Kimpa Vita

The Kongo civil wars had run for nearly forty years by 1704. The capital, São Salvador, stood empty; rival claimants held fortified positions in the countryside; the Capuchin mission was small and stretched. In that year a woman in her early twenties, of noble family and trained as a ritual specialist, fell ill, and announced on recovering that she had died and that Saint Anthony had taken possession of her body. What she preached was specific.

The holy family had been Kongolese and the events of the gospel had happened in Kongo, with São Salvador as Bethlehem. God cared about the intention of the heart, not about the sacraments the missionaries controlled, and the imported devotional objects held no power in themselves. And, above all, the kingdom must be reunited: the claimants were to stop fighting and reoccupy the abandoned capital. Her followers did exactly that, moving into São Salvador in numbers and reviving it. She sent out emissaries, called Little Anthonys, to carry the teaching. It was a religious movement and a political programme at once, and it very nearly worked, which is why it was dealt with as it was. She was about twenty when the visions began and dead before she was twenty five, and in that time she moved a kingdom's abandoned capital back into occupation, which is a fair measure of how much authority a Kongo ritual specialist could carry.

In 1706 Kimpa Vita was captured by the forces of King Pedro IV, one of the claimants she had been trying to reconcile, at a moment when she had a child and could no longer travel freely. The Capuchin Bernardo da Gallo conducted the examination. The charges were heresy and, in the language of the period, witchcraft, and the specific offences included her claim to be possessed by a saint, her teaching that the sacraments were unnecessary, and her denial that the imported objects held power. She was condemned by a royal council on the missionary's advice and burned at the stake in July 1706 along with her infant son.

The Antonian movement did not stop. Its adherents held São Salvador for a further period and the reunification of the kingdom, when it came, followed the course she had argued for. Almost everything known about her comes from the Capuchin accounts written by the men who tried her, which is the standing condition of the record for African prophets of the period, and John Thornton's reconstruction works by reading those hostile documents closely rather than by finding better ones, because there are none. She is now a public figure in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Angola, named on streets and institutions, and read variously as a proto-nationalist, as an early African theologian, and as a Christian martyr killed by her own church.