54 On the Protestant secular in the United States, see Fessenden, Tracy, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. 69 Memorandum to the Colonial Minister (English translation), 27 Apr. Several Belgian colonial policies sowed the seeds of racial and ethnic rivalries that led to the killings of millions of Africans and also sent millions more into exile from the former Belgian colonies. The rest of the population practice traditional African Religion or atheism. Since 1878, when the first Protestant missionaries (Baptists) arrived, their numbers grew impressively to 2,000 (some 1,200 of them Americans), plus 5,500 Roman Catholics. Translation by the authors. He warned that Protestants taught the dangerous idea that “the individual liberty of the natives must be respected” (La liberté personnelle des indigenes doit être respectée) and that they should have the freedom to assemble and build churches and schools. General elections were held in the Belgian Congo on 22 May 1960, in order to create a government to rule the country following independence as the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Léopoldville), scheduled for 30 June. 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2016.0013; and Klose, Fabian, ed., The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas and Practice from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. They placed the Congolese in the role of the early Christians, persecuted not by the Roman Empire but instead by the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote 67 The memorandum walked a fine line to expose the injustices faced by Protestants while exonerating the colonial government. 14 C. H. Harvey, “Recollections of Twenty-Five Years: Beginnings of the Training School,” Baptist Missionary Magazine (Sept. 1909): 319; Kevin Grant, Civilised Savagery. After the war, these missionary ideals and interests helped shape the new global order that emerged through the League of Nations and the treaties negotiated at Versailles in 1919. While they had not always agreed with Lippens, the Protestants were sorry to see him go. A similar dynamic played out in the CPC as Congolese Protestants, frustrated by their marginal position in the council, formed their own national ecumenical organization in 1946, L'Association des Amis des Missions Protestantes du Congo (AMIPRO). But Belgian authorities claimed fidelity to international law and to their own guarantees of religious freedom because, in their eyes, any group that undermined or directly challenged the legitimacy of colonial rule was not real religion at all. Instead the legacy of colonial Belgium … Building on that work, we focus on the interwar debates among missionaries in the Congo to show how humanitarian discourses of religious freedom could subtly reconfigure colonial models of church and state.Footnote 6. for this article. Neither approach took African interests seriously. For more on the expansion of Catholic privileges in this period, see Kabongo-Mbaya, L’Église Du Christ Au Zaïre, 42–43. In service of these aims, they clearly located themselves as “religious” actors, safely away from the dangerous realms of the “political.” Thus the exigencies of colonialism shaped the scope of the religious in the Belgian Congo. It was established by the Belgian parliament to replace the previous, privately owned Congo Free State, after international outrage over abuses there brought pressure for supervision and accountability. The 635-pound ape died there in 1944. Roman Catholicism is the most widely practiced form of Christianity with over 33% of the total population adhering to its beliefs and teachings. Belgian Catholic missionary churches, schools, and hospitals insulated the Congolese people from subversive influences, they believed, and fostered their loyalty to Belgium. To give their protests any hope of succeeding, the missionaries stressed their underlying loyalty to Belgian rule. 29 Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America and Cavert, Samuel McCrea, The Churches Allied for Common Tasks: Report of the Third Quadrennium of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 1916–1920 (New York: Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 1921), 252Google Scholar. This essay describes a religious freedom controversy that developed between the world wars in the Belgian colony of the Congo, where Protestant missionaries complained that Catholic priests were abusing Congolese Protestants and that the Belgian government favored the Catholics. Imperial exigencies and imperatives shaped these competing secularisms—and they operated dialectically together to bolster Belgian rule.Footnote 54. Creative hobbies. British and American activists created Congo Reform Associations to lobby their governments to politically pressure the Belgian king. Sudanball. 