The ‘Prophet Movement’ in Congo
An American Baptist mission secretary’s report on the movement around Simon Kimbangu, written after a visit to the Lower Congo in August 1921. It gives Kimbangu’s own story of his call at second hand and the missionaries’ view of what followed.
Lerrigo was Candidate and Medical Secretary of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. He says that he reached the Congo in August 1921, when the movement was in full swing, travelled through the district most affected, and took his information from the missionaries there. Kimbangu’s account of his visions came to him from Budimbu, an English-speaking Congolese who had heard it from Kimbangu himself. He spells the name “Kibangu”.
He writes as a missionary whose stations had been emptied by the movement and who thought it a delusion mixed with older practices, and he also judged the sentences on Kimbangu and his followers too severe. It is the nearest account in time cited in Simon Kimbangu and the Kimbanguist Church.
Cited in
- 1921, firm date