02 novembre 2007
The Holy Bible has eaten the soul of my nation from the inside and left it an empty and stinking shell
At Congo’s independence in 1960, Mircea Eliade, the expert
on myths and religion, had this anecdote to comment about the way Congolese
people lived the event, or rather turned it into a cargo cult, in the opening
pages of his book “Myth and Reality”: “In
some villages the inhabitants tore the roofs off their huts to give passage to
the gold coins that their ancestors were to rain down. Everything was allowed
to go to rack and ruin except the roads to the cemetery, by which the ancestors
would make their way to the village. Even the orgiastic excesses had a meaning,
for, according to the myth, from the dawn of the New Age all women would belong
to all men.” He then went on to add: “We
may suppose that “mythical behavior” will disappear as a result of the former
colonies’ acquiring political independence.”
Eliade couldn’t have been more wrong. With political
independence now in its 47th year, a far more nefarious myth has now bugged the
soul of the Congolese nation: The Holy Bible and the vicious fundamentalists
totting it everywhere, even in market places and in packed and stifling “taxis-buses.”
After more than fifteen years of absence from the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC), my homeland, I started going back there on a
regular basis in 2003, and even living in the capital city of Kinshasa for half
of the year since then. This experience was not so much a narrative of
non-return than a cultural turbulence of reentry. For instance, during the
Congolese presidential electoral campaign in July 2006, watching television one
night, I was mystified to watch and hear a pastor who was being interviewed
exclaim: “This is a special country and a
special people: God had prophesied on this land and its people! Politicians
better watch out.” Asking people around me what he meant by that
admonition, they advised with condescension that I read Isaiah 18. And I, for
one, was among those who used to claim: “No
one reads anymore in the Congo."I meant by this aphorism that the practice and performance of literature as
experienced in the West has all but disappeared in the country. But I was
discovering that night that I needed to amend that aphorism as follows: Congo“The one book being read and misread in the is The
Holy Bible.”
Consider this other instance: On another one of my stays in
All this galore could have been great materials for comic relief had it not also parasitized the political arena!
In February 2006, after years of dictatorship and more years
of the bloodiest war in Africa dubbed “
On August 17, 2006, as the country was awaiting the
publication of the results of the first turn of the presidential elections, the
“communications” people of Jean-Pierre Bemba, the most formidable contender to
the incumbent president Joseph Kabila, produced a narrative of the country on
their party-owned television network “Canal Congo TV” (CCTV). They brought on
the set this young “prophet” who “had a dream” on the outcome of the elections.
Strangely, the text of the Congolese prophet was the very text of the dream of
another prophet: Daniel (2:31-45).
“Show me the dream and its interpretation” (6) were the
threatening words Nebuchadnezzar had thrown at the “magicians,” “enchanters,”
and “sorcerers” of Babylon who were put to the ordeal of finding
out not only the king’s disturbing dream but its interpretation as well. The
biblical narrative goes on to say that “the
mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision of the night” by God (19), thus
saving those “wise men” from
destruction by unveiling Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and its interpretation to
Daniel as the narrative of the Babylonian kingdom: the famous messianic “Dream
of the Golden Image.” Duplicating Daniel’s process, the Congolese television
prophet likewise had a nightly vision too, in which God allowed him to crack
open the unfolding mystery of Congo’s
future.
According to the Congolese television prophet, Nebuchadnezzar’s dream as pertaining to the Congolese situation was to be interpreted as a narrative in six installments:
1. The “head of [the] image” in “fine gold” represents the Belgian colonial regime, as gold is associated with a monarch’s crown;
2. The “breast and
arms of silver” represented the administration of
3. Mobutu’s brutal regime was the image’s “belly and thighs of bronze”;
4. The regime of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the assassinated father of the incumbent, was the image’s “legs of iron”;
5. The transitional government led by the incumbent Joseph
Kabila was the image’s “feet partly of
iron and partly of clay”;
6. The regime that was about to unfold in the wake of the
presidential elections will be Jean-Pierre Bemba’s upcoming regime of “stone” (the French word “pierre” (stone) having been extracted
from Bemba’s first name and conflated with the biblical “stone” which, according to verse 34, was set to shatter the image’s
legs: “As you [Nebuchadnezzar] looked, a
stone was cut out by no human hand, and it smote the image on its feet of iron
and clay, and broke them in pieces[.]” The Congolese prophet, however,
doesn’t stop there. Contradicting himself, he then equates the stone, which he
had previously conflated with the person of Bemba, with the Congo, “the
stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth”
(35).
