Prophecies of suffering, forgetfulness and recognition: The Kimbanguist Church in Angola and Lisbon
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AFRICA, HERE YOUR SCRIPT ! 
http://www.mandombe.info/importan2.htm Mbanza Congo: the forgotten God, the remembered suffering Lest us stay for a second in Mbanza Congo. Historically speaking, the north of Angola was part of the Kingdom of Kongo, the capital of the kingdom (Mbanza Congo) being located in today’s Angola. Despite its claims of universalism, Kimbanguism in Central Africa remains a strongly Kikongo-speaking phenomenon and therefore a ‘border culture’ linking people from the Democratic Republic of Congo, from Congo Brazaville and from Angola. Kimbanguist religious and historical imagination is strongly dependent on notions of Kongo and for the members of this Church from any of these three countries it does not make much sense to speak of post-colonial states: they prefer to think in terms of ‘Congo Kinshasa’, ‘Congo Brazzaville’ and ‘Congo Angola’. They usually say that the three Congos are like the three stones of the typical rural African hearth, a very powerful symbol in the entire continent. For them, getting rid of one of the three ‘stones’ is out of the question: the three of them are important for the maintenance of the imagined territory, so the fear that Angola may declare Kimbanguism illegal is taken with a lot of worry by Kimbanguists.8 And although the three parts are equally necessary, Angola seems to be particularly important for the unity of the Church for two reasons: firstly because Angola is seen as the birth pace of the Bakongo and the country which boasted the capital of the Kingdom of Kongo; secondly, for economic reasons, because the amounts of money Kimbanguists from Angola used to send to Nkamba could not be minimized. Another particular importance of Angola is the figure of Kimpa Vita. Kimpa Vita was a Kongo prophetess who in the eighteenth century started a religious movement known as ‘Antonianism’ (Thornton 1998). As it is remembered today by Kimbanguists, the movement was fundamentally a Christian way to contest Christianity. That is, Kimpa Vita was denouncing the false Christianity of the European intruders by showing that their deeds (especially slave trade, but also oppression in general) were contrary to the very spirit of the religion they announced, which was supposedly based on humanity and liberation. She went as far as to say that Christ was a Black African, and, according to oral history, she said that he was born in the Congo basin. She was burned alive as a heretic by the Catholic church in 1706. According to oral sources of Kimbanguist and non-Kimbanguist Bakongo I interviewed in Mbanza Congo, Kimpa Vita was a healer who used to bring dead-born children to life by invoking a spirit with which she had established a close contact: this spirit was called, precisely, Kimbangu. Today, many Kimbanguists see Kimpa Vita as announcing Kimbangu, in a typical ‘prophetic chain’ of the kind already described. The memories of Kimpa Vita are very strong among Bakongo today, and several accounts exist about her life and, mostly, about her unfair suffering and that of her infant, who, according to some oral sources, was burnt with her. The historical figure is very important for all Bakongo, though there are some disagreements about her. In particular, the Mapdists and the Kimbanguists do completely different readings of Kimpa Vita’s own religion. According to Mpadists, she was killed because she tried to remind Africans that they will not be saved by Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ belonged to the Whites, while Blacks had to (still have to, according to them) revive and worship their own God: Wamba Wuanpungu Tulendo, a God that had been forgotten, but that she came to remind Africans about (as later did Simon Mpadi and also Kimbangu, according to Mpadists).9 According to Kimbanguists, this is sheer nonsense, as Kimpa Vita was a Christian, but interestingly enough they also phrase her actions against a background of forgetfulness. Africans had forgotten that all the teachings Christian catechists were trying to introduce had been there already before they arrived, and they had been there in a purer form, for it was the basin of Congo where everything had happened, from Moses liberation to Jesus’ birth. They interpret Kimpa Vita’s name as an abbreviation of the Kikongo phrase ‘e KIMPA kiaki lueta songa, kia VITA laka kua yeto’ (‘the word that they preach on us is not new to us; it was already ours’; I