On 19 September, 2023, the first Provincial Chapter of the new Province of St. Charles Lwanga elected Br. Gabriel Samba, OP, as its first Prior Provincial. After confirmation by the Master of the Order, Br. Gerard Francisco Timoner III, OP, Br. Gabriel accepted this responsibility on 20 September, 2023.
Brother Gabriel Samba was born on 25 June, 1966 in Linzolo, Congo-Brazzaville. He joined the Order in 1992 and did his novitiate in Kigali (Rwanda), as a son of the Province of France. He made his first profession there on 8 August, 1993. After studying philosophy in Dakar (Senegal), he began his first cycle of theology at the Catholic University of Central Africa (UCAC) in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 1995. Due to the closure of the Saint Dominique house in Yaoundé, he continued and completed his first cycle of theology at the Facultés Catholiques de Kinshasa. After his diaconal internship in Nairobi, Kenya, he was ordained priest on 17 September, 2000 in Bangui, Central African Republic, and continued his Biblical studies at the University of Natal in South Africa.
While Director of Radio Veritas, Archdiocese of Douala, Cameroon, he was appointed Socius of the Master of the Order for Africa, from 2011 to 2017. At the end of his doctoral studies in pastoral theology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, at the time of the erection of the province of St. Charles Lwanga in Equatorial Africa, he was instituted Vicar of the Master of the Order over the new province by Brother Gerard Francisco Timoner III, OP.
