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Kimbanguism
an african understanding
of the bible
Aurélien Mokoko GAMpiot
trAnslAted by CéCile Coquet-Mokoko
signifying (on) scriptures
Kimbanguism
vincent wimbush, general editor
editorial board:
William E. Deal (Case Western Reserve University)
Grey Gundaker (William & Mary)
Tazim Kassam (Syracuse University)
Wesley Kort (Duke University)
Laurie Patton (Duke University)
R. S. Sugirtharajah (University of Birmingham, UK)
Signifying (on) Scriptures, a project of the Institute for Signifying
Scriptures at the Claremont Graduate University, invites and challenges
scholars from different fields and disciplines to engage the phenomenon
of signifying in relationship to “scriptures.” The focus of these works is not
upon the content meaning of texts but upon the textures, signs, material
products, practices, orientations, politics, and power issues associated
with the sociocultural phenomenon of the invention and engagement of
scriptures. The defining interest is how peoples, especially the historically
dominated, make texts signify as vectors for understanding, establishing,
and communicating their identities, agency, and power in the world.
other books in the series:
Velma Love, Divining the Self: A Study in Yoruba Myth
and Human Consciousness
Jennifer Reid, Finding Kluskap: A Journey into Mi’kmaw Myth
Isra Yazicioglu, Understanding the Qur’anic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age
Leif E. Vaage, Borderline Exegesis
signifying (on) scriptures
Kimbanguism
An African Understanding of the Bible
AURÉLIEN MOKOKO GAMPIOT
translated by ce´cile coquet- mokoko
THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA
library of congress cataloging- in- publication data
Names: Mokoko Gampiot, Aurélien, author. | Coquet-Mokoko, Cécile,
translator.
Title: Kimbanguism : an African understanding of the Bible / Aurélien
Mokoko Gampiot ; Translated by Cécile Coquet-Mokoko.
Other titles: Signifying (on) Scriptures.
Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State
University Press, [2017] | Series: Signifying (on) Scriptures | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “A comprehensive study of Kimbanguism, founded by
Simon Kimbangu in 1921. Compares it to other African-initiated
churches, and examines its role, alongside other global religious
movements, in Black liberation”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046613 | ISBN 9780271077550 (cloth :
alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Eglise de Jésus-Christ sur la terre par le prophéte
Simon Kimbangu. | Kimbangu, Simon, 1887–1951. | Nativistic
movements—Congo (Democratic Republic) | Bible—Black
interpretations. | Christianity—Africa.
Classification: LCC BX7435.E44 M635 2017 | DDC 289.9/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046613
Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802- 1003
The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the
Association of American University Presses.
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use
acid- free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material,
ANSI z39.48–1992.
This book is printed on paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste.
List of Illustrations / vii
Acknowledgments / ix
Introduction / 1
Part I General Background
1 Europe in Africa / 15
2 African Responses: The Birth of African Christianities / 34
3 Kimbanguism as a Social Movement / 62
Part II Kimbanguism and the Bible
4 The Three Sources of Kimbanguist Theology / 83
5 The Identity of Simon Kimbangu in the Contemporary
Kimbanguist Faith / 122
6 Miraculous Healing and Worship / 155
Part III Expressions of Kimbanguist Messianism
7 Kimbanguist Prophetism, Messianism, and Millenarianism / 175
8 A Theology of Identity Reconstruction in a Global Context / 196
9 Reclaiming Kimbangu’s Prophetic Heritage / 228
Conclusion / 260
Notes / 265
Bibliography / 279
Index / 287
contents
Unless otherwise noted, all photographs appear courtesy of PRESKI (Presse
Kimbanguiste).
Maps
1 Kingdom of Kongo, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries / 17
2 Democratic Republic of the Congo. Map courtesy of d - maps .com,
http:// d - maps .com /carte .php ?num _car = 14168 & lang = en. / 64
Figures
1 Kimbangu in front of the Lubumbashi jail / 72
2 Photograph of Marie Muilu superimposed on the temple
of Nkamba / 77
3 One of the “small soldiers” of Armageddon / 92
4 The Rise to Jerusalem / 94
5 Simon Kimbangu’s image hovers over Diangienda Kuntima and
Simon Kimbangu Kiangani / 130
6 Simon Kimbangu Kiangani / 131
7 Dialungana, Kisolokele, and Diangienda / 133
8 Painting of the creation of man starring the sons of Kimbangu / 140
9 Marie- Louise Martin greeted by Elizabeth Mvete / 145
10 Kimbangu’s mausoleum in Nkamba. Photo: author. / 159
11 The Kimbanguist band, conducted by Diangienda / 163
12 The Lord’s Supper, conducted by Diangienda / 169
13 Diangienda healing two church members / 170
14 Temple of Nkamba / 186
15 Rev. Figueiredo with the author. Photo courtesy of the author. / 207
16 Kristin Shrader- Frechette kneels in front of Kimbangu’s portrait.
Photo: Gabriel Nzau Ngoma Wagaza. / 208
17 Corinne Kumar D’Souza receives a blessing from Diangienda. Photo:
Gabriel Nzau Ngoma Wagaza. / 209
illustrations
viii illustrations
18 David Wabeladio Payi teaches church members the Mandombe script.
Photo: author. / 222
19 Members of the Saint- Denis congregation graduate from their
Mandombe course. Photo: author. / 223
20 Armand Wabasolele Diangienda and the Kimbanguist Symphonic
Orchestra. Photo courtesy of the Kimbanguist Symphonic
Orchestra. / 226
21 Kimbanguist Symphonic Orchestra in concert. Photo courtesy of the
Kimbanguist Symphonic Orchestra. / 226
22 President Mobutu visits Diangienda / 232
23 President Joseph Kabila visits Dialungana / 246
This book would never have been published without the help and input of
Professor Vincent Wimbush, who not only suggested a new approach for
my research, but also welcomed me into his Institute for Signifying Scrip-
tures and gave my work a home in the Signifying (on) Scriptures series at
Penn State University Press. I am immensely grateful and indebted to him.
I am also deeply appreciative of the help, suggestions, and understanding
of Kathryn Yahner, acquisitions editor, and Hannah Hebert, editorial assis-
tant, at Penn State University Press, who accompanied me through the
editing process with as much kindness as professionalism.
I have been encouraged by the interest of colleagues who invited me
to present and discuss my research in their departments: Professor Thee
Smith of Emory University, Professor Maha Marouan of the University
of Alabama, Emerita Professor Rosa Bobia of Kennesaw University, and
Professors Marla Brettschneider, Carol Conaway, Penny Moreau, Courtney
Marshall, and Faina Bukher of the University of New Hampshire. Your sup-
port has been greatly appreciated.
I am also indebted to Professors Michael Gomez of New York Univer-
sity, Drew Smith of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, John Jackson of the
University of Pennsylvania, Edith Bruder of SOAS, Zekeh Gbotokuma of
Morgan State University, Clément Akassi of Howard University, Pamela
Gay- White of Alabama State University, David Garbin of Kent University,
and Metka Zupancic and Emeritus Professor Michael Mendle of the Uni-
versity of Alabama. Each of you has been a steadfast friend, and your sup-
port has always been highly valued.
By introducing me to sociology and supervising my research at the
University of Rennes 2, Emeritus Professor Pierre- Jean Simon has been a
crucial influence and a real mentor. My fellow researchers at the Groupe
société, religions, laïcité of the French national research center (CNRS)
hosted by the University of Paris, Sorbonne, are also deserving of thanks
for their interest in my work and their encouragement. I am especially
acknowledgments
x acknowledgments
grateful to Professors Philippe Portier, Jean Paul Willaime, Jean Baubérot,
Sébastien Fath, Joëlle Allouche- Benayoun, and Martine Cohen.
Emeritus professor Georges Balandier expressed interest in my work
and encouraged me to publish it in the United States; I was very honored
when he offered to write a preface for this book, but health issues unfortu-
nately made this impossible. Professor Elikia M’Bokolo helped by inviting
me to speak on his radio program, Mémoire d’un Continent, on Radio France
Internationale, thus making my work more visible, and by organizing a
historic international conference in Kinshasa called “Simon Kimbangu, the
Man, His Work, and His Contribution to the Liberation of Black People,”
which successfully connected the work of scholars with that of the mem-
bers of the Kimbanguist Church.
I am also extremely grateful to the leaders of the Kimbanguist Church,
particularly the spiritual leader Simon Kimbangu Kiangani for his support
and encouragement, and Maestro Armand Diangienda Wabasolele for his
interest, the interview he gave me, and his invariable helpfulness. I am
indebted to King Kipula Nsimba Wise for his help with information and
pictures of the Kimbanguist Symphonic Orchestra; to Gabriel Nzau Ngoma
Wagaza, who generously shared archival material and images he took as the
church’s official photographer with PRESKI until 2001; and to the many
interviewees, especially the late David Wabeladio Payi and Véronique Kabeya,
as well as the other inspired people and church members who answered my
questions with honesty and confidence. Jérôme Makiadi, Enock Mban, Syl-
vain Mbote Munzila, Adrien Fwakasumbu Luwawanu, and Joseph Shiashia
honored me with an invitation to be a guest of the first Kimbanguist Book
Fair in the greater Paris area. My longtime friends Saturnin Ngoma, Gody
Dia Kongo, Fortuné Mboussa, Darius Azika- Eros, David Biangué, and Erick
Siassia have been helpful and supportive. May all the Kimbanguist commu-
nity find here the expression of my heartfelt appreciation.
My final thanks are for my family: my wife, Dr. Cécile Coquet- Mokoko,
introduced me to Professor Wimbush and prioritized the translation of
my manuscript into English; our two sons, Antoine Elikia and Vincent
Luka, were patient during the years- long process of writing and revising
the manuscript, which kept their father engrossed in his work. I am also
grateful to my sisters, Madeleine Ambembé, Antoinette Mabouéré, and the
late Jeanne N’Gania; my brothers, Joseph, Gustave, Roger, and Blanchard
Mokoko; and all my relatives for their unwavering helpfulness and support.
“Black race, you must know that you were only the dregs of mankind”;
“Africa, oh Africa, all riches are yours”; “You, Black person, God has loved
you from the beginning”; “Black is the skin God had chosen in this world”:
these literary, biblical- sounding calls to the Black race come from hymns,
which are one of the sacred theological sources of Kimbanguism. An
African- initiated church born in the 1920s from the preaching and healing
campaign conducted by Simon Kimbangu, a Congolese Baptist catechist,
in reaction to the colonial situation in the Belgian Congo, Kimbanguism
has cultivated a theology of Black liberation by offering a unique under-
standing of the Bible.
Because the Bible was inseparable from the European colonial enter-
prises in sub- Saharan Africa, its use, circulation, and promotion rapidly
became a political instrument as much as a religious one. Consequently,
the Christian religion has been among the most effective tools of colonial
domination of African natives, who were exposed to the Bible from the fif-
teenth century onward. When Christian missionaries began spreading the
gospel in African societies, they introduced the Bible as a unique account
of the history of humanity, which was endowed with a logic of racial classi-
fication putting Whites on top and Blacks at the bottom. According to this
logic, even before they were subjugated, Africans had been long prepared
to occupy the lowest rung on the ladder of humankind, a position to which
they are still assigned today. The most familiar and striking example of this
introduction
2 kimbanguism
is, no doubt, the biblical myth of the curse of Ham. For this myth to take
on ideological and legal dimensions, the Christian colonial message had to
bring the dominated to accept their own domination, so that Blacks would
participate in and collaborate with their own inferiorization. The philoso-
pher Albert Memmi recalled, “As a child, I often heard people tell me very
seriously about the origins of black bondage: we all know that of the three
sons of Noah, Shem begat the Semites, who received the law, Japheth begat
the northern peoples, who inherited technical skills, and Ham fathered the
Hamites, who—well, who didn’t get anything. And that is why Europeans
can, with the blessing of Holy Providence, dominate the Africans. This was
the first attempt to explain the colonization process by the ‘colonizability’
of indigenous peoples.”1
This is how many columnists of the colonial press used the religious
metaphor of a biblical ancestor’s sin to justify the inferiorization of the
Black people, as the Guinean historian Ibrahima Baba Kaké explained:
“Black people, it is said in Christian schools, are the descendants of Ham,
and the curse uttered by Noah against the son of Ham who had disrespected
him still weighs on his posterity. This assertion was so categorical and was
repeated over so many centuries that it ended up in history books.”2
Claiming to be universal, Christianity was imposed as the religion of
all, regardless of ethnic and racial difference. But the Eurocentric nature
of its message entailed a phenomenon of counter- acculturation, which
led Africans to observe themselves using all possible modes—concern,
questioning, self- deprecating humor, self- criticism—whether or not they
defined themselves as believers. For instance, a philosopher from Burundi
related a debate he had with some friends on African atheism; one of
them began complaining about the lot of Black people everywhere: “I can’t
believe in God. . . . If God exists, He must be evil. I can’t forgive Him for
letting blacks all over the world be poverty- stricken and despised by every
human being.”3 This view is not unique. It echoes a conversation with one
of my maternal uncles, who had never received a formal education and
explained his atheism in these words: “For me, God does not exist; God is
just the White man. He’s been able to invent the radio, electricity, planes,
and the like.”
What these two examples reveal is not so much the notion that God is
truly evil or is actually the White man, but a critique of the oppressed status
experienced by Blacks. This critique was also echoed, from a Christian per-
spective, by a famous Congolese singer who was very popular in the 1970s,
Georges Kiamuangana Mateta (aka Verckys). In his hit “Nakomitunaka”
introduction 3
(I Am Wondering), the artist questioned the manner in which Blacks had
been Christianized:
I am wondering (bis)
My God, I am wondering: (bis)
Where on earth does black skin come from?
And who was our ancestor?
Jesus, the son of God, was a White man.
Adam and Eve were White people.
All the saints were White people too.
Why is that so, my God?
I am wondering (bis)
My God, I am wondering! (bis)
In the books about God we see
that all the angels
are pictured as White people,
and all saints
are pictured as White people.
But when it comes to the Devil,
then he is pictured as a Black man!
Where does this injustice come from, oh mother?
I am wondering (bis)
My God, I am wondering: (bis)
Where on earth does black skin come from?
The colonists keep us from understanding.
They reject the statues of our ancestors,
and the fetishes of our forefathers
are not accepted by them.
But we can all see that in church,
we pray with rosary beads in our hands.
We pray
to the images that fill the church:
But all these images show only White people.
Why is that so, my God?
I am wondering (bis)
My God, I am wondering: (bis)
The prophets of the Whites
are accepted by us,
but those of the Blacks
4 kimbanguism
are not accepted by them.
My God, why did You make us so?
Where is our ancestor, that of Black people?
Africa has opened her eyes.
Africa, there’s no turning back for us (ah mother)
I am wondering! (bis)4
This song, which belongs to the tradition of Congolese rumba, was writ-
ten by Verckys in 1971 and was well known to the Congolese from both
sides of the river and to the Angolans as well. It reflects the Eurocentricity
behind the Christianization of Africans, with angels represented according
to European codes equating Whiteness with perfection, beauty, and purity.
When positive values are only represented through White characters, it is
impossible to develop a positive image of Blackness. To a certain extent,
this approach was the result of the “discovery” of the African continent,
which compelled Africans to come to terms with Europeans’ presence and
ultimately to embrace religions designed for others. Black people could
only find a place for themselves in this worldview by assimilating it and
accepting their condition as slaves or subalterns. But this did not preclude
the possibility of a backlash. The song above is an example of the reactions
of Black people who, instead of accepting the imposed order, challenged it
by questioning the reason for their oppressed situation.
The large- scale Christianization of Africa was shaped by the Berlin
Conference of 1884–85. From then on, Black people were perceived only
as children to be disciplined by the White man or as objects of pseudo-
scientific studies, to be used for theorizing on evolution. Space does not
allow an exhaustive list of all the theories developed to explain the low
rank of Black people in the social order, but let me briefly discuss the most
relevant one, social Darwinism, which posits a global evolution of all soci-
eties, whose growth is supposed to follow three stages, from savagery (the
inferior stage) to barbarity (the medium stage) to civilization (the supe-
rior stage). As the French historian Éric Savarèse pointed out in writing
about colonial representations of African peoples in the West, “without a
doubt, it was the Black man—as abstractly defined in many works—who
appeared as the most infantilized.”5 But how to designate African societ-
ies? With a colonial term such as “tribe”? In terms of race, ethnicity, com-
munity, or society? Until the colonial bureaucrats defined specific usages
of the concepts of race and ethnicity, finding the right term was a problem.
In the field of science, the Western conception of the African Other was
introduction 5
warped by its ethnocentric character, and this was even more true in the
field of religion. As Vincent Wimbush stressed, the need to define the
term “religion” also revealed a hierarchy between “civilized” and “savage”
nations, which was invented in the wake of the first contact between the
West and the worlds of the Other: “In this new situation and the discursive
political climate, dominated peoples—savages/primitives—could now be
seen as being either hyperreligious or not religious at all, or not religious
on the right terms.”6
The concept of religion has generated a “Tower of Babel of definitions,”
as the French sociologist Yves Lambert used to say. The word comes from
the Latin religare, which means “to tie” or “to link together,” thus designat-
ing the connection between human beings and the deity, as developed by
the thinkers Lactantius (a.d. ca. 260–ca. 325) and Tertullian (a.d. ca. 155–
ca. 220). A second understanding of the term was proposed by the linguist
Benveniste, for whom religere meant “to gather or collect; to accomplish
scrupulously,” thereby joining together the authority of tradition and the
punctilious performance of rituals. How is religion to be defined in an age
when religious affiliations are increasingly shifting all over the world? In
his search for delimiting criteria, Lambert stressed that the human quest
for origins was always inseparable from the assumed existence of one or
several deities or of a form of transcendence, which may be embodied,
such as in the notion of mana, where a living being may be comprehended
as a power or entity. It also seems important to distinguish religion from
magic and witchcraft “on the basis of the existence or absence of com-
munal activities, since magic and witchcraft are usually practiced in the
private sphere.”7
In the African context, it makes sense to ask whether it is most appro-
priate to use the concept of religion or the concept of a belief system.
Indeed, many scholars have tended to designate as “African religion(s)”
a suite of behaviors in which customs and rituals intersect with kinship
systems and superstitions, thus creating a hazy notion from which it
is difficult to extract any specifically religious content. In his study of
religions among the Beti people of Cameroon, the French sociologist
Philippe Laburthe- Tolra observed, “There was no term to accurately trans-
late ‘religion’ in their language. . . . In the realm of conscience and belief,
the most difficult thing to grasp for a modern Westerner was, no doubt,
the sense of a continuous and immanent presence of the invisible world,
interweaved in the visible one.”8 Thus it is possible to retain as functional
the definition of religion proposed by Lambert: “a system of beliefs and
6 kimbanguism
practices related to supernatural forms of reality—whether they are living
beings, entities, or forces—in connection with human beings via sym-
bolic means, such as prayers, rituals or meditation, and giving birth to
communal forms of expression.”9
This definition seems relevant insofar as it encompasses all the elements
pertaining to religion, religiosity, or new religious movements establishing
systems of beliefs and practices in relation to the metasocial sphere, as well
as communal forms of expression. Yet it remains inadequate to account for
elements pertaining to identity construction, particularly religious shifts in
African belief systems. Indeed, defining religion in a contemporary context
implies taking into account the motivations, thought patterns, and social
interests at work behind the subjective choices of actors, which shape their
behaviors. The field of religions is a particularly rich one when it comes to
exploring ethnic identities, thought patterns, ethics, and weltanschauungs.
