Congo

The Congo basin was the territory of the Kingdom of Kongo, whose ruler accepted baptism in 1491 after Portuguese contact, and what followed is one of the most instructive cases of religious encounter in African history.

Kongo cosmology is organised around a boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, conventionally figured as a horizontal line with water at it, and around the sun's daily passage through four positions, rising, noon, setting and midnight, which map onto birth, maturity, death and the ancestral state. The diagram of that cycle, the dikenga, is a cross within a circle. When Christian missionaries arrived carrying crosses, the sign was already meaningful, and Kongo Christianity that developed over the following centuries was built by Kongolese for Kongolese purposes rather than administered from outside.

The nkisi, an object charged by a specialist with the power of the dead and activated to heal, protect or punish, remained central. Wyatt MacGaffey's work on the material argues that Kongo religion is best understood as a coherent system of ideas about power and its legitimate use, into which Christian elements were incorporated without dissolving it.

The kingdom's Christianity was therefore genuine and not European. Its kings corresponded with Rome, its nobles were educated in Portugal, and its people continued to consult the dead.

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.