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Abstract
In the spring of 1921, a young Kongo prophet named Simon Kimbangu launched a revival that won thousands of followers and posed a growing threat to Belgian rule in the Congo. This article examines the dynamic confluence of the Kimbanguist revival and the spread of Garveyism along the west coast of Africa. Scholarly treatments of Kimbanguism have not satisfactorily explained this connection, in large part because Garveyism has been traditionally miscast as an American-centered doctrine of immediate liberation rather than a malleable and portable diasporic movement that acquired a uniquely African cast as a result of its spread through the subcontinent. In the Belgian Congo, Garveyism provided an organizational spark that aided the emergence of Kimbangu's church. Perhaps more consequentially, the spread of Garveyism through the region facilitated the emergence of rumors that conditioned the manner in which both Africans and Europeans perceived and responded to the revival. Viewing Garveyism from this perspective helps us understand why it was such a vibrant politics during the interwar period. It also suggests the broader utility of diasporic identifications and ideas as potentially emancipatory materials for local politics making.
Notes
Notes
1 National Archives of England, London (PRO), CO 536/138/10282, G. Thomas to A.J. Wallach, 27 July 1921; W.B. Frame to C.E. Wilson, 25 June 1921, in Cecilia Irvine, “The Birth of the Kimbanguist Movement in the Bas-Zaire 1921,” Journal of Religion in Africa 6, no. 1 (1974): 67–70; Jean-Luc Vellut (Ed.), “Account of Nyuvudi Paul,” in Simon Kimbangu 1921: de Prédication à la Deportation: Les Sources (Brussels: Academie Royale des Sciences D?Outre-Mer, 2005), 67–85.
2 Peter Hugh James Lerrigo, “The ‘Prophet Movement’ in Congo,” The International Review of Missions 11, no. 42 (1922): 275–76; PRO, CO 536/138/10282, J.P. MacGregor to British Ambassador to Belgium, 21 Nov. 1924; PRO, CO 536/138/10282, R.L. Jennings to A.W. Hilliard, 19 May 1921; Raymond Leslie Buell, The Native Problem in Africa, vol. 2 (London: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1965), 602–03; Marvin D. Markovitz, Cross and Sword: The Political Role of Christian Missions in the Belgian Congo, 1908–1960 (Stanford: Hoover Institute Press, 1973), 137; Efraim Andersson, Messianic Popular Movements in the Lower Congo (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1958), 57–59, 65; Anders Kraft, “La Force de L’Espirit,” in Simon Kimbangu 1921: de Predication a la Deportation: Les Sources, edited by Jean-Luc Vellut (Brussels: Academie Royale des Sciences D'Outre-Mer, 2005), 40–2; Rapports 165 et 171 du 19 et 20.6.21 de A.T. Luozi à C.D.D. Boma, in Paul Raymaekers and Henri Desroche (eds.), L’Administration et le Sacré: Discours Religieux et Parcours Politiques en Afrique Centrale (1921–1957) (Brussels: AcadÅmie Royale des Sciences D'Outre Mer, 1983), 68–69; Irvine, “Birth,” 43–44.
3 Article in L’Avenir Colonial Belge, 17 July 1921, in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (MGP), vol. 11, ed. Robert A. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983–2011), 9:98.
4 Rapport no. 322 du 17.5.21 de A.T. Thysville à CDD, in Raymaekers and Desroche, L’Administration, 51–55; Belgian Foreign Ministry Archives (BFMA), AI (A15) 1405 bis 11/Q/3, “Report on Kimbangu, 23 June 1921” and “Lettre de M. le Gouvenor-Général” (translation mine); PRO, CO 536/138/10282, L. Morel to Jennings, 6 June 1921; Jennings to Mr. Wilson, 18 June 1921; Thomas to Wallach, 27 July 1921; Jennings to Morel, 25 July 1921; Irvine, “Birth,” 47; Peter Hugh James Lerrigo, “Africa—A Land of Green and Golden Glory,” Missions 14, no. 3 (1923), 133; Peter Hugh James Lerrigo, Rock-breaker: Kingdom Building in Kongo Land (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1922), 92.
5 BFMA, AI (A15) 1405 bis II/Q/3, Lettre de M. le Gouvenor-Général, 23 June 1921; Irvine, “Birth,” 43; W. Reynolds, interview with Efraim Andersson, quoted in Andersson, Messianic, 254; Rev. T. Moody, quoted in Negro World (NW), October 27, 1923, 2; BFMA, AI (A15) 1405 bis II/Q/3, J.C. Van Cleemput, “Mouvement prophetique au Bas-Congo,” 14 September 1921.
