Marcel Lihau

Marcel Antoine Lihau
First President of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Congo
In office 23 November 1968 – June 1975
President	Joseph-Desiré Mobutu
Preceded by	position established
Succeeded by	Bayona Bameya
Secretary General of Justice of the Congo
In office 11 September 1960 – 14 September 1960
President	Joseph Kasa-Vubu
Prime Minister	Joseph Iléo
In office 9 February 1961 – 2 August 1961
Commissioner General of Justice of the Congo
In office 14 September 1960 – 9 February 1961
Personal details
Born	9 September 1931 Bumba, Équateur Province, Belgian Congo
Died	9 April 1999 Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Resting place	Gombe, Kinshasa
Political party	Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (1971–1975) Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social (1982–1999)
Spouse(s)	Sophie Kanza (m. 1964)
Children	6
Alma mater	Université catholique de Louvain

Marcel Antoine Lihau or Ebua Libana la Molengo Lihau (9 September 1931 – 9 April 1999) was a Congolese politician, jurist, and law professor who served as the initial first president of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Congo and was involved in the creation of two functional constitutions for the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Lihau was able to achieve post-primary education with the help of sympathetic social workers and became the first Congolese to study law. He encouraged Congolese politicians to form an alliance that allowed them to secure the independence of the Congo from Belgium. Afterwards he served briefly as a justice official and negotiator for the central government before being appointed to lead a commission to draft a new constitution. He was appointed dean of law faculty at the University of Lovanium in 1963. The following year he helped deliver the Luluabourg Constitution to the Congolese which was subsequently adopted by referendum. In 1965 Joseph-Desiré Mobutu seized total control of the country and directed Lihau to produce a new constitution. Three years later Lihau was appointed first president of the new Supreme Court of Justice of the Congo. He retained the position, continuously advocating for judicial independence, until 1975 when he refused to support a harsh sentence for student protesters. Lihau was summarily removed from his post by Mobutu and placed under house arrest. In 1982 he helped found the reform-oriented Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social. In response, Mobutu suspended his rights and banished him to a rural village.

In 1985 Lihau, his health in decline, sought refuge from political persecution in the United States, eventually securing a job as a professor of law at Harvard University. He continuously advocated for democracy in the Congo and returned to the country in 1990 to discuss political reform. He went back to the United States to seek medical treatment, dying there in 1999.

Marcel Lihau was born on 9 September 1931 in Bumba, Équateur Province, Belgian Congo. He was the eldest of eight children. After his secondary education at the Bolongo seminary, Lihau attended the Jesuit University Centre in Kisantu, graduating from the school's administrative sciences division. One of his teachers, sociologist Willy De Craemer, resolved to help him enroll in the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, a school mostly unavailable to Congolese. To do this, De Craemer tutored Lihau in Latin, Greek, and Flemish so he could take the Jury Central entrance exam. Lihau passed the test with a high score and was enrolled in the university. Since it was his goal to study law (then not offered to Congolese students), De Craemer and several sympathetic Jesuit educators arranged for Lihau to take the necessary classes under the cover of studying Roman philology. He also studied economics and philosophy. For the duration of his studies he stayed with the family of a former director of Léopoldville Radio, Karel Theunissen. Lihau served as president of the small Congolese-Ruanda-Urundi students' union in Belgium, Association Générale des Étudiants Congolais en Belgique (AGEC).

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