Kimbanguism, Garveyism, and Rebellious Rumor Making in Post–World War I Africa

In the spring of 1921, a young MuKongo Christian named Simon Kimbangu announced that he had been called to heal and preach in the name of the Lord, broke from his European mission, and inaugurated his own independent African ministry. As accounts of Kimbangu’s miraculous healing powers spread, thousands flocked to his village, Nkamba, which became known as “Jerusalem.”1 European observers, at first delighted by Kimbangu’s assault on traditional beliefs, soon became alarmed by reports of Kimbanguist prophets urging people not to work for whites, nor to pay taxes to the state.2 Stories swirled that Kimbangu had declared the true God to be black, and that he had called for whites to be expelled from the Lower Congo, or perhaps thrown into the sea. Observers noted the peculiar similarity between these extreme utterances and the propaganda of the “American agitator,” Marcus Garvey, who had hosted his spectacular international convention in New York just months earlier.3

After a hasty investigation, colonial officials set out to arrest Kimbangu, but the prophet was able to escape, and went underground for three months. Now a real atmosphere of crisis set in. As economic production ground to a halt, Belgian administrators instituted what one observer described as a “military occupation,” holding dozens of Kimbanguists without trial or examination, and setting soldiers loose in the countryside.4 Officials were convinced that Kimbanguists had been led to the brink of rebellion, as Territorial Administrator Leon-Georges Morel put it, by “the pan-African movement which prevails in America.” And indeed, among Kimbanguists there was a widespread belief that the Belgians would be driven from the Congo by an arriving black American army. One popular version imagined the arrival of a great ship sailing up the Congo River, which would portend the end of white rule—what seems to be a garbled reference to Garvey’s well-known Black Star Line. Thomas Moody, an American missionary stationed near the rail line, reported that the workers were “thrilled at the chance to join the movement initiated by Marcus Garvey.” Or, as Father J.C. Van Cleemput of the Redemptorist Mission concluded, “the battle cry of the [Kimbanguist] movement … [is] to found a prophetic religion, a Negro religion, to destroy the whites and expel them, to gain independence: in a word, ‘Africa for the Africans.’”5

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African Garveyism—not unlike Garveyism in general—was once viewed through the prism of the oversized schemes and ambitions of its namesake.6 Focus settled on the failed negotiations between Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and the government of Liberia to establish a UNIA settlement near Monrovia.7 This in turn encouraged the belief that Garvey was the purveyor of a futile and retrograde “Back to Africa” politics. And indeed, during the UNIA’s Liberian colonization efforts of 1919–21 and 1923–24 Garveyites dutifully enacted the well-worn tropes of emigration movements dating to the 18th century, envisioning a cadre of Westernized and Christianized African Americans and Afro-West Indians returning “home” to rebuild fallen Africa, armed with the skills acquired during their trials abroad and guided by the hand of Providence.8

In recent years, however, scholars have revived efforts to redraw the routes of African Garveyism away from American supporters’ aspirational visions of their “Motherland” and toward the multifaceted and dynamic spread of the movement in African communities themselves.9 As much as Garvey hoped to oversee a grand Negro empire in Africa, the needs of the moment invited other opportunities and possibilities. In practice, Garveyism was transmitted across the continent less as an appendage of the UNIA than as an organic vehicle of network-building and consciousness-raising, a decentralized complex of information, ideas, and associations that encouraged local initiative toward the work of a common, global project of African and racial redemption. Garveyite organizers and sympathizers carried with them a series of broad and relatively fixed assumptions: a view of the “Negro race” as a unified and ancient category of belonging; a belief that African redemption and Negro redemption were coterminous and Biblically ordained; a faith that the mobilization of a scattered people through organizational, economic, and religious congress would hasten their liberation; and an understanding of history that suggested a declining white civilization and an ascendant Negro one. These beliefs were sufficiently dramatic to demand action, while remaining capacious enough to ensure that the work done on their behalf would be malleable, adaptable to changing circumstances and fortunes, amenable to local and regional innovations. Across Africa, Garveyism was embraced by a dynamic and mobile group of primarily English-speaking, mission-educated men, and articulated as a politics that avoided direct and vocal confrontations with European rulers, advocated inwardlooking programs of institution-building and racial self-help, and became manifest in vehicles of political association and independent Christianity, commercial panAfricanism and ethnic nationalism.10

More explosively, Garveyism filtered into popular consciousness through—and was given unpredictable shape by—broad “genres” of rumor and periodic eruptions of millennial prophesizing.11 In South Africa, where, as Helen Bradford has observed, “‘common sense’ was Garveyized and Garveyism was domesticated,” the UNIA developed a talismanic power that proved meaningful and useful to activists of national organizations like the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) and the African National Congress (ANC), regional aspirants like the charismatic herbalist and pan-Africanist Wellington Butelezi, and revivalists like Enoch Mgijima’s Israelites and followers of the prophetess Nontetha Nkwekwe.12 Across the country, and then throughout the vast southern-central African region—aided by the migrant labor networks that carried people, goods, and news—emerged the widespread belief among peasants and itinerant workers that Biblical justice would sweep white rule from the continent and that black American liberators would play the part of avenging angels. These rumors surfaced in areas of dense Garveyite organizing such as the Eastern Cape, where Wellington told his followers that at the appointed hour “General Garvey” and his army of black Americans would rain balls of burning charcoal on whites and non-believers from warplanes above, and in the protectorate of South West Africa (now Namibia), where extensive UNIA organizing on the coast and in the interior generated the belief among Herero Christians that an American fleet was en route to drive away the Europeans.13 But rumors of black American liberators also followed Garveyite information networks to their frontiers: Among Watchtower adherents in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and, for our purposes, among Kimbanguists in the Lower Congo.14

