Simon Kimbangu's public ministry lasted from April to September 1921 and that is the whole of it. He was a Baptist mission catechist at Nkamba in the Lower Congo, a man who had already declined a call once, and when he began laying hands on the sick the reports of healings spread very fast along the river and rail routes.
Within weeks people were walking for days to reach him. Mission stations emptied as members went to Nkamba; more importantly for the administration, so did plantations, mines and workshops. He preached against the nkisi and told people to burn them and to hold to the Bible, which the Protestant missions approved of, and he was regarded by his followers as a prophet sent to Africans, which they did not.
The Belgian administration read the crowds as sedition. He went into hiding, then gave himself up in September. A military court tried him without any effective defence, convicted him of hostility to the state, and sentenced him to death; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and 120 lashes. He was moved to Elisabethville, more than a thousand miles away, and stayed there until he died in 1951. He was thirty four when he was arrested and sixty four when he died, so the overwhelming majority of his adult life was spent in a cell for a ministry that had lasted less than half a year.