thank the Revd Kilombo for the information and translation). To put it bluntly and under the background of the politics of forgetfulness: Kimbanguists and Mpadists agree that Kimpa Vita came to remind a God, but they accuse each other of having forgotten which God exactly she came to remind... More importantly, however, they agree on that Kimpa Vita epitomises the suffering of the Bakongo, of Blacks in general, and of their respective churches and leaders Simon Mpadi and Simon Kimbangu. In recent years, a movement has developed within the Kimbanguist Church with the goal of rehabilitating the importance of Kimpa Vita as the announcer of Simon Kimbangu and as defender of the Kingdom of Kongo, and reassessing the historical value of the former kingdom’s capital, Mbanza Congo, in tnorthern Angolan. In December 2005, the Kimbanguist Church based in Nkamba (the holy city of Kimbanguists) sent a delegation to northern Angola to visit the place where the remains of the body of Kimpa Vita had been buried (a first expedition had already been organized in 1960). Angolan Kimbanguists now intend to propose building a heritage site and a mausoleum to re-establish the name of the prophetess so brutally assassinated by Europeans in 1706. The investigation is led by Nkamba and is seen by Kimbanguists not only as a way to restore the name and honour of Kimpa Vita, but also to do justice to Kimbangu’s family, since Kimpa Vita was, they claim, genealogically linked to him. As some Kimbanguist put it, this shows that the Kimbanguist church has its deepest roots in Angolan territory: it is, so to speak, an Angolan church. Angolan Kimbanguists wanted to propose an international conference to rehabilitate Kimpa Vita in 2006, but so far this has not taken place, because the Government has not yet granted authorisation for it. I for one am very curious to see how the Catholic pope handles the figure of Kimpa Vita when he goes to Angola for the first time in 18 years, in May 2009 to talk about reconciliation, if he does bring the issue at all. The interest of Kimbanguists for Kimpa Vita and Mbanza Congo is of course very old and rooted in the deep history of the Bakongo. Yet it is significant, in order to contextualize the present crisis of the Church in Angola, that their intent to build a mausoleum in Mbanza Congo and to prove the blood links between Kimpa Vita and Simon Kimbangu coincided with the organization of an International Conference on Mbanza Congo (held in Mbanza Congo itself) that the Angolan Government hosted in August 2007, which led to a formal application to convert Mbanza Congo into a site of Patrimoine de l’Humanité recognized by the UNESCO and from which Kimbanguists were mostly excluded. Is Mbanza Congo national Angolan heritage? Or should it rather be considered primarily as a heritage, through Kimpa Vita, of the Nkamba-based Kimbanguist Church? And if so, should the conclusion be, as they told me, that the Kimbanguist Church is, in its deep origins, an Angolan phenomenon? A Christian Black Atlantic Whether in prophetic narratives, ‘African’ means only Bakongo people (the ethnic group of almost all Kimbanguists) or Africans in general is a matter of contention, even within the churches themselves. In any case, they are universalistic, and claim that the message of liberation brought about by Simon Kimbangu is for everybody, whether white or black, whether African or European. However universalistic, the most striking feature of prophetic movements (and here I am thinking of not only Kimbanguist, but also Mpadism, Tokoism and other such movements in Angola) is that they have such highly dignified notion of their African-ness. Kimbanguist are particularly proud that the Holy Spirit should choose Africa as the place where to appear and to build the New Jerusalem. They have members intellectuals who write pamphlets proving that the Bakongo area was the cradle of humanity and, more important, of ‘civilisation’, a concept they have learnt to use so as to create a highly respected notion of themselves and to de-legitimise any kind of discourse on the ‘civilizing mission’ the Portuguese or other Western intruders: Bakongo had already a high civilization, and did not need any other form of it. In this urge for expressing a civilisation for themselves, Kimbanguists have developed madombe in order to escape what they called, in an interview in Luanda, the ‘linguistic colonisation’ of having to write using the Latin script system. In doing so, they have produced a religious system and a civilization that they see as profoundly