Considerations of the spread and influence of Garveyism during Kimbangu’s revival have tended to hinge on whether Kimbanguism was sparked from abroad or developed on home soil. One group of scholars has extrapolated revolutionary consequences from the presence of Garveyism in the Congo, particularly the circulation the UNIA’s official organ, the Negro World, among a rising generation of mission-educated evolues in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), including Kimbangu and Andre Yengo, who later became the primary financial backer of Kimbangu’s nascent church. A second camp, led by the anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey, the foremost American scholar of Lower Congo society and culture, bristles at the implication that the Kimbanguist revival was initiated by a “Garveyite conspiracy,” and expresses concern that such a reading merely fuels the well-worn and patronizing assumption that anti-colonial initiative in Africa grew out of external forces rather than local political and cultural currents.15

The new work on Garveyism in Africa allows us to move past this binary because it suggests a mode of diasporic transmission that was co-produced across different “spatial scopes.”16 If Garveyism was carried to Africa from abroad, it became meaningful to the extent that it could serve as a useful conduit of local politics, and be shaped and directed on the ground. As some of the best theoretical work on the African diaspora has suggested, “diasporic practice” implies not only mobility and transnationality but also rootedness and place.17 Diasporic identities and political formations do not work outside and around bounded communities, but must rather be articulated “through place and localness.”18 If Kimbanguism was grounded in the exigencies of colonial politics in the Belgian Congo, and legible in the context of cultural understandings rooted in precolonial Kongo cosmology, the emergence and trajectory of the revival also reflected global forces set in motion by the First World War, and by the efforts of Garveyites and other anticolonial activists to bring about the end of white supremacy. In the case of Garveyism, the exchange was reciprocal: local manifestations of the movement, in the Lower Congo and elsewhere, invited a reconsideration of tactics and perspective from Garvey and his officers in Harlem.

Following the swirling rumors that accompanied the spread of Garveyism to Africa offers a means to enrich our understanding of the anti-colonial ferment generated during and following the Great War. Erez Manela’s brilliant account of the political upheaval stimulated by the war, and by the widely disseminated and variably translated pronouncements of American president Woodrow Wilson, acknowledges the influence of the “Wilsonian moment” on broad “publics” spread throughout the colonial world, but nevertheless settles on case studies that chart “four emergent nations”—Egypt, India, China, and Korea—and on subjects that were literate, Western-educated, “modern” elites.19 Marcus Garvey, too, was conversant in the modern idioms of international relations and nation building, and his movement was ignited by the recognition among peoples of African descent that the principle of self-determination did not—and would not for the distant future—apply to subjects with black skin. But Garveyism, like the pan-African tradition from which it emerged, also proffered a fertile resource for popular forms of knowledge production.20 As Garveyism spread across the globe, to the great dismay and concern of colonial officials, it engaged publics unlike the ones charted by Manela but no less enmeshed in the global struggle to define the scope, length, and nature of colonial rule after the war.

The spread of Garveyite rumors in the Belgian Congo was explosive because it merged prophetic streams of radical anti-colonialism, the diasporic stream adding authority to the local one. Prophetic politics—what Anthony Bogues has called the “redemptive prophetic” tradition in black radical intellectual thought—posed a existential threat to colonial order because it invoked an authority that resided not within the “totalizing knowledge regime” of the colonial state but rather within indigenous forms of knowledge and culture.21 In the same manner that Garvey’s call of “Africa for the Africans” pierced the logic of European tutelage and signaled the arrival of a coming Golden Age for Africa, Kimbangu’s healing powers imbued him with the guiding light of the Holy Spirit, catalyzed deep-rooted BaKongo understandings about spiritual authority, and foretold the renewal of the Kingdom of Kongo. Rumors of the imminent arrival of black American liberators infused the prophetism of Kimbangu and his followers with a powerful diasporic sanction.22 As in other parts of Africa and the Americans, Garvey’s message of a world turned upside-down fueled local iterations of race consciousness and anti-colonialism.

Following Garveyite rumors allows us to glimpse the ways in which these merging streams of intellectual production are articulated in place and within relations of power. As the historian Luise White has suggested, the search for linear, textual forms of evidence can draw undue attention to the intellectual worlds of particular actors and away from the social worlds within which they reside.23 The study of rumor, on the other hand, compels us to examine the manner in which ideas travel through space, to consider how they are understood and made meaningful through communal and negotiated acts of interpretation.24 If, as Roland Barthes has argued, “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing,” the spread of rumor remains, in Ranajit Guha’s words, “a receptacle of new inputs and meaning.”25 Indeed, to limit our understanding of transnational ideas to direct intellectual exchanges is to ignore a far richer history of their spread. Charting the articulation and uses of rumor reveals a fluid space of “opinion-in-formation” that gestures to a mass-based politics of diaspora rather than an elite-driven one.26 It allows us to recognize the impact of Garveyist transnationalism in the Belgian Congo and elsewhere by acknowledging the social imaginary that it helped produce.

Extravagant rumors and prophesies of upheaval and revolution created a shared discourse through which both the colonial state and Kimbanguists came to understand the implications of the revival. In a classic review of the literature on religion and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, Terence Ranger cautions us to be wary of putting too much stock in the “paranoi[a]c fears” of colonial agents, who often worried excessively and unnecessarily about the sinister influence of outside agitators.27 But these beliefs—whether paranoiac or not—had great consequence in dictating the terms by which colonial agents and colonial subjects encountered each other. The wartime and postwar narrative of an anti-imperial “rising tide of color” both conditioned the response of colonial agents to evidence of sedition and offered a vocabulary through which seditious expressions could be mediated.28 By couching their protest in the language of rumor and revivalism—encouraged by the millennial expectation of black American liberators—Kimbanguists engaged in a dialogue that both identified local opportunities as well as the global currents swirling around them. If Garveyism presented a Westernized conception of diasporic awakening and prophetic deliverance, it also offered Africans in the Lower Congo useful raw material for the performance of their own, homegrown prophetic traditions. The political consciousness that emerged echoed Garveyist rumors across the continent and nearly precisely confirmed local understandings about black Americans, their return to Africa, the resurrection of the King of the Kongo, and the end of white rule.

