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.2
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.3
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