Congo

IN THE STRANGLEHOLD OF FEAR

Growing Unrest and Mutual Suspicion in Peacetime

1921–1940

DURING THE INTERWAR YEARS, THE MAJOR SOCIAL UPHEAVALS that began during the first decade of the Belgian Congo continued unabated. Industry picked up its pace. More and more people left their villages and went to work for an employer. The first cities arose. There, tribes became mixed and new lifestyles gained popularity. On Sunday afternoons, people danced to the music of Tino Rossi; the generation before them had still done so to the rhythm of the tom-tom. But in the countryside, time had not stood still. The system of mandatory crops introduced during World War I was now applied everywhere. The mission posts expanded their hold over the people’s souls. Schools and hospitals were built even in remote areas. The teams combating sleeping sickness moved into even the smallest villages.

In that light, everything was tending toward expansion, a process that served both colonizer and native. Or, at least, that is how people preferred to view it. “Since the world war of 1914–18, the calm in Congo has never been seriously disturbed,” wrote a Catholic school headmaster in a Flemish backwater.

A few minor disturbances, provoked not seldom by secret sects and sorcerers, sometimes served to make a certain area unsafe … The Bula-Matari, as the natives call the Belgian administration in Congo, is generally able to rely on the Negroes’ submissiveness and deference to authority, at least in so far as the persons in charge themselves attend to the requirements for a good colonial official, and excel in an orderly andvirtuous life, by means of sincere charity and redoubtable willpower.”

That was a gross exaggeration. The colonial officials could apply all the sincere charity and redoubtable willpower they pleased, they were still unable to reverse the tide of growing irritation amid the native population. This was not about “a few minor disturbances” in a “certain area,” but about significant popular movements that were able—despite heavy-handed repression by the colonial government—to expand across large parts of the colony. The fever of independence that manifested itself beginning in 1955 was not new at all, but had a very long incubation period. But to understand that, we must first pay a visit to Nkasi’s younger brother. And to the Holy Ghost.

GOD’S WAYS MAY BE MYSTERIOUS, but the roads leading to the Holy Ghost are pretty hopeless, especially now that he has moved to Nkamba. From Kinshasa to Mbanza-Ngungu, formerly Thysville, the roads are excellent. A few years ago the Europeans and the Chinese joined forces to provide Congo with at least one decent road, leading from Kinshasa to the port of Matadi. But as soon as we leave that highway, the road becomes a sandy track, the sandy track becomes a mud puddle and our progress becomes snail-like. The distance from Mbanza-Ngungu to Nkamba is eighty kilometers (fifty miles) and we finally cover that in three hours. A new speed record, people tell us later. Yet the road to Nkamba is definitely no dirt track used only once in a great while. Each year, thousands and thousands of pilgrims go up it in search of spiritual renewal. They refer to it not as Nkamba, but as the Holy City or la nouvelle Jérusalem.

Simon Kimbangu first saw the light of day on September 24, 1899, only a few years after Nkasi was born. His childhood and adolescence were not so very different from those of his contemporaries, but he would go down in history as a major prophet. Few are those who have a religion named after them, but Simon Kimbangu was to join the ranks of Christ and Buddha: today, Kimbanguism is still a living religion in Congo, accounting for 10 percent of the country’s believers.

Nkasi had said so himself: “Kimbangu, that was no magic. He was sent by God. A sixteen-year-old girl who had already been dead for four days, he brought her back to life.”

Congolese and colonizers first heard about this remarkable man in 1921, the year of the alleged resurrection, but Nkasi had known about him long before that. They came from the same area. Nkamba and Ntimansi, their native villages, were within walking distance of each other. “Oh … so when did I see him for the first time? Bon … I knew Simon Kimbangu back in the 1800s already. If he said: ‘Now we’re off to Brussels,’ then one second later he really was in Brussels. After all, he even healed my younger brother!”

