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Simon Kimbangu was an infant when he received a blessing from a Protestant missionary and nearly 30 when he heard the divine call: "I am Christ. My servants are unfaithful. I have chosen you to bear witness before your brethren and to convert them. Tend my flock."

"I am not trained," he argued, though he had been schooled at a Baptist mission, "and there are ministers and deacons who are able to serve in this way." He fled his village to toil in distant oil fields, but the call hounded him.

Finally, he returned home to preach the Word. Women gave up their pagan fetishes. Men gave up all but one of their wives. Then in 1921 the healings began. A sick woman got out of her bed and walked. A dead child was reportedly raised to life. And a blind man named Ngoma regained his sight after the prophet daubed his eyes with paste made of soil and saliva.

Soon thousands of people left their jobs and flocked to N'Kamba in Central Africa to see the Holy Spirit's power and hear the prophet. Missionaries resisted his efforts. One charged the prophet with unforgivable sins against Caucasian Christianity: "Kimbangu wants to found a religion which is in accord with the mentality of the African."

Since there were no provisions for stoning native heretics, officials did the next best thing. They punished the prophet with 120 lashes and packed him off to a solitary cell in a far-off prison. They hoped that would take care of the "crackbrained" Simon Kimbangu and the gullible fanatics who followed him. But they were mistaken.

Simon Kimbangu was born in 1889, into a Central Africa already changed by the long presence of white foreigners spreading their often-conflicting notions of God, civilization, race, and commerce. Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao was looking for a route to India when he sailed into the Kongo River in 1482. Catholic missionaries arrived a decade later, and while they baptized kings and chieftains who imposed Christianity on their people, their success was superficial—the gods of ancient ancestors continued to reign supreme.

When Protestant missionaries began to arrive in the 1870s, they found a popular pagan piety lightly embellished with Christian touches, including a belief that crosses conveyed magical powers. Among these newcomers were British Baptists energized by England's evangelical revival. These came to Africa to save souls and fight the slave trade, but they nurtured a paternalistic and patronizing attitude toward the native people, viewing them as depraved children who needed the white man's correctives.

It was to a school run by these Baptists that Kimbangu's aunt took the young man when his parents died. He stayed at the British Baptist Missionary Society school and mission at Ngombee Lutete for many years. He was baptized with his wife at the mission in 1915 and became a lay preacher and evangelist there in 1918. It was also at the mission that he began experiencing the visions that would change his life.

The Kimbanguist church traces its beginnings to April 6, 1921, the day Kimbangu healed a sick woman. His fame spread from that day, and soon a movement formed around him. It did not take long for white religious leaders and colonial government officials to notice Kimbangu and his followers. They moved swiftly and forcefully to clamp down on a movement that they suspected taught unorthodox theology, and that they feared would cause declining attendance at other churches, labor stoppages, social disruption, and possibly even rebellion.

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