Mutuality, resistance and egalitarianism^55Paris as a self-improvement group for expatriates from French
Equatorial Africa, through which money was collected to im-
prove their condition as well as that of their original territories.
This movement became largely influential in the Lower Congo re-
gion, and eventually evolved into a religious following known as
‘Matswanism’ after the founder’s passing in 1942.^14 At the same
time, in post-independence Congo his figure would become inspi-
rational for several politicians.^15
In this framework, the border between such religious and po-
litical movements was often more than blurry, or perhaps even ir-
relevant, conjured under concepts of charisma and utopia.^16 This
was evident in the colonial setting, where such prophetic leaders
were endogenously and exogenously construed as being political-
ly agent – reason why they sojourned in local prisons more often
than not – and in the postcolonial setting, where political move-
ments such as Bundu Dia Kongo (“Union of the Kongo”), led by
Ne Muanda Nsemi, have combined a struggle for the restoration
of the ancient Kingdom of Kongo with religious ideologies, to the
extent of clashing against state authorities.^17
Apart from the religious/political conflation, such examples
also highlight the emergence of a process of religiously mediated
political disconnection – one between ‘the state’ (as an apparatus
of government) and ‘society’, here conceived as the expression of
autonomous collective organization, beyond externally imposed
jurisdictions.^18 In other words, religious utopian and messianic
ideals acted here against a hierarchical colonial system that had
been imposed as a ‘totalization’ with no epistemological, political
and moral alternative.^19 This emerged in a specific historical mo-
ment of political transformation in the African continent towards
independency, through which the forces of production of the state
were irrevocably undermined by grassroots mobilizations of di-
verse order: social, cultural, intellectual, political, military, reli-
gious, etc.^20 These processes of ‘refracted governmentality’, where
a political, ideological and epistemological distinction is produced
between the state and the will of its citizens, and also and ulti-
mately implied a problem of (individual, collective, national) sov-
ereignty and opened the ground for the consequent circulation of
ideals of freedom and liberation.^21