The road is rough, but it is a relief to arrive in the Holy City. The area around the town is hilly. Eucalyptus trees rustle in the valleys and the shade is soothing. Nkamba itself is on a hilltop overlooking huge stretches of Bas-Congo. A lovely breeze is blowing. Still, one does not enter town just like that. References and traveling papers from Kinshasa and a young adept from Mbanza-Ngungu are required to pass the three roadblocks manned by Kimbanguist security personnel. There is something peculiar about them: they are all dressed neatly in uniform, with green berets and facings, but they are also barefooted. No boots, no clodhoppers, no sandals, nothing. Kimbanguists don’t believe in shoes. Once inside, the visitor is immediately struck by the peace and serenity of the place. Kimbanguism is the most Congolese of all religions and at the same time you feel like you’re in a different country. Everyone walks around barefooted, dressed soberly, radios and boom boxes are forbidden. No one shouts. Alcohol is taboo. What a contrast with Kinshasa with its extravagant dress, its everlasting shouting and swearing, its pushing and shoving in line for the taxi buses, its honking, and its busted loudspeakers!

The most striking building in town is the temple, an enormous rectangular thing built in eclectic style built by the believers themselves between 1986 and 1991. Putting together a building like this in five years’ time is no mean achievement. In front of it is the mausoleum of Simon Kimbangu and his three sons. First venerated as a prophet, the founder today enjoys divine status. That same status also applies to his three sons, who are nothing less than the embodiment of the Holy Trinity. A young female Kimbanguist once explained it to me at poolside in Kinshasa. I still have the scrap of paper that she scribbled all over then. “Kisolokele, born in 1914 = God the Father; Dialungana, born in 1916 = Jesus Christ; Diangienda, born in 1918 = the Holy Spirit.” The Kimbanguists no longer celebrate Christmas on December 25, but on March 25, the birthday of the second son. When the founder died in 1951, Diangienda Kintuma, the youngest of the three, assumed spiritual leadership of the movement. He kept going for a very long time: from 1954 until 1992. Now that position is occupied by a grandson, Papa Simon Kimbangu Kiangani, but the succession was not a perfectly smooth one. His cousin Armand Dingienda Wabasolele, another of the prophet’s grandsons, felt he was entitled to be the spiritual leader of Kimbanguist Church and, in addition to a schism, this contention has led to a great deal of musical rivalry. The Kimbanguists attach a lot of importance to music: in addition to beautiful choruses, their liturgy is characterized by the generous use of brass bands. In Kinshasa, the former pretender to the throne, Wabasolele, is the leader of a two-hundred-man symphony orchestra; in Nkamba, his cousin, the current spiritual leader, Kiangani, prides himself on his philharmonic orchestra. I once attended an open-air performance by the symphony orchestra in Kinshasa; I have no idea where they obtained their glistening instruments in that shattered city, but their performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana was a steamroller that easily outvoiced the honking of the evening rush hour. Wherever the truth lies, today it is Simon Kimbangu Kiangani who is venerated as the Holy Ghost.

That veneration is something to be taken quite literally. Darkness is already falling when I settle down on the square before the cathedral for evening prayers. I sit with my back to the spiritual leader’s official residence. To the right I see the monumental entranceway. Its pillars are hung with colorful textiles, a throne stands on carpets that have been rolled out over the concrete. A brass band plays uplifting martial music; the musicians are wearing white and green uniforms and marching in place. Kimbanguism is an extremely peace-loving religion, yet brimming with military allusions. Those symbols were not originally part of the religion, but were copied in the 1930s from the Salvation Army, a Christian denomination that, unlike theirs, was not banned at that time. The faithful believed that the S on the Christian soldiers’ uniform stood not for “Salvation” but for “Simon,” and became enamored of the army’s military liturgy. Today, green is still the color of Kimbanguism, and the hours of prayer are brightened up several times a day by military brass bands.

