Prophecies of suffering, forgetfulness and recognition: The Kimbanguist Church in Angola and Lisbon
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Bibliography Amselle, J.-L. 2001. Branchements : Anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures. Paris: Flammarion. Balandier, G. 1955. Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique Noire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Balandier, G. 1976. ‘Les mouvements d’innovation religieuse en Afrique Noire’ in H.-C. Puech (ed.), Histoire des Religions, Vol. 3, Paris: La Pleiade. Bond, G., W. Johnson and S. Walker. 1979. ‘Introduction’ in G. Bond, W. Johnson and S. Walker (eds) African Christianity : Patterns of Religious Continuity. NY : Academic Press. de Bruijn, M., Dick F. & R. van Dijk, 2001, Mobile Africa. Changing Patterns of Movement in Africa and Beyond. Leiden: Brill. Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff. 2000. ‘Millennial capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming’, Public culture 12(2): 291–343. Davie, G. 2002. Europe: the Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. London: Darton, Longman and Todd.
Eade, J. and D. Garbin. 2007. ‘Reinterpreting the relationship between centre and periphery: pilgrimage and sacred spatialisation among Polish and Congolese communities in Britain’, Mobilities 2(3): 413-424 Fabian, J. 2006. ‘Forgetting Africa’, in M. Ntarangwi, David Mills and M Babkier (eds) African Anthropologies, pp 139-153. Ferguson, J. 2006. ‘Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the “New World Society”’ in Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Fernandez, J. W. 1978. ‘African Religious Movements’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 7: 195-234. Jenkins, P. 2002. ‘The Next Christianity’, The Atlantic Monthly, 290 (3): 53-68 Jenkins, P. 2007, God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, D. and D. M. Anderson. 1995. ‘Revealing prophets’ in Anderson, D.M. and D. H. Johnson (eds), Revealing Prophets: prophecy in Eastern African history, London, Nairobi, Kampala and Athens, OH: James Currey, EAEP, Fountain Publishers and Ohio University Press. Kayongo, L. N. 2005. ‘Kimbanguism: its present Christian doctrine and the problems raised by it’, Exchange: Journal of Missiological and Ecumenical Research, 34 (3): 135-155. MacGaffey, W. 1983. Modern Kongo Prophets: Religion in a Plural Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marwick, M. 1950. ‘Another modern anti-witchcraft movement in East Central Africa’, Africa 20 (2), 100–12. Meyer, B.1998. ‘Make a complete break with the past: memory and postcolonial modernity in ghanaian Pentecostal discourse’, in R. Werbner (ed) Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London, Zed Books, pp. 182-208. Ranger, T. O. 1986. ‘Religious movements and politics in Sub-Saharan Africa’, African Studies Review 29 (2), 1–69. Richards, A. I. 1935. ‘A modern movement of witch-finders’, Africa 8 (4), 448–61. Sarró, R. 2009. The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone. Bloomington & Edinburgh: Indiana University Press & Edinburgh University Press & for the International African Institute. Sarró, R., R. Blanes and F. Viegas. 2008. ‘La guerre dans la paix: ethnicité et angolanité dans l’Église kimbanguiste de Luanda’. Politique Africaine 110: 84-101. Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge. Thornton, John. 1998. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement 1684-1706. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehouse, H. 2000. Icons and Arguments. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1 It would be impossible in such a short space to even attempt to provide an overview of the literature on prophetic movements in colonial times in Africa. Apart from an endless list of monographs, there have been several attempts at writing review articles, such as Dozon 1974, Balandier 1997, Fernandez 1978, Ranger 1986, and many others (see also the first chapter of Sarró 2009). For the problems of defining a ‘prophet’ and of using the category transculturally, see Johnson and Anderson 1995. 2 For a thorough study of Kimbanguism in colonial and early post-colonial times, see MacGaffey 1982. 3 The history of Kimbanguism in Angola, and the political implications of the current schism, has been the object of another article I have recently co-authored (Sarró, Blanes & Viegas 2008). 4 Kilombo, J. ‘A História Repete-se: Paralelismo entre a Civilização Israelita e a Civilização Kimbangu’ (‘History repeats itself: paralelism between Israelite Civilization and Kimbangu Civilization’), Luanda, no date, no publisher indicated. As he acknowledges in the preface, Kilombo is in fact just translating and elaborating on a previous text, with a similar title, written in Lingala by The Revd. Albert N’Tanda Mfuawunu and issued in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1999. 5 The difference between Kyangyang and Kimbanguism could be analysed using Harvey Whitehouse’s theory of modes of religiosity (Whitehouse 2000): whilst kyanygang remains an iconic religion unable to go beyond the impact of the image in people’s individual episodic memory and to create a body of semantic, encyclopaedic knowledge to be socially distributed, Kimbanguism has become a doctrinal religion, where there is a body of narrative history to be socially memorized, learned and transmitted, and in which individual visions (such as those of pakundungu and pelekete in 1978) can become socially transmitted religious capital. 