Garveyism in West Africa

Garveyism reached the Lower Congo not from southern-central Africa but via a parallel network of information transmission and organizing that carried Garveyist information along the West African coast and to remote outposts hundreds of miles into the hinterland. News of the movement began filtering through wellconnected channels in 1919, but it was the UNIA’s first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, a month-long gathering held in August 1920, that became the watershed.29 By the end of 1920, in the words of one observer, “a great wave of Garveyism broke over the West Coast.”30 Copies of the Negro World flowed into port towns, carried by sailors, sent through the mail by trans-Atlantic correspondents, disseminated by local agents.31 Organizers traveled up and down the coast, passing through and distributing literature in Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Togo, Dahomey (now Benin), Nigeria, and Cameroon.32 Aided by the expansion of the railway and the fluidity of labor migration, word of the movement spread far inland, especially in northern Nigeria. A Negro World correspondent from Minna remarked on the enthusiasm for the UNIA throughout the region, and asked for instructions on how to mobilize support for the organization in a territory where it was not officially established. Another correspondent, from Zaria, frustrated by the slow pace at which the Negro World circulated, recommended a local owner of a merchandise shop to act as an official agent and distributor of the paper. The Negro World was discovered in Kano, Benue (Munshi), and Ilorin provinces, and a division of the UNIA may have been briefly established at Kano. Working as a colonial agent in a remote outpost in northern Nigeria, a journey of several days from the nearest telegraph office and even further from the railway, the future novelist Joyce Cary was surprised to learn that the local markets were full of excited talk about a black king, commanding an iron ship full of black officers and crew, and preparing to drive the whites out of Africa.33

Garveyites established six UNIA divisions in British West Africa, two in Liberia, and two—briefly and secretly—in Senegal.34 But as was the case in other parts of the continent, the influence of the movement was manifest to a greater degree outside of the official edifice of the organization. The merits of the UNIA were fiercely debated in the pages of African-run newspapers like the Sierra Leone Weekly News, the Times of Nigeria, and the Gold Coast Leader35; in informal discussion groups, like the one organized by Jacob Akinpelu Obisesan in Ibadan36; and within political organizations like the pathbreaking National Congress of British West Africa, whose vice president and Gold Coast delegate, J. Casely Hayford, continued to receive smuggled copies of the Negro World from friends in the United States and the West Indies long after the paper was officially banned throughout much of the region.37 Nnamdi Azikiwe, the future president of independent Nigeria, learned of the UNIA from a fellow student while he was studying at the Hope Waddell Institute in Calabar. French authorities worried about newspaper stories “spread through the grapevine” in Dakar schools and carried by students back to their villages and colonies of origin. One official, suggesting that Garvey’s slogans were “more dangerous than rifles,” urged vigilance, but conceded that there were “no walls thick enough” to stop the spread of informal rumor and gossip. As a writer for the Cape Argus complained in 1923, “[a]t almost every West African port the inquisitive voyager has only to get into the ‘black quarter’ and to scratch a little below the surface to find signs of the organization.”38

It was in the midst of this ferment that Garveyism was first discovered in the Congo. In October 1920, Belgian authorities arrested an African clerk named “Wilson,” in Lisala, after learning that he was working in the colony as a UNIA agent. Wilson was a British subject, in the employ of the African and Eastern Trade Corporation; although at first believed by the Belgians to be a native of the Gold Coast, and later a black American, it is almost certain, as French intelligence officers later concluded, that he was Wilfred Ascanius Indouishi Wilson, a native of Porto-Novo, Dahomey, born to Sierra Leonean parents. After working in French Guinea (Guinea) and the Gambia, Wilson arrived in Rufisque, Senegal, in 1916, where he was employed by the commercial firm, Barthes and Lesieur. There he met Francis Emeric Webber, a native of Sierra Leone working in nearby Dakar. Webber, who frequently traveled south to the Gambia and Sierra Leone, returned to Dakar at some point in 1919 or 1920 with news of the UNIA. By the time Wilson traveled to the Belgian Congo, the two men had established a secret division of the organization in Dakar, under the cover of a commercial business enterprise. Stationed in the Congo, Wilson established a subscription to the Negro World, which he distributed among fellow migrant and Kongo workers in Leopoldville, the colony’s capital and urban hub. Judging by his arrest in Lisala, a several days’ journey from the capital, Wilson was intent on spreading news of the UNIA broadly. In his possession in Lisala was found a copy of the UNIA’s constitution, along with a letter, written by Webber, announcing that a great organization had been formed in the United States to redeem the Negro race; that Africans, at the Cape and elsewhere, had pledged their participation; and that the movement would be firmly entrenched in the Congo by December.39

Wilson’s brief organizing work in the Congo established a foundation for Garveyist consciousness in the Belgian colony. Over the next few years, UNIA material and information continued to filter into Leopoldville, carried by “bearers of the black word” from British and French West Africa, who joined the “invasion” of skilled workers hired to fill positions in European firms as mechanics, carpenters, ironworkers, and clerks.40 Dakar, which served as a major recruitment center, had emerged by the end of 1921 as a hotbed of illicit Garveyist organizing.41 In Rufisque and Dakar, Wilson, Webber, and several associates originally from Sierra Leone—many connected by their employment by the Elder Dempster Shipping Company—continued their quiet work on behalf of the UNIA, distributing copies of the Negro World along with propaganda leaflets advertising for the organization and for the Black Star Line. In early May 1922, the UNIA’s “traveling commissioner,” John Kamara, established a division at Dakar, and a month later, Wilson wrote to the UNIA’s Secretary-General in New York, requesting official sanction for a second division in Rufisque.42