Those bands, by the way, are truly impressive. It is a quiet Monday evening when I find myself on the square. While the martial music rolls on and on, played first by the brass section, then by flutes, the faithful shuffle forward to be blessed by the spiritual leader. In groups of four or five, they kneel before the throne. The spiritual leader himself is standing. He wears a gray, short-sleeved suit and gray socks. He is not wearing shoes. In his hand he holds a plastic bottle filled with holy water from the “Jordan,” a local stream. The believers kneel and let themselves be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Children open their mouths to catch a spurt of holy water. A young deaf man asks for water to be splashed on his ears. And an old woman who can hardly see has her eyes sprinkled. The crippled display their aching ankles. Fathers come by with pieces of clothing belonging to their sick children. Mothers show pictures of their family, so the leader can brush them with his fingers. The line goes on and on. Nkamba has an average population of two to three thousand, plus a great many pilgrims and believers on retreat. People come from Kinshasa and Brazzaville, as well as from Brussels or London.

Thousands of people come pouring in, each evening anew. For an outsider this may seem like a bizarre ceremony, but in essence it is no different from the long procession of believers who have been filing past a cave at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees for more than a century. There too, people come from far and near to a spot where tradition says unique events took place, there too people long for healing and for miracles, there too people place all their hope in a bottle of spring water. This is about mass devotion and that usually says more about the despair of the masses than about the mercy of the divine.

After the ceremony, during a simple meal, I talk to an extremely dignified woman who once fled Congo as a refugee and has been working for years as a psychiatric nurse in Sweden. She loves Sweden, but she also loves her faith. If at all possible, she comes to Nkamba each year on retreat, especially now that she is having problems with her adolescent son. She has brought him along. “I always return to Sweden feeling renewed,” she says.

THE NEXT DAY I finally meet Papa Wanzungasa, Nkasi’s younger brother, the one I came to Nkamba for. He is only one hundred years old, but still active. What a family! His 60-year-old cousin looks like he’s 45, his 126-year-old brother is one of the oldest people ever, and at the end of his first century he is still a member of the upper ministry at Nkamba and first deputy when it comes to evangelization, finances, construction, and materials supply. He has been registered with the Kimbanguist Church since 1962 as Pasteur No. 1. In 1921, when Simon Kimbangu’s public life began, he was a boy of thirteen. Kimbangu was thirty-one.

No other area in Congo was so impacted by the arrival of Europeans as Bas-Congo. Slavery was abolished, the demand for porters and laborers on the railroad severed the traditional pattern of life, farmers had to raise manioc and peanuts for the colonizer, and money and taxes were introduced. Europeans repeated time and again that they wanted to open up Congo and civilize it, but for the Africans the immediate results were disastrous. Sleeping sickness and the Spanish flu had killed an estimated two-thirds of the population, and European medicine proved powerless. That produced a deep-seated suspicion among the local population: these white people brought more sickness than they did healing.

It was at the mission post of Gombe-Lutete, twelve kilometers (about 7.5 miles) from his native village, that Simon Kimbangu was baptized by British Baptists and became a catechist himself. In 1919 he went looking for work in Kinshasa, just as Nkasi had. He applied for work at William Lever’s Huileries du Congo Belge, without success. But he found himself in a world of Africans who had traveled and could write and do arithmetic. Thousands of black employees there were working for some twenty companies. By that time he was already hearing voices in his head, and receiving visions that summoned him to great deeds. For the time being, though, he paid them no heed. But a year later, when he returned to his village and found that the British Baptists had appointed someone else as their official catechist, something snapped.

On April 6 he heard talk of Kintondo, a woman who was seriously ill. He went to her, wearing a hat on his head and clenching a pipe in his teeth … almost, one would say, like a missionary. When he arrived he laid his hands on her and commanded the deathly ill woman to rise up, which tradition says she did, the very next day. Rumors of the miraculous healing spread like fire. The stories grew wilder all the time. In the weeks that followed, Kimbangu was said to have healed a deaf man and a blind man. That’s right, and they said he had even caused a young girl, who had died a few days earlier, to rise from the dead! Here at last was someone with much more power than those white people with their injections against sleeping sickness that actually made you sicker than you were before. Redemption was nearing. From all over the region, people abandoned their fields and hurried to Nkamba.

