With the forelying critical edition of Gerard Philips’ travel diaries, a unique historical source becomes available to the public. Philips’ notebooks testify to the complex relationships that marked daily life in the Belgian Congo and in Ruanda-Urundi on the eve of Congolese independence. The author was at the same time a senator, an academic and a priest, a combination of capacities due to which his travel report offers a unique insight into the relationship between the political, university and ecclesiastical environments in the colonial era. Moreover, these journals cover the story of two journeys, in 1957 and in 1959, enabling the reader to closely follow the change in Belgian colonial policy – as a result of the policy shift from the liberal-socialist government Van Acker IV to the Eyskens III cabinet – and to witness the momentum of the Congolese struggle for emancipation in the late 1950s. The editors offer a detailed historical introduction, and in the process of annotating the source, they have made good use of unpublished materials from a large number of archive collections.