For members of the Dakar and Rufisque divisions, Garveyism was galvanizing because it encouraged them to view their ostensibly localized and modest work of resistance against vast imperial powers as part of a global movement of world-historical significance and of inexorable, gathering strength. “If we cannot do much here under French Colonial Administration, we can do our utmost to further the universal aims of the association by our moral and financial support,” explained John Henry Farmer, secretary of the Dakar division. The UNIA had sounded an alarm “reverberating through the [N]egro communities scattered in the five great continents; and the oppressors beholding this strange spectacle are arrayed to stem the tide; but, the cup of affliction is full and running over, the march is steady, impregnable and firm.” The stakes were clear: “victory or death; Africa free or the annihilation of 400,000,000 [N]egroes with their backs to the wall.” Africa, assured Farmer, had “heard the call to unity” and was “rising to a man.”43

Carried from the United States to British colonies on the west coast of Africa, forwarded to migrant workers stationed in French West Africa, Garveyist propaganda found a circuitous means of dispersal into the heart of the Congo. After the discovery—and destruction—of the UNIA in Senegal, officials in Dakar were left grumbling about “the curious spectacle … of the existence of a movement presumably of antiEuropean character, originating among negroes in the United States, sternly repressed in eleven French Colonies, and indulgently tolerated” in the British colonies.44

The Rise of Kimbanguism

What do we know happened in that year [1918]? Large numbers of people died and not by the will of God. —Kimbanguist catechism45 When Simon Kimbangu’s revival broke in April 1921, it was at the height of this Garveyist organizing. It was also a time of fraying order for reasons that fell particularly hard on the Congo. During the traumatic years of the Congo Free State (1885–1908), profits in ivory and rubber were ruthlessly pursued using the tools of forced labor, kidnapping, mutilation, and mass murder. The transfer of the colony to the Belgian state in 1908 mitigated some of the worst and most visible brutalities of King Leopold II’s regime, but did not end practices of forced labor and corporal punishment, and conditions of depopulation, famine, and social disintegration. World War I invited a further series of plagues upon the Congolese. During the grueling East African Campaign, tens of thousands succumbed to injury, exhaustion, illness, and hunger. Hundreds of thousands more perished in the global pandemics borne by wartime migrations.46 In all, according to Wyatt MacGaffey, between 1885 and 1921 the population of the Lower Congo region was reduced by as much as 75%.47

Joining this physical devastation was the hegemonic project of the colonial state and its allies. Colonialism, as V.W. Mudimbe argues, demanded a restructuring of the terms of order to conform to the totalizing thesis that “Western history is the only space of human history and of God’s fulfillment and revelation.” The eradication of African agency, faith, culture, social structures, and political economy was viewed as a necessary precondition for the rebuilding of the continent, subject by subject, in the image of European “civilization.” In this Manichean order the bloody exploitation of white supremacy was understood as an act of European sacrifice, a “white man’s burden.” Efforts by Africans to sustain ways of thinking and being that fell outside the boundaries of “civilized” expectations were viewed as further proof of Africans’ lack of preparation for self-government. Efforts to confront the colonial regime were perceived as manifestations of madness. Undergirding the colonial state was the church, with its symbolic and spiritual order rooted in Europe, and its investment in the “long conversation” through which missionaries endeavored to remake codes of conduct, moral behavior, and systems of belief in the image and under the authority of a white God.48

Simon Kimbangu, observes Wyatt MacGaffey, “belonged to the first generation of BaKongo to grow up under colonial rule and to realize in his own life its peculiar frustrations.”49 As a young man Kimbangu joined the Baptist Mission Society (BMS), receiving four years of instruction at a village school and at the NgombeLutete mission, roughly ten miles from Nkamba. But within the mission structure, Kimbangu soon found his ambitions stifled. His interest in teaching was undercut when he was unable to secure a deacon under whom to train, a failure for which Kimbangu suspected missionary interference. His desire to be an evangelist was halted by church officials concerned about his level of educational attainment and literacy. Kimbangu returned to Nkamba as a lay preacher, then journeyed to Leopoldville in search of work, joining a stream of educated and partially educated BaKongo hoping to secure positions in the bureaucratic sector or with large foreign firms. For Kimbangu, as for many others, it was not a particularly enriching or fulfilling pursuit. He found employment with the British-owned export company, Huileries du Congo belge, using his mission training to inscribe shipping numbers on oil drums.50

Kimbangu’s revival must be understood against the background of his own struggles, which must in turn be framed within the particularities of Kongo political and religious traditions that suggested prophetism as a logical and hopeful solution in 1921. During the Pentecost on the Congo in 1886, large numbers of BaKongo had converted to Protestantism during a revival that was popularly viewed as inaugurating an age of political order and spiritual harmony. The arrival of the colonial state and the expansion of the missions did not overturn older traditions in practice; rather, the state and the church were understood to constitute new forms of control within existing systems of belief. Political legitimacy continued to rest on the capacity of rulers to tame spiritual authority: to use their “magic,” or righteous communion with God, to gird against the destructive threat of witchcraft.51

By 1920, as the colonial state faced a growing crisis of authority, the BMS was losing hold of its own claim to preserving order. Reforms in the century’s first decade introduced into the mission a strict moral code to curtail polygamy, drinking, and dancing, which led to the suspension and excommunication of large numbers of Christian converts. Efforts to encourage in their members a firm Protestant work ethic and sense of individual responsibility by stressing congregational selfsupport created further disillusionment and confusion. As MacGaffey observes, “[t]he missionary idea of the Christian—individually saved, economically selfsufficient, and socially autonomous—is the Kongo ideal of complete anarchy.” For mission-educated BaKongo like Kimbangu, frustrated in their ambitions within the church hierarchy and limited in their opportunities without, the failures of the BMS to maintain harmonious relations was cast in a sinister light. In breaking from the mission, Kimbanguists did not reject its logic; rather, they began to suspect that European missionaries had departed from the true path, and that to conceal their shortcomings they had hidden parts of the gospel from Africans. They also began to question why, if this was the case, the authority to receive God’s word should not be vested instead in themselves.52

