Abstract
In the early 1920s, in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), an African Christian church emerged from the liberation struggle initiated by Simon Kimbangu. Kimbangu was a Baptist catechist, and his church was in opposition to the Belgian colonial order. While Kimbangu drew crowds of followers, thanks largely to his healing powers and his preaching, singing also appears as a tool that empowered the nascent church to express the Congolese people’s suffering and challenge the existing social order. The African Independent Church (AIC) born from this movement considers itself as a tool of identity reconstruction, empowering the believers to express their suffering and challenge the racial inequalities still extant in the global social order.
This essay was translated from French to English by Cécile Coquet-Mokoko.
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Notes
See Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, Les Kimbanguistes en France, Expression Messianique d’une Église Afro- Chrétienne en Contexte Migratoire en France, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010);
and Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, “Kimbanguism as a Migrants’ Religion in Europe,” in Afe Adogame, Roswith Gerloff, and Klaus Hock (eds.), Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 304–313.
Wyatt MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets, Religion in a Plural Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 181.
Marie-Louise Martin, Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church, D. M. Moore (trans.), (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, [1971] 1975), pp. 55, 144.
Susan Asch, L’Église du Prophète Simon Kimbangu: De ses Origines à son Rôle Actuel au Zaäre (Paris: Karthala, coll. Hommes et Sociétés, 1984), p. 148. Translation by Cécile Coquet.
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© 2014 R. Drew Smith, William Ackah, and Anthony G. Reddie
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Gampiot, A.M. (2014). Inspired Hymns as a Belief System in the Kimbanguist Church: A Revelation of the Meanings of Blackness. In: Smith, R.D., Ackah, W., Reddie, A.G. (eds) Churches, Blackness, and Contested Multiculturalism. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386380_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386380_16
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