Every religion claims to be, in the words of Claude Rivière, “both a system
which accounts for human nature and the universe and an organized sys-
tem of action seeking to remedy whatever is unpredictable, uncanny, and
accidentally tragic in social and individual life.”10 For Clifford Geertz, “It
is a matter of discovering just what sorts of beliefs and practices support
what sorts of faith under what sorts of conditions.”11 Through their actions,
words, and behaviors, human beings define their ways of life, their rela-
tions to others and the world, and their understandings of the forces at
work behind all these interactions.
It is thus easy to grasp the religious and political motivations behind
the Christianization of Africans. The missionaries, whose purpose was to
preach the gospel, actively contributed to the colonial venture by preparing,
training, and socializing the colonized peoples so that they would adopt
certain types of moral behavior and promulgate a system of beliefs based
on White superiority. While the ideology of social hierarchy put into place
a specific order for social classification, the processes of social differentia-
tion and hierarchy began to be questioned and contested. Thus, political,
regionalist, nationalist, and religious movements emerged among subal-
tern peoples as challenges to the social order or as movements of counter-
acculturation or appropriation of the self- image imposed by the colonizers.
One of these Black ideologies was the négritude movement, initiated in the
1930s by intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor,
who inspired other Black leaders. It was followed by Afrocentric theories
developed in the 1950s by Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile Obenga, who
claimed that African civilizations predated White ones.
introduction 7
These new ways of theorizing Blacks and Blackness, though adopted
by many, did not remain unquestioned. The following comments by a
Cameroonian theologian illustrate this point: “As such, the thesis of the
preexistence of African civilizations does not change anything in the pres-
ent situation of black people. Even worse, there has been a decline of the
trailblazers, and one wonders why the first have become last. The knowl-
edge of our creativity is of no use whatsoever if it does not allow us to
take up historical initiative in the here and now.”12 The answer to the ques-
tion “Why did the first become last?” is at the core of the quest of African-
initiated churches, for they provide answers to the question of Blackness
from a different perspective. The paradox of African Christianity is that
it has embraced the Bible and the Christian message while implement-
ing resistance to it, so there have been two antagonistic forces: on the one
hand, the dominant culture, which aims at maintaining the dominated in
an oppressed status, and on the other hand, religious resistance, which has
taken all sorts of shapes. In some cases, Africans seem to uncritically accept
the Bible that came from abroad; in other cases, they have appropriated it
more actively, transforming it radically into systems of belief addressing
their own situation in the here and now.
Some African churches have organized a process of counter- acculturation,
reversing the stigma, reconstructing their identity, and rereading or rein-
terpreting the Bible. Throughout the history of the colonization of Africa,
the political claim for national independence went hand in hand with
religious movements of resistance known today as African independent,
African- initiated, or Afro- Christian churches. Operating from within
the closed space of the Christian scriptures, which had been introduced
as a universal history that Black people had no choice but to internalize,
African- initiated churches succeeded in restoring a positive historical or
mythical role for them. As Lewis Gordon explained, “Rejecting the thesis of
thought as fundamentally white requires liberating it from the economy of
rationalizations that assert this. The liberation of thinking, then, becomes
also an important dimension of liberation praxis. It requires addressing
the dimensions of thought that have been barred from their potential or
reach.”13 To give a satisfactory account of the way African- initiated churches
have implemented such a liberation praxis, it is necessary to shed light on
a number of concepts, namely, prophetism, messianism, millenarianism,
nativism, and syncretism. The definitions offered by the American theolo-
gian David Barrett, who was an expert on African churches, are the most
useful for a study of contemporary Kimbanguism:
8 kimbanguism
(1) A prophetic movement is a religious awakening founded and led by
the charismatic figure of a prophet or prophetess, who speaks from
within a consciousness of being set apart for some divine purpose,
adopts a critical stance towards the established order, proclaims a new
religious idea or allegiance, and in the process attracts a considerable
following.
(2) A messianic movement is one which, centred around a dominant
personality, claims for [the leader] special powers beyond the prophetic
and involving a form of identification with Christ. This definition is
applicable to the African scene but differs somewhat from the current
usage in the history of religions, where messianism refers to belief
in the future advent of any being, singular or plural, expected by a
community as the future savior who will end the present order of
things and institute a new order of justice and happiness.
(3) A millennial movement is one which preaches an imminent
millennium, Golden Age or End of the World, involving the
overthrow of oppressors from outside Africa, the expulsion or
throwing into the sea of the white race, the return or resurrection of
a culture- hero or of the ancestors bringing unlimited quantities of
material goods, the rejuvenation of the old, and often the reversal
of colour roles.
(4) A nativistic movement is an organised attempt on the part of a
society’s members to revive or perpetuate selected aspects of its
culture, usually resulting in a rejection of European culture and a
return to the old ways of traditional religion; often allied with it is an
immunity cult rendering initiates immune from European assault.
(5) A syncretistic movement is one which amalgamates the Christian
religion with traditional beliefs and concepts, and often with other
non- Christian religious systems such as astrology, to such an extent
that the revelation in Jesus Christ, and the Lordship of Christ over
all other gods, is obscured, challenged or denied, leaving only an
outwardly Christian appearance with a pre- Christian content.14
In chronological order, the oldest African messianic movement, Anto-
nianism, was led by a Congolese prophet called Kimpa Vita, also known
as Dona Beatriz (her Christian name), in the early eighteenth century. She
initiated a nationalist and spiritual revival movement with a discourse that
perfectly suited the mentality and expectations of her compatriots, whom
she successfully mobilized for the restoration of the kingdom of Kongo.15
introduction 9
The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth
witnessed the emergence of Black African churches in South Africa, first
researched by Bengt Sundkler,16 which fell into two groups: the so- called
Ethiopian churches and the Zionist churches. The former were the result of
interethnic relations: an African Methodist pastor, Mangena Mokono, left the
European churches to create an African independent church in 1892. Out
of this church several other “Ethiopian” religious movements were born, all
of them preaching the liberation of Black people from bondage. The Zionist
churches, which emerged in southern Africa, were syncretic churches that
took after Daniel Bryant’s African American church, the Christian Catholic
Church in Zion.17 Quite probably, the Nazareth Baptist Church, initiated by
the Zulu prophet Isaiah Shembe in 1911, played a significant role in the Zion-
ist movement in South Africa, since he insisted on the worship of a Black
Christ and on interpreting the Bible in the context of Zulu religion. Another
historic African- initiated church discussed by scholars is the Harrist move-
ment, launched by William Harris on the border between Liberia and Ivory
Coast. Its goal was to bring Bible- based answers to the colonial problem.
The Kimbanguist movement, which is the focus of this book, was initi-
ated by Simon Kimbangu in the early 1920s in the southwestern portion
of the former Belgian Congo. Since then, it has become a major African-
initiated church, as Jean- Claude Froelich pointed out: “Of all the African
churches of classical messianic or prophetic type that were born from a
reaction to colonial domination, the Kimbanguist Church is no doubt the
most remarkable.”18 Although it is difficult to know the exact member-
ship of the Kimbanguist Church, which has been a member of the World
Council of Churches since 1969, Kimbanguists officially claim to be 17 mil-
lion strong. The church’s success has triggered unrelenting interest from
sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, historians, journalists, and
theologians. The first scholar who developed an interest in Kimbanguism,
and who remains the best known, is the French Africanist Georges Baland-
ier. Analyzing Congolese messianic movements as part of the dynamics
of social change he was witnessing, Balandier perceived two alternatives:
either the messianic movements of Africa were essentially religious, or
they betokened the awakening of people who saw themselves as having
neither past nor future, but were reacting against violations of their dignity.
“They express a passionate desire for change; and because they assert the
universal nature of human dignity, they represent a step towards univer-
sality.”19 Balandier’s work is centered around this time- hallowed tradition,
which he described in the 1950s as a reaction to the colonial situation.
10 kimbanguism
Subsequent research on Kimbanguism includes works by Marie- Louise
Martin, a Swiss theologian and missiologist. The best known of these is
Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church. Her theological approach
has centered on two main questions: Is the Kimbanguist Church a Chris-
tian church or a cult? Does it run the risk of insisting on syncretic elements
that could end up drawing it away from Christ as the only messiah and
redeemer? Her observations throughout the 1960s and 1970s led her to
conclude, “It is wrong to call the Kimbanguist Church a cult in the theo-
logical sense of the term, since it is in the process of ‘becoming and being
a Church,’ which, I hope, we are all engaged in.”20 Also worthy of notice
is the reference book written by the Congolese historian Martial Sinda, Le
messianisme congolais et ses incidences politiques, published in 1972 with a
preface by Roger Bastide called “Les Christs noirs.” It describes Kimban-
guism and its splinter groups through the prism of Bakongo historical
and religious traditions and in the Belgian and French colonial contexts.
Other specialists on Kimbanguism who did extensive fieldwork in post-
colonial Zaire between the 1960s and the mid- 1980s are the American
anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey—who analyzed the church through the
prism of Kongo cultural patterns and beliefs in his classic Modern Kongo
Prophets—and the American sociologist Susan Asch, whose discussion of
the Kimbanguist Church was articulated around the relations among reli-
gion, politics, and socioeconomic development in Zaire in the late 1970s
and early 1980s.21
Yet, since then, no in- depth research has been published on this major
African independent church in the post–Simon Kimbangu era. My book
aims to fill this gap, providing historical data and offering new sociological
and theological analyses of the church’s understanding and interpretation
of the Bible, grounded in an insider’s knowledge of the religion and a native
command of the African languages spoken by the members of this church.
The two studies I published in France on the Kimbanguist Church in Cen-
tral Africa and in the diaspora (now reference books for French- speaking
researchers) offered new insights by analyzing contemporary Kimban-
guism using the sociological perspective of the relationship between reli-
gion and ethnicity. I took as my starting point the Kimbanguist religion in
order to understand its relation to ethnicity—not the other way around, as
Balandier did. To accomplish this, I investigated the massive body of oral
traditions, which had remained absolutely untapped by scholars, although
it represents for the Kimbanguists a source of faith and wisdom as sacred
as—and inseparable from—the scriptures.
introduction 11
The present book includes a new analysis, inspired by the American
theologian Vincent Wimbush, who suggested that I focus more on the
theological appropriation of the Bible by this church and include a com-
parative study with other African churches. In this book I show how the
scriptures are read, understood, and appropriated by these churches, and
how they use the Bible as a foundation to assign a history and a future role
for African and Africana people. But my documentation of the processes
of appropriation of the Bible by African- initiated churches in both colonial
and postcolonial times remains mostly centered on Kimbanguism. I chose
to keep building on my twenty- year knowledge of this church because it is
the most important and famous African- initiated church today, and also
because I have cultural and family ties with this field of research. My late
father, Antoine Mokoko, was one of the first pastors of this church, and
my mother, Joséphine Elo, is still a member of the clergy in the Congo-
Brazzaville branch of the EJCSK (Église de Jésus Christ sur la terre par
son envoyé spécial Simon Kimbangu). I thus offer an insider’s analysis
of Kimbanguism; my major assets are a mastery of Congolese languages,
which helps me decipher the hymns, speeches, and messages addressing
believers, and an intimate knowledge of Congolese culture and the Kim-
banguist religion. I observe from the inside, combining the findings of
participant observation and semi- structured interviews with an analysis of
inspired hymns and spiritual leaders’ speeches. These elements offer a rich
potential for cross- disciplinary observation, at the junction of sociology, eth-
nology, history, Africana studies, and biblical studies. Indeed, the Kimban-
guist reading of the Bible reveals a process of self- identification based on
a critique of Africana people’s oppressed position throughout the world.
How are African history and the history of enslavement and colonization by
Europeans interpreted through this Afro- centered approach to the Chris-
tian scriptures? How is Blackness reinterpreted through the Kimbanguist
reading of the Bible?
The answers offered in this book are developed in three distinct parts. The
first exposes the background and context of the European Christian pres-
ence in Africa in order to offer a comparative analysis of African- initiated
churches as phenomena of appropriation of the Bible and to discuss the
role of Kimbanguism as a social movement. The second part is dedicated
to an analysis of Kimbanguism and the Bible. It is especially focused on
theological sources—the interpretive template of the biblical text and sub-
text that Kimbanguism offers. I show how the Bible is read, understood,
and appropriated by Kimbanguists, and I investigate the particular role
12 kimbanguism
given to Simon Kimbangu in the Kimbanguist reinterpretation of scrip-
ture. Indeed, from being a special envoy of Jesus Christ to the Black people,
to the embodiment of the Holy Trinity, Kimbangu’s presence and sacraliza-
tion pervade the whole process of understanding the Bible, negotiating a
new status for Blacks within and thanks to the sacred text, as well as healing
practices—a crucial dimension in African Christianity. Finally, the third
part of this book explores the messianic and millenarian dimensions of
this African understanding of the Bible, delving into the complex relations
the church has created and maintained with political leaders and exploring
the beginning of the fulfillment of Kimbangu’s prophecy in the increasing
presence of African American and African- descended people as sojourners
and benefactors in the holy city of Nkamba.
A Note About Names
In Congolese tradition, last names are not family names, but the traditional
names given to each person based on the circumstances of her or his birth,
as a tribute to an ancestor, or to ward off evil (such as sudden infant death).
This is completely different from the Western system of naming, in which
the children of the same father and mother have the same last name. In
the years after independence, if the family was Christian, a Christian name
was added to the traditional name when the child was christened. Then,
beginning in 1972, the policy of Zairianization—“authenticity”—made it
compulsory for each citizen to choose an additional name in a local lan-
guage, either to replace the Christian name or to serve as a surname in
the European sense of the term. This is how the three sons of Kimbangu
chose, respectively, the “Zairian” names Lukelo, Kiangani, and Kuntima.
This is also why some of the books by Diangienda appear with “Joseph
Diangienda” as the author’s name, while those written after Zairianization
use “Diangienda Kuntima.” The grandchildren of Kimbangu were free to
choose their own last names as they wanted; only some of the children of
Dialungana have chosen “Kiangani” as a last name. There is further expla-
nation in chapter 7 about Congolese naming traditions.
part i
general background
To understand Kimbanguism, it is necessary to situate it not only in the
history of the territory where it was born, which used to be known as the
kingdom of Kongo, but also against the backdrop of traditional African reli-
gions, which reflect a coherent worldview.
Although it is difficult to reconstitute this history completely, let me try
with the existing documents to give an account of the political, ethnic, and
religious elements that are the background of the Kimbanguist religion.
More often than not, when evoking the kingdom of Kongo, scholars tend
to refer to the linguistic area corresponding to the Kongo ethnic group. But
whenever they try to depict the different groups making up this kingdom,
it becomes clear that there were several kingdoms—including those of the
Kongo, Angola, Loango, Anzico, and Teke. The research by the Jesuit father
Joseph Van Wing in his Études ba- Kongo; by Georges Balandier on daily life
in the kingdom of Kongo from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; by
Cuvelier and Jadin; and by Kabolo Iko Kabwita help build fuller knowledge
of the ethnic, political, and religious background of the kingdom of Kongo.1
The origin of this kingdom has been lost in the oral traditions. But, unlike
other African political systems, the kingdom of Kongo has benefited from
several written accounts left by European missionaries and other Western
explorers.
According to a myth that became famous thanks to the writings of the
Italian explorer Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi (published in 1687), a man
europe in africa
1
16 general background
called Ntinu Wene, or Nimi Lukeni, the youngest son of the king of Bundu
(or Vundu, near the present- day city of Boma in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo), resented having to live under the authority of his elder broth-
ers; he left his kinsmen to emigrate with a group of followers to a region
south of the Congo River. There, he mustered his men into an armed band,
which exacted a toll from anyone wanting to cross the river. Then, Cavazzi
wrote, “one day, he argued with his paternal aunt, who refused to pay the
demanded sum. He ripped her belly open, though she was pregnant. Out
of fear of his father’s wrath, Lukeni then settled down on the southern bank
of the river, where he founded the kingdom of Kongo after defeating a local
chief called Mambombolo.”2
This murder was the starting point of the gradual conquest of the ter-
ritory that came to be known as the kingdom of Kongo. But the authority
of a king is not legitimate until he earns the support of both his subjects
and their (dead) ancestors, who rule the territory. The lands that Ntinu
Wene had conquered did not hold the remains of his ancestors. In the
Kongo system, the property of land is exclusively held by ancestors, and
it can be neither divided nor ceded; the living only benefit from the use
of it. Consequently, Ntinu Wene’s conquest of the territory represented a
violation of the sacred, vital link among the ancestors, the living, and the
land.3 It was outside of the initial society that he built a new kingdom and
subjugated it to his law. He imposed his authority by filling his subjects
with awe.4
Balandier wrote that three elements marked the nature of this newborn
kingdom.5 The first was sacred violence, which is the privilege of a double-
faceted monarch—a brutal and domineering person, yet also a righter of
wrongs and a peacemaker. Second, Ntinu Wene was considered to be the
inventor of the art of forging metals, thereby endowing his people with
weapons for waging wars and tools for agriculture. Third, he instituted a
court of justice that was both respected and feared.
Beyond the brutal power exerted by Ntinu Wene lay another power based
on ancestor worship. If the observers of the early kingdom of Kongo are to
be believed, Lukeni, while conquering the Congo plateau territories located
around his city of Mbanza Kongo, was regarded as a foreign invader until
he had obtained the blessing of the ancestors guarding his new possessions.
He thus became interested in legitimizing his reign through a matrimonial
alliance with a woman from the lineage of the conquered Nsaku clan.
The early history of the kingdom of Kongo, as described by most observ-
ers, gives the picture of relentless ethnic warfare between populations from
europe in africa 17
regions now situated in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
and Congo- Brazzaville. The boundaries that enclosed the ancient king-
dom of Kongo are blurred due to its coexistence with other kingdoms and
because those kings often exaggerated their territories,6 but it was mainly
located in present- day Angola. The kingdom bordered the Atlantic Ocean
on its western boundary and spanned the Zaire River toward the Bateke
Plateaux to the east. Its northern boundary extended toward present- day
Gabon and its southern boundary beyond the Kwango River, totaling more
than 115,000 square miles. The kingdom never had one common govern-
ment, but it shared a common civilization.7 As time went by, the invaders
merged with the natives, and together they formed a vast kingdom whose
splendor amazed the Europeans who arrived by the late fifteenth century.
1000 km
1000 mi
0
0
Angola
Democratic Republic of Congo
Congo-Brazzaville
Map 1. Kingdom of Kongo, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
18 general background
The kingdom of the Kongo is commonly divided into six provinces or main
territories: Mbamba, Soyo, Mpemba, Mbata, Mpangu, and Nsundi.
Other authors claim that the territory was once inhabited by the Batswa
ethnic group—that is, the Pygmies, who now live in the forest regions of
the areas mentioned above—and that the Bakongo, coming in successive
migratory waves, took hold of the territory and enslaved them to build the
kingdom of Kongo and its capital city, Mbanza Kongo.8
The general trend nowadays is to describe the kingdom of Kongo
as having been composed of the three present- day countries of Congo-
Brazzaville, the DRC, and Angola. Actually, it was the king of the Bateke
people, known as the Makoko Teke, who gave the land of what is now
Congo- Brazzaville to the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who was
acting on behalf of France in 1880. This allows us to infer that the land
belonged to the Bateke kingdom.9
Oral tradition does not give a specific date of birth for the kingdom
of Kongo; the only existing written sources date to the year the kingdom
became known to the Portuguese, who settled there from the 1490s. Fur-
ther, the kingdom of Kongo left no tangible traces apart from remnants
of the Christianization period, such as the ruins of the old cathedral of
Mbanza Kongo, which remain to this day and hold a particular significance
for Kimbanguists, as I discuss below. Around the new kingdom, a num-
ber of elements typical of oral traditions congregated, shaping a distinctive
political and religious worldview.
