Benoît Verhaegen was a Belgian academic and Africanist who specialised in the political sociology and post-colonial history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Verhaegen fought in the Korean War and arrived in the Belgian Congo in 1959 shortly before independence. Sympathising with African nationalism, he remained in the country until 1987 and taught at various institutions in the Congo which became Zaire in 1971. He was increasingly influenced by Marxism and worked particularly on contemporary political movements in the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He formulated the idea of "immediate history" and published a number of important studies and collections of documents.
Verhaegen arrived in the Belgian Congo in 1959 and remained in the country after independence in 1960 during the Congo Crisis at Lovanium. His politics had become increasingly left-wing and "progressive" and he openly sympathised with the emerging African nationalist movement. Involved in nationalist politics, he served as chef de cabinet to Aloïs Kabangi, Minister of Economic Co-ordination and Planning, in the Lumumba Government. However, he became increasing disenchanted with the established political groups during the crisis. Although remaining a Catholic, his views became increasingly radical over the course of his career and embraced Marxism and Maoism as a route towards agrarian socialism in the Congo. Verhaegen began researching political movements in the Congo in the aftermath of independence and formulated the idea of a "immediate history" which mixed anthropological, historical, and sociological approaches to current events on an extensive documentary basis. He was involved in collecting documents published by contemporary political actors in the Congo and intended his work to be interacting with political actors. He wrote important studies on the Kwilu rebellion, the nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba and the Alliance des Bakongo political party. Together with and, Verhaegen began involved in the new African section of the Belgian which published important series of documents on contemporary Congolese politics. This was disbanded in 1971 and Verhaegen became the director of the African Studies and Documentation Centre which replaced it. He directed its journal series Cahiers du CEDAF which was superseded by Cahiers africains. He also led the creation of a historical research section at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Verhaegen continued to teach at Lovanium but became critical of the "colonial" values he believed the institution embodied. He moved to Kisangani in 1971 as part of the consolidation of university education by the Mobutu regime under the National University of Zaire. He founded the Interdisciplinary Resarch Centre for the Development of Education and headed the university's social science section at Kisangani, later the University of Kisangani. He left the Congo in 1987 to return to academic roles in Belgium. He retired in 1990. A festschrift in Verhaegen's honour entitled Le Zaïre à l'épreuve de l'histoire immédiate was published in 1993 and included contributions by Immanuel Wallerstein and. He retired to France and died at Montréal-les-Sources, Drôme on 14 October 2009.