6 Adam Ewing, “Garvey or Garveyism? Colin Grant’s Negro with a Hat (2008) and the search for a new synthesis in UNIA scholarship,” Transition 105 (2011): 130–45.
7 This view is revivified by Colin Grant, who virtually ignores the work of Garveyites outside of Liberia, and who characterizes Africa as little more than a “Utopian ideal” and an “escape route” for Garvey and his followers. See Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 387.
8 James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin, 2006).
9 See Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); Michael O. West, “The Seeds are Sown: The Impact of Garveyism in Zimbabwe in the Interwar Years,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 2/3 (2002): 335–62. The scope of Garveyist organizing in Africa is brought into sharp focus by the magnificent two-volume “Africa Series” of the Marcus Garvey Papers. See Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. IX and X (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For important and pioneering work on Garveyism in Africa, see Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, CT: Majority Press, 1976), 110–50; Robert Edgar, “Garveyism in Africa: Dr. Wellington and the American Movement in the Transkei,” Ufahamu 6, no. 3 (1976): 31–67; Arnold Hughes, “Africa and the Garvey Movement in the Interwar Years,” in Garvey: Africa, Europe, and the Americas, edited by Rupert Lewis and Maureen Warner-Lewis (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1986), 111–35; Robert A. Hill and Gregory Pirio, “‘Africa for the Africans’: the Garvey Movement in South Africa, 1920–1940,” in The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa, edited by Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (London: Longman, 1987), 209–53; Gregory Pirio, “The Role of Garveyism in the Making of Namibian Nationalism,” in Namibia 1884–1984: Readings on Namibia’s History and Society, edited by Brian Wood (London: Namibia Support Committee, 1988), 259–67; Rupert Lewis, Marcus Garvey, Anti-Colonial Champion (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988), 153–77.
10 Ewing, The Age of Garvey, especially 186–237.
11 In her work on vampire stories in central and east Africa, Luise White identifies—and argues for the importance of—“genres” with recognizable outlines, adaptable to local particularities and needs. See Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 6.
12 Helen Bradford, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 214. For the relationship between the UNIA and the ICU, see Bradford, Taste of Freedom, 126–27, 214–16; William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape, 1890–1930 (London: James Currey, 1987), 283; Robert Trent Vinson, “‘Sea Kaffirs’: ‘American Negroes’ and the Gospel of Garveyism in Early Twentieth-Century Cape Town,” Journal of African History 47, no. 2 (2006), 297–99. For links between the UNIA and ANC, see Vinson, Americans are Coming, 95–101; Hill and Pirio, “Africa for the Africans,” 231–36. For the Wellington movement, see Edgar, “Garveyism in Africa”; Vinson, Americans are Coming, 103–18. For the Israelites, see Robert Edgar, “The Prophet Motive: Enoch Mgijima, the Israelites, and the Background to the Bulhoek Massacre,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 15, no. 3 (1983): esp. 419–21; Robert Edgar, Because They Chose the Plan of God: The Story of the Bulhoek Massacre (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1988). For the prophetess Nontetha, see Robert R. Edgar and Hilary Sapire, African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000), 1–31; Clifton C. Crais, “Representation and the Politics of Identity in South Africa: An Eastern Cape Example,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (1992): 113–18.
13 Vinson, Americans are Coming, 103. For a detailed account of Garveyism in South West Africa, see Pirio, “Role of Garveyism,” 259–67. See also Zedekiah Ngavirue, “On Wearing the Victor’s Uniforms and Replacing their Churches: Southwest Africa (Namibia) 1920–1950,” in Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements, edited by G. W. Trompf (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), 396–99; Heinrich Vedder, “The Herero,” in The Native Tribes of South West Africa (Cape Town: Cape Times Limited, 1928), 163. The Marcus Garvey Papers extensively document Garveyite organizing work in the protectorate and the resulting rumors among the Herero. For examples of the former see MGP, 9:204, 9:279, 9:425, and 9:673–74. For examples of the latter, see MGP, 9:614–16, 9:666, 9:671, 1); 8–9, 10:720–26, and 10:732.