It is also difficult to get a clear picture of the political nature of the
kingdom of Kongo, particularly as regards the relations between the king
and his subjects and their perception of him. How did the succession of
the monarch take place? Was it a dynastic or a democratic process? Only
through the remnants of sociopolitical structures observable in present- day
Congo and Angola can we infer what the kingdom of Kongo may have been
as a political entity. Historians have reached a consensus about the duality
of the kingdom’s political power, which seems to have been both temporal
and spiritual. The Kongo social universe, as the Congolese historian Kabolo
Iko Kabwita explained, is a tripartite community, consisting of God, the
ancestors, and the members living on their own soil. In Kongo tradition,
the king, who is mainly considered to be the head of a clan, is the repository
of traditional religion. That is to say, he is the priest of ancestor worship.10
The American anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey clearly analyzed the nature
of such worship:
europe in africa 19
In Kongo the important distinction lies between ordinary persons, of
any age, and those who exercise occult power (kindoki), including both
the dead and powerful living elders. In many instances such elders,
especially those initiated as “chiefs” were regarded as spirits (binzambi-
nzambi, “little gods”) and treated as cult objects, as containing some
extraordinary soul that could be constrained to produce extraordinary
effects, good or bad. Chiefs (sing., mfumu) were persons initiated to the
cult of a particular spirit on behalf of the groups they represented. . . .
Like other initiates, they incorporated attributes of the spirit whose
powers they mediated. . . . The dualism of chief and priest, the latter
clearly dedicated to local spirits responsible for weather and fertility, is
evident in accounts of the former Kingdom of Kongo.11
It may then be inferred that temporal power was also a matter of spiri-
tual power, which was given by the “gods” or “ancestors.” In this sense, a
chief, and especially a king, was entrusted not only with the temporal care
of his subjects, but also with their protection by acting as a go- between with
Nzambi a Mpungu (literally, God Almighty). It was impossible for a person
not born into the clan or ethnic group to rise to the throne. To become the
ruler, the king or king- to- be must have been born in the Kongo ethnic group.
In traditional Kongo society, social organization is based on a minimal
unit, which is not the nuclear family but the lineage, that is, the whole
group of descendants of an ancestor, who is often known to them all, but
also has a mythical dimension. Lineage in Kongo society includes those
who live on the surface of the earth (the living), those who are below the
surface of the earth (the dead), and those who are not yet born. The line of
descent is the governing principle of the transmission of kinship. It deter-
mines a more or less exclusive degree of affiliation within and between
groups of individuals sharing the same ancestor. In the Kongo cultural sys-
tem, the line of descent is usually traced from a single parent, the mother: a
child is her or his mother’s and only belongs to her kin. The line of descent
is therefore matrilineal, and kinship ties are transmitted by females only.
Hence a male, unlike his sister, cannot transmit his kinship to his chil-
dren—the latter are no kin to him, because they belong to their mother’s
kinship group. Yet all his nephews and nieces (the children of his sister) are
members of his kinship group.
Since individuals belong to their mother’s kinship group, female chil-
dren represent a real source of wealth, for they are the ones who perpetuate
20 general background
the clan. A man is considered to be the husband of the children’s mother,
but his physiological fatherhood is ignored, while the “social” father, the
children’s legal tutor, is actually his brother- in- law. The matrilineal system
is not a matriarchy, giving the mother exclusive authority over her children.
In this system, women are just progenitors, while actual power inside the
family is in the hands of maternal uncles. The matrilineal system, which
is still recognized in modern Kongo society, determines who is entitled to
inherit from whom property rights, titles, and duties, and who transmits to
whom social identity and status.
This does not mean that the head of a family or kinship group is nec-
essarily a king or the head of the whole ethnic group—even though a king
may be the head of his family or kinship group or be a local chief for a
region or village. This is probably the way the king of Kongo identified,
since he ranked above the heads of all families and the heads of all kinship,
tribal, and ethnic groups and just under Nzambi a Mpungu. The order of
succession may have been systematically dynastic, as was the case for King
Nzinga Nkuvu, a descendant of the first Kongo king, Ntinu Wene/Lukeni.
In some cases, it was the council of elders that made decisions about the
succession or the nomination of a new sovereign, granting him legitimacy
by transmitting to him the relics of different sorts of ancestors, such as
albinos (believed to be reincarnations of the dead) or previous incumbents
of the office.12 The French anthropologist Albert Doutreloux’s discussion
of the “rod chief” (from the Kongo mvuala, “rod”) allows a better under-
standing of one aspect of the authority of Kongo chiefs—and, by extension,
kings—over their people:
1. When the chief travels and the mvwala is brought out, the members
of his clan must remain in their houses until the Children and
Grandchildren have passed.
2. No member of the clan may touch the mvwala, for to do so would mean
he presumed to be chief.
3. If the chief plants his mvwala in the market, everybody must sit down
and hear what he has to say.
4. If the chief comes to confer a title, his mvwala will be planted in the
middle of the village until the investiture is over.
5. Mvwala is to be kept next to the house post at all times.13
Below, I discuss the ways the kinship system and the mvuala, as defined
in the kingdom of Kongo, remain alive in, but are at the same time disrupted
europe in africa 21
by, the ideology of succession at work in the Kimbanguist Church. But first,
it is important to stress that, as the explorers Filippo Pigafetta and Duarte
Lopez remarked in 1591, “In the whole kingdom of Congo, absolutely no
one can claim to possess anything that he may freely dispose of or bequeath
to his heirs. Everything belongs to the king, who divides charges, valuables,
and lands as he deems fit. The king’s sons are themselves subject to this
law. For this reason, if anyone fails to pay him the annual tribute, the king
strips him of his power and gives it to another man.”14
This passage is particularly illustrative of the absolute nature of the
power wielded by the king over his subjects, collaborators, and sons. It is
also useful to note that the socially established values described by West-
ern observers constructed a common law that regulated the principle of
primogeniture by requiring the submission of both younger brothers and
women, thereby delineating an essentially male hierarchy. The aim of this
subordination and dependency in social and family life was—and still is—
to have women fulfill the roles of wives and mothers; depend on men for
their material, affective, and social security; and perpetuate the clan’s lin-
eage by giving birth.
Matrimonial alliances are also regulated by the common law, which
requires the payment of a dowry. This, as Balandier explained, establishes
the distinction between the legitimate wife, on the one hand, and the con-
cubine or the (purchased) female slave, on the other. The dowry payment
involves a ceremony that reveals the role of the young bride’s brother
through the “option” he takes on his sister’s future children, who will have
judicial and sentimental ties to him.15
The kingdom of Kongo is a foundation for the Kimbanguist religion, which
builds its work of identity reconstruction on that kingdom and its civiliza-
tion, with its distinctive religious and cultural worldview. While differing
from the moral code of European missionaries, the Kongo moral code and
respect for hierarchy included two types of sanctions. A negative sanction
might have been meted out to offenders, based on the condemnation of
certain actions regarded as vices—namely, adultery, theft, homosexuality,
and pedophilia.16
Positive sanctions were like a good neighbor policy with the ancestors,
since infringement on a taboo could cause their wrath. Here, morality was
essentially social and knew neither of a Judgment Day nor of any notion
of retribution; a purgatory was totally absent from Kongo representations
of the hereafter. The Kongo conception of death and the hereafter derived
22 general background
from a spiritual domain that is usually designated as animism: “Animism,
strictly speaking, attributes a vital force or soul (anima in Latin, hence its
name) to all elements in the world; it therefore involves worshiping the
spirits and all the invisible beings endowed with personalities, wills, and
powers, and also ancestor worship, which implies a belief in the notion that
souls are independent from bodies and liberated by death.”17
A number of elements delineate the content of traditional Congolese
beliefs, which never aimed to be universal, since only tribe members are
allowed to worship. The first structural feature is the belief in a maker, known
as God Almighty in each vernacular language (here, Nzambi a Mpungu).
This belief is found in many traditional African religions, and God’s action is
understood to coexist with the interventions of intermediary, more approach-
able deities and tribal ancestors. For the French Africanist Jean- Claude Fro-
elich, the fact that archaic peoples had the concept of a single maker is an
indicator that the belief is extremely ancient.18 Today, Kimbanguists still pray
to the God of the Bible under the name Nzambi a Mpungu.
The second element that characterizes Congolese animism is the belief
in invisible, more or less anthropomorphic spirits, which haunt springs,
rivers, rocks, and forests. Froelich classified them into two categories: half-
mythological, half- divine beings inhabiting trees and caves in human or
animal guise, and local spirits, who serve God and inhabit the earth like
human beings, but who are invisible and much more powerful than the
former and are in direct contact with human beings. This aspect of ani-
mism is recognized in the Kimbanguist Church, but it is combated as evil,
as I discuss below.
The third essential feature of Congolese tribal religions is ancestor wor-
ship, which is linked to beliefs about life in the hereafter. According to these
beliefs, every human being is endowed with a soul, which either leaves the
body after death to continue living in the invisible world of the ancestors
or is reincarnated in his or her own family—especially if the deceased was
a young person. Old people who die after a virtuous life become ancestors,
whom their descendants worship with sacrifices and offerings of alcoholic
beverages. The bankulu (plural of nkulu, “elder”) are the dead members of a
clan. The land is their realm; they inhabit the woods and rivers, where they
live in perfect harmony in villages similar to those of the living.19
Ancestors sometimes morph into deities—when they have become more
remote through the succession of generations of their descendants. Para-
doxical though it may seem, an ancestor may at the same time be consid-
ered as reincarnated and still be worshiped at his or her grave, as Froelich
europe in africa 23
pointed out: “an impalpable part of his being, the consciousness of his self,
survives somewhere in the realm of the dead.”20 Today, the Congolese still
worship ancestors by paying tribute to the dead members of their families:
it is a common sight in Congo on the feast of All Saints Day (November 1)
to see people in cemeteries talking to their dead, settling old scores with
them, or thanking them for their protection. As I discuss below, the Kongo
belief in reincarnation is clearly recognizable in the Kimbanguist dogmas
on the incarnation of the Holy Spirit and the Second Coming of Christ.
While, as Froelich pointed out, the notions of chastisement and reward
seem absent from a moral system essentially based on social values, Bal-
andier showed that the end of the trip is the realm of the ancestors and the
goal is to obtain a “lasting life.” The dead are the “living par excellence”; they
are outside of time and wealthy; they have power that allows them to con-
trol nature and human beings. From their villages underneath riverbeds or
the floors of lakes, they can go out to mingle with the living (without being
seen) and tamper with the order of things.21
Witchcraft and anti- witchcraft are also important components of ani-
mism. These twin but antagonistic forces are revealed through the witch
and the anti- witch, who inspire, respectively, distrust and trust. According to
the social beliefs held by tribal people and by Congolese people, the witch is
the person who spreads fear because his or her supernatural powers allow
him or her to cause death or madness, attract thunder and unleash thunder-
bolts, make women barren, or spread epidemics. Anything out of the ordi-
nary can be blamed on witchcraft. Based on anthropological observation in
the region, the witch (ndoki) is purported to shape- shift and can live “in the
guise of a human being or animal, and dissolve the boundaries of nature.”22
On the contrary, the anti- witch (nganga) is able to control the actions of
the former: identifying the source of disease or misfortune, repairing what
has become paralyzed, and healing the witch’s victims and those made sick
by him or her. The anti- witch enjoys social recognition as the counselor,
the protector, the healer who provides fetishes, and, most important, the
fighter of witches. The nganga’s influence on individual destinies cannot
be overestimated.23
One might assume that this logic of antagonistic forces ruling the lives
of Congolese people has totally disappeared nowadays, but nothing is fur-
ther from the truth. The opposition between the witch and the anti- witch
is still at work in Congolese social representations, and it does not seem to
have been substantially modified by modernity. As the Congolese historian
Martial Sinda pointed out, “Witchcraft has ramifications even in the cities
24 general background
that are home to Africans with a European education. To this day, witch-
craft, which causes actual panic in this milieu, remains far more formida-
ble than any other misfortune.”24
Even before Christianization, witches were already identified as the dev-
il’s minions, known in the Kikongo language as kadiapempa. This notion
was further reinforced by exposure to the Manichaean opposition of God
and evil. However, the role of the anti- witch today seems to be yielding
ground to both European rationalism and the tremendous success of
preachers- cum- exorcists trained in American- style holiness churches,
which have mushroomed since the 1990s in Brazzaville and Kinshasa. Still,
among Kimbanguist believers, it is forbidden to resort to either witches or
anti- witches.
Another feature of traditional Congolese beliefs was the system of initia-
tion, which was a form of socialization of young men and women, helping
them to internalize the norms and beliefs specific to the Kongo group. By
keeping the members of a given age group secluded from the rest of the
community for the period of time dedicated to their initiation, this system
functioned as a school where rights and duties were made clear and obliga-
tions were explained. It may also be compared to a church, in which young
men and women were inculcated with core beliefs about their relations to
the universe and particularly to supernatural beings. In the kingdom of
Kongo, a well- known rite of passage was kimpassi, which was recorded by
many chroniclers and observers.25 The local masters of kimpassi—led by a
woman, the ngudi nganga—were in charge of conducting the rituals: teach-
ing the novices in an outdoor shed far from the village and making sure the
young men and women complied with their new rules of conduct.
The initiation ritual took place in three phases. First, the novices went
through a symbolic death: stripped of their clothes, lined up like corpses,
bound by a pact, they were carried into the shed to be rebirthed by Ma
Ndundu (Mother Albino). Then, each of the “newborns” took part in the
specific kimpassi dance, recited the pledges of allegiance, and chose his
or her initiation name. Their training in civic values and ritual practices,
as well as the learning of secret languages, could then begin. Finally, after
months or years of ordeals, the initiates could return home, where they
were greeted with demonstrative celebrations and presents. Kimpassi most
probably played a part in the struggle against Portuguese colonization, for
the missionaries perceived it as a major obstacle.
Beyond kimpassi, the education of community members was based on
narratives, proverbs, and songs explaining the meanings of names and
europe in africa 25
mottoes. In addition to this oral literature, which buttressed religious and
political authorities, there were “revealed texts” (transmitted by the spirits,
the ancestors, or the dead), formulas and prayers, and songs facilitating
communication with Nzambi a Mpungu and the ancestors. It seems that
the Kimbanguist Church’s spiritual retreats and renaming processes may
be traced back to the tradition of kimpassi, since the inspired hymns of
Kimbanguism reflect the supernatural relation between human beings and
the angels or the departed, sending them spiritual messages.
Human beings’ relation to time was part of what may be called the tra-
ditional calendar. Indeed, in the kingdom of Kongo, there were not seven
days, but four: Nkandu, Konzo, Nkenge, and Nsona. Each of these four
days was associated with social and religious rituals: Nkenge and Nsona
were the days of the ancestors and of resurrection, while Nkandu and
Konzo were associated with the transmigration of souls.26
It is clear that the Congolese system of beliefs and values starkly differed
from those of Europe, although some Western explorers were capable of
appreciation and enthusiasm about its level of “civilization.”27 But eventu-
ally, after centuries of colonization, the traditional Congolese system was
destroyed by Christianization, schooling, and urbanization, which pro-
foundly disrupted the social and religious organization of Kongo society.28
Christianity aims to be a universal religion, and European missionaries
assumed it was their calling to convert all non- Westerners, without ques-
tioning the nature of their “heathen” beliefs. But from the outset, mission-
aries were confronted with an epistemological issue. Were non- Europeans
able to become Christians? The question was first raised after the begin-
ning of the colonization of the New World, where the indigenous peoples
of the Americas were seen as devoid of souls and therefore impossible to
Christianize. From the mid- 1510s to his death in 1566, the Dominican friar
Bartolomé de Las Casas argued Aquinas’s theological assertion that society
is part of nature and hence all societies, whether Christian or pagan, are
equally endowed with dignity and legitimacy. His priority was to spare the
natives from further cruelty and slaughter on the part of the Spaniards.29
Las Casas’s insistence earned him the title of “defender of the Indi-
ans,” awarded to him by Cardinal Cisneros as early as 1516. Paradoxically,
his acute concern with human dignity faltered when it came to the Afri-
cans’ fate. Indeed, Las Casas suggested that the tragic depletion of the
indigenous West Indian population be compensated for by importing
slaves from Africa. From then on, sub- Saharan Africa and particularly the
26 general background
kingdom of Kongo became a reservoir for an enslaved human workforce.
Later, Las Casas recanted this position; his apologetic history of the Indies
testified that the ability to progress and to receive the message of Christ
belonged to all of humanity, for “all the races of the world are men.”30 Still,
it remained doubtful whether Africans could—or should—be evangelized,
for the Christianization of sub- Saharan Africa and particularly the king-
dom of Kongo was irretrievably tainted by practices of oppression insepa-
rable from it.
Indeed, the Congolese territory officially entered history only after it was
“discovered” by the dominant Other. In 1482, the Portuguese navigator
Diogo Cão reached the mouth of the Congo River, on the coast of what
was to become Luanda, Angola. As early as 1484, the Portuguese created
trading posts along the Atlantic coast of the Congo and Angola. In 1575 they
founded São Paulo da Luanda, which became their main trading and mil-
itary post. The conquest of Africa was seen as guaranteeing both salvation
and earthly bliss to those going there—soldiers, merchants, priests, all of
them colonizers. Today, because of a lack of primary sources, it is impossi-
ble to relate precisely how the Congo was Christianized. It seems to have
been an uneven process with varying degrees of success from one region to
another and from one ethnic group to another.31
Still, it appears that sub- Saharan Africa, particularly the kingdom of
Kongo, was Christianized in two phases. The first occurred in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries and concerned mostly Portuguese colonies, such
as the kingdom of Kongo, and islands in the Atlantic Ocean, such as Cape
Verde, Principe, and São Tomé. The Portuguese were the first Europeans
who settled there after the existence of natives was publicized by the “dis-
coverers.” Subsequently, the Christianization process involved many dif-
ferent religious orders. Georges Balandier’s research shows how it was
launched over and over again, involving one Catholic monastic order after
another with little consistency. But ultimately, “the two centuries of Chris-
tianization had very poor results, with a heavy toll in terms of sufferings
and human losses, due to either the climate or the journeys.”32
Hence, the complex history of the Christianization of Congo and Angola
shows the long- standing presence and influence of the Portuguese, until
the kingdom of Kongo was officially divided up among three European
powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85.33 This conference resulted
in what is commonly known as the General Act of Berlin, or the sharing
of Africa. The ancient kingdom of Kongo was partitioned by colonial pow-
ers, which split its population among the so- called Belgian Congo (now the
europe in africa 27
Democratic Republic of the Congo), the French Congo (Congo- Brazzaville),
and Angola.
Territorial limits being set, there were now further encounters between
Christianity and traditional Kongo religion; the penetration of the three
Congos by Europeans went hand in hand with a modernizing mission,
which introduced not only market economics but also Roman Catholi-
cism. The Berlin Treaty of 1885 was amended by the Convention of Saint-
Germain- en- Laye,34 which guaranteed freedom of religion and worship and
reaffirmed the right of all missionaries to enter, travel, and reside on the
African continent. While Christianization had often predated colonial pen-
etration and occupation in many African countries, it was significant that
this act put all Christian churches on an equal footing, inviting them to
further compete for new converts.
Colonial archives also show another form of religious orders dividing up
Africa. The key actor in this process was Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, who
founded the Society of Missionaries of Africa (aka the White Fathers) in
1868 and the order of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa in 1869.