It was in Leopoldville in 1920, working for Huileries du Congo belge, that Kimbangu learned of Garveyism.53 There he came into contact with a “black American”—surely a migrant from British West Africa, possibly Wilson—and was exposed to the flood of enthusiasm for the movement being carried by mobile workers, propagandists, and smuggled copies of the Negro World up and down the coast.54 Kimbangu was also introduced to elders of the Ngombe Lutete mission, including Andre Yengo, a successful trader and bricklayer, whose shadowy organization, “Congomen,” served as the primary distribution network in the colony for the Negro World.55 The relationship between Kimbangu and Yengo was at the core of the revival. At around the same time that Kimbangu began performing miracles at Nkamba, Yengo and his associates began establishing the infrastructure for a Kimbanguist “national church” of the Lower Congo. From Leopoldville, Yengo, the Congomen, and disillusioned members of the BMS solicited new recruits, established collections to finance the movement, and held daily meetings to spread information and build support. To facilitate contact and deliver funds and supplies to Nkamba, they established liaison points at Kasangulu and Inkisi. During his months as a fugitive, Kimbangu maintained contact with Yengo’s cadre, visiting Leopoldville at least twice.56

If Kimbangu drew inspiration and support from these connections, his prophetic movement was deeply rooted in Kongo cosmology. For centuries prophetic power had been invoked by BaKongo prophets in moments of social breakdown, dispute, and disorder. In these revivals, spiritual forces identified and spoke through the prophet. As had been the case in the past, during Kimbangu’s revival this spiritual authority became vested in both men and women prophets.57 As Yolanda Covington-Ward has argued, Kimbanguists merged elements of mission-inspired Protestant Christianity with “everyday cultural performances” rooted in the “traditional embodied movements” of spirit-induced trembling. In doing so they pierced the “logical framework” of colonial and mission authority by reasserting the alternative authority of Kongo cultural performance, and by invoking the higher power of the Holy Spirit in the service of this performance. According to one account, Kimbanguists foretold the coming of twelve “real” prophets, the very greatest of them appearing in Mbanza Kongo (San Salvador), the heart of the former Kongo Kingdom. In so doing, Kimbanguists imbued their promise of a coming Golden Age with the sacred and sentimental authority of a Golden Age passed.58

What had begun to emerge, then, before Kimbangu escaped Nkama on July 6, and before Yengo and several of his associates were arrested on July 17, was a promising, if nascent, vehicle through which to reject European mission control and to establish an independent space for alternative African religious expression. The project was challenging to colonial order without being directly antagonistic. Kimbangu urged his followers to pay their taxes; Yengo told colonial agents that he sought a church modeled on the Senegalese example, where French authorities allowed powerful Marabouts to operate with a large measure of autonomy within the framework of European administration.59 But at the core of Kimbangu’s challenge to BMS authority was his accusation that European missionaries had compromised their legitimacy by concealing the full truth from Africans. If they had brought God to Africa, only Kimbangu could bring Him “to the African.”60 Far from rejecting BMS doctrine, Kimbanguism articulated the religious justification for a reassertion of BMS principles in the context of black leadership. Where European missionaries had failed to receive the word of God, Africans would succeed. Where the missionaries instructed Africans to worship a foreign deity and to conform to foreign standards of order and propriety, Kimbangu instructed them to worship a God who represented black people as well, and who sanctified African cosmogony—a God who revealed Himself to black people by working through Kimbangu’s prophetic movement.61 By reconstituting spiritual authority in this manner, Kimbangu was stripping Europeans of all moral authority.62

Des sentiments xenophobes: World War I and the Rising Tide of Color

If Kimbangu’s revival sprouted from homegrown roots, it was also a product of the destruction, disruptions, and discourses engendered by the Great War. Across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, men and women mobilized to defend the spoils of decades of empire-building—“to decide,” sneered V.I. Lenin, “whether the British or German group of financial marauders is to receive the most booty.”63 Throughout Africa, the devastating conditions and novel opportunities presented by the war engendered episodes of anti-colonial resistance. Rebellion erupted in Nyasaland (Malawi), Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique), in the Transkei region of South Africa, in northern and southern Nigeria, and in the western Volta region of French West Africa (Burkina Faso).64 In the Belgian Congo’s Equatorial Province, the healer and prophetess Maria N’koi organized a short-lived revival in which she encouraged crowds to turn away from the colonial state, and prophesied the defeat of the Belgians by an invading German army.65 These insurrections were joined after the war by a “strike influenza” that mobilized workers across the globe, and by a series of protests, rebellions, and revolutions in Russia, Germany, India, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, China, Indonesia, Turkey, and Egypt.66

With Western Europe in physical and financial ruin following the Armistice of 1918, roiled by anti-colonial insurgencies, imperial policymakers turned with renewed interest to tropical Africa. Noting somberly that “the era of European autocracy in Asia is past,” Britain’s chief imperial theorist, Frederick Lugard, observed that Africa was to be “the land of economic development for the white races in the twentieth century.”67 But in the era of mandates and responsible stewardship ushered in by the Covenant of the League of Nations, the excesses of the past must be replaced with sober and intelligent colonial leadership. E.D. Morel, who earlier in the century had led the transnational movement to end King Leopold’s murderous reign in the Congo, argued that the “just, equitable, understanding government of the primitive, but highly intelligent, adaptable, kindly and politically helpless races of tropical Africa, is one of the finest and most unselfish tasks which remain for white men to fulfill in the world.”68 This did not mean, for Morel or other “liberal imperialists,” that European manufacturers and working men should not benefit from the harvesting and production of African raw materials.69 What it meant was that Africans must be carefully ushered in to the modern world, compelled to work part of the time for European firms but protected at other times by the embrace of their “traditional” rulers, institutions, laws, and social mores.70 In the British, French, and Belgian colonies, variations of indirect rule sought to maintain this balance by intruding on African “custom” only so much as was needed to fulfill the economic prerogatives of colonial statecraft. Lugard’s “dual mandate” for interwar Africa acknowledged that Europeans were not “developing the resources of Africa from motives of pure philanthropy,” but maintained that the mandate to profit from the colonial enterprise offered a felicitous path toward the accomplishment of the colonists’ stated purpose: aiding “the native races in their progress to a higher plane.”71