14 For the spread of rumors about black American liberators in Zambia, see Ewing, Age of Garvey, 176–85.
15 For examples of the first camp, see Damaso Feci, “Vie cache et vie publique de Simon Kimbangu selon la literature colonial et missionaire belge,” Les Cahiers du CEDAF 9–10 (1972): 1–83; Kimpianga Mahaniah, “The Presence of Black Americans in the Lower Congo from 1878 to 1921,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, edited by Joseph E. Harris 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993), 405–20; Susan Asch, L’Eglise du Prophète Kimbangu: De ses origines à son role actuel au Zaire (Paris: Karthala, 1983); Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, Kimbanguisme et Identité Noir (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004); Andersson, Messianic. For examples of the second, see Wyatt MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets: Religion in a Plural Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); Joel E. Tishken, “Prophecy and Power in Afro-Christian Churches: A Comparative Analysis of the Nazareth Baptist Church and the Église Kimbanguiste” (PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2002).
16 Joseph Fronczak, “Local People’s Global Politics: A Transnational History of the Hands Off Ethiopia Movement of 1935,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 2 (2015), 270 (italics removed from original).
17 The notion of diasporic practice is drawn from Kesha Fikes, “Diasporic Governmentality: On the Gendered Limits of Migrant Wage-Labour in Portugal,” Feminist Review 90 (2008), 50. See also Tina Campt, “The Crowded Space of Diaspora: Intercultural Address and the Tensions of Diasporic Relation,” Radical History Review 83 (Spring 2002): 94–113; Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
18 Brown, Dropping Anchor, 6.
19 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8.
20 Pan-Africanism was less an ideology than a historically conditioned social, cultural, and political field of meaning. Prescribing neither radicalism nor conservatism, neither boldness nor caution, neither separatism nor interracial cooperation, the pan-African tradition offered a building block of group identify formation. As historians Michael O. West and William Martin argue, the intellectual traditions of black internationalism generated a “potter’s clay” that might be molded and utilized in creative and unexpected ways. See Michael O. West and William G. Martin, “Contours of the Black International: From Toussaint to Tupac,” in From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution, edited by Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 11.
21 Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), 9–10, 16–20.
22 Yolanda Covington-Ward, Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism, and Everyday Performance in Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), especially chapter 2; Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, “Reading Black Identity: Kimbanguism and the Bible,” in Refractions of the Scriptural: Critical Orientations as Transgression, edited by Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Routledge, 2016), 139–48.
23 Luise White, “Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History,” History and Theory 39, no. 4 (2000): 11–22.
24 Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman helpfully define rumor as “a specific proposition for belief, passed along from person to person, usually by word of mouth, without secure standards of evidence being present.” See Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947), ix. The literature on rumor is deep, interdisciplinary, and geographically rich. For classic works see Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. Joan White (1932; New York: Vintage, 1973); Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966); Terry Ann Knopf, Rumors, Race and Riots (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1975); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Anand A. Yang, “A conversation of rumors: The language of popular ‘Mentalitès’ in late nineteenth-century Colonial India,” Journal of Social History 20, no. 3 (1987): 485–505; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For useful recent work, see Steven Hahn, “‘Extravagant Expectations’ of Freedom: Rumor, Political Struggle, and the Christmas Insurrection Scare of 1865 in the American South,” Past & Present 157, no. 1 (1997): 122–58; Veena Das, “Specificities: Official Narratives, Rumor, and the Social Production of Hate,” Social Identities 4, no. 1 (1998): 109–30; Luise White, “Telling More,” 11–22; Lauren Derby, “Beyond Fugitive Speech: Rumor and Affect in Caribbean History,” Small Axe 44, no. 2 (2014): 123–40.
25 Guhu, Elementary Aspects, 261. Barthes’s quote is lifted from Guha’s text.
26 Derby, “Beyond Fugitive Speech,” 131. Similarly, Luise White argues that studying the spread and reception of lies “allows us to read testimony as a social rather than an individual construction. Individuals speak from social worlds. This makes what they say fantastic evidence … but it is evidence that arises out of more than their personal experience.” White, “Telling More,” 16–17. Drawing on Robert A. Hill’s notion of “dread history,” Anthony Bogues calls for scholars to “shift our archives” to “grapple with the lived experiences of the Afro-Caribbean masses” by focusing attention not on “standard forms of historical production” but rather on what Kamau Brathwaite calls the “inner plantation”: “cores and kernels; resistant local forms; roots, stumps, survival rhythms growing points.” See Robert A. Hill, Dread History: Leonard P. Howell and Millenarian Visions in Early Rastafari Religion in Jamaica (Chicago: Research Associates School Times Publications/Frontline Distribution Int'l, Inc., 2001); Bogues, Black Heretics, 176–80; Kamau Braithwaite, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” Savcou 11/12 (1973): 1–11.
27 Terence Ranger, “Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa,” African Studies Review 29, no. 2 (1986): 17.