The Holy See put him in charge of the apostolic delegation to Sahara and
Sudan, granting him the title of primate of Africa. In 1889–1890, in a con-
text of competition with Protestant missionary societies, which had begun
gaining substantial ground in Central Africa, Lavigerie obtained permis-
sion from King Leopold II of Belgium for an international conference in
Brussels on the abolition of slavery. An international treaty was signed both
to put an end to the slave trade and to protect all missionary communities
fighting against human trafficking. Lavigerie thus secured protection for
Catholic missions in Central Africa while associating the penetration of the
Catholic Church with the cause of civilization.35
The Berlin Conference thus ushered in the second phase of Christian-
ization, marked by the free circulation of missionaries and the settlement
of missionary posts and institutions in all the countries delineated by the
Association internationale africaine. This new modus operandi for Chris-
tianization further strengthened the ties between the missionary societies
and their home governments.
Following the long- standing and unchanging policy of the Roman
church, any process of Christianization potentially entailed the construc-
tion of a state, that is, a temporal structure. The Catholic Church had an
interest in politics and did not just send missionaries to Africa: the Holy
See dictated the carving of states out of Africa as it was gradually being
Christianized. The church, whose mission is to preach the gospel, remained
28 general background
closely associated with the colonial venture, but this was done on the con-
dition that the church’s political action would not clash with the interests
of the imperial states of Europe. Christianization was not supposed to lead
to political empowerment of the natives. Evidence of this can be seen in
the following declaration by Pope Benedict XV, who reiterated in 1920 the
doctrine of separation between the Christianization of natives and their
politicization, which had been inaugurated in 1880: “When dealing with
the populations they are in charge of, the missions shall carefully banish
any idea of paving the way to a political awareness of their nationhood.
Hence they shall never meddle in any kind of political or temporal interests
of their own nation, or any other nation.”36
How did the Christianization of Africans effectively take place after the
Berlin Conference? How did Christian missionizing deal with questions
pertaining to ethnicity and African values and belief systems?
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the missionary move-
ment gained momentum with the founding of the Séminaire des missions
étrangères (Seminary of Foreign Missions) and missionary orders. Among
the leaders of this movement was Father François Libermann, who initiated
the first mass journey of missionaries to sub- Saharan Africa and founded
the Society of the Holy Heart of Mary, which eventually merged with the
Congregation of the Holy Spirit (or Spiritan congregation); he is often con-
sidered to be one of the cofounders of the latter.37 Frequently named by his-
torians of Cameroon are the German Pallottine father Herman Nekes and
the Spiritan father Alexandre Leroy, while scholars of Congo- Brazzaville
and Gabon regularly mention Msgr. Prosper- Philippe Augouard, and schol-
ars of Rwanda and Burundi discuss Msgr. Jean- Joseph Hirth.
Famous Protestants include the explorers of the inland territories, such
as Dr. David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary and physician who was
instrumental in the promotion and expansion of the British commercial
empire, the Christianization of the southern countries of Africa, and the
fight against the slave trade. Rev. George Grenfell was a British Baptist
missionary and explorer who spent thirty- two years of his life surveying
sub- Saharan Africa and founding missionary settlements, particularly in
Cameroon and Congo.
Joseph Merrick, a Baptist pastor hailing from Jamaica, is considered to
be the first Black missionary; in 1843 he tried to found the first Christian
Baptist mission among the Duala people of Cameroon. In spite of his
failure in this attempt, “the ideology of negritude, which was then in the
making in the British West Indies, may take pride in the fact Blacks were
europe in africa 29
Christianized by other Blacks. Yet, these mixed- race Jamaican literati
were considered to be ‘Whites’ and were called by this name among the
people of the coast of Cameroon.”38 This hampered their initiative, which
was later stopped by the standards defined by the Berlin Conference. Pas-
tors William Holman Bentley and Thomas Comber, both members of the
Baptist Missionary Society, settled in the Belgian Congo. Their accom-
plishments included the Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language,
published in 1887. When Comber passed away that year, Bentley settled
in Ngombe Lutete in Lower Congo, where he “devot[ed] his linguistic
expertise to the translation of the New Testament into Kikongo, which
was completed in 1893. He also translated Genesis, Proverbs, and part of
the Psalms.”39
Thus, in the southern part of the Belgian Congo—the future birthplace
of Kimbanguism—the Baptist Missionary Society had already put down
roots before the Catholic missions arrived, and this was a source of ten-
sion. As a result of this competition, Christian missions moved inland,
far from urban areas, which proved to be a key factor in their methods of
Christianization.
The two main methods implemented by Western missionary societies
to penetrate Africa and found settlements were, first, gaining the trust of
local chiefs and kings, and second, creating schools for the education of
the natives. Western missionaries actually invented the figure of the local
chief, an authority they established in parallel with preexisting traditional
chiefs. Sporting their medals, the local chiefs were often in conflict with
the traditional chiefs, whose voices conveyed a sense of continuity with the
precolonial system of values and beliefs, independent from the colonial
power structure that had bestowed honors on their rivals. Under such cir-
cumstances, the medal- bearing chiefs and their conversions to Christianity
were essential in the process of development of missions in sub- Saharan
Africa, and these chiefs were the most commonly mentioned by colonial
ethnographers.40 In Cameroon, for instance, the princes had a vested inter-
est in relying on the White man and his God, which were of great import in
a world centered around a keen sense of antagonistic forces, social prestige,
and awe toward invisible powers.41
This is how a new elite, composed of catechists, bilingual assistant
teachers (known as moniteurs), and medal- bearing chiefs emerged as an
intermediary category between White missionaries and the majority of
natives. This native elite was complicit with the Christianization process,
the expansion of missions, and the wider colonial order. The intrusion of
30 general background
Christianity thus entailed profound transformations of the social and polit-
ical systems, both of which were closely linked to religion.42
In this context, Christianization went hand in hand with the preserva-
tion of the political order. King Nzinga Nkuvu, a descendant of the first
Kongo king, Ntinu Wene/Lukeni, converted to Roman Catholicism and
was baptized as Afonso I (aka Joaõ I). This baptism was not a simple indi-
vidual conversion, but a political act. According to the historian Luc Croe-
gaert, personal baptism also entailed political calculations on the part of
African heads of state. Indeed, they saw it as a way to build alliances with
European powers and to thwart the plots of rival family members and their
allies.43 During the twenty years of his reign, King Afonso corresponded
regularly with the king of Portugal and requested the help of missionaries
to Christianize his kingdom.
Starting in 1491, the year the Capuchins arrived in Kongo, the nation’s
religious landscape was transformed. At first, the North was scarcely
affected by Christianity, while other people were gradually Christianized.
In 1492 the church of Angola was born, and in 1518 Don Henrique, the son
of King Afonso, was consecrated as the first native bishop of sub- Saharan
Africa by Pope Leo X.
Still, the king of Kongo did not outwit the colonizers; although convert-
ing to Catholicism with his subjects meant placing his kingdom on the
international scene, it did not establish an independent Congolese church
outside of the grip of the Vatican and Europe. Although the king’s son was
a bishop, this never paved the way for other nominations of Congolese
men to the bishopric; Henrique remained the first and only Black bishop
in the kingdom of Kongo. After Henrique passed away in 1521, King Afonso
wanted two of his nephews to be granted the same title, but his efforts
were to no avail. The king of Kongo’s wish to appoint his own clergy was
rejected by the king of Spain, who appointed all members of the regular
clergy in São Salvador (the capital) and paid them. Even attempts by the
Jesuits to found seminaries in Congo at the time proved unsuccessful.44
And “in 1596, when King Álvaro II had won Vatican approval for Kongo to
have its own bishops at a cathedral in São Salvador, the crown of Portugal
had managed to squeeze the right to nominate bishops in the See of Kongo
and Angola from the Vatican.”45
Meanwhile, the Christianization process went on, relying on, besides
the conversions of chiefs and their subjects, schools and churches, which
were two inseparable institutions insofar as the moniteurs were usually
catechists as well. Regarding education, Croegaert stressed that “the priests
europe in africa 31
immediately acknowledged its importance and always considered it as the
bedrock of their missionizing work.”46 Indeed, through the school sys-
tem, children were disciplined and (re)educated away from the traditional
value system, which the missionaries perceived as inherently pagan. Con-
sequently, an actual social change was implemented in the confrontation
between the biblical values conveyed by Christian missionaries and the tra-
ditional Congolese values. A Christian society emerged from the Congolese
people’s perception of the need to embrace European values and thus be
defined as “civilized” beings.
While new values were being shaped out of the first contacts between
the dominant Whites and the subjugated Africans, the book as an object of
learning had a considerable impact on the subjectivities of Africans, as the
American theologian Vincent Wimbush pointed out in his analysis of the
narratives of enslaved Africans, particularly the famous Olaudah Equiano.47
The introduction of books, and in particular the Bible, elicited curiosity
among Africans, who, like Equiano, were used to oral traditions. Books
soon represented a locus of the secrets or magic of White men.
Yet in the eyes of the dominant Other—the White man—was a Black
person really seen as a full- fledged Christian once baptized? How did West-
ern missionaries perceive Black identity when reading and teaching the
scriptures?
The Catholic and Protestant missionaries no doubt believed in their mis-
sionizing work; they were primarily concerned with bringing salvation to
Africans by spreading the gospel among them. But what exactly did they
want to save them from? Colonial archives hold materials written by mis-
sionaries that give clear indications of their perception of Black people.
In effect, the image that colonial missionaries had of Africans coincided
with the definition of pagans in Christian theology; it was based on a Man-
ichaean opposition between good and evil, light and darkness, God and the
devil. This is reflected in the first catechism published in Kikongo in 1624
for the Kongo catechumens’ preparation for baptism:
M[aster]. Why do you say, “By the grace of God”?
D[isciple]. Because it is neither thanks to my own merits, nor those of
my father and mother or any other mortal creature that I have become
a Christian, but thanks to the goodness and forgiveness of God and
the merits of Christ.
M. What dignity does man receive when he is made a Christian?
D. He becomes the adopted child of God and an heir to Heaven.
32 general background
M. And he who is not a Christian?
D. He remains a cursed son, a slave to the Devil; he is cast out of
Heaven.48
In this theological worldview, human beings were either children of
God, once they had received a Christian baptism, or children of the devil,
if they had not been christened. They were children of the devil because
of original sin, which was said to bind all human beings as descendants
of Adam and Eve, until they were christened.49 When people got baptized
in the church, they went from darkness to light. When European mission-
aries landed in Africa, of course, none of the natives had been baptized,
so every African was supposed to be under the influence of the devil. The
socially codified values of the kingdom of Kongo, described by early Euro-
pean observers and condemned by White missionaries, became subsumed
under three significant social practices: polygamy, dancing, and the use of
fetishes. The first two were closely associated in the judgmental percep-
tions of Kongo culture conveyed by missionaries.50 Consequently, Africans
had to be freed from sin through conversion to Christianity. But until then,
they were considered by their instructors to be children of the devil, pagan,
polygamous, fetish believing, animist, savage, and barbaric.
But once baptized, were Africans—in this case, Congolese people—
regarded as full Christians? This question was addressed by Kabwita, who
explained that Christian missionaries’ interest in the African continent,
particularly the kingdom of Kongo, was primarily spurred by economic
priorities. At a time when the triangular slave trade was by far the most
lucrative form of trade, the Catholic Church also possessed its own slaves to
ensure its financial self- sufficiency.51 The enslaved captives, bound for the
Americas, had to be christened, but they received no religious education
prior to their baptism. Priests merely gave the future slaves a “simulacrum
of baptism,” that is, a collective baptism, for which the celebrant was paid
with a per capita tax.
In reality, such christenings had no other function than increasing the
zone of influence of the Catholic Church and its secular allies in their
competition with Protestant kingdoms, then defined as heretical. This is
why first the government in Lisbon and then the Spanish administration
insisted that all captives be baptized.52
Therefore, although baptized, the Congolese who remained on the con-
tinent were clearly perceived as incomplete Christians by a number of mis-
sionaries. “In 1603, a missionary declared that Congo was totally ruined
europe in africa 33
where good morals were concerned and was Christian only in name.”53
Bishop Manuel Baptista Soares, who was known for his numerous excom-
munications, wrote the following remarks about the Congolese in his 1619
report: “Christianity is so imperfect among them that the king himself has
official concubines. Among this numerous people, only very few regard
the vices of the senses as sins. Many among them take the title of defender
of the faith and send ambassadors to the courts of Rome and the Catholic
king. They do so out of vanity rather than a sentiment of zeal for religion.”54
However, a different assessment was given by other missionaries, such
as Father Liévin- Bonaventure Proyart, who, in the last quarter of the eigh-
teenth century, insisted that the Congolese people publicly professed a gen-
uine attachment to the Catholic faith, though they lacked competent clergy
to exhort them and give them the sacraments.55 In 1906, Msgr. Henri
Vieter was eloquent when challenging his European audience’s assump-
tions about African Christians: “See for yourselves. . . . There are many
black Christians who put some white people to shame. Many whites have
not done for Christ in their whole lifetime one- tenth of what blacks must
offer to be given baptism.”56
This brief historical overview of the religious experience of African Chris-
tians shows to what extent Black people, even when baptized, were con-
sidered to be second- class Christians who were members of the church
only as slaves or as statistics for competing missionary societies. From the
standpoint of European missionaries, Africans were christened either with-
out their consent or in order to benefit from the charity work of the church,
which provided them with clothing, food, and medical care. Hence, for
Europeans, Africans remained “savages and barbarians, who were happier
under the yoke of Europeans than in the dire poverty and cruelty of their
despicable milieu.”57 The link between Christianization and ethnicity was
unbreakable in a worldview that assigned Africans to the lowest rung in the
hierarchy of human beings.
Given this context, how did Africans perceive the religious messages that
were preached to them, particularly the Bible? What place did they assign to
the dominant Other, that is, the White man, in their own worldview?
Three elements help in understanding Africans’ reactions to the mission-
ary enterprise in their midst. The first is the Bible, which was translated
by missionaries into local languages, allowing Africans to approach and,
eventually, appropriate the Christian message.1
By translating the Bible into African languages, European missionar-
ies gave the natives the possibility of not only becoming familiar with the
scriptures, but also, in the context of Protestant missions, interpreting and
understanding the gospel in an autonomous manner. This obviously facil-
itated the emergence of independent African religious initiatives, such as
the independent Baptist church, which was founded and led by Black mis-
sionaries and pastors with the support of the Baptist Missionary Society
based in Cameroon. African versions of the Bible sometimes led readers to
diverge from the message given by the missionaries. The African audiences
who read these texts were often more preoccupied with identifying familiar
notions than exotic ones in the Bible, which led them to appropriate the
scriptures through the prism of their preexisting worldviews, shaped by
their own traditions (see parts II and III).
Second, the Christianization process entailed forms of syncretism,
incorporating African values and belief systems. Indeed, the complexity
and difficulty of the missionary venture may perhaps be explained by the
natives’ desire to protect their culture from invasion: the Congolese did
not want a foreign god to be imposed on them. They covertly resisted this
african responses
the birth of african christianities
2
african responses 35
deity by keeping up the worship of trees, springs, natural forces, and ances-
tors; many testimonies give evidence of this in fifteenth- century Congo.
Consequently, a misunderstanding appeared in this syncretism, since Afri-
cans, including the Bakongo, adhered to Christianity on the sole basis of
their needs and the rules of their own logic, twisting Christian symbols and
images to fit their traditional religious worldview.
The third element to be taken into account to grasp the natives’ reactions
to the missionary enterprise is their perception of White men and their
God, since the rising influence of the latter significantly transformed Afri-
cans’ traditional worldview and representations. How did the Congolese
understand their first encounter with Whites and their subsequent expo-
sure to European belief systems?
To understand the image Africans had of Europeans, it is necessary to
investigate the accounts of the first encounters between the two groups.
As mentioned in chapter 1, the “discovery” of the mouth of the Congo
River by the Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão resulted in the massive
arrival of European missionaries and settlers, who penetrated the region
from the Atlantic seaboard. According to some chroniclers, when the
Congolese discovered White people, they considered them to be ances-
tors, because in their collective psyche, the departed were represented as
white- complexioned beings. It may be assumed that this first perception
of Whites was a positive one, since ancestors have the status of benefac-
tors, protectors, messengers of good news, and soothsayers (when they
appear in dreams). This positive image seems to have persisted for a
rather long period of time—long enough for the Christianization process
to have been facilitated, in spite of the cross- cultural misunderstanding
that had led the natives to believe that these white- colored beings had
come to bring them riches.2
This need for the early Congolese to understand and rationalize the
abnormality of White presence was made even more explicit by MacGaffey:
“The Kongo understanding of what sort of people the Europeans were
and what their arrival meant was very different from what the Europeans
themselves thought. In Kongo thought to this day, the universe is divided
into the two worlds of the living and the dead, separated by water. Africans
who die travel to the land of the dead, where they change their skins and
become white.”3 A prayer dedicated to the British sailor Andrew Battel, who
was temporarily detained by the Angolans in 1608–1610, says, “Baliani
ampembe muenyeye ke zina,” which means, “my white- faced companion
has come out from under the surface of the earth, and he shall not stay with
36 general background
us for long.”4 This misunderstanding led the Congolese to integrate the
Europeans as nonhuman beings who would not stay permanently.5
However, the behavior of the Portuguese was such that they soon lost
their characterization as spirits to become threatening, possibly danger-
ous men.6 Once the myth that Whites were ancestors had been debunked,
Africans were in a position to judge them by their deeds, and consequently
ranked them among the evil and dangerous people. Still, the paradoxes
of colonization and its ideological representations resulted in the natives’
ambivalent acceptance of White men as embodiments of both God and
the devil, as benefactors and malefactors, liberators and oppressors. As
the French ethnologist Pierre Erny observed, “Skin color, maybe more
than any other element, is conducive to a surprisingly persistent imagery,
which often upsets communication when men from different races come
into contact.”7
The representation of Whites as messengers from the next world first
facilitated the missionizing project, but that image was gradually decon-
structed, particularly when missionaries began spreading the biblical myth
of the curse of Ham as an instrument of and a justification of the domina-
tion of Whites over Blacks. In the person of his son Canaan, supposedly
standing for all of his descendants, Ham was cursed by Noah in favor of
his brothers, Shem and Japheth (Genesis 9:25–27). The scriptures remain
silent on the racial origins of Ham and his descendants. Indeed, the con-
cept of race and the racist ideologies of domination attached to it did not
appear until 1555. The sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse observed, “In the
early Church of Augustine the curse of Ham or Canaan was regarded as an
explanation of slavery, but not of blacks, simply because slavery at the time
was ‘colourless.’ The association of the curse of Canaan with blackness8
arose only much later in medieval Talmudic texts. In the sixteenth century
it became a Christian theme and by the seventeenth it was widely accepted
as an explanation of black skin colour. From here it was but a small step to
the interpretation of the curse of Canaan as an explanation of and justifica-
tion for the slavery of black Africans.”9
The circulation of ideas from one culture to another is a timeless phe-
nomenon that affects in various ways every facet of culture. In the realm
of religions, the transfers usually happen in only one direction, since the
dominant religion usually conveys an ostensibly universal message with an
ethnocentric discourse. European Christianity, essentially rooted in Med-
iterranean cultures, gave Africans the Bible as the only history book for
humankind, in which Blacks also were supposed to find meaning.
african responses 37
Racial ideologies thus built a racial classification of human beings on
the basis of this chapter from Genesis. The episode of the curse of Ham/
Canaan fueled Christian ideologies of the role of Providence as well, since
it led a number of missionaries and Western defenders of imperialism to
believe that theirs was God’s chosen race and that they had been entrusted
by him with the mission of civilizing the other, necessarily benighted,
races. This myth of the curse of Blacks has been a major underpinning
of Christian European ethnocentrism throughout world history. An Essay
on the Inequality Among Human Races, the infamous book written by the
French writer and diplomat Arthur de Gobineau in 1853, rapidly became
one of the cornerstones of racist and xenophobic ideologies.10 Gobineau’s
racist speculations on the Bible contributed to the emergence of Christian
eurocentrism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He contended that
Black identity was altered forever as a consequence of the curse of Ham,
which had already been used to justify the transatlantic slave trade in the
Americas and the enslavement of Africans by Europeans in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. These theories are recognizable in several school-
books used in Christian missions in Africa, which taught children about
the origin of races by tracing them, as Gobineau did, to the three sons
of Noah. Other schoolbooks added a geographical partition of these races:
“The children of Shem went to Asia; the children of Ham went to Africa;
the children of Japheth went to Europe.”11
In the French Congo, the religious order Fathers of the Holy Spirit began
missionizing quite early. One of them, Augouard, left his mission in Gabon
to set out for the Congo as soon as Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza had con-
quered the region, in 1880. An explorer and a builder, known as “the bishop
of the cannibals,” Augouard made regular trips along the river, in the swamp-
land, and through the rain forest. He was convinced that Africans were still
under the curse of God as descendants of Ham: “The black race is indeed
Ham’s accursed race, God’s accursed race. There is nothing in particular that
indicates it, but it can be felt and seen everywhere, and one can’t help but feel
compassion and terror at the sight of the poor wretches. Pagan blacks are
lazy, gluttonous, given to stealing and lying, and indulging in every vice. This
is no flattering portrayal, and yet it is less ugly than the truth.”12
In one of the many letters sent to his mother, Augouard wrote “that he
was really certain now that he was living among blacks, that they actually
were the descendants of Ham—a descent of which the prelate seemed to
lament the existence.”13 Finally, one of his dialogues with Pope Leo XIII
illustrates the distance he kept from his fold:
38 general background
“Is it true,” Leo XIII asked him, “that your diocesans eat human
flesh?”
