For most of the twentieth century the chants captes existed only as oral tradition, carried forward by successive generations of Kimbanguist singers and by the church's own Department of Kimbanguist Songs in Kinshasa, which kept the official record of which songs had been received, by whom, and in what order. The earliest and most historically significant layer, the hymns captured at Nkamba during 1921 itself, remained undocumented in print for more than seventy years, surviving only in memory through decades in which the Kimbanguist movement itself was banned and driven underground by colonial authorities.
That changed in 1995, when the Kimbanguist Church in Switzerland published Chants captes kimbanguistes de 1921, subtitled Chants de la Pentecote de Nkamba, a bilingual Kikongo and French edition covering the first twenty four songs received at Nkamba. W. Heintze-Flad and D. Ndofunsu prepared the edition and its French translation, working from the official list compiled by Pastor Nsambu Twasilwa, the department's director, so the collection carries the church's own institutional authority rather than an outside compiler's reconstruction of which songs belong to the founding repertoire.
Scholarship on Kimbanguism treats the 1995 collection as the moment the founding hymns moved from living memory into a fixed, citable text without losing their liturgical use. The songs it preserves still function in worship today, sung by a movement several generations removed from the events of 1921, and the volume remains the standard documentary reference for a body of religious song that was, from the moment it was first received, understood by the people who received it as revelation rather than composition.