Crucial to this rhetoric of postwar governance was the core principle that African subjects were best to avoid—at their present stage of development—the rigors of modern politics. Following this logic, anti-imperialist challenges to white hegemony—particularly by peoples of African descent, who were deemed furthest from achieving an organic condition of sovereignty—were viewed not merely as a threat to Europe’s future, but a threat to the civilization itself. After the war, citing the work of some of the world’s most eminent scientists, popular writers in Europe and the United States devised sweeping new theories of history, sociology, and politics through the lens of the “new biological revelation,” what bestselling American author Lothrop Stoddard described as “the mightiest transformation of ideas that the world has ever seen.”72 Arguing that the scientific breakthroughs of Darwinism and eugenics had exposed the natural rights tradition as a “pernicious delusion,” Stoddard declared World War I the “White Civil War,” and warned of the “rising tide of color” that would, if left unchecked, wash away the civilization of the superior race. Stoddard’s work was approvingly cited by U.S. president Warren G. Harding, who declared “the race problem” a global concern that could be addressed only by maintaining “natural segregations” and abandoning ideas of “social equality.” The central lesson of Stoddard’s work, wrote Lugard in a glowing review, was “the vital necessity of preserving the purity of race-types.” “Here . . . is the true conception of the inter-relation of colour,” wrote Lugard, updating the compromise suggested by Booker T. Washington in his famous address at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. “[I]n matters social and racial a separate path, each pursuing his own inherited traditions, preserving his own race-purity and race-pride; equality in things spiritual; agreed divergence in the physical and material.”73

The need to protect the stiffening, “crustaceous borders” of the global color line in the 1920s was given added imperative by widespread fears that the Great War had elicited the emergence of new types of political solidarities.74 In an insightful report written during the First World War, a British intelligence officer noted with foreboding the “unprecedented mixing of representatives of almost all the black races” during the East African Campaign and suggested that over the camp fires the “doctrine of ‘Africa for the African’ [had] taken form as an ideal in the minds of many.”75 After the war there was much hand-wringing by commentators worried that the conflict had taught Africans a series of bad lessons: that the previously “hypnotic” moral authority of Western civilization was not infallible; that Europe was enfeebled militarily and materially; that colonial subjects should not be content with their wages or their political subordination; that they shared a common condition and could share a common voice. Everywhere was evidence of a creeping race consciousness, spurred by wartime congress, exacerbated by postwar dislocations and deprivations, facilitated by improvements in postal and transportation technologies, and inflamed by the “flood” of propaganda entering the continent from nationalist sources in India and Egypt, and from the “extreme section of American Negroes.”76 By the end of 1922, the Negro World had been officially banned throughout much of Africa, or was otherwise “strictly controlled.”77 Rumors of Garveyist-engineered uprisings, alliances with Bolshevists and PanIslamists, and sundry conspiracies enlivened colonial fears. In 1923, as Hermann Norden made his five-month trek across the Congo, he was astonished to find at post after post Belgian officials eager for information about “Marcus Garvey, his Black Star [L]ine, and other details of that mad dreamer’s plan to win the continent back for its scattered people.”78

Marcus Garvey, for his part, devoted the bulk of his formidable propaganda work to popularizing and sustaining precisely this narrative of creeping racial consciousness and pan-colored alliance.79 Copies of the Negro World, born up and down the west African coast, situated the work of the UNIA at the heart of a global, inexorable march of forces that would end in the return of Asia to the Asians, Latin America to the Latin Americans, and Africa to the Africans. The Negro World carried news of mounting opposition to United States stewardship in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Nicaragua, and especially the Philippines. Even more attention was given to clashes of colonial subjects with British authorities across the Middle East, Africa, and India. Japan’s rise on the world stage, Chinese nationalist struggles, and Abd el-Krim’s revolt against the Spanish and the French in Morocco were afforded sustained and detailed attention. To ensure the message was not missed, the paper reprinted essays by statesmen like David Lloyd George and the former Kaiser Wilhelm, warning of the sinister confluence of these episodes throughout the colonial world. Garvey provided his own guided analysis in his popular front-page editorials, as did UNIA intellectual leaders in reprinted speeches, editorials, and recurring columns. Stories of anticolonial activity, reprinted from wire services, were rechristened with titles that brought the editorial vision of the paper to the fore: “Bitter Race War to the Death is Forecast”; “White Race in Peril”; “The Tide of Color Goes on Rising.”80 These sentiments became part of the common language through which Garveyites in North America, the Caribbean basin, and sub-Saharan Africa came to understand the purpose and the thrust of the movement.

There was a rich political and intellectual context, in other words, for Belgian officials to view evidence of Garveyism’s arrival in the Congo as confirmation of a coalescing, anti-white, pan-African sentiment; or, in the Orwellian framing given it by colonial agents, des sentiments xenophobes. And it is unsurprising, given its proximate position at the center of Garveyite channels of communication, that Kimbangu’s revival was understood by colonial officials through the prism of these anxieties. On May 11, the territorial administrator, Leon-Georges Morel, visited Nkamba with a company of soldiers to observe Kimbangu’s activities. According to Morel, Kimbangu gathered his followers in front of the administrator’s tent and recited the biblical narrative of David’s defeat of Goliath, while a large engraving of the fallen giant was displayed. Followers exclaimed that they expected fire to fall from heaven upon the whites, as it had done upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. “It is necessary to confront Kimbangu because the tendency of his movement is pan-Negro,” wrote Morel from the field. “Kimbangu possesses an almost unlimited moral authority over the crowd, and it is certain that he could create a spirit of hostility among the natives toward the white race.”81

