![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Ecumenism has been a constant effort of many Christian agents in war-torn Angola ever since the 1960s, and certainly in the reconciliation initiatives that have taken place since the end of the war in 2002. Today, ecumenism is a structuring concept in the new law of religious freedom, which stipulates that, in order for religions to be legal, they must belong to an ‘Ecumenical Platform’. Yet, in the northern parts of Angola, Bakongo people remember too well how strongly allied Christianity has been with oppressive forms of power since the arrival of Diogo Cão five centuries ago, and especially since the martyrdom of Kimpa Vita in 1706. The local cosmology and an acute sense of historical resentment have created a strong resistance to any form of Christian ecumenism, especially among the thousands of exiled Bakongo who are returning to the country from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, where they explored their Kongo, rather than their Portuguese, roots. Thanks to these returnees, Kongo religious institutions, some officially banned by Angolan laws, are being visibly revitalised and spread among local people to whom Christianity and ecumenism have little to offer beyond memories of suffering and oppression. How far grassroots ecumenism may be possible among these Kongo religious institutions remains uncertain.
Acknowledgements
I conducted nine months of fieldwork in Mbanza Kongo between 2014 and 2016, building upon earlier fieldwork in the DRC and among Kimbanguist diasporas in Europe. I would like to thank Marina Temudo for her invaluable insights in and after the field, the late mpangi Blaise Matondo for having made it possible for me to visit so many bangunza and their churches and who translated interviews, and the anonymous readers of the earlier versions, whose comments were most helpful. Tony Simpson persuaded me that less information can be more informative than too much. Special thanks go to Richard Werbner for inviting me to give a paper at the Ecumenism conference in Gaborone in 2015 and for having gone beyond the call of duty in helping me to address the anonymous readers’ comments.
Notes
1 It is difficult to say when the civil war started, as violence between the MPLA and the other two groups had already been occurring before the end of the anti-colonial war.
2 C. Messiant, ‘Les églises angolaises dans la guerre’, in L’Angola postcolonial. Vol 1: guerre et paix sans démocratisation (Paris, Karthala, 2008), pp. 303–24. See also B. Schubert, A guerra e as igrejas: Angola 1961–1991 (Basel, P. Schlettwein, 2000; original German edition, 1997).
3 ‘Prophets of rebellion’ is the title of the classic cross-cultural study on anti-colonial prophets by Michael Adas: Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1979). Despite its title, however, this study did not attribute real political effects to the prophets considered (none, in any case, from the Kongo region). Instead, Adas sees their ritual activities as symbolic and expressive rather than instrumental. Georges Balandier gives a more positive reading of the effective anti-colonial political activity of prophets and their churches in his Sociologie de l’Afrique Noire: Dynamique des Changements Sociaux en Afrique Centrale (Paris, PUF, 1955). Many of Balandier’s examples come from Kongo regions.
4 Catholicism was of course as old as the arrival of the Portuguese on the coast of Angola in the 15th century. Although rather dated, the most detailed overviews of the history of the Catholic Church in Angola are still M.N. Gabriel, Angola: cinco séculos de cristianismo (Braga, Literal, 1978) and E.A. Macua, Breve história da evangelização de Angola: 1491–1991 (Luanda, CEAST, 2001).
5 A.F. Santos Neves, Ecumenismo em Angola: do ecumenismo cristão ao ecumenismo universal (Nova Lisboa, Coloquios, 1968).
6 The most thorough account of persecution of Catholic priests for their involvement in anti-colonial movements is the recent study by C.A. Alves, Esperar pela hora de Deus: o exílio forçado de sacerdotes angolanos em Portugal –1960–1974 (Luanda, Mayamba, 2015). See also the earlier study by M. Gonçalves, Angola: reconciliação e paz em perspectiva cristã (Luanda, CEAST, 1995), and the Appendix by M. Gonçalves in T. Neves, Angola: justiça e paz nas intervenções da Igreja Católica 1989–2002 (Luanda, Texto Editores, 2013).
7 By ‘Kongo regions of the north’, I mean the Kikongo-speaking provinces neighbouring the DRC that once constituted the ‘Congo Português’ and which, in a much more distant past, were the central part of the Kingdom of Kongo. Today they comprise two provinces: Uige and Zaire.
8 For a very detailed account of the social conditions that led to the rebellious movement, see J. Vos, Kongo in the Age of Empire 1860–1913: The Breakdown of a Moral Order (Madison, Wisconsin University Press, 2015).
9 Neves, Angola: justiça e paz, offers a good account of the role of the Catholic Church in the immediate period after the war, and so does, with a focus on reconciliation initiatives, M.J. Chaves, O papel da Igreja no pós-guerra civil em Angola (Anápolis, Transcultural, 2008). For the delicate position of the same institution during the war, see A. Vela Ngaba, Angola: a voz profética dos bispos da CEAST (1975–2002): uma antropologia teológica para a educação para a paz (Mbanza Kongo, Sedieca, 2008).