28 The most famous expression of this genre is Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1920).
29 H.F. Worley and C.G. Contee, “The Worley Report on the Pan-African Congress of 1919,” The Journal of Negro History 55, no. 2 (1970): 141; “Letter from ‘Dorn,’ Sierra Leone,” NW, 26 March 1921, 4; Ah Venn, “An African Letter,” NW, 21 Feb 1931, 4; R.L. Okonkwo, “The Garvey Movement in British West Africa,” Journal of African History 21, no. 1 (1980): 107.
30 School of Oriental and African Studies Archives, London, International Missionary Council/Committee of British Missionary Societies Papers (SOAS-IMC/CBMS), Calabar Missionary Correspondence, 1911–1923, Rev. J.K. Macgregor, Principal, Hope Waddell Training Institute, to J.H. Oldham, Calabar, 10 February 1923.
31 Buell, Native, 2:304; Marcel Olivier to Albert Sarraut, 1 August 1922, MGP, 9:550; Administrator of Douala District to Commissioner of France, 9 December 1923, MGP, 10:149; Schomburg Center, New York Public Library (SC-NYPL), J.R. Ralph Casimir Papers, Sc MG 110, Box 1, Folder 8, J.E. Casely Hayford to J.R. Ralph Casimir, 10 January 1925; SC-NYPL, John Edward Bruce Papers, Reel 1, Group A, Folder 7, H, 1-15, Hayford to John E. Bruce, 24 November 1923; “Intercepted Letter from John Henry Farmer to Randall,” 15 June 1922, MGP, 9:456; J. Ayodele Langley, Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900–1945 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 96.
32 SC-NYPL, John Edward Bruce Papers, Reel 1, Group A, Folder 7, H, 1-15, Fred W. Toote to John E. Bruce, 12 January 1922; “Speech by John Farmer and Toasts at Farewell Banquet for John Kamara,” MGP, 9:467–68; PRO, FO 115/2766, R.C.F. Maugham to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 17 August 1922; “Report on John Smith,” Dakar, 25 June 1924, MGP, 10:199.
33 SOAS-IMC/CBMS, Calabar Missionary Correspondence, 1911–1923, J.K. Macgregor to J.H. Oldham, 10 February 1923; “Letter from A.B. Bentinck Beckley, Minna, Northern Nigeria,” NW, 9 April 1923, 2; “Letter from Joshua Wilson, Zaria, Nigeria,” NW, 4 Feb. 1922, 3; PRO, CO 583/109, W.F. Gowers to Hon. Secretary to the Government, Lagos, 28 March 1922; Hughes, “Africa,” 117; Joyce Cary, The Case for African Freedom (London: Secker & Warburg, 1941), 16–17.
34 Surviving UNIA records indicate that between 1925–1927 West African divisions existed in Accra and Mampong (in the Ashanti region), Gold Coast; in Monrovia and Brewerville, Liberia, and in Freetown, Sierra Leone, which maintained two divisions. See “Divisions of the UNIA, 1925–1927,” Records of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Central Division, New York, 1918–1959, Box 2, a16 [microform]. Branches also existed in Lagos and Kano, Nigeria, and in Dakar and Rufisque, Senegal. For a report on the Lagos division, see PRO, CO 583/109, letter from G.H. Walker to Secretary, Southern Province, 29 March 1922. For Senegal, see Pierre Jean Henri Didelot to Governor-General of French West Africa, MGP, 9:501–11. See also “Article from African Messenger (Nigeria),” reprinted in NW, 30 Sept. 1922, 10; “Article from The Provincial Herald (Aba, Nigeria),” reprinted in NW, 7 Oct. 1922.
35 See, for example “Editorial in the Sierra Leone Weekly News,” 14 January 1922; “Editorial in the Gold Coast Leader,” 1 December 1923; “Article in Gold Coast Leader, 19 September 1925; “Frank H. Dawson to Times of Nigeria,” 28 June 1920; “Article in the West Africa Mail and Trade Gazette, Freetown,” 24 September 1921. All in MGP, 9:315; 10:134–35, 342, 718.
36 Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa, trans. A. Keep (New York: Africana Publishing Co., 1974), 275–78.
37 PRO, CO 554/54/1512, Supporting Speech by Hon. Casely Hayford, British West African Conference, March 1920; Langley, Pan-Africanism, 125-33. SC-NYPL, Bruce Papers, Reel 1, Group A, Folder 7, H, 1-15, Hayford to Bruce, 24 November 1923; SC-NYPL, J.R. Ralph Casimir Papers, Sc MG 110, Box 1, Folder 8, Hayford to Casimir, 10 January 1925.