Morel returned to Nkamba on June 6 with twenty soldiers to arrest the prophet. Kimbangu, in his own telling, instructed his followers to resist not evil, and offered himself for capture.82 But the encounter quickly spiraled out of control. In the resulting confrontation, two soldiers were wounded, one several times with a knife; a woman was shot in the side, and her ten-year-old nephew was killed. As the soldiers razed the village, the sentry guarding Kimbangu abandoned his post to “share in the loot,” allowing Kimbangu to escape. In the minds of his followers, Kimbangu had performed another miracle. “The Government sent troops to arrest him, but the power of the Lord overcame them,” explained the minor prophet Mabwaaka Mpaka Gabriel. “A little stream south of Kemba flooded till it resembled the Congo itself, and Pharoah’s chariots were unable to cross.”83

During Kimbangu’s three months in hiding, the situation quickly devolved. The colonial state went into lockdown, sweeping up Kimbanguists and allowing soldiers to roam the countryside, where they seized money and goods, defiling places of worship, and committing “outrage[s]” against women. The “growing spirit of insolence and insurbordination” observed among Kimbanguists by worried Europeans, the disquieting evidence of “a new race consciousness,” emerged in full bloom.84 The Leopoldvillebased newspaper, L’Avenir Colonial Belge, reported that whites in the capital were subject to “outrageous taunts” during the day and robberies demonstrating a “disconcerting boldness” at night. Kimbanguist renditions of translated versions of Baptist hymnals like “Soldiers of Christ, Arise!” were perceived to carry a new, sinister subtext. Original compositions, like the one recorded by the Belgian author Jeane Maquet-Tombu, announcing the rise of the apostles of liberation and the end of colonial rule, seemed to confirm these fears.85 These perceptions were filtered through the prism of fear-stoked concerns about a global rising tide of color. As American missionary Catherine Mabie put it in her annual report for 1921, the prophet movement was “closely akin to the world wide developing sense of race solidarity among negroes.”86

The risk was believed to be especially acute along the rail line, the colony’s only effective means of transportation between the Atlantic coast and the interior, where rumors circulated that laborers were planning a work stoppage. Investigators noted considerable and accelerating support for Kimbangu along the line, and reported that bands of catechists were proselytizing and preaching “sedition.” One investigator witnessed workers throwing their livrets (identity cards) at the feet of their foreman, declaring, “we do not want to work any more, we have had enough of working for the white man.”87 An American missionary, Thomas Moody, observed that the workers were “thrilled at a chance to join the movement initiated by Marcus Garvey.”88

During the crisis, many Kongo indeed came to view news of a powerful African spiritual authority as proof of the imminent end of European rule. Minor prophets—some deputized by Kimbangu, others who attached themselves to the movement by their own initiative—counseled their followers to abstain from work, to refuse to pay taxes, to refuse to shake the hands of white people. Toward the end of June, the minor prophet Ngunza Timote told his followers that by placing their trust in God “the posts of the state will be burned,” the whites would return home, and the Kongo would become their own leaders. This counsel gave concrete shape to Kimbangu’s prophetic suggestion that “the whites will become the blacks and the blacks will become the whites.”89 It also mirrored the Kimbanguist chant:

Our leaders, our young men, our young women, our children are lost, our country is lost, for the whites possess it. But we teach that our land will be reborn. The whites will be driven out. We will go into the forest, we will gather all the firewood, and we will place all the white people in it so they can burn, and we will be masters in our country.”90

Apocalyptic beliefs that the end was near, that the Lord’s arrival was imminent, that rifles would rain from the sky and the railroad would be torn up as Europeans fled into the sea were joined by concrete expectations of African rule. Declaring, “[w]e have found the God of the Blacks,” Kimbanguists began preparing for a new era of spiritual and political authority.91

As elsewhere on the continent, the notion that the colonial period was near an end was intertwined with rumors that the ousting of the Belgians would be facilitated by the arrival of black Americans.92 In the Congo the rumor was given local context, expressed in the popular belief that a ship would “be seen coming up the Congo at Manyanga,” at which point “the white people would leave the colony.”93 The rumors were also given legitimacy by a pervasive Kongo legend about the Atlantic Slave Trade. Rather than killing their captured slaves, it was said, Europeans decided to leave them on an island (America) to starve, only to be thwarted by God, who provided the former slaves with civilization, skyscrapers, and plentiful food. In performing this action Europeans had endowed black Americans with the means to mount a challenge to their authority in Africa. The expectation, particularly during moments of unrest, was that these “ex-Africans” would return, armed with their impressive technology, to liberate their kin. Because America, like Europe, was also viewed as the land of the dead, ideas about returning black Americans were often synonymous with the return of the ancestors, the joining of the worlds of the living and the dead, and by extension the inauguration of a Golden Age that incorporated elements of the Christian millennium with Kongo understandings about renewal and political-religious harmony.94 Rumors about the arrival of black American liberators thus reveal the extent to which Africans in the Lower Congo were positioned as both local and diasporic agents amid the anti-colonial ferment of the post–World War period. If the rumors were rendered in the context of local cosmological beliefs and expectations, they were articulated in a manner that expressed a consciousness of—and interaction with—global events. One messianic prediction dated to the year of Kimbangu’s revival imagined the arrival of the “King of the Americans,” endowed to set up factories and schools in the Congo. This black American liberator—bearing ships and technology and wisdom—projected a compelling mirror of the Garveyist rhetoric traveling up and down the west African coast. It suggested that like whites in the colony, Kimbanguists proceeded with repertoire of information, belief, and expectation that flowed from multiple spatial scopes.95