6 That many prophetic and religious movement in general in colonial Africa were marked by mimesis, enchantment of others’ technology and magical appropriations of the ‘modernity’ of those who excluded Africans has been noticed by researchers ever since A.I. Richards and M. Marwich wrote about the ‘modernity’ of anti-witchcraft movements in Central Africa in 1935 and 1950s respectively, but especially analyzed by later scholars such as P. Stoller (1995), F. Kramer (1993), J-P. Dozon (1995) and many others. Michael Tausig (1993) is famous for having noted that mimesis and becoming are not incompatible, and Ferguson (2006) has criticized that many studies of mimesis in African failed to notice that mimesis was not mere imitation but that sometimes it did manage to create a political space and a voice for those excluded from the political community. 7 The reasons given to us as for the need of Africans to have their own system of writing, revealed by God to an African person, thus making it possible to bypass what they call ‘linguistic colonialism’, reminded me of the explanations given to Jean-Loup Amselle on the N’ko, an equally complex writing system of the Malinké people of West Africa, also first learned through divine revelation and now wide taught in Guinea and Mali (Amselle 2001). 8 Although I have dealt with this elsewhere (Sarró, Blanes and Viegas 2008), let me briefly remind that Angolan public in general is worried with Kimbanguism for three reasons, which has led to some gossip about the government wanting to declare it illegal. Firstly, because the schism of the Kimbanguist church into two wings is provoking a lot of violence in Angola; secondly, because Kimbanguists, in both branches, send an awful lot of (Angolan) money to their bases in the Democratic Republic of Congo; thirdly, because Kimbanguists are by and large from the Bakongo Northern bit of Angola, and they are therefore associated with the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, a country from which many evils come, most notably corruption, illegal migration, weird Neo-Pentecostal Churches with non-acceptable practices, ‘witch-children’ accusations, ‘witch-children’ witch-doctors, illegal market, diamond smuggling, and so on and so forth. 9 A comparative footnote: The movement kyangyang in Guinea Bissau, already alluded to, also develops the theological theme of the ‘forgotten God’. Its prophetess claims that in 1986 she was seized by Nhala (the high God in local cosmology) and was instructed to persuade her ethnic group, Balanta rice farmers, that they had to stop worshiping sprits and had to start praying to the neglected Nhala, as did neighbouring (and more ‘developed’) Muslims and Christians. Much as Kimbanguists in Congo and Angola, people converted to Kyangang in Guinea Bissau do not stand the idea that prior to the prophetic transformation they did not know the monotheistic God and that they were ‘heathen’, ‘pagan’, ‘kafir’ or ‘polytheistic’. They were monotheistic, but they had forgotten about it. 10 According to interviewees, there are many African Americans moving to Nkamba, the holy city of Kimbanguists, or willing to be buried there. The scholar of Kimbanguism David Garbin also mentions it in an article on the centrality of Nkamba for Kimbanguist migrants, co-authored with John Eade (Eade and Garbin 2007). 11 Much of Western scholarship has normally accepted the historical understanding that Christianity is somehow ‘foreign’ to Africa. As a famous text had it ‘African Christianity has arisen within the context of an expanding world-system and, thus, it bears the imprint of this Western system’ (Bond, Johnson, and Walker 1979: 1). Prophetic movements fight not only against such an imprint, but also against such a view: they see Christianity as revealed to an African person directly and therefore, as profoundly African, and, as the pastor’s reaction show, they get offended if you told them that Kimbangu learnt Christianity from the White missionaries: he learned true Christianity from God and from Christ. White missionaries were actually those who accused him and took him to prison. Paracletism (the birth of an African Paraclete) and Pentecostalism (the descent of the Holy Ghost upon Africans) are two solutions that guarantee to believers that the movement at stake is genuinely African. Kimbanguism opted for the former, while other movements such as Tokoism went for the second one. Directory: articles articles -> Ancient Ecologies and the Biblical Perspective articles -> Tour de France by owen mulholland articles -> 1-techniques for airborne radome design, volume 1 Authors articles -> God's Perspective on Man articles -> Mythopoetic language in the psalms articles -> Executive report of key results of recent research on supplier development strategies and outcomes articles -> Egeny Mironov (born 1966) is a Russian film and stage actor articles -> Intro to Journalism September 30, 2005 articles -> For immediate release usta nominates katrina m. Adams as chairman of the board, ceo and president Download 127.65 Kb. Share with your friends:
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