Congo

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 routes through the forest, but we exchanged secret signs. At night we came together to sing. Sometimes the Belgians surrounded us during prayers. They had heard our singing, but couldn’t see us. We could see them, though, but we were invisible to them.” The early Christians in Rome during their persecution also kept up their spirits with magical stories. If the earthly powers don’t give you the respect you deserve, you look for it at a higher level.

This tough approach to Kimbanguism was one of the most serious mistakes made by the administration; the colonial authorities misjudged the situation completely. They combated symptoms, but not the cause. The real problems that gave rise to such a massive religious revival they ignored completely. Hard repression of the form took precedence over any empathetic concern about the contents. And that backfired on them. A radical version of Kimbanguism arose in Bas-Congo in 1934, Ngunzism, and that was openly anticolonial. Its adherents called for an end to taxation and for the Belgians’ withdrawal. Shortly afterward came Mpadism or Khakism, initiated by Simon-Pierre Mpadi, who added the soldier’s khakis to Kimbanguism, to say nothing of a much more radical train of thought. He turned against the colonizer, advocated polygamy, and organized gatherings where the crowd engaged in ecstatic dancing. At the start of World War II, he hoped that Congo would be liberated by the Germans. Matswanism was another phenomenon, one that blew in from Congo-Brazzaville. André Matswa (or Matsoua) was a World War I veteran who had served in France with the legendary tirailleurs sénégalais, the French colonial troops. While still in France he had set up a fraternal society and emergency fund for Africans. When he returned to Brazzaville he was venerated as a messiah and that movement made its way across the river. Matswa was ultimately deported to Chad, where he died in 1942. But, despite all the repressive measures, new messianic religions kept popping up. That stubborn resilience is telling indeed. It comprised, after all, the first structured form of popular protest and showed how many people were longing to be set free.

And it was not limited to Bas-Congo. New religious movements sprang up all over the country. In the mines of Katanga there arose the Kitawala, a corruption of “the Watch Tower,” the name originally used by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That faith, which started in the United States in 1872, had migrated to South Africa and from there, beginning in 1920, to the Katangan copper belt.

In Congo it took on an explicitly political character. Spreading bit by bit across the colony, it thrived mostly underground. Still, it was to become the largest religious movement in Congo after Kimbanguism. In other parts of the country, smaller, secret sectarian societies arose. In the district of Kwango there was the Lukusu movement, also known as the snake sect. In Équateur there arose the Likili cult, whose members rejected Western beds, mattresses, sheets, and mosquito netting—all items held accountable for Congo’s falling birthrate.

Along the upper reaches of the Ariwimi in Orientale province originated the sinister Anioto society, whose members were known as the leopard people. That movement spread across the northeast of the country. The leopard people performed random acts of terror and murdered dozens of natives. Their motives were not always clear, but the tenor of the movement was clearly anti-European.

During the 1920s and 1930s, therefore, there arose some fifty religious movements. Their methods varied from pacifistic to terroristic, but the underlying rancor was more or less the same.

In Congo, religion was the pilipili (hot chili pepper) of the people.

“We are God’s people,” Wanzungasa said to me at the end of our conversation in the green leather armchairs of the Holy City’s state chamber. “We are not allowed to do evil, not even toward those who have done evil to us in the past. We do not demand an eye for an eye. We wield brass bands, not machetes.” He paused for a moment. I looked up from my notebook and saw his serene, lined face. He had been born in 1908, the year the Belgian Congo was established. His religion was officially recognized by Belgium only on December 24, 1959, some six months before independence. He was probably thinking back on the first half of his life, his first half-century. In a quiet voice, he concluded: “There was no freedom then. During the colonial period, people were bought and sold. We were like slaves. Truly, the only color colonialism ever had was that of slavery.”