Conclusion

On September 12, Simon Kimbangu returned to Nkama, instructed his followers to construct a great fire, and told them to prepare for his arrest. He surrendered voluntarily on September 14.96 At his trial, Kimbangu was found guilty of posing as the savior of the black race, of declaring whites the enemy, of convincing his followers to believe in a new God who was more powerful than the state, and of attempting to construct an African National Church.97 In the years after Kimbangu’s arrest his followers sustained his church by stepping back from open confrontation with the state, more carefully guarding its secrets, and nurturing Kimbanguism’s separatist impulse, which included the belief that a higher power would deliver them from bondage. In 1925, John P. MacGregor, the British Consul at Boma, reported that “the natives who have thrown off their connection with the missions are convinced that Kibangu [sic] and his disciples will return amongst them, that the fire of heaven will consume all those who have not adhered to their beliefs, and that the Europeans will disappear from the country of which Kibangu and his followers will remain the sole masters.” According to MacGregor, Kimbanguists “declare . . . their fidelity to the state authorities, carry out all their fiscal and administrative obligations, [and] give every evidence of exemplary submissiveness to the government.” But they had rejected the authority of the missions. And they expected divine deliverance. Intellectually, they had “emancipated themselves.” MacGregor compared Kimbanguists to the Jews during the Roman period, awaiting the coming of the Messiah.98

The idea of returning black Americans remained an important rhetorical and metaphysical vehicle for expressing a new age of African independence within Kimbangu’s church. As Kimbanguists traveled through the region spreading their gospel, and as Congolese women and men chanted “seditious” songs in open defiance of white rule, the specter of Marcus Garvey, the great symbol of black rule, carved an indelible mark on the fragile psychology of the colonial state. For years to come both whites and blacks would wonder when Americans might arrive in their midst. In the remote village of Tshaba, in the central Congo, the traveler Hermann Norden came across a capitao lashing Africans, who explained, “[t]hey are getting notions of race equality and Africa for the Africans.”99

Rumors of black American liberators, when they emerged in 1921, were given legitimacy by the foundational expectations of Kongo cosmology, which cast “America” as an analogic land of the dead, of the ancestors, and by extension a source of messianic prophecy. But the particular outlines of this narrative of black American liberators also bore the unmistakable imprint of global Garveyism. Like the transmission of rumor, the spread of diasporic consciousness traffics in broad and malleable communal “truths” that rely for their valence on local understandings, articulations, and politics making. As word of a great congress of Negroes in America spread up and down the coast of West Africa, throughout the massive southern-central African migration network, and into east African ports, Garveyism generated great excitement, interpretation, and expectation. What was conveyed was often more rumor than substance, the projection of UNIA aspirations more than concrete plans or accomplished fact. Black Americans had acquired advanced technological tools, it was said. They had acquired a great fleet of iron ships, or were building a great army. An anti-colonial tide of color was rising. These stories were legible because notions of whiteness and blackness had become inscribed in the cultural logic and political institutions of colonial rule, as well as in deep-rooted traditions of pan-African identity building and exchange. They had purchase as a method of articulating dissent because the rhetoric of race consciousness was threatening to colonial agents in the best of circumstances, let alone in the aftermath of World War I, when it was widely feared that precisely the types of provocations expressed by Garveyism would come to pass without the exercise of extreme vigilance. When Simon Kimbangu organized his revival at the center of the Congo’s Garveyist information network and among its most committed readers of the Negro World, and when he organized a movement that was grounded in independent Christianity, politically non-confrontational, and practically motivated toward the creation of a space for black consciousness-raising and organization, he was articulating the outlines of an African Garveyism that emerged throughout southern Africa, in Nyasaland and the Rhodesias, and in Kenya. He was moving in a space created by the dynamic convergence of local forces with broad currents of rumor and pan-African identity, and legible to colonial agents, white writers, missionaries, and African subjects. He was drawing on Garveyism to garner authority for a prophetic message that also drew its authority from a long tradition of Kongo prophetism, and that sought to reorganize the terms of spiritual leadership in ways that reformulated the old (pre-colonial) order in the pursuit of a new (post-colonial) era.

The uses to which Kimbanguists and other Africans put Garveyism helped generate a fundamental shift in Marcus Garvey’s own thinking about his movement and its contributions to the anti-imperial struggle.100 Once declaring his intention to establish a grand Negro Empire in Africa under his leadership, Garvey now argued that the object of the UNIA was not to “transport men to carry out the conquest of Africa” but to “broadcast throughout the entire continent” the activities of the UNIA.”101 And whereas Garvey once envisioned an emigrationist movement led by African American and Afro-West Indians to develop and civilize fallen Africa, Garveyites now spread the message, as Garveyite organizer Ernest Wallace put it during a meeting in the Eastern Cape, that UNIA agents were not deputized “to tell what the [N]egroes in America do . . . but to ask them to work out their own salvation.” Africa must take the ingredients offered by Garveyism and “cook her own pot.”102 In November 1924, months from his imprisonment in Atlanta’s federal penitentiary, the financial and bureaucratic edifice of his organization crumbling around him, Garvey announced the inauguration of a “second period” in the UNIA’s development, to be devoted less to sustaining the UNIA as a “great institution” than to the pragmatic work of “quiet and peaceful penetration.”103 Critics of Garvey, both at the time and since, have, for understandable reasons, focused on the implosion of the bureaucratic UNIA in the mid-to-late 1920s. But, paradoxically, Garveyism’s global legacy would emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the UNIA’s imperial dream. The decline of Garvey’s institutional empire provided space for the emergence of a “second period” of modest organization building and consciousness raising that remained a vital wellspring for African activists, proselytizers, and intellectuals throughout the interwar era. Garvey’s success at building a workable mass politics out of the ferment of the Great War is well known. But his true contribution to global politics came later, during the frustrating decades of the 1920s and 1930s, and through the agency of men and women who adopted the infrastructure of Garveyism to pursue their own ends, and not always in ways that Garvey himself would have approved. “If we have accomplished nothing else but the bringing to the natives of Africa a consciousness of themselves and a desire on their part to free themselves from thralldom of alien races and nations, we would have justified the existence of this great organization,” Garvey declared at Liberty Hall in 1923. Africa’s redemption “will not mean so much fighting from without as the rising of the people from within with a new consciousness of their power which is gradually being realized.”104