38 Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey: An Autobiography (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1970), 31–35; Lieutenant Governor of Côte d’Ivoire to Martial-Henri Merlin, 4 Dec 1921, MGP, 9:251–56; Article from Cape Argus, 5 January 1923, reprinted in NW, 24 February 1923, 10.
39 BFMA, AF-1-17 (1884–1920), Lettre confidentielle du le Substitut, Colin, Lisala, à Monsieur le Procureur du Roi, 5 October 1920; BFMA, AI (A15) 1405 bis II/Q/3, Vice Governor General to the Minister of the Colonies, 2 August 1921, and Report by Governor General, 2 August 1921; BFMA, AA, AE/II No. 1375 (3240), “Not sur le mouvement Pan-Negre,” 1922; Martial-Henri Merlin, Governor-General of FWA, to Albert Sarraut, Minister of Colonies, Dakar, 27 July 1921; Enclosure: Jean Pourroy to Aujas, 17 June 1922; Pierre Jean Henri Didelot to Governor-General of French West Africa, Saint-Louis, 4 July 1922; “Article in Congo (Brussels),” April 1922. All in MGP, 9:111–12, 463, 501–11; 10:405.
40 Moulin to Henri Jaspar, in MGP, 10:30. On the “invasion” of skilled workers, see Martial-Henri Merlin, Governor-General of French West Africa, to Albert Sarraut, Minister of Colonies, Dakar, 27 July 1921, MGP, 9:111. For evidence of ongoing Garveyist penetration into the Belgian Congo, see BFMA, AF-1-17 (1921), letter from Cartier to Jaspar, 29 June 1921; PRO, CO 583/109, letter from G. Ashie-Nikoi, c/o S.A. des Huileries du Congo Belge to General Agent, Black Star Line, 18 February 1922; A. Earnsure Johnson, “The New Belgian Congo,” NW, 14 October 1922, 6.
41 Martial-Henri Merlin to Albert Sarraut, 27 July 1921; Lieutenant Governor of Côte d’Ivoire to Martial-Henri Merlin, 4 December 1921. Both in MGP, 9:111, 9:251–56.
42 “Minutes of the Inaugural Meeting of the Dakar UNIA Branch,” 7 May 1922; Wilfred A. Wilson et al., Rufisque UNIA Branch, to Secretary-General of the UNIA, 3 June 1922. Both in MGP, 9: 418, 442.
43 Enclosure: Speech by John Farmer and Toasts at Farewell Banquet for John Kamara, Rufisque, 24 May 1922, MGP, 9:466–68.
44 Letter from Pierre Jean Henri Didelot, Saint-Louis, to Gov-General of FWA, 4 July 1922, MGP, 9:501–11; PRO, FO 115/2766, R.C.F. Maugham to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 17 August 1922.
45 John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, eds., An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1974), 156. This passage was brought to my attention by Vumbi Yoka Mudimbe, Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 26.
46 For World War I in the Belgian Congo, see Jan Vansina, Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 142–45; David Van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People, trans. Sam Garrett (New York: Ecco [an imprint of HarperCollins], 2014), 131–39. For a useful survey of the impact of the war in Africa, see Melvin E. Page, ed., Africa and the First World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987).
47 For the story of the Congo Free State, see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). For a good summary of the trauma’s visited on the Lower Congo by during the first three decades of Belgian rule, see Covington-Ward, Gesture and Power, 78–80. MacGaffey is cited in this text.
48 Mudimbe, Parables and Fables, 5. For a discussion of the meaning and uses of “madness” in the colonial context, see Bogues, Black Heretics, 17–18, 157. For the “long conversation, see Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 Vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991–1997).
49 MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets, 103.
50 According to D. J. MacKay, Kimbangu “found the way of faith” in 1914 or 1915, and was baptized, with his wife, in July 1915. See MacKay, “Simon Kimbangu and the BMS Tradition,” Journal of Religion in Africa 17, no. 2 (1987), 124–25. See also MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets, 102–04; Mahaniah, “Presence,” 411–12.
51 For a detailed discussion of Kongo traditions of messianic renewal, the Pentecost of the Congo, and the relationship of both to Kimbanguism, see Wyatt MacGaffey, Custom and Government in the Lower Congo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 250–55.
52 MacGaffey, Custom, 252–55; MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets, 180; MacKay, “Simon Kimbangu,” 117–24.
53 Damaso Feci argues that nothing did more to shape the course of Kimbangu’s ministry before 1921 than his time working in Léopoldville. Feci, “Vie cachée,” 13.
54 At his trial, Kimbangu admitted to having a relationship with a black American while he was working in Léopoldville. See Jeanne Maquet-Tombu, Le Siècle marche; Vie du Chef congolais Lutunu, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Office de publicitÅ, 1952), 144.