“Yes, Holiness, every day.”
“How strange, not one of our holy martyrs was ever eaten!”
“Well, Holiness, I will try to be the first.”
“Don’t you do such a thing,” the pope replied, “we would have
no relics!”14
This exchange shows how Africans were seen as alien human beings, to
be approached and Christianized on the basis of specific criteria. Even the
schooling of African children integrated this notion, since they were taught
about the curse on their ancestors to encourage them to internalize the
myth and accept their inferior status vis- à- vis White people. For instance,
a songbook used in missionary schools, which was published in 1911 in
the Belgian Congo by the Order of the Missionary Sisters of the Precious
Blood, includes three songs in Lingala written by Sister Arnoldine Falter
that explicitly mention the curse of the Blacks, with one song entirely ded-
icated to the theme. The title of this song is “Esisezelo ea Kam” (Punish-
ment of Ham):
O Father Ham, what did you do?
We are suffering so much
By God we are punished
Harshly without pity
The punishment that He inflicted on you,
is inherited by us all.
And Noah, as a punishment for you
humiliated you
And thus Ham always works for his brothers.
And now, we your descendants,
[we are] slaves on earth.15
Another song, “Nkongo Salangana” (Congo Delight), celebrates the
liberation of the Congolese from Arab slavery. The true reason for this
enslavement, however, is related again to the curse of Ham:
Cursed by our Father Noah,
Look at us, all the Blacks of this country,
Oppressed because of his terrible insult!16
african responses 39
The psychological impact on Black children of such a form of schooling
was assessed in the United States by the famous “doll test” invented and
used by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1940s. The American scholar
Joe Feagin related a more recent incident, which took place at a private
Christian elementary school. A nine- year- old Black girl was told in class by
her White teacher, “Black people were born of sin, let’s pray for the black
people.” The girl returned home wishing she were White.17 Feagin related
this typical example of racial insensitivity to the story of Noah’s curse of
Ham’s descendants, which was used as an ideological justification for the
teacher to inflict psychological harm on a child. The teacher did not even
think about the repercussions of such an ideological reading of scripture,
let alone equip her Black pupil with any means of fighting back systemic
racism and “the pain of white oppression.”18
In a similar process, schools in sub- Saharan Africa were used in parallel
with missions to inculcate the beliefs that colonial domination by Europe-
ans was justified by Ham’s being cursed by God and that Blacks should be
maintained on the bottom rung of humanity as a result. The Christianiza-
tion of Africans was implemented both in churches and in schools, and
the children were thus prepared to collaborate in their own domination,
internalizing the myth of their stigmatization and the notion that their only
salvation must be brought by the White masters’ gospel.
Although ancestor worship was a source of blessings in traditional
African belief systems, it became blurred and was turned into a source of
oppression by these teachings. Indeed, not only did the myth of the curse
of Ham upset the place of ancestors in traditional African cosmogonies
by replacing them with an entirely new set of White forebears, but it also
ingrained in Africans’ minds the acceptance of submission to Whites as
preordained by God. Liberation from this fate could not be achieved with-
out help from the White conqueror, as shown in the following excerpts
from the same songbook. The instrument of the liberating divine interven-
tion is a “strong King sent by God to this country.” King Leopold II, who is
alluded to here, acts as the intermediary of the Belgians:
A Country elected by God
to release your brothers and sisters!
O Belgium, may Heaven make you prosperous!
A third song (number 43) teaches the children that they actually belong to
a cursed race:
40 general background
Look at Ham, the son of Noah,
He made fun of his own father
He was cursed by his father
So are the Blacks, his children.
The affliction of being of the same stock as Ham and necessarily miserable
is strongly emphasized in the texts of most Christian songs taught to Afri-
cans; these are only some examples. A second booklet of hymns, Njembo
y’Eklesia (Joy of the Church), published in Bamanya by the same religious
order, had the children sing (number 52):
O mother of Jesus, mother of the Congo,
Look with benevolence on your country.
Protect your black children
Who are in pains and misfortune!
We were the slaves of the devil,
we were in death and in darkness.19
An excerpt from a schoolbook published in 1951 by the Dominican
fathers taught African children their history in the following terms:
Long ago . . . the Arabs used to mistreat the Blacks very much; they
captured women and children and sold them. . . . The great chief
of Europe, called Leopold II, sent soldiers . . . and the war against
Arabs came to an end. . . . Not long ago, our fathers were pagans;
they did not know God, they had superstitious beliefs; they were lazy,
distrustful, and envious of one another. Diseases came from the East.
When Leopold II learned of this great misery, he asked the Fathers
and Sisters to come here and help us. Now we see churches, schools,
hospitals, and maternity wards everywhere. . . . The natives are gradu-
ally becoming Christians. . . . The ignorant are liberated and cured of
their diseases thanks to the doctors and Sisters. Nowadays, animosity
and jealousy no longer exist among blacks, for the Kingdom of God
has already come to the Congo. Glory to the King.20
Surprisingly, the king who is glorified here is not Jesus Christ but the Belgian
king Leopold II, and God’s elect are not presented as Christians or even Jews,
but Belgians. This shows that there was a deliberate intention to impose on
Africans an ideology of domination allegedly blessed by Providence.
african responses 41
The criteria chosen to consolidate the myth may be tied to the percep-
tion of Africans by colonial missionaries. The passages above show that
being a pagan, holding “superstitious” beliefs, or being lazy, jealous, dis-
trustful, sick, poor, or derelict are read as so many signs of the curse on
Africans, and their salvation is thanks to the Belgians—made visible in
Catholic social work and charities. These qualities also correlated with
missionaries’ racialist perceptions of phenotypical features, such as skin
color, which buttressed their theological representations of Africans and
elicited emotional responses to articles of faith or beliefs. This observation
is valid for nations throughout Africa, as is shown in Wimbush’s analysis
of the narratives of enslaved Africans. Skin color was an “easy and obvious
point of difference, that was made to signify the dominance” of Whiteness
around a “rather dramatic focal point . . . [which] turned out to be some-
thing mysterious (of course), variously referred to as beauty, sentiment or
sensibility, imagination or reason. In all categories and all respects that
[were] said to matter, blacks [were] found wanting.”21 Indeed, a schoolbook
entitled Practical Lingala Lessons (Lingala is the national language spoken
in both Congos) asserted, “Men around the world are divided into four cat-
egories—White, Black, Yellow, and Red. Whites inhabit Europe; they are
scattered around the world, in Asia, Africa, and America. They surpass all
others in intelligence.”22
The Protestant missionary J. E. Carpenter, from the Congo Balolo Mis-
sion, evidenced his own belief in deterministic theories of geography and
climate when he asserted, “Arabs in the north and Europeans in the south
of Africa surpass Africans in knowledge.” He further explained, “The first
reason is that they do not live in hot regions; as a result, they work hard
for food and clothing. Another reason is that in Europe and Asia, people
knew how to read and write for hundreds of years, and they brought their
knowledge together. Africans do not know about writing.”23 All differences
between Blacks and Whites were fraught with moral implications and value
judgments. Black people were assumed to be less intelligent because of
their lack of written language (despite their rich oral traditions) and thus
incapable of recording their knowledge and transmitting it from one gen-
eration to the next. Such racialist ideologies necessarily had an impact on
many Africans, triggering among them reactions of either submission or
revolt when they became aware of their subaltern position.
Black intellectuals in Africa reacted to the racist content of the myth of
Ham in the same way as James Baldwin when he wrote, “I realized that
the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that, according to many
42 general background
Christians, I was a descendant of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I
was therefore predestined to be a slave. This had nothing to do with any-
thing I was, or contained, or could become; my fate had been sealed for-
ever, from the beginning of time.”24 Denouncing the superiority complex of
Europeans and their descendants, Baldwin concluded, “It is not too much
to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let
us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is
possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and
hypocrisies of the Christian church.”25
In the late 1950s, Afrocentric theories became attractive to many African
intellectuals and elites. Among them, the thesis of Cheikh Anta Diop—a
Senegalese scholar who studied Egypt, who remains as contested by West-
erners as he is revered by Africans—was that Ham was Black, contrary to
his brothers, Shem and Japheth. Diop wrote: “In fact, we know that the
Egyptians called their country Kemit, which means ‘black’ in their lan-
guage. The interpretation according to which Kemit designates the black
soil of Egypt, rather than the black man and, by extension, the black race
of the country of the blacks, stems from a gratuitous distortion by minds
aware of what an exact interpretation of this word would imply. Hence, it is
natural to find Kam in Hebrew, meaning heat, black, burned.”26
Diop’s contention is that the biblical ancestors were therefore Black and
that White men appeared only recently, from the stock of Shem (ancestor
of the Semites), whose name designates “a white man who bears the more
or less weakened traits of a very old race- mixing with the black element.”27
Consequently, Afrocentric theorists who agree with Diop that Ham was
Black do not embrace the myth of the curse of Ham but consider Blacks
to be of older human stock than Whites. This leads many to consider the
biblical forebears to be Blacks.
On the political plane, African elites also reacted to the process of inferi-
orization of Blacks. The movement known as negritude has varying defini-
tions. Aimé Césaire said, “Négritude is the consciousness of being a Black
person, the simple acknowledgment of a fact that implies the acceptance
and assumption of one’s destiny as a Black person, as well as one’s his-
tory and culture,” while Léopold Sédar Senghor popularized the concept
by defining it as “constituted by the body of values of Black civilization.”28
But negritude was not simply imposed as a concept; it was used as a
tool of response to White discourse. This conception of Blackness was
challenged, however, by many authors. For instance, Thomas Melone
saw it as a process of recuperation by members of an elite speaking on
african responses 43
behalf of all Africans without their consent: “The African people feel by
no means concerned in this case; they are not in a position to partici-
pate in the sacred meal to which they are invited by . . . négritude.”29 In
his book Orphée noir, Jean- Paul Sartre, seeing in negritude an “anti- racist
form of racism,” warned that it was thereby contributing to perpetuating
the myth of White superiority. It must be admitted that the movement
was trapped in the stereotypes of colonial ethnology and that it remained
focused on the idea of a Black race while turning into positive traits the
aspects depicted as negative in colonial discourse. “[It] is still the same
language about race that Négritude took up to overturn it and exalt black
beauty, black originality, and intuitiveness. The ‘haven of race’ thus sus-
tained politics, poetic creativity, and the fight for and construction of
pan- Africanism. Négritude is a racialism that could not do away with the
assumptions of colonial ethnology.”30
Nevertheless, despite fierce debates over its legitimacy, negritude did
have great literary and political importance in French- speaking Africa up
to the 1970s, and it favored the emergence of the theories of Diop, Théo-
phile Obenga, and Joseph Ki- Zerbo, all of whom searched for an African
past—no matter how mythical or real it might be—to herald a positive
Black identity in the face of White colonizers. All of these scholars claimed
that because Egypt, the cradle of science and civilization, was peopled by
Blacks, Whites come from Blacks, and civilization originated from Africa to
then reach the rest of the world.31
Several Black leaders built on negritude to redeem and extol Black iden-
tity. Joseph Mobutu, the president of the Republic of Zaire, addressed the
United Nations in 1973: “Pseudo- scientific arguments were not lacking to
justify the dehumanization process while treating the black man as an infe-
rior being, for, they said, the white colonist was different from the black
colonized, so the white man was superior to the black one.”32
On the religious plane, reactions came both from White missionaries
sympathetic to the Black cause and from Africans themselves. From the
same Bible also emerged salvation myths, and several protests were framed
as religious arguments rooted in the Bible. The Cameroonian theologian
Jean- Marc Ela related that “in 1870, a group of missionary bishops circu-
lated a document begging the popes to release the black race from the curse
of Ham, which weighed them down.”33 The awareness of the ethnocentric
nature of the Christian message as a tool of domination also triggered reac-
tions among African leaders and, understandably, led to the emergence of
African independent churches. In the early eighteenth century, a young
44 general background
Congolese prophet initiated the oldest African independent movement
derived from Christianity. Her name was Kimpa Vita.
The movement she inspired is known as the Antonians. It was one of
the first instances of African appropriation of the Christian message and
the Bible, combining political and religious aims into what would become
a long ethno- messianic history. Kimpa Vita, who would become known
as Dona Beatriz, was born around 1684 to parents who were members of
the highest group of the Kongo aristocracy. Because her father served as a
commander in the king’s army, he was often on the battlefield, warring for
King Ávaro X. The army was composed of men, but it also included female
members who followed their husbands, brothers, or sons to cook their food
and take care of them. Consequently, it may be inferred that Kimpa Vita
was raised in a military- inspired culture, steeped in patriotic values.
Her hometown was on Mount Kibangu, a few miles away from the cap-
ital, Mbanza Kongo (São Salvador in Portuguese), in the province of Sundi.
Chroniclers of the kingdom of Kongo had already noted the importance of
this province in the monarchical system; indeed, it was always ruled by the
firstborn sons of kings and heirs to the throne.34 It was on Mount Kibangu
that the mani vunda (king), Pedro IV, had found refuge with his follow-
ers during the war and chaos that followed the death of King Antonio I of
Kongo. Though legitimately presenting himself as the rightful heir to the
crown and as a Catholic sovereign based in São Salvador, Pedro IV had been
unable to secure the backing of the Capuchin father Bernardo da Gallo in
his attempt to reconquer his subjects. He dared not return to the capital,
fearing assassination attempts from his rivals; yet the Congolese people
felt an ardent desire to see the kingdom restored under one sovereign, who
would live in the repeopled capital. He was prompted to act in response to
this popular aspiration by the politico- religious movement initiated by the
twenty- two- year- old Kimpa Vita.35
From historical accounts of her life, it appears that Kimpa Vita had a
dual relationship to Christianity. First, her religious experience included
the Kongo mystical tradition of kimpassi (described above), into which she
is said to have been not just initiated, but inducted as a priestess. In the
accounts of her contemporaries, she was an “anti- sorceress” who practiced
healing, and this status necessarily enhanced her prestige among her fel-
low Congolese, for the nganga, the anti- witch or medicine (wo)man, was
rather well perceived in the Kongo society of the time. Before Kimpa Vita
launched her movement, another woman, Mafuta, who was also a nganga,
african responses 45
had attempted to organize a struggle against the foreign presence in Kongo.
She was considered to be a harmless mystic by the colonial authorities, and
they made no moves to stop her.36
Second, because Kimpa Vita had been baptized in the Catholic Church,
her knowledge of the Bible was restricted to the catechism, which had been
translated into her native Kikongo in 1624. Because the Catholic Church
discouraged free access to the Bible, she grew up in an environment
steeped in devotion to the Virgin Mary, the saints, the sacraments, and litur-
gical objects, such as the crucifix and the rosary. The catechism focused
on prayers, such as the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary; the Articles of Faith;
the Ten Commandments; the sacraments; and discussions of sin and the
Christian life.37 Kimpa Vita had no exposure to the Bible, but she seems to
have received the standard type of education in the Catholic tradition that
was available at the time. This is what she used as a lens to interpret the
oppression of the Congolese in particular and Black people in general. For
Georges Balandier, the Bible, “which presents the Africans with a society
comparable to their own, provides a possibility of transcending the inferi-
ority they have suffered, of denying their state of ‘savagery.’ By identifying
with the people in the Book, they can re- establish an equality which in their
eyes is the condition of all future progress.”38
Thanks to its missions in the kingdom of Kongo, the Catholic Church
offered the Congolese—whose ethnic belongingness was and remains very
strong—a communal and spiritual framework that fit with ancestor wor-
ship and Kongo cultural norms. Black people could hardly find a satisfac-
tory message in the Bible, and it was overshadowed by the rituals and saints
of the Catholic Church (particularly Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint James,
Saint Francis, and Saint Alexis). Africans could only inscribe themselves
into humankind’s history by embracing and appropriating the Catholic his-
tory and traditions surrounding them. As mentioned previously, the Chris-
tianization of the kingdom of Kongo took place in two stages. The first
stage, from the fifteenth century into the sixteenth, was led by the Portu-
guese under the spiritual patronage of Saint James and involved coercion,
as did the struggle against Islam in Iberia. The second stage occurred in the
mid- seventeenth century under the patronage of Saint Anthony and was
characterized by the more pedagogical approach chosen by the Capuchins,
typically hailing from Spain or Italy. Saint Anthony was presented as an
intercessor, whom the Congolese could look to for salvation from hardship.
This can be seen in the following prayer:
46 general background
Si quaeris miracula,
If you are seeking for miracles [see for yourself:]
Death, error, and calamity
The Devil and leprosy are disappearing
Sick people are healed and rise again
The sea recedes, and shackles are broken;
As for lost things and limbs,
The young and elderly ask for and retrieve them.
Dangers are warded off and poverty ends.
Let those who know tell all about it,
All that Paduans say.39
Saint Anthony is also invoked by women seeking marriage:
My dear Saint Anthony,
I pray you very fervently
To give me my first husband;
The next one I’ll find on my own.
My dear Saint Anthony,
My Saint Anthony of flesh and bone,
If you give me no husband,
I will leave you in the well.40
It is quite understandable that Congolese resistance was organized on
the basis of the identity parameters the people had been given, involving
a form of identification with biblical characters as well as Catholic saints
and traditions. When Kimpa Vita became convinced that she had received
a mission from Saint Anthony to restore the kingdom of Kongo, she began
a process of identity reconstruction.
Kimpa Vita’s prophetic mission came at an important point: the king-
dom was filled with hopelessness and disappointment with the political
leaders’ subservience to the Catholic missionaries. Quite significantly, the
founding moment of the Antonian movement was the attempt by Kimpa
Vita to fell a cross that stood right next to the king’s court.41 The Capuchin
chronicler Father Bernardo da Gallo wrote that this happened after a first
encounter with the king, whom Dona Beatriz had asked to meet to tell him
about her mission.
