Simon Kimbangu

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.

Kimbanguism was constructed almost entirely while its founder was in prison. The administration deported his followers in large numbers to distant districts, which scattered the teaching across the colony instead of ending it, and for thirty years the movement existed as an illegal network of house meetings under continuous surveillance. Kimbangu himself, held incommunicado, played no organising role.

Leadership fell in practice to his wife Marie Muilu and later to his sons, and the youngest, Joseph Diangienda, formally organised the church after Belgian recognition in 1959, a year before independence. It grew very quickly. It joined the World Council of Churches in 1969, the first African initiated church admitted, and it now has several million members across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, the Republic of the Congo and the diaspora. Its theology has been the subject of considerable discussion, in particular the place accorded to Kimbangu himself, on which the church's own formulations and those of its critics have not always matched, and there have been internal divisions over the question. It is a large living church and the atlas describes it rather than adjudicating its doctrine.