55 The Congomen were, in the words of the Vice Governor General, “poisoned by Garveyism.” BFMA, AI (A15) 1405bis II/Q/3, Vice Governor General to Minister of the Colonies, 2 August 1921. See also M. W. Kodi, “The 1921 Pan-African Congress at Brussels: A Background to Belgian Pressures,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph E. Harris, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993), 276; Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History (London: Zed Books, 2002), 49.
56 BFMA, AI (A15) 1405 bis II/Q/3, Memo by Governor General, 39B, 2 August 1921; Lettres 2787 du 23.7.21 de CDD Moyen-Congo à Progou (Congo-Kasai), in Raymaekers and Desroche, L'Administration, 83–84; Mackay, “Simon Kimbangu,” 125, 149; Feci, “Vie cachée,” 29.
57 The most famous of these prophets was Kimpa Vita (Dona Beatriz). See Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, Kimbanguism: An African Understanding of the Bible, trans. Cécile Coquet-Mokoko (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017), 46–48. For a discussion of female prophetism during the precolonial period and during Kimbangu’s revival, see Yolanda Covington-Ward, “‘Your Name is Written in the Sky’: Unearthing the Stories of Kongo Female Prophets in Colonial Belgian Congo, 1921–1960,” Journal of Africana Religions, 2, no. 3 (2014): 317–46.
58 Covington-Ward, Gesture and Power, 11, 84, 93–94.
59 Account of Nyuvudi Paul, in Vellut, Simon, 67–85; Andersson, Messianic, 61; Lettres 2787 du 23.7.21 de CDD Moyen-Congo à Progou (Congo-Kasai), in Raymaekers and Desroche, L'Administration, 83–84.
60 F. Jodogne, “Le Mouvement Pan-Nègre,” reproduced in Zana Aziza Etambala, “Les missionnaires rédemptoristes face au mouvement Kimbanguiste: 1921–1925,” Bulletin de l'Institut historique belge de Rome LXIV (1994): 207; Buell, Native, 2: 604.
61 Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, “Reading Black Identity: Kimbanguism and the Bible,” in Refractions of the Scriptural: Critical Orientation as Transgression, edited by Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Routledge, 2016), 141–42.
62 This argument is convincingly developed in Mackay, “Simon Kimbangu,” 113–54. As Covington-Ward puts it, “If the Kongo people can receive visions and the Holy Spirit in thei bodies, and hear the voice of God themselves, what need do they have for European missionaries to interpret for them?” See Covington-Ward, Gesture and Power, 89.
63 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1970), 6.
64 George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Nyasaland Rising of 1915 (Blantyre: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Page, “Introduction,” and James K. Matthews, “Reluctant Allies: Nigerian Responses to Military Recruitment, 1914–1918,” in Africa and the First World War, 7, 100–02; Mahir Saul and Patrick Royer, West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001).
65 Vansina, Being Colonized, 264; Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), chapter 2.
66 “Strike Influenza,” The Messenger, November, 1920, 5; Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 4–13; Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 380–90.
67 Sir F. D. Lugard, “The Colour Problem,” Edinburgh Review 233, no. 476 (1921): 280–81. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins note that British policymakers, conceding that the status quo in South Asia could not hold, redoubled their energies in Africa with a “crusading zeal.” Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000, 2nd ed. (Harlow, England: Routledge, 2002), 406–07.
68 E. D. Morel, The Black Man’s Burden (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1920), 179–80. For an account of Morel’s leadership in the Congo Reform Association, see Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost.
69 For a discussion of postwar conceptions of imperialism among “liberal imperialists,” see Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 173–204.
70 For an analysis of the ways in which colonial authorities “invented” tribal hierarchies and authority in Africa, see Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
71 F. D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1922), 617.
72 Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 30–44, 238–40. For representative works of this genre, see Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color; Maurice Muret, Le crepuscule des nations blanches (The Twilight of the White Races) (Paris: Negro Universities Press, 1925); Basil Mathews, The Clash of Colour: A Study in the Problem of Race (New York: Edinburgh House Press, 1924).
73 Stoddard, Rising Tide of Color, vi; Warren G. Harding, “Address of the President of the United States at the Celebration of the Semicentennial Founding of the City of Birmingham, Alabama, October 26, 1921” (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1921), 6–8; Lugard, “The Colour Problem,” 283.
74 For a discussion of the establishment of “crustaceous borders” in the era of high nationalism, see Mae M. Ngai, “Nationalism, Immigration, Control, and the Ethnoracial Remapping of America in the 1920s,” OAH Magazine of History (July 2007), 12.