Although she came from the aristocracy, Kimpa Vita successfully drew vil-
lagers’ attention and won their support. Her message met their expectations
african responses 47
in the socioreligious field as well as the political and economic ones. Indeed,
being a nganga, she was able to fight a phenomenon that all dreaded—
witchcraft—but also bring a message of hope based on eschatological prom-
ises. She claimed to have visions of Saint Anthony, who took possession
of her body. The oldest testimony from the period is that of da Gallo: “The
event occurred thus, she said: while she was sick and on the verge of dying,
in her throes, a friar dressed like a Capuchin appeared to her. He told her he
was Saint Anthony, sent by God into her head to preach [to] the people and
announce the restoration of the kingdom.”42
Because the intrusion of the Christian religion had upset the tradi-
tional system of Congolese religions, which was centered on ancestor
worship, challenging the new religious order implied an appropriation
of the Bible. This is why, having no direct access to scripture, Kimpa
Vita appropriated aspects of Catholic identity, particularly the figures of
Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Saint Francis, Saint Alexis, and Saint Anthony of
Padua, by turning them into Kongo ancestors. The young prophet delib-
erately opted for a Congolization of the Christian religion, as da Gallo
explained: “She used to say that Jesus was born in São Salvador, which
was Bethlehem . . . baptized in Nsundi, which was Nazareth, and that
Jesus Christ as well as the Madonna and Saint Francis were originally
from the Congo, from the Black race . . . that Saint Francis was born in the
clan of the Marquis of Vunda and that the Madonna, the mother of Jesus,
was the descendant of a female slave or a servant of the Marquis Nzimba
Npanghi (Mpangu).”43
Because this was happening in the early eighteenth century, nation-
states were not yet the norm around the world, particularly in Africa. Thus,
identity rhetoric rooted in ethnic belonging was extremely common; fol-
lowing this logic, people could have no access to history save by thinking in
terms of ethnicity. This is why the kingdom of Kongo was sacralized, since
Jesus, his mother, Mary, and the saints, Beatriz claimed, had been part of
its history.
In this identity reconstruction, Kongo names were subjected to a mimetic
process, with the Portuguese titles Dom and Dona, normally reserved for
the nobility, being appropriated by all men and women.44 Meanwhile, Por-
tuguese Christian names “were rapidly ‘kongolized’ and adapted to the pho-
netic exigencies of the Kikongo language. . . . Certain names received an
indigenous justification: they were explained by means of analogies. . . . This
usage of foreign names has continued from the sixteenth century to the pres-
ent, and has led to the formation of veritable ‘fraternities’ of homonyms.”45
48 general background
Christianity also offered the Congolese people an avenue for ancestor
worship through expressions of reverence for the dead, particularly through
the Feast of All Saints,46 allowing them to reconnect with their ancestors in
the spirit of traditional religions. Hence, Catholic prayers and sacraments
were revisited. The Salve Antonia, as Dona Beatriz’s new prayer was called,
was more like a critique: “God wants an intention, it is the intention that
God grasps. Baptism serves nothing, it is the intention that God takes. Con-
fession serves no purpose, it is the intention that God wants. Good works
serve no purpose: intention is what God wants.”47 Obviously, this state of
mind was closer to the Protestant ethics of free interpretation and universal
priesthood than to the confession of sins, which is one of the core sacra-
ments in the Catholic Church.
Kongo culture gives crucial importance to intention, specifically in the
elaboration of harmful or curative fetishes (nkisi). Hence, it is not surprising
that Kimpa Vita should have considered intention to be key to understanding
sin and being cleansed from it. The emphasis she placed on intercession
was also characteristic of both traditional Kongo representations of Nzambi
a Mpungu’s intermediaries and the syncretic effects of Christianization on
Kongo conceptions of God, as John K. Thornton pointed out: “In the final
portion of the prayer, the Salve Antonia shifts from denying the validity of the
sacraments to reasserting the concept of advocacy of the Virgin and the saints
before God which characterizes the original prayer and, indeed, Catholic the-
ology, but with one exception. The new prayer takes the virtues of Mary from
the Salve Regina and substitutes Saint Anthony, progressively increasing his
power and significance until he becomes a figure equal to God Himself, start-
ing with the popular images of Mary holding the baby Jesus.”48
Bernardo da Gallo’s account of the facts helps illuminate the nationalis-
tic dimension of the project, by quoting one of the hymns taught by Kimpa
Vita: “Saint Anthony is the merciful one. Saint Anthony is our remedy.
Saint Anthony is the one who will restore the kingdom of Kongo. Saint
Anthony is the comforter from the kingdom of heaven. Saint Anthony is
the gate to heaven. Saint Anthony holds the keys to heaven. Saint Anthony
is above the Angels and the Virgin Mary.”49
It is useful to remember that the doctrine Kimpa Vita was building on
was that of the Portuguese Catholic Church and that allusions to Saint
Anthony abounded in the prayers of Portuguese sailors. But the act of
appropriating Saint Anthony and having him intervene in Congolese poli-
tics with other attributes than those of Christ and the Holy Spirit (see John
14:15–17) was entirely novel.
african responses 49
The importance of kinship has already been noted as crucial both in
the succession of chiefs and in ancestor worship. Hence, it comes as no
surprise that Jesus and his mother were perceived as being Africans and
were included in the lineages of ethnic or kinship groups. Indeed, it is only
by being part of the ethnic/kinship group that ancestors may be worshiped
and answer the prayers of their children. Likewise, whenever Whites
needed to gain acceptance from the Congolese, they allowed themselves to
be assimilated as if they were ancestors returning from the next world. This
image remained embedded in the Congolese psyche for hundreds of years
until the colonial rule imposed by Europeans became intolerable, leading
the Congolese to dispel the confusion.
Kimpa Vita did precisely the work of deconstruction of the representa-
tions that conflated Europeans with the ancestors, first by stressing that
the former’s Whiteness should not be mistaken for that of the African
spirits. As her contemporary Father da Gallo wrote, “She taught that white
men originated from a certain soft stone called ‘fama.’ This is why they
are white. Blacks come from a tree called ‘musanda’ (nsanda). It is from
this tree’s bark or envelope that they make ropes and loincloths, which
they use to cover their nakedness; this makes them black, or the color of
this bark.”50
Kimpa Vita’s choice of stone as the matter Whites were made of was
quite significant to her rejection of them; to this day, Congolese people
still say of callous people that they have a heart of stone. Her compar-
ing Whites to a stone was thus symptomatic of her resentment of
colonial oppression and her efforts to disconnect self- esteem from Euro-
centeredness among her followers. Conversely, the bark from the tree she
defined as the origin of Blacks was given a positive connotation, since
this dark- colored bark possesses therapeutic virtues. In providing her fol-
lowers with a new, positive self- identification, she was effectively help-
ing them free themselves from negative stigma. This also explains why
Kimpa Vita appropriated Christian beliefs. As William Randles explained,
“This nationalization of the Christian religion with a geographical trans-
position of the Christian tragedy seems to have occurred in parallel with
the praise of blacks over whites.”51
In Kimpa Vita’s eyes, the kingdom of Kongo was the real holy land, and
the forefathers and foremothers of Christianity belonged to the Black race.
Thus, as Sinda pointed out, “Dona Beatrice was trying to found a Congolese
church by imitating the Catholic Church she was vigorously fighting because
of the latter’s influence on the kingdom’s political staff. A Christian herself,
50 general background
Dona Beatrice intended to create a national church that would be freed from
all the antagonisms that divided the kingdom’s political society.”52
Along with this transformation of the Portuguese Saint Anthony (the
patron saint of preachers), Kimpa Vita’s extolling Blackness went hand in
hand with a rejection of Whiteness, which was connected to evil. Bernardo
da Gallo voiced his indignation over this matter quite explicitly:
More than anything else, what those Antonians achieved was to make
us missionaries the targets of hatred. They prevented parents from
presenting their children for baptism and adults from getting mar-
ried in church. They made us an object of popular odium, to such a
point that upon seeing us, people call their false Saint Anthony to the
rescue, crying, sadi, sadi, sadi, Jesus Mary (here comes the Nkadiam-
pemba [devil], find protection!). In each village we crossed, we heard
them crying this to ask their false Saint Anthony to rescue them from
us, whom they considered to be devils.53
The phenomenon of appropriation of the devil—a character from the
Christian pantheon—to serve as an explanation for the disruption and evil
wreaked by Whites is similar to the more recent appropriation, in the cos-
mogony of the Nation of Islam, of the figure of Jacob as the “evil scientist”
who created a race of white- skinned, blue- eyed devils.
Just as significantly, in Kimpa Vita’s discourse Whites also appeared as
the ones who held the secret of divine revelation and economic develop-
ment. Indeed, she accused foreign priests of “having monopolized the secret
of divine revelation and the riches associated with it for the sole benefit of
White people and of opposing the effort of salvation led by ‘Black saints.’”54
The simple fact of reproaching Whites for not sharing the secret of divine
revelation and wealth was revealing of her awareness of the gap between
Blacks and Whites and the resulting underdevelopment of African societies.
In response to these concerns, the Antonian movement focused on the hope
of bringing about the reunification of the kingdom of Kongo and its libera-
tion from White oppressors for a future of peace and prosperity.
The movement created by Kimpa Vita was not anchored in any specific
location. Historians’ accounts indicate that it was made up of several thou-
sand followers who roamed in a sort of pilgrimage, praying and singing on
the roads and in public places. Although her increasing influence earned
her popular support in many villages, Kimpa Vita was negatively perceived
by the Kongo aristocracy and the official church.
african responses 51
The prophet publicly proclaimed that she held the santíssimo sacramento
(holy sacrament) that would help restore the kingdom; this eventually drew
the attention of King Pedro IV, who lived on Mount Kibangu. He sent emis-
saries to verify her assertions, but Kimpa Vita turned them away, arguing
that the king should come and see for himself. Reluctant at first, the king
eventually chose to take advantage of the young woman’s impressive popu-
larity for his own political benefit.
Meanwhile, the official branch of the Catholic Church in the kingdom of
Kongo was beginning to fret about Kimpa Vita’s rise and making plans to
bring about the demise of the Antonian movement. Da Gallo, a Capuchin
missionary, showed his determination in his dealings with the Congolese
people, but he also maintained good relations with political powers. He had
perceived the prophet Mafuta to be harmless to the Catholic mission, but
his reaction to Kimpa Vita’s movement was unequivocal condemnation,
because she preached a form of heresy that attacked the Catholic faith. Not
only did Kimpa Vita work miracles, but she also preached the restoration
of the kingdom of Kongo, denouncing missionaries, the Holy See, and the
sacraments of the Catholic Church, and burned the crosses as so many
other fetishes. Finally, her giving birth to a child (Antonio), even as she
advocated chastity and claimed to be a virgin and a moral example, was
used against her by the missionaries.
The Capuchins quickly put pressure on King Pedro IV after he had
prevailed over his two rivals under the banner of Catholic orthodoxy. He
eventually ordered Kimpa Vita to be arrested. On July 2, 1706, the Congo-
lese prophet was sentenced to death by an ecclesiastical tribunal; she was
burned at the stake with her lover.
Even after her death, the movement she had initiated did not lose all
momentum; instead, it kept alive the nationalist consciousness of the
Congolese people, thanks to the eschatological promises of the prophet,
who had proclaimed the impending judgment of God. According to the
Swiss Africanist and theologian Marie- Louise Martin, it was Kimpa Vita
who launched for the first time the idea of a Black Christ who would come
to free oppressed peoples from bondage. Kimpa Vita also predicted the
upcoming restoration of the kingdom of Kongo, which would coincide with
the return of prosperity.55
The execution of Kimpa Vita did not bring about the atonement of the
Antonians. On the contrary, according to some historians, her movement
turned her into a mythical figure. Another missionary, Father Lucques,
observed:
52 general background
After their [Beatriz’s and her lover’s] deaths, the Antonians, instead
of asking for forgiveness and reintegration, became more obstinate
than ever. They proclaimed that the woman they revered as a saint
had appeared on top of the tallest trees in São Salvador. Soon after,
another woman began preaching that she was the mother of the
false Saint Anthony [i.e., Kimpa Vita]. She encouraged people to have
no fear, telling them that while the daughter was dead, the mother
remained. She insisted on being called “the mother of all virtues.”
May God assist us with His grace so that the holy faith may not be
lost in this country.56
The final comment of the missionary is revealing of the long- term
impact left by Kimpa Vita in the minds of her fellow Congolese. Indeed,
while the Antonian movement did not endure for long after the death
of its founder, the kingdom, although weakened by civil war, was able to
remake itself in a new shape after the death of King Pedro IV in 1718.
Father Cherubino de Savonna, a Capuchin who lived in Kongo from 1760
to 1767, described the new political structure as “a cluster of independent
local chiefs, who were allied between themselves through a system of
matrimonial alliances—a sort of empire gathering separate kingdoms.”57
As Georges Balandier retrospectively analyzed, Kimpa Vita’s dream of an
“ideal kingdom of liberty and fullness of life” reemerged when her “mys-
tical heirs . . . without even knowing her name” took the same path.58
These spiritual heirs are undeniably Simon Kimbangu and his followers,
who were clearly inspired by the same hope to nationalize Christianity and
rebuild the kingdom of Kongo both mystically and spiritually. Yet, before
Kimbangu appeared on the scene, another African- initiated movement of
spiritual revival was launched by a prophet named William Wadé Harris,
although he was far away from the former kingdom of Kongo, on the bor-
der between Liberia and Ivory Coast.
Westerners’ preoccupation with Christianizing Africans had not
remained restricted to Congo and Central Africa; it took them everywhere
on the continent, particularly to Ivory Coast and Liberia on the so- called
Gold Coast of western Africa. The Capuchins, the Dominicans, and the
Society of African Missions of Lyons, France, undertook this mission in
1895. However, theirs was a difficult task, since the population was either
already converted to Islam or still attached to animist beliefs. By the early
twentieth century, fewer than 2,000 of the tribal residents of the coast had
been baptized.59
african responses 53
It was not until Harris launched a prophetic movement that the region
was won over to Christianity. In 1914, the First World War caused the French
settlers and missionaries present in western Africa to return home. Yet the
missionizing work was not disrupted, for the impact of Harris’s preaching
led to a remarkable breakthrough of the Christian churches in Ivory Coast.
His activities led to more than 100,000 Africans being baptized in the span
of eighteen months—most of them in Protestant denominations (which
French colonial authorities tended to consider more loyal to the British
Empire), but a sizable number in the Catholic Church.
William Wadé Harris was born in Liberia circa 1860 in the Grebo ethnic
group. The Grebos belong to the Kru people, who are found on both banks
of the Cavalla River, in the center and southeastern portion of Liberia and in
the western part of Ivory Coast, in a forest area. Liberia had been founded
twenty years before, in part by African American freed people who had
decided to leave the United States and go to Africa. When they landed on
African soil, they were greeted by the Grebo people, who gave them part of
their lands. As a member of this welcoming group, Harris, a native of the
town of Sinoe, was constantly in contact with the African Americans who
had settled there.
By 1910, tension had risen between the American- born Black people and
the native Liberians as a result of cultural clashes and diverging political
interests. The former were perceived as new colonizers by the latter, who
called them “White Negroes,” for they had concentrated into their own
hands the management of all public affairs. This situation of domination
and subordination triggered conflicts, which were exacerbated by the Brit-
ish and French colonists who were also present in the country; they were
trying to curry favor with certain native groups in boundary disputes with
the other groups of settlers.60
This was the context in which William Wadé Harris was jailed in 1910
for taking part in protest movements, which the Liberian government con-
sidered to be a coup. In his prison cell, he claimed, he was visited by the
Archangel Gabriel, who entrusted him with the special mission of convert-
ing the pagans and spreading the gospel and set him on his prophetic path:
“‘You are not in prison,’ the Angel said. ‘God is coming to anoint you. You
will be a prophet. . . . You are like Daniel.’”61 Mrs. Neal, Harris’s daughter
(whose full name has not survived in the historical record), provided the
following details in an interview she gave to the missionary Pierre Benoît:
“He saw the Lord in a great wave of light and was, he said, anointed by
him. He felt the water pour on his head. God told him to burn the fetishes,
54 general background
beginning with his own, and to preach everywhere Christian baptism; he
must, by divine command, leave off all the European clothing he was then
wearing and his patent leather shoes, to reclothe himself in a kind of togo
[toga] made with a single piece of stuff [material]. . . . He seemed so exalted
and talked so incoherently that all the world thought him mad.”62 Once out
of jail, Harris chose two female collaborators to help him in what was to
become a mass religious movement, spreading over Liberia, Ivory Coast,
and the Gold Coast (present- day Ghana).
William Wadé Harris’s career was relatively long compared with other
founders of prophetic churches. He was born a Methodist; his mother was
part of the first generation of Christians in a coastal village of the Grebo
country, which was often visited by Episcopalian and Methodist mission-
aries. At age twenty- one, he joined the American Methodist Episcopal Mis-
sion of Harper, Cape Palmas, where he had been baptized and had learned
to read and write both in English and in his native Grebo. He then became
an active lay preacher in the tradition of the American Methodist mission.
Around 1885–1886, he married in the Episcopal Church a woman named
Rose Farr, who was the daughter of a renowned catechist and schoolteacher
from the Episcopalian mission of Spring Hill. Harris was still a young man
when he found work as part of the crew of a British merchant ship, which
traded along the coast of West Africa, and later as a brickmason. These
experiences exposed him to other African civilizations. After the birth of
their first child, Harris left the Methodist Church to join his wife’s church,
and he became a lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and an assistant
schoolteacher at the American Protestant Episcopal mission of Half Graway
in 1892. This job not only put him in charge of many native students, but
eventually earned him an influential position in the government as an
interpreter and cultural intermediary. His proficiency in English caused
the Catholic fathers Hartz and Harrington to praise his abilities, the former
writing in 1914 that Harris “speaks the pure and flawless brand of English
which is Britain’s pride” and the latter, in 1917, that Harris “spoke in per-
fect English, a very remarkable acquisition for a Kruman whose pigeon [sic]
English is usually unintelligible except to the initiated.”63
Thus, William Wadé Harris’s religious and educational background was
strong enough to allow him to read the Bible without an intermediary and
to gain a personal understanding of the scriptures on the basis of his own
spiritual quest and rootedness in African cultural values. His work as a
preacher consisted of translating into local languages and offering interpre-
tations of chosen biblical passages for his people. His accurate knowledge
african responses 55
of scriptures and the depth of his Christian beliefs were remarkable to
many of his European contemporaries; yet, he had been educated not by
foreign missionaries, but by African converts, with whom Harris shared a
similar worldview.64
His preaching focused on three main points. First, he attacked witch-
craft and fetishes, a stance that was all the more significant and convincing
because he was said to have inherited from his mother the status of a con-
jure man—like most other African spiritual leaders. Second, he published
ten commandments that espoused African cultural practices, condoning
polygamy but banning adultery. Finally, the prophet used the scriptures to
deliver a message of hope to his fellow Africans on the basis of eschatolog-
ical promises, telling them that “the time is fulfilled, the devil is defeated”
and baptizing them “in the name of the Father, and his Son who died
for your sins on the cross, and of the Holy Spirit who will change your
hearts.”65
As mentioned earlier, his success was largely due to his linking the
scriptures to issues pertaining to Blackness. Prophet Harris’s attachment
to the Bible is perceptible in one of the messages he sent to his followers:
“Read the Bible, it is the word of God. I am sending you one in which I have
marked the verses that you should read. Seek the light in the Bible. It will be
your guide.”66 Yet, although he taught the Bible and christened thousands
of people with the blessing of Catholic and Protestant missionaries and col-
onists, Harris did not condone the subjugation of his fellow Africans. The
human losses of the First World War led the French authorities to recruit
soldiers among the natives of their colonies, including the Ivorians; along
with other leaders, William Wadé Harris expressed his reluctance to com-
ply in a letter sent to one of his followers, in which he wrote: “France is
making war on the king of Ethiopia and on his subjects. Let no Black man
go to Europe.”67 From then on, his relationship with the French colonial
authorities changed.