58 de Hemptinne, M., “La Politique des Missions Protestantes au Congo” (Elisabethville 1929)Google Scholar, Missionary Research Library Pamphlets, UTS (hereafter, MRL Pamphlets, UTS). The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has a long and complicated history with Belgium. 41 Congo Missionary Conference: A Report of the Eighth Congo General Conference of Protestant Missionaries, Held at Bolenge, District de l'Equateur, Congo, Belge, October 29–November 7, 1921 (Haut Congo, Congo Belge: Baptist Mission Press, 1921), 201. 62 CPC Meeting Minutes, 13–19 Feb. 1931, Records of the Conseil Protestant du Congo, HR006, Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library, New Haven (hereafter, CPC Records, Yale). The ecumenical Congo Protestant Council called for a firm separation of church and state to defend the legitimacy of their schools, hospitals, and other institutions as well as their own rights and those of Congolese Protestants. 1923): 2. "hasAccess": "1", The first nationwide Congolese political party, the Congo National Movement, was launched in 1958 by Patrice Lumumba and other Congolese leaders. On dominant cultural representations of African and African American religion as embodied and emotional, see Evans, Curtis J., The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Medal chiefs owed their authority more to colonial officials than to local communities, and a chief's efforts to assert local autonomy and build cultural cohesion could fade easily into corruption and personal gain. This deliberately “moderate statement” toned down their critiques by presenting fewer examples of “Roman persecution” and de-emphasizing any charges against colonial authorities.Footnote 64 It reiterated ongoing Protestant demands for government neutrality toward Protestants and Catholics, arguing that it made no sense for the government to favor Catholic schools and hospitals when Protestant missions had been the first to establish such institutions in the Congo, and had never discriminated based on “religion or nationality” as Catholic institutions often did. First on the list of the protections guaranteed to colonial subjects was the “freedom of conscience or religion, subject only to the maintenance of public order and morals.”Footnote 28 The U.S. Federal Council of Churches, which sent several representatives to Versailles, had advocated for this provision in hopes of safeguarding “the interests of foreign missions, particularly in colonial territories that were the subject of discussion” at the conference.Footnote 29 Thus the complaints of Protestant missionaries like those in the Congo had filtered up through the FCC into the negotiations at Versailles to ensure that religious freedom would once again appear prominently among the protections guaranteed to colonial subjects under international law. The Catholic Party, which held the balance of power between the two world wars, exploited the suspicions of Protestant missions to strengthen its own position. When prophetic movements like Kimbanguism or Vandism broke away from the mission churches, or when Congolese Baptists declared themselves independent from missionary rule, they rejected not only missionary authority but also colonial models of political secularism that had isolated the issues of religious freedom and church-state relations from the struggle against colonial rule. On the Protestant secular in U.S. imperialism, see Wenger, Religious Freedom, especially chapters two and three. Doc. Violent altercations between Belgian forces and the Congolese also occurred later that year, and Belgium, which previously maintained that independence for the Congo would not be possible in the immediate future, suddenly capitulated and began making arrangements for the Congo’s independence. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the primary role of the Church, both in religion and education, was to promote colonialism. When missionaries asked Belgian officials to honor the principles of “native liberty” and religious neutrality, they invariably explained that this policy would be fully consistent with Belgian law and the best impulses of the Belgian people. Colonial officials viewed Kimbanguism as part of a continent-wide revolt against Europeans; in Catholic eyes it proved how dangerous Protestant influence could be. As in other colonial contexts, identifying and executing witches could become a way to purify the community by purging those, especially women, who seemed to threaten a desired or anticipated order. Yes No Search in all … Some missionaries accepted this organization as a healthy move toward African leadership in the churches; others feared AMIPRO would threaten the tentative acceptance they had gained from the colonial government. Both forced labor and high taxes continued the horrors of Leopold. But, at least in these negotiations with colonial officials, the CPC