75 PRO, WO/106/259, Captain J.E. Phillips, “Africa for Africans and Pan-Islam,” 1917.
76 BFMA, AF-1-17 (1884-1920), Sir H. H. Johnston, “Our Rule in East Africa: A Grave Indictment,” Observer, 15 August 1920; Rudolf Asmis, “Africa—a World Problem,” NW, 18 March 1922, 4; “Strong Anti-White Wave Sweeps Continent of Africa,” NW, 15 April 1922, 3; A. H. Maloney, “The Heart of Africa is Throbbing—Throbbing with Revolt!” NW, 15 April 1922.
77 The Negro World was banned throughout French West Africa on January 14, 1922. It was banned in Nyasaland (Malawi) on March 24, Nigeria in June, the Gambia in September, and the Gold Coast in December, all in 1922. In Sierra Leone, the paper was “not absolutely prohibited” but “strictly controlled,” and only a few copies were allowed to circulate. In the Belgian Congo, officials were informally empowered to suppress Garveyite materials in mid-June 1921; the Negro World was officially suppressed in April 1922. See Robert A. Hill, “Introduction,” MGP, 9:xlviii; Pierre Jean Henri Didelot to Governor-General of FWA, 4 July 1922, MGP 9:510; PRO, CO 267/600/26912, Acting Governor, Sierra Leone, to Duke of Devonshire, 28 May 1923; Henri Jaspar to Louis Franck, 30 June 1921, MGP, 9:49–50; Report by Special Agent J.T. Fourney, 7 June 1921, MGP 3:459.
78 Hermann Norden, Fresh Tracks in the Belgian Congo: from the Uganda Border to the Mouth of the Congo (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1924), 64. Nancy Rose Hunt argues that the “nervous state” of the Belgian colonial enterprise can be rooted in the exigencies of post-atrocity governance. See Hunt, The Nervous State.
79 Garvey was joined in his enthusiasm for Stoddard’s “rising tide of color” thesis by other members of Harlem’s New Negro intelligentsia. After reading Stoddard’s book, Hubert Henry Harrison entered into a correspondence with Stoddard, congratulating him for identifying the crisis facing the white race with such clarity.
80 Examples of this rhetoric are too numerous to list, but see, for example: Negro World, August 1, 1925, 2; Negro World, March 19, 1927, 2; Negro World, Negro World, March 24, 1928, 2; Negro World, April 28, 1928, 2; Negro World, July 18, 1925, 2; Negro World, April 9, 1921, 10; Negro World, July 4, 1925, 7.
81 Rapport no. 322 du 17.5.21 de A.T. Thysville à CDD, in Raymaekers and Desroche, L’Administration, 51–55; BFMA, AI (A15) 1405 bis 11/Q/3, “Report on Kimbangu, 23 June 1921” (translation mine).
82 Andersson, Messianic, 63–64. For an account that explicitly reads Kimbangu’s arrest and subsequent persecution as a parallel to the trials of Jesus Christ, see Jules Chomé, La passion de Simon Kimbangu, 1921–1951 (Brussels: Les Amis de Présence africaine, 1959).
83 PRO, CO 536/138/10282, letter from A.T. Léon Morel to Reverend Lanyon Jennings, Kamba, 6 June 1921; Rev R. Lanyon Jennings to Mr. Wilson, BMS Wathen, 18 June 1921; Rev. George Thomas to A.J. Wallach, BMS Thysville, 27 July 1921; Mabwaaka Mpaka Gabriel, “A Prophet Dictates His Autobiography,” in An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire, edited by John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1974), 60.
84 PRO, CO 536/138/10282, letter from Rev. George Thomas to A. J. Wallach, 27 July 1921, and Rev. R. Lanyon Jennings to Monsieur Morel, L’Administrateur Territorial, Thysville, 25 July 1921; Lerrigo, “Africa,” 133; Lerrigo, Rock-Breaker, 92.
85 A. Brenez, “Soyons Fermes: Imposons le Respect du Blanc,” L’Avenir Colonial Belge, 14 August 1921, 1; PRO CO 536/138/10282, MacGregor to British Ambassador to Belgium, 21 November 1924; Maquet-Tombu, Le Siècle, 142–43. In English, the song reads: “The country, yes, the country will change, / It is true. / The apostles of this idea will rise, / On the day assigned by the Savior. . . . Let everyone shed the mourning cloth (indigo) / And take the white loincloth of joy! . . . In the hope that the whites will go away! / This is the last tax we pay!”