In addition, his belonging to a Protestant church had led more converts
to join British missions than Catholic missions, which were supported by
the French settlers. Hence, he was eventually arrested in Ivory Coast and
deported to Liberia, since he was not a French subject. There are two ver-
sions of this arrest, the first of which stresses the brutality of the colonial
forces, who allegedly manhandled him and one of his Liberian singers,
Helen Valentine, to such a point that Valentine died of her wounds. The
other version emphasizes that the officer in charge of deporting him waited
until Harris was done preaching and baptizing converts on the beach of
56 general background
Port Bouët before he notified Harris that he was to leave French territory
and take a boat to Liberia.68
Following Harris’s deportation, three types of reaction were observed.
First, the Catholics, whom the Ivorian natives saw as connected with the
French colonial administration, lost the respect they had gained from
Harris’s activities. Second, in order to better cash in on his success, and
perhaps appropriate it, the Protestant churches appointed two emissaries:
Rev. Benoît in September 1926 and John Ahui in 1928. Both had secured
certified letters from the prophet, in which Harris expressed his wish to see
his followers join a Protestant church, particularly the Methodist Church.
Finally, the natives themselves were inspired by his example, and a number
of leaders emerged who all claimed to be following in the wake of Harris.
But they were loyal neither to the French colonial authorities nor to the
mother churches.
A number of studies claim that Harris did not create a church, but col-
laborated with the established Protestant and Catholic churches. Still, the
nationalist awareness he triggered eventually led to the founding of the
Harrist Church.69
Using race as a tool for the interpretation of the scriptures through the
prism of African values, Harris’s preaching addressed Blackness with a
problem- solving approach. According to Harris, it was the animist back-
ground underlying ancestor worship, witchcraft, and fetishes that was to
blame for the lack of development of Africans compared to Europeans.
Witchcraft had already been shown to be a key cultural aspect of African
cultures and societies; it is still embedded in their worldviews. In trying
to find rational causes for the technological gap separating Africans from
Europeans, Harris assumed that Africans had been conquered by Euro-
peans because they had caused God’s anger by choosing to put their trust
in fetishes and by preying on each other through witchcraft.70 Harris was
effective in his preaching because he was convinced that if Africans would
only renounce witchcraft and convert to Christianity, there would no longer
be a “Black problem,” and Africa would close the technological gap that
plagued it. By appropriating the Bible as a form of therapy for the predica-
ment of colonized Africans, he tied his own prophetic actions to his under-
standing of Blackness and Whiteness.
While the teachings of the prophet appropriated the Bible, he did not
dissociate the scriptures from the figure of the White missionary who came
to Christianize the Africans, contrary to what Kimpa Vita did in the king-
dom of Kongo. Harris never urged his fellow Africans to leave European
african responses 57
churches or rebel against the colonists. The French ethnologist René
Bureau emphasized this characteristic of Harris’s activities in the following
passage: “People asked him, ‘When you are gone, who will show us the
way?’ ‘The White man will—this is why I am handing the work over to the
clerics. Wait for the man of the Bible; if a White man comes and does not
show you the Bible, then you’ll know he’s a liar.’”71 Taking the White man
as a model, Harris gave a reformulation of Christianity buttressed by three
representations of Whites: as men of the Bible, as men of the school sys-
tem, and as men of science.
Harris believed that Whites knew the secrets of the Bible because they
had mastered the art of reading and writing—the White men’s magic. Only
by becoming initiated into the mysteries of scripture could Africans also
share in these secrets; hence, the prophet insisted that his followers send
their children to the White schools, so that they would learn how to read
and eventually empower themselves to own the secrets of the Bible and of
development. This prophetic logic was apparent in Harris’s preaching and
was conveyed in the words of an apostle from the Harrist Church whom
I interviewed in 2002: “When Prophet Harris came, there wasn’t much
teaching done. The whole teaching revolved around his prophecy, which is
known as the trilogy of prophecy and recommendation of Prophet William
Wadé Harris. He told them, ‘Send your children to school! When they are
endowed with the White man’s knowledge, they will read the contents of
the Bible for you. You will not be misled. And you’ll be seated at the same
table as the Whites and share the same meal.’”72 School thus appeared in
Harris’s preaching as the place where Africans could learn how to read and
write with the goal of understanding the holy scriptures, which he believed
contain the key to development. Today, most Harrists follow this prophetic
logic, and many are literate.73
The third representation conveyed by Harris’s message was Whites as
prosperous men of science; he announced that a golden age had come with
the arrival of White missionaries and schools. The racial equality he was
envisioning was unthinkable in colonial times, however, since Blacks and
Whites could not even be seated at the same table sharing either a conver-
sation or a meal. This vision of Blackness and Whiteness could only exist
in the future, but Whiteness appeared here as a mirror, which the prophet
used to increase awareness of the gap between Blacks and Whites and find
a solution to it.
As in the case of Simon Kimbangu, the prophetic movement that Harris
initiated elicited two kinds of reception: from the colonial authorities and
58 general background
from those Catholic and Protestant churches and those African indepen-
dent churches that were spawned from his own.
Several types of officials reacted to the preaching of this Africanized
Christian message by William Wadé Harris. First, the Catholic and Prot-
estant missionaries gave him free rein to preach and baptize in their
mainstream churches. Some missionaries actually considered him to be
a messenger sent by God to achieve the conversion of his fellow Africans.
The French colonial authorities initially also had a favorable view of his pro-
phetic movement, because Harris was careful to preach an attitude of total
submission to their power, the value of a strong work ethic, and morality.74
Nationwide, among the native population, William Wadé Harris’s mis-
sion was wildly successful, since his fellow Grebos and other Ivorians mas-
sively embraced a message that promised protection from evil, immediate
prosperity, and certain punishment to those who would not heed the proph-
et’s words and acts of power.75 This is why the people followed his sermons
and applied his recommendations scrupulously. Fetishes were burned and
the Sabbath respected, with shopkeepers closing their stores. The British
governor of the Gold Coast eventually acknowledged that Harris had a pow-
erful impact on the masses and had succeeded where White missionaries
had failed. The deportation of Harris caused the rise of several new leaders
who claimed to be his spiritual heirs, and his succession became a bone of
contention. Several African- initiated churches claim to have their origins
in Harris’s mission.
Prophet William Wadé Harris’s activities gradually spawned an indepen-
dent church rooted in his teachings. In August 1955, the Harrist Church
held its first congress, which ended in the appointment as its head of the
Ivorian John Ahui, who inherited the prophet’s staff and Bible on the occa-
sion. With the help of assistants, Ahui successfully spread Harris’s pro-
phetic message among villages near the Liberian border. The years leading
up to Ivorian independence offered a favorable context for the development
of the Harrist Church, and it was quickly granted recognition by the Ivo-
rian state. On March 4, 1961, it was officially registered with the new state
authorities under the name of Église du Christ/Mission Harris. It became
a major African- initiated church, ranking fourth among the churches of
Ivory Coast. In 1998, it joined the World Council of Churches, based in
Geneva, Switzerland; it was then 2 million strong, according to the Harrist
officials I interviewed in the greater Paris area.
In spite of the vicissitudes and splits entailed by the succession crisis,76
the Harrist Church has survived to this day, drawing its tenets from the
african responses 59
Bible and the teachings of the prophet. It is interesting, from a compara-
tive perspective, to investigate its formulation of the question of Blackness.
Harrist theology offers three analyses of Blackness, distinguishing an Afri-
can identity predating colonization, an Africanness linked to William Wadé
Harris’s prophetic activities, and a modern Black identity in the making.
Harris considered himself to be a messenger sent by God to convert and
christen Africans in order to save them from the spiritual predicament that
their attachment to fetishes and witchcraft had put them in. He described
his mission in the following terms: “God has sent me to proclaim that the
time has come when he wants to deliver you from the power of the devil
who ruins you, makes you foolish and kills you. The time is fulfilled, the
devil is conquered here also, therefore burn all your fetishes, all your gree-
grees and your amulets, and I will baptize you in the name of this God who
is your Father, of his son Jesus Christ who has died for your sins, and of the
Holy Spirit who changes your hearts.”77
By baptizing Africans and separating them from the psychological hold
of fetish worship and witchcraft, Harris believed that he would lead them
to prosperity and happiness. The main goal of his mission was met, for he
was successful in converting massive numbers of Ivorians to Christianity,
while before he came, many had asked for baptism and joined Christian
churches only halfheartedly, out of fear rather than faith, with their belief
in fetishes and witchcraft still intact. Harris’s prophetic approach was revo-
lutionary: he knew exactly how they felt, and he had an insider’s familiarity
with Ivorian society and its cultural references, since he came from a family
of conjure men and women. He succeeded where European missionaries
had failed, because he, like the people he preached to, was African. Yet,
though nationalistic and geared to Africans’ needs, his message was not
hostile to Europeans and Whites in general. On the contrary, Harris had a
positive image of Whites and conveyed it in his preaching.
Harris recommended submission to colonial authorities for the time
necessary for Africans to learn Western technology in order to carry out
African projects of development. As Sheila Walker has explained, he encour-
aged Ivorians to work hard while keeping them focused: if they learned
White men’s techniques and prayed for seven years, they would empower
themselves and make possible their own liberation from colonialism.78
His prophetic message created short- term millenarian hope, since, fol-
lowing the seven years of prayer, asceticism, schooling, and learning the
Bible, the time would come when his prophecies would be put to the test. But
after seven years, Harris’s contemporaries did not witness the fulfillment
60 general background
of his prophecies: Africans were still chafing under the various colonial
yokes in the 1920s and would remain so in the following decades. But the
Harrists I interviewed explained that the prophet’s pronouncements were
realized in the creation of the United Nations, where Blacks and Whites
are seated at the same negotiation table, and in other organizations where
African voices are heard. In the realm of politics, Harris’s prophecies are
also considered to have been fulfilled by the independence of Ivory Coast,
including his statement that a “son of Africa” would lead.79
Harris’s activities led to the emergence of two forms of Ivorian nation-
alism. On the one hand, the new political awareness gave rise to political
parties, including that of Félix Houphouët- Boigny, who was to become the
first president of Ivory Coast and who emulated Harris’s talent in bringing
together various ethnic groups. Hence, William Wadé Harris’s prophecy
about sons of Africa reaching the highest positions in Ivory Coast as a result
of the recommendations seemed to be fulfilled, since Houphouët- Boigny
had been educated in European schools prior to being elected.
But on the other hand, although the prophet himself never called for a
rejection of Whites or even for the creation of an independent church, his
followers’ actions, particularly those of his Ivorian successor, John Ahui,
showed a separatist tendency, which led to the launching of the Harrist
Church in 1955, apparently with Harris’s approval.80 This shows that Har-
ris, like other African prophets, may have been unable to entirely control
the desire for political liberation that they had fostered among their compa-
triots. This was also the case with an earlier splinter of Harris’s movement,
a sect called Sons of God, which announced the “apocalyptic” end of the
colonial order, promising that “the whites would leave the land before long
and taxes would be reduced.”81 This had caused concern in the French colo-
nial government and eventually led to the prophet’s deportation from the
territory of Ivory Coast.
It seems clear that William Wadé Harris’s prophetic activities gradually
led his followers to consider his mission and identity from a different angle
than the missionary perspective, so that they finally began to attribute to
him some of the same importance that Jesus Christ had for White people.
“God sent each of his sons to a different group of people to save them.
Jesus went to Europe to save the whites, but he did not come to Africa. It
was the prophet Harris, an African like us, whom God sent to bring us into
the light.”82
It is striking to observe how the Harrist Church, like other African-
initiated churches, offers a pattern of dissociation between the White
african responses 61
missionaries’ “magic,” as embodied in the scriptures, and the believers’
explicit need to see a fellow African preach a message of salvation, hold-
ing out the promise of immediately palpable evidence of empowerment.
This pattern can only be effective in these churches through a more or
less deliberate process of appropriation and transformation of the Bible
under the guidance of the prophetic leader and his successors. Perhaps the
movement that best exemplifies such a process is the Kimbanguist Church,
which was born in the early 1920s through the political and religious activ-
ities of another prophet in the Belgian Congo: Simon Kimbangu.
3
The Kimbanguist movement was launched by Simon Kimbangu, a Bap-
tist catechist. Belonging to the Cingombe ethnic group, part of the Kongo
group, he was born in the village of Nkamba, near Matadi in the southwest-
ern part of the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo)
around 1889, according to many researchers. The Kimbanguists believe
he was born on Wednesday, September 12, 1887—a date that was discov-
ered by the church by means of a revelation. The only child of his parents,
Kuyela and Luezi, he was called Kimbangu, which means in Kikongo “the
one who reveals the hidden meaning of things.”
Kimbangu was educated at the Baptist mission of Ngombe Lutete.
After marrying Marie Muilu and fathering three sons—Charles Kisolokele
(February 12, 1914), Paul Salomon Dialungana (May 25, 1916), and Joseph
Diangienda (March 22, 1918)—he became a catechist there in 1918. Many
historians contend that he failed the exams that would have given him pas-
toral status. But not all of them share the same analysis of this failure.
Georges Balandier, for instance, tied it to Kimbangu’s prophetic vocation:
for Balandier, this failure triggered the shock that made separation from
the mission easier (or even caused it), by arousing the need to act in parallel
with the official church and, to a certain extent, against it.1
Father Van Wing, a contemporary of Kimbangu and a well- known anti-
Kimbanguist, nevertheless pleaded in favor of Kimbangu by stressing his
Protestant background: “Although he was very intelligent and endowed
kimbanguism as a social movement
kimbanguism as a social movement 63
with a remarkable oratory talent, he never accessed the rank of pastor. He
evangelized several villages under the title of catechist.”2
In 1918, Kimbangu heard the voice of Christ ordering him to convert
his compatriots, but he felt unequal to the task. He resisted the call, but
everything he undertook to make a living systematically failed. He went
to Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) to labor as a factory worker in the Belgian
Congo’s oil works, but when payday came, the European man in charge
of handing him his due (which never exceeded twenty francs) refused
to give him anything, arguing that he had already been paid, as his sig-
nature on the payroll sheet proved. This occurred three times in a row,
and then Kimbangu heard Christ’s voice again, explaining that what he
was experiencing was linked to his resisting the call. Kimbangu made
the decision to leave this job and go back to his family in Nkamba; his
colleagues took pity on him and gave him financial help to compensate
for his three months without salary. So he tried to stay a while longer in
Léo poldville by selling chikwangs (loaves made of manioc), but again he
failed, for no customer was interested in his merchandise. Eventually, a
desperate Kimbangu went back to Nkamba on foot; with what little money
he had left, he bought eels for his family’s supper on his way home, but
an officer from the colonial police seized them before letting him resume
his trip.
When he arrived in Thysville, a city located forty- six miles from Nkamba,
Kimbangu was hired to work on the roads by the Office of Colonial Trans-
portation, but that same evening, he was told he was not needed. He finally
returned to Nkamba to farm his land, but the calling was persistent.
Kimbangu’s resistance to the calling lasted until 1921, when he initiated
his spiritual revival movement among the Congolese people. According to
Kimbanguist oral tradition, his wife, Marie Muilu—who was aware of what
was going to occur on Wednesday, April 6, 1921—rang a bell at 6 a.m. at the
request of her husband. After the morning worship, Kimbangu and many
other villagers took the road to Naona, a village where a market was taking
place. On the road to the market, facing Nkamba and on top of a hill, was
the village of Ngombe- Kinsuka; there, a young woman called Nkiantondo
had been dying for several days, her family expecting her to breathe her
last any minute. The Kimbanguist oral tradition, as shaped by his son and
successor, Diangienda, portrays Kimbangu as yielding to the urge of Christ
as he stepped into the young woman’s cabin and ordered everyone save her
husband and relatives to leave the room. On his knees, he made a short
prayer and, taking the sick woman by the hand, said, “Nkiantondo, in the
64 general background
name of Jesus of Nazareth, be healed and rise.” It is said that Nkiantondo
rose at once, completely recovered.3
As the news of the healing of Nkiantondo spread, villagers began consult-
ing Kimbangu for all sorts of illnesses and handicaps. The blind recovered
sight, the paralyzed could walk, the deaf heard, and the mutes spoke. The
first successful resurrection, which is very famous in Kimbanguist histo-
riography, was that of Dina, a fifteen- year- old girl whose corpse had already
begun to decompose; she had been dead for three days. This was how long it
had taken her funeral procession to march from her birthplace, the village of
Ntumba, to Nkamba. When Kimbangu asked her parents what they wanted,
the father answered: “If we didn’t want our daughter to be resurrected, we
would not be here.” The Kimbanguist narrative relates the miracle in these
terms: “Realizing that these people clearly possessed a high degree of faith,
Map 2. Democratic Republic of the Congo.
kimbanguism as a social movement 65
[Kimbangu] begged the Lord to resurrect the young woman. Then, hold-
ing the hand of the dead woman, he cried out, ‘Dina, in the name of Jesus
Christ, resurrect.’ Dina opened her eyes and rose at once. Then there was
an outburst of joy.”4 As I discuss below, an identity reconstruction process
eventually associated the memory of this young woman with an African
American woman called Dinah, who came to visit Nkamba in 2002.
After Dina’s resurrection, crowds of people, not all of them Christian,
came from the southern portion of the Belgian Congo, the northern parts
of Angola, and the southern parts of the French Congo to Nkamba, both
to get healed and to hear Kimbangu preach. But Kimbangu, who at the
time had no intention of creating a new church, asked them not to leave
their home churches. To help him in his new mission, Kimbangu chose
priestly collaborators, among whom were two women; the more famous
was Michaëlle (Mikala) Mandombe, who was only thirteen when she was
first selected. Like him, these aides healed sick people and people with all
kinds of handicaps in the name of Jesus.
For Pierre Bourdieu, revisiting Max Weber’s theories on religion, a
prophet is a figure who is characteristic of times of crisis and dissensus
among the believers, the established clergy, and the official religion, and
whose role is to offer the people an understanding of the world that meets
their needs, giving new meaning to the present and future life.5 Simon Kim-
bangu, just like his predecessors Kimpa Vita/Dona Beatriz and William
Wadé Harris, found all the conditions required to mobilize his compatriots
into a prophetic movement. The Congolese were chafing under the colonial
yokes of the Belgians, French, and Portuguese. Illiteracy made it impossible
for them to read the Bible or fully access the Christian message.6 Finally, at
the time, a flu epidemic was taking a heavy toll on the local population.
Kimbangu’s prophetic activities kindled the faith of the Kongo people on
both banks of the Congo River and in Angola, who flocked to Kimbangu.