As did the parents of Nkasi and Wanzungasa. Nkasi was in Kinshasa by then, shoveling dirt, but his brother saw it all at firsthand.

We settle down in the green leather easy chairs in Nkamba’s state chamber, to talk about that distant past. As behooves a Kimbanguist, Wanzungasa speaks in a quiet, friendly voice.

Our parents were both Protestants, they were farmers. As a child, I had a hunchback. My mother heard about a man in Nkamba who healed all kinds of disorders, the blind and the deaf, and who had even brought the dead back to life. She took me along, and we arrived here. Nkamba was full of people. They were called to the front in the order in which they came. When it was my turn, I was called up along with my mother. We knelt in front of Simon Kimbangu. He placed a hand on my head and said: “In the name of Jesus, stand up, straighten your back, and walk.” I did that, and saw that my hunchback had disappeared. It didn’t even hurt.

He tells his story calmly and factually and makes no attempt to proselytize his listener. The facts are there, for those willing to believe.

My mother was overjoyed. Simon Kimbangu said that we should go and wash ourselves in the holy water. We stayed for three more days, to be sure I was completely healed. Today the doctors say that I had tuberculosis, but that’s not true. I walked completely bent over. I was healed by my faith. That’s how it goes in my family, otherwise my brother could never reach the age of 126, could he? There were many more sick people in our village. The news of my healing traveled fast. Then everyone went to Nkamba and became Kimbanguists.

The colonial government was worried by this sudden abandonment of the countryside. The Cataractes district of Bas-Congo was a major breadbasket for Kinshasa, but suddenly the markets were empty. Rumors even reached the big city. Some people put down their work and returned to their native regions. There, the first to become concerned were the Protestant missionaries: many of Kimbangu’s initial followers, after all, came from their mission posts. And even though the Protestants advanced a much more individual form of worship, they wondered whether Kimbangu wasn’t taking things too far. Kimbangu had ignited a fire that flashed across the countryside. All over Bas-Congo, new prophets were shooting up like mushrooms. They were called bangunza, or ngunza in the singular. Their rallies led to frenzied scenes. One Swedish missionary, who had lived in Congo for years, noted in his diary:

Today I attended the Ngunza gatherings. It is extraordinary. You should see them shudder, stretch their arms, point them in the air, look at the sky, straight into the sun. You should hear them shout, pray, beg, softly whisper “Jesus, Jesus.” You should see Yambula [one of his best evangelists] leap, run, spin on his axis. You should see how the crowd comes together, strides along, kneels beneath the shaky hands that hold the bangunza above their heads—Listen to what is happening here! Go away, cast off these graven images.

Two aspects cannot be emphasized enough. First, the followers of the new faith did not turn against Protestantism, but in fact used it to their own ends. This was no rupture with Christianity, but a specific coloring-in, yes, an intensification of it. This was no return to precolonial religious practices; the new believers, in fact, explicitly renounced the ancestral belief in witchcraft. But at the same time—and this is the fascinating thing—the followers made use of religious symbols and gestures that hearkened back to traditional healing (trance, charms, incantations). They were against cult objects images, but behaved like native healers. What they found, in other words, was an African form for an imported faith. Second, even though this sudden religious revival was not without a link to social conditions, it was foremost an exclusively spiritual phenomenon. Kimbangu was no political rebel: he made no anticolonial tirades and his doctrines were not directed against the Europeans. But the colonial authorities had a very hard time believing that.

