Ekanga Shungu came to Belgium from the Congo in 1964 when her parents decided to send her to a boarding school for nuns in the Belgian Ardennes. She studied journalism and communications.

In 1986, astonished at the lack of a media outlet dedicated to ‘Belgicans’, as the Congolese were known in Belgium at the time, she published the guide ‘L'Afrique Noire à Bruxelles’ (Black Africa in Brussels) about the African community in the Belgian capital, following an extensive survey. It was the first publication to mention the district that the Congolese in Belgium at the time called Matonge, after a popular district in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC.

At the end of that year, she set up the Tam-Tam newspaper, the first monthly reference for the Afro-descendant diaspora in Belgium in the 1980s, putting the spotlight on a creative, talented, resourceful minority that was often scorned and abused by the Belgian administration, or unfairly discriminated against and stigmatised. The Tam-Tam adventure ended in December 1989 with the headline story being ‘The Blacks Pampers’, a future generation of Africans who are now perfectly integrated and fully involved in Belgium's social, cultural, economic and political life.

Currently based in France, she has recently turned her hand to writing, publishing two novels, ‘Walo la Rebelle’ (2023) and ‘Chez nous on ne pleure pas’ (2024), about the children of independence who were placed in religious institutions against their will.