KINSHASA, Congo — The founder of one of Africa’s largest independent churches spent 30 years in jail and died a prisoner, banished far from his home by Belgian colonial authorities who judged his activities to be dangerous.
Unexpectedly, Simon Kimbangu’s religious movement spread across Congo and prospered enough that it now has followers even in Belgium, with pilgrims visiting a quaint village south of the Congolese capital of Kinshasa to pay homage to him.
April 6 has been marked in Congo as Kimbangu Day since 2023, a holiday to celebrate the “struggle of Simon Kimbangu and African consciousness.” Some see him as the Nelson Mandela of Central Africa, with comparable suffering but not nearly the fame.
If Kimbangu’s articulation of a home-grown theology of Black liberation appealed to many Congolese in violent colonial times, now his message resonates differently as Congo faces instability stemming from a violent rebellion in the east.
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Some Congolese say Kimbangu’s movement – nonviolent, independent, well-organized and resilient – can be a positive example for a nation facing perhaps its worst territorial crisis since independence in 1960. Others say the spirit of sacrifice that Kimbangu embodied should be emulated by Congo’s leaders.
“The first challenge for African leaders, or Congolese leaders, is that they are not free,” said Bwatshia Kambayi, a historian of Congo who sees similarities in the struggles of Mandela and Kimbangu. “African leaders, they do not realize that they have a slavery mindset. We are independent, but we are not free.”
A far-flung, multi-million-member movement
The Kimbanguist Church, officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth Through the Prophet Simon Kimbangu, is a revival movement. It is believed to have anywhere between 6 and 17 million members, most of them Congolese. Its spiritual seat is Nkamba, a town southwest of Kinshasa that believers call the New Jerusalem.
Although its primary teachings refer to the Bible, the Kimbanguist Church is distinguished by its veneration of Kimbangu as the Black embodiment of the Holy Spirit. Fiercely independent, the church maintains a hierarchical structure and is currently in its third generation of leadership.
The Kimbanguist Church prohibits polygamy, which is socially accepted in Congo. It encourages peaceful ways of resolving conflict among members. A sense of good neighborliness is witnessed in the sharing of foodstuffs for communal events, and the church has invested widely in schools and other social enterprises. Women can rise to positions of authority.
Toussaint Mungwala, a Kimbanguist pastor from …
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“Women are ministering in the church. They have a key role to play because the church is so thankful for what the wife of Simon Kimbangu did when her husband was in prison,” said André Kibangudi, a church elder. “We should have more female leadership.”
Congo in 1921 was a Belgian colony, the source of raw materials like rubber, timber and minerals that paid for the reconstruction of Belgium after World War I. Kimbangu, a lay Baptist catechist, was an unlikely candidate for leadership. Even though he urged his followers to pay taxes, his religious idea proved too provocative for authorities.
Kimbangu identified God with Nzambi, the deity in the Kikongo language, and presented himself as God’s envoy on Earth. This implied the Blackness of God, subverting cultural representations of the deity as white and possibly European. All the trembling, as Kimbangu touched the sick, alarmed European settlers and reassured the plantation workers who trekked to Nkamba in search of healing.
But he led his ministry for only five months. Facing insurrection charges, Kimbangu was sentenced to death. King Albert I of Belgium commuted the punishment to life imprisonment, and the prophet was exiled to present-day Lubumbashi, about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away.
Few photos were taken of Kimbangu, who was 64 when he died in 1951. In the stylized photo of him presented in official files, he wears the austere garb of a prisoner, baldheaded and looking quizzical. Sometimes he is painted next to his wife, Marie Muilu, who led the movement until her youngest son, Joseph Diangienda Kuntima, took over in 1959. Kuntima was succeeded by his brother in 1992. The group’s leader since 2001 is Simon Kimbangu Kiangani, a grandson of the founder.
On Easter Sunday, as Kimbanguists prepared for the next day’s holiday, church members at the Kinshasa branch chanted “Simon Kimbangu Kiangani oyee,” praising the leader who was not among them. The group composes its own sacred music, lilting songs that prompt women in green-and-white wraparounds to vigorously shake their bodies. Some in the group were boarding church-owned buses that would take them to Nkamba.
The church’s rules forbid “dating a married man,” said Chantal Makanga, a widow, citing what she considered a striking example of Kimbanguism’s values. “It’s not bad to fall in love or to date me, if the final goal is to get married.”
Border tensions fueling Congo’s crisis
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President Félix Tshisekedi’s major challenge is the armed conflict in eastern Congo, where the largest city, Goma, has been controlled by rebels since January 2025. Those rebels, the Rwanda-backed M23, have effectively carved off the mineral-rich North Kivu province and caused the flight of hundreds of thousands, provoking fear of secession and forcing the president to seek drastic measures.
Notably, Tshisekedi has offered U.S. companies access to eastern Congo’s minerals – mostly untapped and estimated to be worth $24 trillion – as a bargaining chip for U.S. support to secure eastern Congo.
But some critics predict an intensification of the problem with the entry of a big new rival for resources into eastern Congo, where the Chinese have long been active in mineral extraction. Some lawyers and activists have filed a petition arguing that a mineral partnership with the U.S. threatens Congo’s sovereignty, and the leader of the National Episcopal Conference likened such a partnership to “selling off the minerals of an entire nation to save a regime or a political system.”
Tshisekedi has embraced Kimbanguists; his prime minister, Judith Suminwa, is one of them. That’s an indicator of the government’s respect for Kimbangu as a champion of Black emancipation and highlights the Kimbanguist movement’s importance as a source of votes.
“The church today is very dynamic, very influential,” said Paul Kasonga, a Kimbanguist pastor of millions in Mongala province.
What Congo’s leaders can learn from Kimbangu “is that the guy didn’t work for himself. He sacrificed himself to free people who had been in slavery, who had been suffering,” Kasonga said.
Kambayi, the scholar and former minister of higher education, said the elite running Congo “are poor men who want to live as rich people.”
“This is not the fight of Simon Kimbangu,” he said. “None of them has reached the level of fighting for people’s freedom, for people’s liberty.”
Toussaint Mungwala, pastor of Kimbanguists in Kwilu province, said he felt the force of Kimbangu’s legacy back in 1981 when he saw a German priest praying while holding a picture of Kimbangu and Muilu. The sight intrigued him and drew him to the Kimbanguist Church.
Five years later, Mungwala converted from Catholicism, convinced that Kimbangu was on the side of the people.
“The lesson that people can learn from the church is that the prophet, the founding prophet, fought for people’s rights,” he said.