86 Mabie, a missionary for the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (ABFMS), is quoted in Covington-Ward, Gesture and Power, 104.
87 Belgian Foreign Ministry Archives, Brussels (BFMA), AI (A15) 1405 bis II/Q/3, Lettre de M. le Gouvenor-Général, (translation mine); Cecilia Irvine, “Birth,” 47. Livrets were work cards carried by Africans in the Belgian Congo that offered proof of “good standing.”
88 Rev. Thomas Moody, quoted in NW, October 27, 1923, 2.
89 J. Nyrén, “Bland skördemän i Kongo (1922),” in Simon Kimbangu 1921: de Predication a la Deportation: Les Sources, edited by Jean-Luc Vellut (Brussels: Academie Royale des Sciences D'Outre-Mer, 2005), 98; Rapports 165 et 171 du 19 et 20.6.21 de A.T. Luozi à CDD Boma, in Raymaekers and Desroche, eds., L'Administration et le Sacré, 69; Gampiot, Kimbanguisme, 61.
90 Recorded by F. Jodogne and quoted in “Le Mouvement Pan-Nègre,” in Etambala, “Les missionnaires rédemptoristes face au mouvement Kimbanguiste,” 204. I have translated the chant into English.
91 A. Walder, “Ngunzarörelsen i Kongo (1922),” in Simon Kimbangu 1921: de Predication a la Deportation: Les Sources, edited by Jean-Luc Vellut (Brussels: Academie Royale des Sciences D'Outre-Mer, 2005), 104; Maquet-Tombu, Le Siècle, 141.
92 Some reports suggest that as his revival expanded, as the expectations of his followers grew, and as Belgian authorities moved to suppress his nascent movement, Kimbangu himself began invoking the prophecy of American liberation. A Luozi, in June, a clerk in the administrative service, reported Kimbangu publicly declaring, “for many years the Belgians have been our leaders and have done nothing for us, but soon the Americans will arrive to make war with the Belgians and become our leaders.” In September, the Chief of Kingoi claimed that Kimbangu told him that even hundreds of arrests would not halt the movement because the Americans were coming. See Report by A.T./Luozi, 13 June 1921 (translation mine); Report by A.T./Luozi, 3 September 1921. Both cited in Irvine, “Birth,” 43, 53. The Congolese sociologist and son of a Kimbanguist pastor, Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, reports that Kimbangu did prophesize the return of black Americans in the course of African liberation. See Gampiot, “Reading Black Identity,” 144.
93 BFMA, AI (A15) 1405 bis II/Q/3, Lettre de M. le Gouvenor-Général, 23 June 1921; Irvine, “Birth,” 43; W. Reynolds, interview with Efraim Andersson, quoted in Andersson, Messianic, 254.
94 “The Slave Trade,” in An Anthology of Kongo Religion, 38–39; Wyatt MacGaffey, “Kongo and the King of the Americans,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 6, no. 2 (1968): 172–74; Mackay, “Simon Kimbangu,” 117–18, 138–44.
95 MacGaffey, “Kongo,” 177; Macquet-Tombu, Le Siècle, 148; Buell, Native, 2:603; Kodi, “The 1921 Pan-African Congress,” 278–79.
96 Buell, Native, 2:604.
97 Andersson, Messianic Popular Movements, 67.
98 Macgregor to British Ambassador to Belgium, 6 August 1925, PRO, CO 536/138/41490; Andersson, Messianic, 68–70.
99 Letter from the Governor General, 33B, 12 July 1921, BFMA, AI (A15) 1405 bis II/Q/3; Norden, Fresh Tracks, 148.
100 In October 1921, Garvey cited the agitation in the Belgian Congo as an example of the impact that the “tutelage” of Garveyist organizing was reaping in Africa. See “Transcript of a Speech by Marcus Garvey at Liberty Hall,” NW, October 29, 1921, 2. Mary Rolinson similarly notes the manner in the needs and exigencies of organizing in the American South transformed the politics and rhetoric of the UNIA. See Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The UNIA in the Rural South, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 15.
101 Marcus Garvey at Liberty Hall, NW, 14 April 1923, 2.
102 Report of Speech by Ernest Wallace, 23 December 1925, MGP, 10:351–52.
103 Marcus Garvey, “The Silent Work That Must Be Done,” 16 November 1924, MGP, 6:42–46.
104 Marcus Garvey at Liberty Hall, NW, 14 April 1923, 2; Marcus Garvey at Liberty Hall, NW, 17 March 1923, 1.
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Adam Ewing
Adam Ewing is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics. He is currently working on a global history of pan-Africanism.