This drew the attention of the missionaries and colonial administrators
in the Belgian Congo. Contemporary observers of Kimbangu insisted on
denying the reality of what he was doing. For instance, although he was not
on the premises, Father Jodogne, a Redemptorist, described the healings
as fake miracles.7 However, these criticisms were contradicted by a medical
report written by a Dr. Osstram, a missionary from the American Baptist
Foreign Missionary Society, who indicated that “Nsona [a girl he knew] was
a cripple, who could not straighten out her arms and hands or feet. She was
taken to the prophet- healer and walked back home from the mountain of
healing along with her mother.”8
66 general background
A member of the Baptist Church, Kimbangu rose to the position of cat-
echist, teaching the Bible to his fellow Congolese. But he entered history
through a more personal experience pertaining to Christian mysticism,
which led Efraim Andersson to describe him as a “natural mystic.”9 His
position gave him the opportunity to live permanently in contact with both
his fellow Congolese and European colonists who belonged to the same
church as he did. Contemporary Protestant observers of Kimbangu’s activi-
ties described him as “a decent, orderly man who read his Bible and did his
work conscientiously.”10
His preaching focused on two major themes. First, at a moral level, he
recommended that all people should read the Bible, abide by the Ten Com-
mandments, and bestow love on their neighbors, and he preached against
witchcraft. Based on his religious preaching, his moral recommendations
have been memorized and kept by his followers, such as the commandments
not to dance or watch people dancing, not to bathe or sleep naked, to destroy
fetishes and drums, and not to be polygamous.11 Second, he preached Christ
as the source of his power to heal, stressing that Jesus should no longer be
seen as an imported deity, but as the God of Black people also. “The Christ
that missionaries revealed to us is the one from whom I receive my mission
and my power,” he would say. “You must believe in Him and put His teach-
ings into practice. You must no longer continue considering Him as the
White man’s God, but really as the son of the Eternal.”12
In his apostolic circuits, Kimbangu did not just heal people, but he also
preached against the colonial order. From his teachings against colonial
domination, only one sentence has been retained and become famous,
however—his prophecy that “the White man shall become black and the
Black man shall become white.” The Bible was not only meant to be read,
but served as a foundation for commitment to the cause of racial liberation.
Passages from the book of Exodus narrating the liberation of the children
of Israel from their bondage in Egypt offered parallels with Africans’ own
oppression, which made them popular among Congolese audiences.
Contemporary observers mentioned that the biblical story of David and
Goliath was also a recurrent theme. The Belgian colonial administrator
Léon Morel indicated in a report that when he went to control a Kimban-
guist worship service, which had gathered a crowd of followers, Kimbangu
did not so much as turn around to look at him. But the prophet’s youngest
apostle, Mikala Mandombe, held up her Bible for all to see the image of
David and Goliath, using the biblical episode as an analogy to celebrate
Kimbangu as a new David and to challenge Morel as the representative
kimbanguism as a social movement 67
of Goliath—that is, colonial oppression. This analogy was recurrent in
Kimbangu’s preaching. The Swiss theologian Marie- Louise Martin later
observed that the Kimbanguist Church often compared its own history to
that of the children of Israel, particularly in Exodus, so that “the Church’s
own experience makes the notion of salvation history possible.”13
It did not take much time for the people’s hopes to be expressed in terms
of the salvation of the Black race. Kimbangu focused his discourse on the
deteriorated Black identity: he preached Black liberation from the colonial
yoke and prophesied that a temple would be built in Nkamba as a sign
of Black spiritual liberation. Unsurprisingly, although Simon Kimbangu
refused to be labeled a savior, he was considered as such by his fellow Con-
golese. Among the Kimbanguist speeches of the time, the following was
related by the administrative authorities of the Belgian Congo: “God has
promised us to pour His Holy Spirit over our land. We have implored Him
and He has sent us a savior for the Black race—Simon Kimbangou [sic].
He is the chief and savior of all the Blacks, just like the Saviors of the other
races—Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammad and Buddha. . . . God did not want
us to hear His Word without giving us any proof. . . . So He gave us Simon
Kimbangou, who is for us like the Moses of the Jews, the Christ of the for-
eigners, and the Mohammad of the Arabs.”14
In addition to his knowledge of the Bible, Kimbangu’s appeal was rein-
forced by his staff—a rod known as mvuala in the Kikongo language. The
sacred staff among Kongo chiefs, as mentioned earlier, played an important
role in the process of initiation and in the granting of temporal and spiri-
tual powers to the chief. According to Kimbanguist tradition, this staff had
supernatural powers; when ordered by Simon Kimbangu, it could spring
out of its owner’s hands and float upright or horizontally. People even say
that once, after Simon Kimbangu had pointed to the four cardinal direc-
tions with this rod, all the sick and dead people whom relatives were car-
rying to Nkamba in hopes of their healing or resurrection had been given
satisfaction before they even arrived.
In analyzing the lyrics of Kimbanguist songs from the colonial period,
Balandier wrote that Kimbangu’s rod was not only an allusion to Moses’s
famous staff, but also a very significant object in Congolese tradition:
“The staff, or walking- stick, usually carved, was one of the insignia of
royalty, and was for a long time the symbol of authority of the ‘old- style
chiefs.’ The ‘Kingdom of Christ,’ later to become that of the Black Mes-
siah, is conceived of as being real, but adapted to a society in which an
independent Congolese Church and State would coexist. In a more or less
68 general background
complementary sense, the ‘staff’ indicates that Simon Kimbangou [sic]
was both King and Prophet.”15
These descriptions show clearly that Kimbangu was seen as a savior and
liberator of the Blacks, but not as an instrument of God’s wrath against
the Whites for colonizing the Congolese. Despite this, one common point
among all the movements that stemmed from Simon Kimbangu’s ministry
is that they often cultivate a rejection of Whites, even though Kimbangu
himself never preached anti- White sentiment. Contrary to the movement
of the Antonians, which grew out of feelings of rejection and hatred of
the White colonizers, Kimbangu’s initiative displayed a benevolent position
toward Whites, which may be explained by his family history.
A motherless child, Simon was raised by his paternal aunt Kinzembo,
who had recently converted to Christianity and joined the Baptist Mission-
ary Society at Ngombe Lutete, headed by Rev. Thomas Comber. The story
of her first encounter with Comber has been preserved in the Kimban-
guist collective memory. The starting point was when Comber, while on
his missionary circuit around the villages located within walking distance
of the Ngombe Lutete Baptist mission, arrived in the village of Nkamba on
a market day. Kinzembo was at the market when he appeared. On seeing
Comber, all the Blacks fled, except Kinzembo. The Baptist pastor walked
up to her and asked why all the others had fled since he had only come to
preach the gospel and meant no harm to the Africans. Comber told her,
“You did not run away, so God shall bless you.”16
Rev. Comber returned to Europe and was replaced by Pastor Ronald
Cameron. The latter was probably informed by his predecessor, and he
contacted Kinzembo. During their first meeting, he tried to take Kimbangu
away with him to give him religious instruction, but since the boy was only
seven, he could not be left with the missionaries. Still, Kinzembo developed
a friendly relationship with Cameron, who gave her as tokens of his friend-
ship a necklace for herself and a knife to be given to Kimbangu when he
grew up. The most outstanding event in their friendship was the following:
one day, while Pastor Cameron was being chased and running away from
villagers who were threatening to kill him, he found refuge and a hiding
place in Kinzembo’s house. Later, Cameron made a prayer, asking God to
bless Kinzembo and the child Kimbangu. Below, I explain how the influ-
ence of Kinzembo has shaped to this day the Kimbanguist perception of
Whites, but for now, I simply note that Kinzembo seems to have been one
of the Congolese natives who were favorable to the implantation of Chris-
tian missions in the region of Nkamba.
kimbanguism as a social movement 69
It seems clear that these events, particularly the episode when he saw
his aunt hiding the fugitive pastor, affected Simon Kimbangu’s relation to
Whites. This influence may explain why his movement, though protesting
the colonial order, did not reject or condemn all Whites. Indeed, his daily
prayer, as transcribed by his son Diangienda, exemplified his nonviolent
stance and racial and gender inclusiveness: “I give Thee thanks, O God
Almighty, who created the heaven and the earth. Heaven is Thy throne, and
the earth is Thy footstool. Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. May
Thou bless all races on the earth—mighty ones and little ones, women and
men, Whites and Blacks. May the blessings from above pour on the whole
world, so that we may all enter Heaven. We ask all this in hopes of obtain-
ing it in the name of Jesus Christ, our savior. Amen.”17
Regardless of the persecutions and punishments, the movement initi-
ated by Simon Kimbangu evolved into a church that developed outside of
White control, but with a certain form of inclusiveness of Whites. Indeed,
he did not call for a rejection of Whites, but he recommended in a proph-
ecy that his followers never lose sight of Jesus’s final promise that they
would one day welcome people from all colors and nations.18 Of course,
Kimbangu’s preaching life did not last long enough to offer a complete
revisiting of the Bible, or the White image in his mind. But his church,
once established, built its own interpretation of scriptures, which helps us
gain a better understanding of Kimbanguist beliefs and representations in
space and time.
Kimbangu’s prophetic activities rapidly took on new meanings and
new directions. There were three groups that reacted to him: first, other
Black people; second, the European missionaries and religious authorities;
and finally, the Belgian colonial authorities. In the eyes of his compatri-
ots, Kimbangu was a man who awakened moral consciences. His expe-
rience, which was first and foremost a personal one, aroused the faith of
his people; they listened to him, renounced witchcraft, and discarded their
fetishes. Although Father Van Wing opposed the movement, he acknowl-
edged its success: “When Simon Kimbangu, who was recognized as the
savior of his people, imposed the destruction of the nkisi, he was obeyed
not only by his conscious followers, but by entire populations who had
no direct contact with him or his group.”19 This triggered an actual social
movement in the Belgian Congo, which had a big impact on the social lives
of the Black people there. The Belgian lawyer Jules Chomé observed that
“had the administration or the missions wanted to impose [these reforms],
they would have met with a lot of resistance. But Simon Kimbangu was
70 general background
obeyed by his followers. In the villages he conquered, the wives of polyga-
mous husbands—save one—were all sent back to their families. The feast
drums—absolutely necessary for the forbidden feasts—were destroyed.”20
At a more political level, Kimbangu’s teaching made the Congolese
aware of the real problems and rekindled their dissatisfaction with their
social situation, including oppression, dire poverty, and a lack of inventions
by Black people in the White- dominated field of science. Kimbangu was
regarded as a liberator whose mission was to bring peace, prosperity, and
happiness, but also a new science that would be more powerful than that
of the colonizers.
Kimbangu’s activities, being both political and religious, did cause a
reaction from colonial authorities and religious leaders. The reaction from
religious authorities was twofold. Simon Kimbangu’s work was initially
received favorably by the Protestants from the Baptist mission of Ngombe
Lutete, because he had been trained by them. At first, Father Chery (first
name unknown) and Pastor Peter Frederickson raised their voices to sug-
gest that Kimbangu’s ministry could indeed be God- given. The director of
the regional mission, after seeing for himself the work of the Black prophet,
made this remark: “It is the first time I have seen such plain evidence of the
presence of Christ in Congo; but the sheep must not lead their shepherd.
It is possible that you hold this power from God, but all the merit must go
to our deacons.”21
But this positive reaction from the Protestants was short- lived, for Kim-
bangu, as a native, was not entitled to such freedom of speech and action.
Pastor Robert Lanyon Jennings was one of the Protestants most opposed
to Kimbangu, and as such, he holds a prominent place in the Kimbanguist
narrative. Not only did he deny Kimbangu’s miracles, but he challenged
him at a foundational moment for the nascent church. Having noticed that
the choir surrounding Kimbangu exclusively sang Baptist hymns, Jennings
went to Kimbangu to ask, “How is it that Jesus, who gave you the power to
resurrect dead people, has so deprived you of hymns that you must resort
to ours?”22 In response, Kimbangu left the crowd for a short moment and
discreetly prayed. A little while later, he came back and taught the choir an
entirely new song; it was the first Kimbanguist hymn. Since then, Kimban-
guists have had a body of hymns exclusively their own, which are discussed
in depth in chapter 4.
According to the Catholic Van Wing, both an observer and a participant,
Kimbangu’s prophetic activities were received rather positively by Protes-
tant missionaries, who considered him to be an envoy from above and a
kimbanguism as a social movement 71
fruit of their missionary work. In 1958, Van Wing noted, “To [Protestant
missionaries] Kibangu [sic] was an inspired man who kindled and point-
edly exalted their followers’ faith in Protestant- style revivals.”23 The initial
passivity of the colonial administration allowed Van Wing to take initia-
tive according to his faith. By June 1921, he had set up a counterpropa-
ganda scheme, which consisted in making Catholic natives understand that
adhering to Kimbangu’s doctrine meant renouncing the Catholic faith and
therefore committing the sin of apostasy.24
The Belgian authorities were the last to react, prompted by traders and
news agencies that persuaded administrator Morel—who was in charge
of the region of Nkamba—that the movement was dangerous. The Kim-
banguist narrative written by Diangienda, the prophet’s son and successor,
relates that Morel went to Nkamba with his staff to see for himself what
was going on. He selected five sick people, including two paralytics, who
were brought to Simon Kimbangu. The prophet healed them without even
touching them. The paralyzed people rose and walked away, leaving their
crutches behind them. Morel, his soldiers, and his interpreter watched in
utter dismay.25 In his report of May 17, 1921, Morel commented on the “reli-
gious fanaticism” and “blind faith” that he saw, comparing the “mass spir-
ituality” he witnessed in Nkamba to that of Lourdes, but complained that
it was “marred with fetishism” due to the more “primitive character of the
natives.” He concluded that Kimbangu’s “goal is to create a religion that fits
the natives’ mind-set. . . . Everybody can see that our European religions,
fraught with abstract notions, do not answer the needs of the African, who
demands protection and solid facts.”26
But as the zeal of Kimbangu’s followers impelled them to leave the hos-
pitals, the railways, construction sites in Matadi, and other workplaces, the
colonial authorities felt compelled to take action. Catholic missionaries
were not the only ones bringing their complaints to the administration:
clerks and factory laborers were deserting their work, and boys serving
in European homes were leaving the linen unwashed and sneaking away
to go to Kimbangu’s meetings. Jules Chomé ironically concluded, “As a
result, from the officials of Trade and Industry in Matadi and Thysville
to the European ladies who suddenly had to do the cooking themselves,
everyone agreed with the missionaries that it was time to put an end to a
movement which caused such trouble.”27 In June 1921, with permission
from his superiors and the help of troops, Morel made a first attempt to
arrest Simon Kimbangu, but he failed. Kimbangu had managed to escape.
This failed arrest is still commemorated today by the Kimbanguists, who
72 general background
understand it as God’s refusal to hand
Kimbangu over at the onset of his
mission. The narrative of Kimbangu’s
eventual arrest insists that he turned
himself in to the Belgian authorities
on the day he had chosen—September
12, 1921, after five months of preach-
ing and healing—and called on his fol-
lowers to remain nonviolent, saying,
“It is now time for me to turn myself
in to the authorities; let impatient men
prone to anger be gone.”28
Simon Kimbangu was charged
with, among other things, troublemak-
ing and advertising false miracles. He
first appeared before the War Council
in Thysville on Thursday, September
29, 1921, and the trial continued into
October. Commander De Rossi was
the presiding judge.29
De Rossi. Kimbangu, do you confess to having organized an upris-
ing against the colonial government and having dubbed
the Whites, your benefactors, as abominable enemies?
Kimbangu. I have not started any uprising, neither against the Whites
nor against the Belgian colonial government. I have
restricted myself to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
De Rossi. Why have you encouraged the people to leave work and
no longer pay taxes?
Kimbangu. This is untrue. The people who came to Nkamba came of
their own free will, either to hear the Word of God, or to
seek healing or get a benediction. Never have I asked the
people to stop paying taxes.
De Rossi. Are you the mvuluzi [“savior” in Kikongo]?
Kimbangu. No, Jesus Christ is the Savior. I have received from him
the mission of proclaiming the news of eternal salvation
to my people.
De Rossi. Have you resurrected the dead?
Kimbangu. Yes.
Figure 1. Kimbangu in front of the
Lubumbashi jail.
kimbanguism as a social movement 73
De Rossi. How did you do [that]?
Kimbangu. By the divine power Jesus gave me.
De Rossi. During the incidents of June 6 in Nkamba, the crowd you
had frenzied injured two soldiers. Why did you flee?
Kimbangu. The soldiers of the Administrator [Morel] had manhandled
me, and this had exasperated those who were on the spot.
The soldiers started firing and pillaged the village. I do not
know who injured the two soldiers, because of the chaos
this had caused. I fled because I had to, since I had to pur-
sue my mission to its end as Christ had ordered me to.
De Rossi. You are denying that you encouraged the people to rebel
against authority. But the printed songs sung by the peo-
ple you have turned into fanatics, copies of which have
been seized in Nkamba, call the people to arms. What is
your response?
Kimbangu. There is no song calling people to rebel against the gov-
ernment. The [Baptist] church also has hymns in which
Christians are called “Christian soldiers,” but the govern-
ment did not put under arrest the Whites who teach us
these hymns.
De Rossi. Where were you hiding during the period from June 6,
1921, until the day you were arrested?
Kimbangu. I kept doing God’s work in several villages.
De Rossi. You were aware that the authorities were actively search-
ing for you, so why didn’t you give yourself up then?
Kimbangu. I had to keep pursuing the work of Jesus Christ in several
places, but I myself decided to give myself up to the White
man who arrested me [Snoeck] when the time had come.
De Rossi. Do you have any consciousness of the danger of epidem-
ics you exposed the people to by having corpses brought
to you in Nkamba?
Kimbangu. There was not a single case of an epidemic, and I did
bring back to life a great number of deceased persons by
the power of Jesus Christ. I have not requested that the
people bring me corpses, but I could not turn away those
who came to me everywhere I went.
De Rossi. The massive desertions of workplaces and encourage-
ments to strike—were these not part of your strategy to dis-
rupt law and order and eventually topple the government?
74 general background
Kimbangu. I did not order the people to leave work, nor did I call to
strike.
De Rossi. People heard you say that ‘the Whites shall become the
Blacks and the Blacks shall become the Whites.’ Isn’t this
proof of your intention of driving all Whites away from
the colony?
Kimbangu. This sentence is not meant to be understood in a literal
sense.
De Rossi. What does it mean, then?
Kimbangu. God will reveal its meaning later, when the time has come.
De Rossi. According to my information, during the time you spent
at the oil works of the Belgian Congo, you were in contact
with Black American subversive groups, including [Mar-
cus] Garvey. What is your response to this?
Kimbangu. This is untrue.
De Rossi. We know that the contributions you collected yielded a
great amount of money. What is the destination of those
funds, if they are not meant to be spent on weapons you
intend to use to topple the government and drive all
Whites away from the Congo?
Kimbangu. I have not organized any contributions. I have not accepted
any payment from the people I have healed or resurrected.
Funds were collected on a voluntary basis by some people
with a view to meeting the needs of the masses of people
who arrived in Nkamba every day, including the purchas-
ing of food for these people. Christ’s teachings condemn
violence. I do not condone violence.
When Simon Kimbangu was arrested, the time of persecution began;
many of his followers were also arrested, and 37,000 families, that is,
150,000 people, were deported. The trial ended with very harsh sentences:
because of his statement that “the White man shall become black and the
Black man shall become white,” Kimbangu received the death penalty; his
disciples received long jail terms. But not everyone agreed about the fairness
of the trial of Kimbangu and his companions. While Father Van Wing—
who attended the proceedings—described it as a “trial where his cause was
inquired into with all due process of law,”30 the Belgian lawyer Chomé was
disgusted with what he deemed to be a hasty trial (it lasted eighteen days),
with no official or unofficial lawyers or other defenders for the accused.31
kimbanguism as a social movement 75
Kimbangu was sent to Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), where he
remained in jail for thirty years, until he died. However, the growth of his