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Zaire The Kimbanguist Church
The Kimbanguist Church, an indigenous Zairian religion,
emerged
from the charismatic ministry of Simon Kimbangu in the
early 1920s.
Kimbangu was already a member of the English Baptist
Mission Church
when he reportedly first received his visions and divine
call to
preach the word and heal the sick. Touring the lower
Congo, he
gained a large following drawn both from members of
Protestant
churches and adherents of indigenous religious practice.
He
preached a doctrine that was in many ways more strict than
that of
the Protestantism from which it evolved. Healing by the
laying on
of hands; strict observance of the law of Moses; the
destruction of
fetishes; the repudiation of sorcery, magic, charms, and
witches;
and the prohibition of polygyny were all part of his
original
message.
Unfortunately, the extent of his success caused
increasing
alarm among both church and state authorities. Numerous
preachers
and sages appeared, many of them professing to be his
followers.
Some of these preachers and possibly some of Kimbangu's
own
disciples introduced anti-European elements in their
teachings. And
European interests were affected when African personnel
abandoned
their posts for long periods in order to follow Kimbangu
and
participate in his services.
In June 1921, the government judged the movement out of
control, banned the sect, exiled members to remote rural
areas, and
arrested Kimbangu, only to have the prophet "miraculously"
escape;
the escape further amplified his popular mystique. In
September he
voluntarily surrendered to the authorities and was
sentenced to
death for hostility against the state; the sentence was
later
commuted to life imprisonment, and Kimbangu died in prison
in 1950.
His movement, however, did not die with him. It flourished
and
spread "in exile" in the form of clandestine meetings,
often held
in remote areas by widely scattered groups of congregants.
In 1959,
on the eve of independence, the state despaired of
stamping
Kimbanguism out and afforded it legal recognition.
The legalized church, known as the Church of Jesus
Christ on
Earth by the Prophet Simon Kimbangu (Église de
Jésus-Christ sur
Terre par le Prophète Simon Kimbangu--EJCSK), has since
succeeded
in becoming one of the only three Christian groups
recognized by
the state, the other two being the Roman Catholic Church
and the
Church of Christ in Zaire. The Kimbanguist Church has been
a member
of the World Council of Churches since 1969. Estimates of
its
membership vary depending on the source. The church claims
5
million members; yet its own internal figures indicate no
more than
300,000 practicing members. Individual congregations are
scattered
throughout much of the country, but the greatest
concentrations
have always been in Bas-Zaïre; some villages there have
long been
totally Kimbanguist.
Since being legalized, the Kimbanguists have bent over
backward
to curry favor with the state. The church's head, Simon
Kimbangu's
son, regularly exchanges public praise with Mobutu and has
become
one of the state's main ideological supports.
Structurally, the
church organization has been changed to parallel the
administrative
division of the state into regions, subregions, zones, and
collectivities. The Kimbanguist Church deliberately
rotates its
officials outside their areas of origin in order to
depoliticize
ethnicity and centralize power, a policy taken directly
from the
state. An insistence on absolute obedience to the leader
and a ban
on doctrinal disputes also are shared by both
institutions. In many
ways, the Kimbanguist Church and the Roman Catholic Church
have
exchanged places in their relationship with the state; the
former
outlaw has become a close ally and the former ally an
outspoken
critic.
Data as of December 1993
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