10 Viegas is the author of some of the most solid sociological accounts of religious change in Angola, e.g. F. Viegas, ‘Panorâmica das religiões em Angola pós-colonial’, Religiões e Estudos, 1, 1 (2008), pp. 11–35, and ‘Igreja e conflitos em Angola’, in B. de Sousa Santos and J.O.S. van Dunen (eds), Sociedade e estado em construção: desafios do direito e da democracia em Angola (Coimbra, Almedina and CES, 2012), pp 497–526.
11 Viegas, personal communication, September 2016.
12 In this article, I use the concept of ‘church’ in a Durkheimian sense, to refer to any organised religious group the members of which meet regularly to worship together. The word translates both the Portuguese igreja, used in Angola to refer to any religious group, not only Christian ones, and the Kikongo bundu.
13 L. Henderson, A Igreja em Angola: Um rio com varias correntes (Lisbon, Além-Mar, 1990), offers the best available written account, based on a very intense personal involvement as a Protestant missionary, of how suspicious Portuguese authorities were vis-à-vis Protestant missions and the World Council of Churches.
14 F. de M. Mourisca Angola: escándalo da paz (Luanda, Gráfica Luz, 2001) and Católicos e protestantes na aventura da unidade (Uije, Sedipu, 2008).
15 See, for instance, Sidney Mintz’s description of the Caribbean as an oikumene (‘Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: the Caribbean Region as Oikoumene’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2, 2 (1996), pp. 289–311), or, closer to my field site, Igor Kopytoff’s work on the Cameroonian Grassfields as an oikumene (‘Aghem Ethnogenesis and the Grassfields Ecumene’ in C. Tardits, Contribution de la Recherche Ethologique à l’Histoire des Civilisations du Cameroun (Paris, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1981). It is rather surprising that the anthropological literature on oikumene and the Christian church literature on ecumenism never meet, and that while the former focuses on cultural exchange, the latter focuses on the religious and institutional.
16 Henderson, A Igreja, p. 112.
17 J.K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement 1684—1706 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1998).
18 The list of rebellious prophetic agents who created political upheaval in Kikongo-speaking areas of French, Belgian and Portuguese areas is enormous and still poorly known by researchers. A very good study of the most important ones and of their context is (now classic) M. Sinda, Le Messianisme Congolais et ses Incidences Politiques: Kimbanguisme, Matsouanisme, Autres Mouvements (Paris, Payot, 1972). W. MacGaffey, in his equally classic Modern Kongo Prophets: Religion in a Plural Society (Bloomington, Indiana University Press 1983) offered a compelling analysis of how the different prophetic movements in the Kikongo areas of the DRC (Zaire in his days) had to be analysed together, as they made full sense only when seen in structural relation to each other, a methodological suggestion I take very seriously. The most updated analysis of the movements led by bangunza in the DRC is Y. Covington-Ward, Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism and Everyday Performance in Congo (Durham, Duke University Press, 2016).
19 It was founded by Ne Mwana Semi, who resides in Kinshasa.
20 Ever since the days of studies by Sinda, Le messianisme, Balandier, Sociologie, and MacGaffey, Modern Kongo, among many others, Kimbanguism has been, by and large, the best-studied prophetic movement in colonial and post-colonial Africa, and Simon Kimbangu the most commented upon anti-colonial prophet of Christian inspiration. For a recent collection of studies, see E. M’Bokolo and K. Sabakinu (eds), Simon Kimbangu: le prophète de la libération de l'homme noir (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2015). However, Angolan Kimbanguism is still insufficiently studied. A preliminary attempt at describing its current shape, with special emphasis on the schism, is R. Sarró, R. Blanes and F. Viegas, ‘La guerre dans la paix: ethnicité et angolanité dans l’église Kimbanguiste de Luanda’, Politique Africaine, 110, 2 (2008), pp. 84–101.
21 For the biography of Simão Toko and its contested interpretations, see the study by R. Blanes, A Prophetic Trajectory: Ideologies of Place, Time and Belonging in an Angolan Religious Movement (Oxford and New York, Berghahn, 2014).
22 A case in point would be the Angolan ‘Church of Kimpa Vita’.
23 Other churches have similar books, often named Keluka, but very similar in their structure to the Kekongo. These books, received by spiritual inspiration, are written in Kikongo and contain very detailed accounts of the lives and deeds of the bangunza bakongo, insisting on the suffering that they were forced to endure because of a combination of Christianity, imperialism, and lack of respect towards Kongo.
24 This is a common term in the DRC to refer to them, but it is rarer in the Angolan context. The Kikongo concept of longo is not used to refer to sacredness and healing in the Kikongo dialects of Angola.
25 Y. Corrington-Ward has documented that the tiny differences are often purely gestural and difficult to perceive. See Gesture and Power.
26 J.W. Fernandez, ‘Symbolic Consensus in a Fang Reformative Cult’, American Anthropologist, 67, 4 (1965), pp. 902–29.