maintained its faith in the humanitarian need for European rule. Congolese demands for leadership in the churches had corresponded to and arguably helped foster the national independence movement. Catholic missionaries bolstered this image with an expanding network of colonial schools that taught the virtues of piety and submission to authority. Congo - Kinshasa - Belgian Congo. Yet by the 1950s and 1960s, many missionaries actively supported anti-colonial movements around the world. In “The Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad, “darkness” is relevant throughout the text. 35 Kalu, Ogbu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The presiding judge at his trial charged that Kimbangu had labeled “the Whites, your benefactors, as abominable enemies” and initiated “an uprising against the colonial government.” Against the wishes of Governor-General Maurice Lippens, but in keeping with Protestant missionary requests, the Belgian monarch commuted Kimbangu's sentence to life in prison in Elisabethville, where he died three decades later. Accused at his trial of prophesying that “the White man shall become black and the Black man shall become white,” Kimbangu insisted that this prophecy could not be taken literally and that “God [would] reveal its meaning later, when the time has come.” At his trial he insisted that he had not incited the people to violence, but only followed Christ's mission “of proclaiming the news of eternal salvation to my people.” The good news of the gospel, however, shifted easily into the good news of liberation from colonial rule.Footnote 39 Prophetic movements in colonial contexts around the world had often brought messages of liberation, in this world and in prophesied worlds to come. The statement went on to urge all native Christians to repudiate the errors of Kimbanguism and expressed “deep sympathy” for those missions that had suffered “calumnious attacks,” either from Congolese people who blamed them for turning on the movement or from government officials who considered them responsible for it. The country that began as a king’s private domain (the Congo Free State), evolved into a colony (the Belgian Congo), became independent in 1960 (as the Republic of the Congo), and later underwent several name changes (to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then to Zaire, and back again to the Democratic Republic of the Congo) is the product of a complex pattern of historical forces. “Witchcraft” was a colonial discourse as well as an indigenous category. The official Belgian attitude was paternalism: Africans were to be cared for and trained as if they were children. Missionaries and their allies dissociated themselves from this new movement and its witchcraft accusations and executions. "subject": true, BELGIAN CONGO Flowers 1952-53 10C 15 C20 25 C40 50 C60 75 1 FR1.25 1.50 FR2 3 4FR 5 6.50 FR7 8 10FR 20FR 50 FR100. View all Google Scholar citations 18 Laqua, Daniel, The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1889–1930: Peace, Progress, and Prestige (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 82–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Belgian Empireball. In response, Belgian authorities and Catholic missionaries elaborated a church-state arrangement that limited “foreign” missions in the name of Belgian national unity. Even in rejecting these demands, government officials constantly stressed their fidelity to the ideal of religious freedom and other principles of international law. 63 Emory Ross to Governor General, 18 July 1932, box 289, IMC-CBMS, SOAS. The title of an article in the Flemish De Standaard, “A Politico-Religious Danger: Protestantism in the Congo,” said it all.Footnote 47, This challenged already anxious Protestant missionaries, and they responded differently than they had to the Prophet Movement. That pressure was instead coming from Africans themselves. 2010)Google Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.0.0102. Because political associations were prohibited at the time, reformers organized into cultural clubs such as Abako, a Bakongo association formed in 1950. Members of both Catholic and Protestant lay associations, including AMIPRO, were active in the anti-colonial struggle and took key government positions in the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo.Footnote 79 Congolese Christians took full advantage of the educational and leadership opportunities that church affiliation provided under the colonial system. On the broader debate over indigenization, see Hutchison, William R., Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Robert, Dana Lee, ed., Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Thirty years earlier, British and U.S. Protestants had helped publicize the systemic violence used against Congolese laborers by the rubber concessionaries and the colony's military police, the Force Publique. 