54 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
region) expatriates concentrated in the suburbs of Leopoldville,
namely the Quartier Indigène (Indigenous Neighbourhood) of the
city. Likewise, other ethnicities and international expatriate com-
munities concentrated around this urbanized portion around the
river Congo.^9
Thus, Leopoldville was everything but a restful city in the
1940s. In fact, many political and religious movements were be-
coming increasingly present in the local public scene, engaging
progressively in the contestation of the colonial regime culminat-
ing in the Congolese independence in 1960. Political associations
such as Joseph Kasa-Vubu’s ABAKO (Alliance des Bakongo),
which emerged in the 1950s, was one culmination of this polit-
ical fervour.^10 Likewise, most political and paramilitary organi-
sations that struggled towards Angolan independence were also
found among exiled communities in this city, and the presence
of Portuguese communist exiles – who fought the Estado Novo
dictatorship in Portugal – in the region was a matter of fact.^11
Simultaneously, as Georges Balandier described, many religious
movements that emerged in the particular ‘colonial situation’ of
the Belgian Congo cultivated a messianistic ideology – usually
concentrated around the figure of a leader or prophet who was
at the same time a politician: Simon Kimbangu, Simon-Pierre
Mpadi, Lassy Simon Zéphyrin, André Matswa and others – which
typically evolved into specific nationalist ideologies that simulta-
neously contested the political state while addressing, more or less
prophetically, new religious orders.^12 Such was the case of Simon
Kimbangu (1887–1951), also a former Baptist student who, after
a religious ministry of just months in the city, was arrested by
the Belgian authorities and spent the rest of his life (thirty years)
in prison in Élisabethville (today Lubumbashi) – but not before
announcing prophetically to his followers that “the white will
become black and the black will become white”.^13 And in fact,
as was observed in the decades after Congolese independence,
movements such as the Kimbanguist Church would become ref-
erentials of the postcolonial nationalist projects. Another particu-
larly interesting example in this respect was the movement known
as Amicalisme – Société Amicale des Originaires de l’Afrique
Equatorielle Française – founded in 1926 by André Matswa in