Less than three weeks after Kimbangu’s first public appearance, district commissioner Léon Morel sounded the alarm. That was altogether understandable: for a colonial administration that was trying to introduce a standard monetary economy and a classic work ethic in Congo, these day-long gatherings of the willfully unemployed were absolutely disquieting. Ever since 1910 the colonizers had been dividing the population into safe little chefferies; now they were suddenly converging by the thousand to take part in bizarre rituals. A meeting was organized in Thysville to which Catholic and Protestant missionaries were invited. The Catholics, most of them Belgian, agreed with the colonial rulers and accused the Protestants of laxity in their dealings with the natives. They called for a vigorous and drastic government intervention. The Protestants, on the other hand, favored a soft approach. This was, after all, a form of Christian popular devotion, they felt, and it couldn’t be all bad, could it? A number of their most cherished converts were involved, people they had known for years and for whom they felt friendship. Heavy-handed tactics would completely alienate them from the mission post. And besides, wouldn’t such repression simply serve to fan the fires?

As was often the case, the standpoints and behavior of the Protestant missionaries were a great deal more subtle and humane than those of the Catholics, but a head-on collision with the mammoth alliance of Catholic Belgian missionaries and Belgian colonial administrators was useless. On June 6 a detachment from the Force Publique, along with Léon Morel, moved on Nkamba to arrest Kimbangu, which resulted in skirmishes and looting. The soldiers stole the mats, the clothing, the chickens, the Bibles, the hymnals, and the little bit of money the faithful had with them. They fired with live ammunition. People were wounded and one person was killed. Afterward the army carted off the movement’s leaders to Thysville, but Simon Kimbangu himself was able to escape. For his followers, this was just one more proof of his supernatural gifts.

He remained in hiding for three months and continued to spread his faith in the villages where colonial officials rarely came and where no one would betray him. That says something about his popularity and about the generally mounting resentment toward the white rulers. In September 1921 he turned himself in—just like Jesus at Gethsemane, his followers felt. The ensuing trial they compared to Christ’s prosecution by Pontius Pilate. And not without reason. It was, after all, a mockery as well. That Kimbangu would be found guilty was a foregone conclusion. A watered-down version of a state of siege had even been imposed, to make sure he would appear before a military tribunal rather than a regular (and milder) civil court. This meant he had no legal representative nor any right of appeal. His fate was decided within three days. Reading the case files today, one is amazed by the tendentious nature of the magistrate’s questioning. The sole objective was to prove that Kimbangu was guilty of undermining public security and disturbing the peace; that was the only crime with which he could be charged and which bore the death penalty.

Commander Amadeo De Rossi chaired the court-martial: “Kimbangu, do you admit that you have organized a revolt against the colonial government and that you have characterized the whites, your benefactors, as being terrible enemies?”

Kimbangu replied: “I had not created any revolt, neither against the Belgians, nor against the Belgian colonial government. I have only tried to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

But the presiding judge was not to be swayed: “Why did you call on the people to lay down their work and stop paying taxes?”

Kimbangu: “That is untrue. The people who came to Nkamba did so of their own free will, in order to listen to God’s word, to find healing or to receive a blessing. Never once have I asked the people to stop paying taxes.”

The judge tried a different tack, and suddenly became overly familiar. The tone grew sarcastic: “Are you the mvuluzi, the redeemer?”

“No, that is Jesus Christ, our redeemer. He has given me the mission of spreading the news of eternal salvation to my people.”

“Have you brought the dead back to life?”

“Yes.”

“How did you do that?”

“By applying the divine power given me by Jesus.”

Those were precisely the answers the court wanted to hear. They confirmed the suspicion that Kimbangu was a subversive fantasist. Because the hymns sung at Nkamba spoke of arms, the court tried to pin on him the charge of summoning people to violence. Kimbangu replied that the Protestant missionaries were not arrested, even though their hymns spoke of “Christian soldiers.” The court tried to trip him up by citing him as having said: “The whites shall be black and the black shall be whites.” Kimbangu said that did not literally mean that the Belgians were to pack up and leave. And besides, since when was egalitarian discourse a racist position? It was suspected that during his stay in Kinshasa he had come in contact with black Americans who were followers of Marcus Garvey, the radical Jamaican activist who believed that Africa was exclusively for the Africans. Kimbangu denied that charge: “Cela est faux” (That’s false).

