Simon Kimbangu’s Transcendental Nationalism

A nationalism beyond colonial geography

Although fundamentally religious, Kimbanguism acquired a nationalist dimension from its beginnings, but one distinct from other forms of African nationalism. It may be called transcendental because it never allowed itself to be confined within the borders of colonial geography.

Although founded on the Bible and Christianity, Simon Kimbangu’s discourse quickly appeared dangerous to the Belgian, Portuguese in Angola and French in Congo-Brazzaville colonial administrations. It could be reproduced and applied literally in other African countries under colonial rule.

The circulation of an emancipatory teaching

The transcendental nationalism of Kimbanguism is clear in its spiritual teachings and in the active proselytism of its disciples. The Belgian colonial administration made the mistake of banishing them to inland regions, where they widely spread the master’s teaching.

Spiritual and political autonomy is an illusion

By linking the spiritual and the political, Kimbanguism broke with Augustine’s Catholic doctrine of the two cities. The dualism of two spheres or kingdoms is merged into a monism of the reversed kingdom. For Kimbangu there is not a kingdom of God apart from the earthly kingdom, but one continuous kingdom in which the struggle to reverse the existing order unfolds, in accordance with what he regarded as God’s original plan, overturned by the white man during the conquest of Africa.

The task is not to endure domination while waiting for redemption in another world, but to evade and exhaust the forces of the dominant power. Redemption occurs in this same world: it preserves the world’s elements and simply reverses their order.

Faith, knowledge and the reversal of power

Faith is not an abstract act detached from geography. It is an inner knowledge of a concrete future realised when ‘Black people become the Whites’—the dominant—and ‘Whites become the Blacks’—the dominated.

This dialectic of reversed poles prevents Kimbanguism from being reduced to a religious movement. It gives it the scope of a global thought in which the bond between the spiritual and political is important without exhausting its meaning.

Thought joined to action

Kimbangu preached the need to know how to read and understand, to distinguish a work from a text, commentary from explanation, and to judge the text’s relevance to its historical context. He called on each person to use reason in reading, and also taught the necessary union of thought and action, community solidarity and the cardinal virtues.

He thereby offered Africa an immense field of thought and an array of means for freeing itself from asymmetrical relations with the forces dominating it. The project is for Africa to restore the natural order of things by recovering control of its destiny.