born during the Belgian colonization of the Congo a period marked by forced labor, murder, torture, and other abuses of the Congolese people. Colonial rule ended in 1960, and when her father then went to Europe to study, he met her mother, a Belgian European.

Diambi Kabatusuila was born in Belgium where her father worked as a diplomat in the Congolese embassy in Brussels. When she was 6 months old, her family moved to Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They left Kinshasa to return to Europe when she was 16, and she later moved to the United States for college.

Queen Diambi, now the mother of two adult sons and grandmother of three, holds a bachelor's degree in business finance and economics from the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and a master's in psychology and mental health counseling from Lynn University in Boca Raton.

When her father shared their family history in 2016, she also learned that he was supposed to sit on the throne but refused.