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