Congolese street and television preachers have a built-in
disclaimer in their prophetic dithyrambs. The television prophet who made these
predictions about a month prior to the runoff elections couched his disclaimer
as follows: if you choose the incumbent despite these dire warnings, everything
he does will be doomed to fail as he is already doomed by the Good Book. The
incumbent did win at long last (with 58%), but to some Congolese who voted for
Jean-Pierre Bemba, who obtained 42% in the runoff elections, the new
democratically-elected president’s administration is doomed by God Almighty as
he might have stolen the elections through black magic or by a devilish
conspiracy with the international community that claimed the elections fair and
square!
Not to be outdone in the religious realm, the incumbent’s camp circulated its own prophecy, which even found its way on the official website of Congo’s President, authored by his official editorialist, Marcel Nzazi Mabidi, who had furbished his pen under Mobutu with his magic realist lyrical praises to the Zairian dictator.
There’s a national “Jesus Christ” in the Congo: Simon Kimbangu (1887-1951); and a “New Jerusalem,” the city of N’Kamba, in the Bas-Congo
Prophet Simon Kimbangu, a catechist, had turned into a
political and religious leader in the early 1920s, a change that made him the
enemy of the colonial state number one. He was swiftly deported into another
province where he died in internal exile under Belgian rule in 1951. Unlike
Daniel, Kimbangu didn’t write prophecies but he’s alleged to have left a
“word-of-mouth” corpus of prophecies that his family and his followers have
used to set up one of the most successful money-making churches in Central Africa, spanning multiple countries, complete
with radio and television stations in Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville, as
well as schools and one university. And still unlike Daniel, Kimbangu is today
a messiah, God’s “Special Envoy” as
the Kimbaguists call him in the full name of their church, the ECSK---“Eglise du Christ au Congo par l’Envoyé
Spécial de Dieu Simon Kimbangu” (the Church of Christ in the Congo by God’s
Special Envoy Simon Kimbangu).
Here’s Kimbangu’s prophecy, as captured by Marcel Nzazi
Mabidi:
"Congo will one
day be independent. For 40 years the country will go through chaos and will
experience daunting difficulties and sufferings of every kind. Then good
fortune will come. The country will first be led by a sheep (Joseph Kasavubu,
the first president). That man will be a native of the province where I was
born.
The country will then
be led by a wild beast (Mobutu) who will come to cast aside the sheep. During
the rule of the wild beast marked by terror, the country will be ransacked.
Money will be lacking in the country. Even banks will be empty.
Then a man will come,
a meteor, a native of the province where I will die (Laurent-Désiré Kabila).
His rule will be very short. His main role will be to chase the wild beast from
power.
Then someone will
come, a young wise man (Joseph Kabila). It’s him that will save this country
and bring to the people true independence.”
To really understand that this country has lost its marbles,
we have to turn back to Isaiah 18, which now passes as the foundational text of
the Congolese “imagined community.”
Even the most seemingly rational Congolese read in Chapter 18 of the Book of Isaiah the prophecy that confirms their narrative as the Lord’s chosen ones, beside the people of modern-day Israel, especially the first verse of this chapter that has the prophet relaying God’s message intimating to a nation “which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia” to
“Go, you swift
messengers,
to a nation, tall and
smooth,
to a people feared
near and far,
a nation mighty and conquering
whose land the rivers
divide.”
A very twisted reading indeed, for if there was in the
African Great Lakes a nation of “tall”
people, it would be the Tutsi Rwandans, the archenemies of the Congolese. When
all this happened, I don’t have a clue. But The
Holy Bible had effectively done its damage…and today most Congolese live
with the expectation that Armageddon---and the ensuing high---might strike
anytime!
This article was first published on "OpedNews" under the same title.
Commentaires
that's very true
pls this very true ,as a congoles .i want you guys to send me more of kimbangu prophecies and messages,miracles through this email
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