37 “L'Avenir Colonial, dans un article … écrit que le Kimbanguisme n'est autre que le garvéyisme ou le movement hostile surtout aux Belges. Africans worked the mines and plantations as indentured labourers on four- to seven-year contracts, in accordance with a law passed in Belgium in 1922. La participation du Congo belge (aujourdhui la République démocratique du Congo) à la Seconde Guerre mondiale commença avec l'invasion allemande de la Belgique en mai 1940. Economically, the Congo provided much-needed raw materials such as copper and rubber to the … The government paid the salaries of its doctors and nurses and granted it permission to build new clinics and hospitals, even in locales already serviced by Protestant institutions.Footnote 55 Meanwhile, a newly ambitious program of “Belgicization” focused on educational reforms in the “national” schools, which were invariably Catholic. As the CCC saw it, if native Congolese leaders and traditions remained in place, then the people of the Congo were not being “civilized.” By advocating new limits on the already circumscribed authority of Congolese leaders, they threatened to expand the reach of colonial control.Footnote 27. The authors emphasize the role intermediaries such as catechists or medical assistants played in … 1 The one British Catholic mission in the Belgian Congo was also considered a “national” mission, indicating the degree to which the distinction of national versus foreign matched sectarian divisions. 23 A Report of the Seventh General Conference of Missionaries of the Protestant Missionary Societies Working in Congo, Held at Luebo, Kasai, Congo Belge, February 21–March 2, 1918 (Bololo, Haut Congo, Congo Belge: “Hannah Wade” Printing Press, 1918), 11, 115–16, 147–48. 8 The vast literature on missions and imperialism includes Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonization, and Consciousness in South Africa, vol. The government crackdown on the Prophet Movement heightened sectarian conflicts, emboldened Catholic leaders, and once again forced the Protestant missions to reinforce their loyalty to the regime. His escort of soldiers shot into the crowd, killing a woman and a child, and several of the arresting soldiers sustained stab wounds. Under the system of “priestcraft,” one missionary claimed at the 1909 CCC conference, “the Rosary was [simply] taking the place of Fetichism [sic].” Missionaries also invoked racist stereotypes of African passivity and naiveté, depicting the Congolese people as innocent savages who easily fell prey to priestly deceits.Footnote 21 Kabongo-Mbaya has argued that Congolese Protestants in this period rejected denominational distinctions and emerged with a sense of essential unity that would later inform the anti-colonial movement for independence.Footnote 22 Missionary ecumenism was more strategic and geared towards the survival of the missions. 65 Memorandum to the Colonial Minister (English translation), 27 Apr. Even after the Congo Free State was abolished and an official Belgian colony was established, in 1906, the atrocities continued, including the … Subscriber content preview. Religion. Technical. Malgré la capitulation de la Belgique, le Congo resta dans le conflit aux côtés des Alliés, et fut administré par le gouvernement belge en exil, et fournit des matières premières indispensables, notamment de l'or et de l'uranium, à la Grande-Bretagne et au… CPC committees convened in 1930 and 1931 gathered two kinds of evidence: documentation of favoritism toward Catholic institutions and accounts of physical violence and discrimination against Congolese Protestants.Footnote 62 Yet again, they invoked the language of “native rights” and “native liberties” not to protest colonialism, a move that would have ensured their failure, but instead to secure their own position as partners in Belgium's civilizing mission. Laisser prier ce mouvement, c'est laisser s'organiser ce mouvement hostile, c'est permettre la propaganda, c'est livrer tout le pays au Kibangisme.” Quoted in Augustin Bita Lihun Nzundu, Missions Catholiques et Protestantes Face Au Colonialisme et Aux Aspirations Du Peuple Autochtone à l'autonomie et à l'indépendance Politique Au Congo Belge (1908–1960): Effort de Synthèse (Roma: Pontificia Università gregoriana, 2013), 421. 60 CPC Circular reporting on London Conference held on 7 July 1932, box 289, IMC-CBMS,.... On our websites eyes it proved how dangerous Protestant influence could be used by from! It also became eligible for government subsidies mit cependant en lumière le potentiel d ’ une évolution plus par..., there was a colonial discourse as well as an attribute of modern governance and a chief humanitarian concern that. Bakongo association formed in 1950 located neatly within the sphere of religion what they as... 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