Christian (and indeed, not only it is based on Christian ethics, but without Christ having announced the Paraclete the whole movement would lack legitimacy), but that has, as part of his appeal, the fact that is profoundly African, and offers such pride to their followers - and not only to those living in Luanda or other African cities. Indeed, through these movements, a most noble and dignified notion of Africa sails from shore to shore of the Atlantic, feeding religious and geographical imaginations, helping to re-situate Africa in a spiritual map, and, according to some of the members of these churches, provoking movements of the ‘back to Africa’ kind.10 A Kimbanguist pastor in Luanda once told me that some African American visitors asked him why did Kimbanguism needed Jesus Christ. If Kimbangu, an African man inspired by God, could establish a link between human beings and God and reveal such wonders as a characteristic African scripture (the mandombe), why then have the intermediary of Christ, a figure that was introduced to the Congo basin and to Angola by foreign agents? The pastor felt offended, and replied that Christ is for them as important as for any other Christian church; Kimbangu had come to earth, precisely, to accomplish the words and works of Jesus and that he was the Holy Spirit born in Africa. Indeed how about that for ‘foreign agents’?11 Whatever the future of this prophetic church will be, it looks as though it is prefigured by the tension between centrifugal universalistic versus centripetal Africanistic (and, to be more precise, Bakongoist) tendencies already visible today. In 2008 in Lisbon I heard an interesting discussion between two Bakongo men. One was reminding that Kimbangu once said that in the future the entire world will speak one single language, and that therefore Kikongo is the language of the future. The other replied that he had not understood Kimbnagu’s words, for kimbangu meant ‘the language of suffering’ and not an individual language: in the future everybody will understand the suffering humanity has gone trhough, both by those who suffer and those who make suffer, and who suffer without realizing. But beyond this discussions, what remains is the powerful imagery of Africa that this church invokes, its role in what, playing with Fabian’s words, I would call ‘the politics of not forgetting Africa’. They are not only spreading prophecies, but also a notion of belonging to Africa that empowers African migrants abroad, as well as brings to the public sphere memories of slave trade and African humiliation that will no doubt create new ways of understanding Africa at a global level and renew an interest about the people who suffered during colonial times. For instance, in Lisbon I have seen Kimbanguists explain with insistence to non-Kimbanguists that, contrariwise to what has been published in the media, Nelson Mandela is not the African man who stayed longer time in prison, for he stayed there for ‘only’ twenty-seven years, while Simon Kimbangu was imprisoned for thirty years, --a telling indicator of the kind of learning about colonialism and suffering that this church can bring about in the diaspora. But the future will also be determined but the Black Atlantic/Christianity intertwining so characteristic of these churches, which may not be too well accepted by other notions of true ‘Africanity’. The notion of a dignified ‘Africa’ that sails through the Atlantic waters with movements such as Kimbnaguism is, to say the least, profoundly Christian; indeed, it was in Africa that true Christianity was ‘remembered’ by the prophets, and it their followers that are ‘reminding’ it to the entire world. As the official mandombe website puts it: ‘Developing the intelligence and the judgement and stimulating the creative spirit of negro-african, it will help the Black Africa and its diaspora to be left the limbs of the lapse of memory, the secular marginalisation and very complex of inferiority’ (http://www.mandome.info). In the Lusophone Atlantic this marriage between ‘authentic’ Africa and ‘authentic’ Christianity is particularly visible in the Kimbanguist as well as in Tokoism, a similar Prophetic movement also settled in Lisbon, but I feel that this will be a bone of contention in discourses about African identity at a global level and also among other prophetic movements (such as the equally deeply Africanist but also clearly non-Christian Mpadist Church) that are today spreading along worldwide prophetic diasporas. 
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