Democratic Republic of the Congo

Christianity in the Congo is older than the colonial period by four centuries. The Kingdom of Kongo received Portuguese missionaries in the 1480s and its ruler Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised in 1491; his son Afonso I made Catholicism the religion of the court, corresponded with Lisbon and Rome, and had a Kongolese son consecrated as a bishop. That church was Kongolese rather than European in its texture, and it produced its own prophetic movements, of which the best documented is that of Kimpa Vita, or Dona Beatriz, who in the early eighteenth century claimed possession by Saint Anthony, preached the restoration of the kingdom and was burned in 1706.

The colonial church that followed under Leopold and then Belgium was a different institution, tied to the state through the mission schools, and the Catholic Church still runs a large share of the country's schools and health facilities. That infrastructure is why it functions as a political actor of last resort: it mediated the 2016 accord that averted a constitutional crisis, and it deployed tens of thousands of trained observers to the 2018 election and published its own count.

Beneath all of it lies the Kongo religious inheritance, which is not folklore but a working system: the minkisi, objects charged with power for specific purposes; the nganga who consecrate and operate them; and the cosmogram dividing the world of the living from the world of the dead across a water boundary. That framework travelled to the Americas with the slave trade and is visible in Cuban Palo, in Haitian practice and in the American South.

Simon Kimbangu was a Baptist mission catechist who had failed his ordination examination. In April 1921, at his home village of Nkamba in the Lower Congo, he began healing the sick and preaching, and within weeks the crowds walking to Nkamba were large enough to empty plantations and mission stations across the region.

The Belgian authorities read this as a political emergency rather than a revival, which in a sense it was: a Congolese prophet drawing tens of thousands without European supervision was a demonstration that the colonial order was not the only source of authority. He was arrested in September 1921, after roughly six months of public ministry, tried by a military court, sentenced to death, and had the sentence commuted by the king to life imprisonment. He was deported to Elisabethville, more than a thousand miles away, and held there until he died in 1951, thirty years later. Thousands of his followers were deported to remote districts, which had the unintended effect of spreading the movement across the colony.

The church that grew from those six months is now one of the largest independent churches in Africa, with several million members, and Nkamba is treated as a holy city and referred to as the New Jerusalem. It was legally recognised in 1959, on the eve of independence, and was admitted to the World Council of Churches in 1969, the first African independent church to join.

Leadership passed through Kimbangu's sons and then to later generations of the family, and the succession has produced disputes and splits, as it has in most churches founded on a single prophetic figure. The core practice remains distinctive: no alcohol, no tobacco, a strong emphasis on healing, and hymns held to be received rather than composed.