Deep Thought : Structure / and Intention / in Kongo / Prophetism , / 1910 - 1921

In 1963, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I wrote a master's thesis on the antecedents of 1921 Kongo prophetism (ngunzisme, after the KiKongo for prophet, ngunza; "Kimbanguism," after the name of the most prominentfprophet, Simon Kimbangu). The thesis pieced together accounts of traditional and new urban cults which sought, through purification and initiation, to fashion an institutional reality capable of dealing with the exigencies of early co­ lonialism of the 1880-1920 era. The thesis was not very suc­ cessful because available sources could not document con­ scious continuity from traditional cultic activity to the dramatic messianism of the prophets, who healed the sick, smashed sacred medicines, cleaned cemeteries, raised the dead, and advocated worship of the one true God. Scholarly writers had forwarded the standard causal explanations for Kimbanguism: economic dislocation,1 "the total fact of colonialism,"2 detailed individual actions of principal figures during the 1921 events,3