But it was to no avail. It didn’t help either when, halfway through the proceedings, Kimbangu went into a trance and began raving and shaking all over. Epilepsy, we would assume today, but the court-appointed physician prescribed a cold shower and twelve lashes. The final verdict was what one would have expected after all this: on October 3, 1921, Kimbangu was sentenced to death, his closest associates to life imprisonment and hard labor. The court order made no bones about the real motives: “It is true that the animosity towards the powers that be has been limited till now to inflammatory songs, insults, forms of defamation, and a few, unrelated cases of insurrection, but it is also true that the course of events could have led, with fatal consequences, to a major uprising.”

Kimbangu was to be made an example, that much was clear. His prosecutors would have liked to see him executed as quickly as possible but, to the amazement of all, Kimbangu received a pardon from King Albert in Brussels. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Kimbangu was taken to the other side of the country, to the prison at Elisabethville in Katanga. There he remained behind bars for the next thirty years, until his death in 1951. Unusual punishment for someone who, for a period of less than six months, had brought a little hope and comfort to a few stricken villages. His term of imprisonment was one of the longest in all of colonial Africa, even longer than that of Nelson Mandela. He spent most of that time in solitary confinement. He had never committed an act of violence.

A PEACEFUL INTERLUDE, this interwar period? Only a few minor disturbances? The excessive sanction imposed on Simon Kimbangu showed that, behind the manly, apparently unruffled facade of the colonial administration, there was a great deal of skittishness. The colonizers were terrified of disturbances. That manifested itself in the way Kimbangu’s followers were persecuted.

From 1921 on, the government began banishing key figures in Kimbanguism to other provinces, with the intention of breaking apart the movement. Old Wanzungasa knew all about it. His uncle was picked up and forced to serve for seven years in the Force Publique. His youngest brother, still only a child at the time, was forced to undergo a Catholic mission education and was baptized against his will, making him the only Catholic in an otherwise Protestant nest. But his in-laws-to-be suffered most of all. “They were banished to Lisala, all the way in the eastern part of Équateur.” Why? Because the mother of his future fiancée was related to Marie Mwilu, Simon Kimbangu’s wife. “Her father died there in exile. My wife was only a girl at the time, she stayed here.”

Initially, the measures directly affected a few hundred families, but in the course of the colonial era their number rose to 3,200. Today the Kimbanguists claim that 37,000 heads of households were forced to move, a total of 150,000 individuals, but the administration’s records speak of only one-tenth of that. Internal exile, by the way, was one of the government’s standard punitive measures: during the entire colonial period, some 14,000 individuals were banished to other parts of the country, most of them for political-religious reasons. The official explanation was that this was for the purposes of reeducation, but in actual practice the deportations were often permanent. The details sometimes remind one of Europe in the 1940s. The Kimbanguists were taken away in closed cattle cars. Hunger, heat, and disease took their toll along the way. Many of them died as a result of the hardships during the journey itself. One man lost his three children before they could even arrive at their final destination; they were buried in a grave beside the river.

The Kimbanguists were banned to the rain forest of Équateur, to Kasai, to Katanga, even to Oriental province. There they lived in isolated villages where their faith was outlawed. Beginning in 1940, the highest-risk exiles were sent to agricultural colonies, work camps surrounded by barbed wire where men and their families were put to forced labor and watched over by soldiers with guard dogs. The mortality rate there was sometimes as high as 20 percent.

None of this, however, had the desired effect. Kimbanguism was not crushed by these drastic measures, on the contrary. Banishment made the people even firmer in their beliefs. Each obstacle thrown up only bolstered their conviction that Simon Kimbangu was the true redeemer. Under such difficult conditions their faith provided them with comfort and something to hold on to, to such an extent in fact that it proved infectious for their surroundings. The local inhabitants were impressed by this new faith. In this way, Kimbanguism spread throughout the interior. Exile did not undermine the movement, but caused it to multiply. There were tens of thousands of followers.