The Congo has produced prophetic movements at intervals, and two of them show the same pattern separated by nearly three hundred years.
Kimpa Vita, a young Kongolese noblewoman, began preaching around 1704 during a period of civil war in which the capital lay abandoned. She said she was possessed by Saint Anthony, that Christ and the saints had been Kongolese and born in Kongo, and that the kingdom should be reunified under a single king. Thousands followed her back into the ruined capital. She was tried by Capuchin missionaries and Kongolese authorities and burned as a heretic in 1706. John Thornton's study reconstructs the movement from Italian missionary records and argues for taking her theology seriously as theology rather than as protest in religious dress.
Simon Kimbangu began healing and preaching in the Belgian Congo in April 1921. Within months he had drawn very large crowds, workers were leaving colonial employment to hear him, and the administration arrested him. He was sentenced to death, the sentence was commuted, and he died in prison in 1951 after thirty years of confinement. The church founded in his name grew despite the suppression and is now among the largest independent churches in Africa.
Both cases involve a message delivered in Christian terms by a Kongolese figure, mass response, and prompt destruction by the authority claiming to represent the same religion.