Congo. David Reybrouck van
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.”4
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.”5
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.6 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.
Meanwhile, close to Nkamba, the religion went underground. Meetings were held by night in the forest, where Marie Mwilu, Kimbangu’s wife, talked about Papa Simon and taught the new believers to sing and pray. People even came downriver from Équateur for these gatherings. Coded messages were used to communicate with exiles in other parts of the country. This clandestinity may have been an obstacle, but it was also a fantastic learning experience that served to stimulate and consolidate the movement. The energy and fervency of those underground years is sometimes reminiscent of the experiences of the early Christians under Roman rule. As a teenager, Wanzungasa experienced it firsthand: “We could only pray at night in the jungle, amid the ‘spiders.’ Those were other Congolese who spied for the whites. During the day we took other