POLITICAL HISTORY, PAGE 14
Other colonial policies alienated Africans from their traditional leaders. Belgium set up an administrative system using local chiefs, often self-proclaimed or created by the colonials, which in effect made them agents of the state rather than moral and spiritual leaders of their people. These chiefs, says Anstey, were "entrusted with the supervision and enforcement of numerous tasks which mostly held the flavour of being the imposition of the white man—the maintenance of roads, the carrying out of hygiene regulations, compulsory crop production. In so far as the necessity of these tasks was not seen, or their performance was resented as a hardship, even the chief by customary right, in seeking to get them done, would begin to be regarded not as the 'Father and Mother' of his people, but as a mere servant of the white man."49
In the realm of religion Protestant-Catholic rivalry broadened the assault on traditional life. Predominantly Catholic Belgium favored Catholic missions in the Congo with subsidies. Non-Belgian, mostly-Protestant missionaries held their own in the competition. Young people became the prime targets and schools the main venues, not only for conversion to Christianity but for indoctrination into a European mind set. Roger Anstey describes the conflict as Christianity battled for African souls: "To the essentially communal ideas of Bantu religion was opposed the doctrine of individual conversion and salvation; to the extended family was opposed the 'Christian', the nuclear family; to a belief in magic as a use of power, sometimes beneficent, was opposed the doctrine quite foreign to Africa, that all magic was evil, a pact with the Devil; to the common African belief in the necessity of maintaining community with the ancestors, and in their vital influence—when this belief was not branded as utterly wrong—was opposed a flabby, Western concept of the Communion of the Saints which abstracted from that doctrine much of its true content and much of what could have made it meaningful in Africa."50
Christian proselytizing took a surprising turn, much to the alarm of colonial officials, with the coming of an African prophet. Simon Kimbangu heeded the call to serve God revealed to him in a series of dreams in 1921. Resistant at first, feeling himself neither preacher nor teacher, he was at last persuaded when his mother dreamed that a stranger had summoned her son. "'There is a sick child in a certain village. You must go there, pray, lay your hands on the child and heal it. If you do not go, I shall require your soul of you,'" went the mother's dream. "Kimbangu was forced to yield," reports historian Efraim Andersson. "He went next day to the village in question and found the child. He laid hands on it and prayed, whereupon he was subjected to violent convulsions. The child, however, was cured of its sickness and put to its mother's breast."51
Word of the miracle quickly spread. Despite arbitrary colonial boundaries, Kimbangu's village of Nkamba, near Matadi on the lower Congo, was soon overrun by the sick and afflicted from both Congos and Angola. Kimbangu opposed traditional beliefs, preaching instead the standard gospel but delivered with a fervor and trembling that emulated the spiritual possession of traditional healers. "Loud instrumental music was used in addition to the singing and dancing" to produce a condition of ecstasy. This synthesis of African and European spiritual elements attracted many followers. "The news that the despised 'blacks' now had a prophet of their own swept over the land like a tidal wave, and their attitude towards Kimbangu was 'a blend of religious awe and admiration.' 'They rejoiced to think that one of their number had become a prophet. Not only white people could be great and powerful, for a mighty one, a man worthy of note could arise from the ranks of the Africans whom they had scorned.'"52
Kimbangu's rise recalled a similar event some 200 years earlier in the Portuguese-controlled ruins of the old Kongo Kingdom. A young woman named Kimpa Vita was called by an apparition of Saint Anthony, around 1704, to attack the evil that beset her land. She changed her name to Dona Beatriz and "succeeded in combining the religious tradition of Congo with Portuguese Christian tradition," to powerful effect. Her teachings that "Congo was the true Holy Land and that the founders of Christianity were black," directly challenged the area's Capuchin missionaries. "Dona Beatriz was a revolutionary who would have found a place in any one of several black movements today," writes Alan Scholefield. "Some of her teachings are bizarre enough, but beneath them one can find the first stirrings of négritude, of black power, of the belief that black is beautiful. She emphasized the differences between black and white rather than the similarities. White people, she said, came originally from a kind of clayey rock, while black people sprang from the wild fig tree."53
Followers of Kimbangu (the movement was called Ngunzism, from the Kikongo word ngunza or prophet) and of Dona Beatriz (Antonianism from St. Anthony) posed a threat to established authority. If broadly interpreted—and foreign rulers, not taking any chances, did just that—they had all the characteristics of nationalism if not revolution. In 1706, under pressure from the Capuchins, the Mani-Kongo had Dona Beatriz burned to death. Two centuries later, in 1921, Simon Kimbangu was arrested by Belgian authorities, tried for crimes against the state, and sentenced to death by hanging, a sentence later commuted to life in prison.
More overtly political was the movement of André Matsoua, called the Société Amicale des Originaires de l'Afrique Equatoriale Française. Matsoua, a Congolese from Brazzaville living in Paris, organized several expatriate Congolese into the self-help group in 1926. Two years later, some of the members went home to establish a branch of the Amicale. It quickly grew to become a breeding ground of resistance to French colonial authority. Like Kimbangu before him, Matsoua paid for his efforts with a lengthy stay in prison. He died in 1942 during a second term of imprisonment. More movements, some religious, others labor-related, followed on the heels of Kimbangu and Matsoua. Nearly all bore an anti-European undercurrent that would one day bubble to the surface.
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