IN KINSHASA I had the opportunity to speak at length with Nkasi about the 1920s and 1930s and the gathering resistance. He who had looked up so often to the white people later in life had to admit that those had been troubled times. “The old people were very tough. The white man, that wasn’t your comrade back then!” After his period as a manual laborer in Kinshasa, he returned to his native region. In those days very few people remained in the city permanently; wage labor was seasonal labor. After his little brother had been miraculously cured by Kimbangu, the obvious thing was for him to become a Kimbanguist as well, despite the inherent dangers. “In Nkamba, Monsieur d’Alphonse was appointed chef de poste,” he said with a singular lack of enthusiasm. That colonial official had been charged with pacifying the area after the Kimbanguist upheaval. To that end he appointed Lutunu, the freeman-boy-cyclist-drunkard-and-assistant-regent of old, as his native chef. Lutunu, after all, got along well with the whites.

Monsieur d’Alphonse shuttled back and forth between the administrative center at Thysville and his post in Nkamba. Nkasi remembered that all too well: “I had to help carry him. On my shoulders, that’s right! There were two of us to carry his litter, and he shook back and forth terribly.” Nkasi could nevertheless laugh heartily about it now. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he imitated the white colonial’s shaking in the tipoy. He flapped his arms at his sides, sloppily and uncontrolled, as though he himself were seated in the sedan chair. Humor must have come to their assistance back then too. The journey covered more than eighty kilometers (fifty miles) and Monsieur d’Alphonse proved a harsh man. “My uncle was one of the local worthies, but Monsieur d’Alphonse gave him two hundred lashes. That was in 1924, I think. My uncle had said: ‘Mundele kekituka ndonbe, ndonbe kekituka mundele.’ The whites shall be black and the blacks white.” Lashes, most probably fewer than two hundred, for a phrase that happened to be the slogan of the Kimbanguists. “The Force Publique soldiers lashed him across his bare buttocks. My uncle had two wives, but directly after those two hundred lashes he became a good Christian, a Kimbanguist. That’s why he ended up with no lashmarks, wounds, or bruises on his buttocks, nothing at all.”

It was during that period that the Matadi-Kinshasa railroad was broadened and made ready for electrification. The slow train puffing along its narrow gauge tracks was no longer sufficient, now that Congo was industrializing at a rapid pace. And air travel, of course, was still in its infancy: the first plane from Brussels landed at Léopoldville only in 1925; it was a biplane and it had taken twenty-five days to complete the journey, more than twice as long as the packet boat.

The work on the rails lasted from 1922 to 1931, with workdays of up to eleven hours. The route was adapted here and there, three new tunnels were dug, old bridges were replaced. The entire journey was reduced from nineteen to twelve hours.

Nkasi, who had seen his father work on the first railroad, was now part of it again. After all, hadn’t he gained experience with a shovel in Kinshasa? “Now I had to work with a pick.” With the piccone was what he said—in Italian, because many Italians were involved in the revamping. His foreman, Monsieur Pasquale, was one of them. “I got ten francs a month and a bag of rice. But one day Monsieur Pasquale said to me: “‘Tu dormi, toi? So you’re napping, are you?’” Nkasi could still imitate the Italian’s broken French. “I told him: ‘Je travaille! I’m working!’ He took me to his home and I became his boy. He showed me how to make the bed and set the table. And for that work I got twenty francs a month!” He still beamed when he thought of it. Never in his working life had he had such a stroke of luck! “Those Italians were used to the sun. They were all single, they never had their wives with them. And they didn’t take a black woman, oh no!”

Of the sixty thousand Congolese workers on the new rail project, no fewer than seven thousand died. Nkasi’s new position, however, placed him in a financial position that allowed him to start thinking about marriage. Since the introduction of currency, the price of dowries had shot up. Marriage was reserved only for the wealthy. The rich were sometimes able to take several wives, while young men couldn’t afford to marry at all.

Nkasi was almost forty by then. In his native village of Ntimansi he met Suzanne Mbila, a Kimbanguist like himself. Their first son was born in 1924, and they married in 1926. Their family grew steadily and he found himself once again living among his own people; that situation showed no signs of changing.