belgian congo religion

Before long, using forced labour and gruesome punishments in its search for quick profits from ivory and rubber, The Congo Free State descended into horror (observed by Joseph Conrad, amongst others), until public opinion forced the Belgian state to take over. Their goals were to constrain the extrajudicial violence of colonial officials and Catholic missionaries, and to gain equal status for their own missions in the civilizing work of the Belgian Empire. Yes No Search in all … History. Neither approach took African interests seriously. 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. 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. Many colonized people claimed Christianity as their own, with consequences that missionaries could not have anticipated. Church, State, and “Native Liberty” in the Belgian... HUMAN RIGHTS AND PROTESTANT MISSIONS, 1870–1918, PROTESTANTISM, PROPHETS, AND THE COLONIAL LIMITS OF “RELIGION”, COLONIAL SECULARISMS AND THEIR UNRAVELING IN THE BELGIAN CONGO, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417519000446, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and Its Aftermath, Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity, A Civilized Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926, British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896–1913, L’Église Du Christ Au Zaïre: Formation et Adaptation d'un Protestantisme En Situation de Dictature, Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonization, and Consciousness in South Africa, Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity, Religion versus Empire? A 1924 statement from the IMC advised missionaries in the Congo to be patient, noting that Belgium had “consistently given complete freedom to Protestants as well as to Roman Catholic Missions,” and interpreted the new “restrictions” as a necessary response to the Prophet Movement.Footnote 43 Protestants should do whatever they could to demonstrate “loyalty to the government,” the IMC advised, including switching over to the French language in mission schools, if they had not already done so.Footnote 44 The same statement warned missionaries to avoid traveling to other colonies, even when their agencies had stations across colonial borders, so as to avoid “everything that may arouse suspicions of political motives.” This was especially important if a missionary's home country governed the neighboring colony. The government was not following its own stated policies of religious neutrality; indeed it was allowing priests to meddle in the affairs of the state. 74 Conseil Protestant du Congo, “Minutes- Meeting 15, Léopoldville” (22 Jan. 1937), CPC Records, Yale. 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. 20 Minutes of the Meeting of the International Missionary Committee, Lake Mohonk, New York, 1 Oct. 1921, box 4, folder 2, Papers of the International Missionary Council, Missionary Research Library, Union Theological Seminary (hereafter, IMC Papers, MRL, UTS.). A priest had actually “ordered the medal chief to bar us from the work,” one Protestant missionary reported; the governor general had refused to intervene on the grounds that medal chiefs, “as representatives of the native community,” must have the right to decide whether any “edifice destined for a religion” could be erected “upon the sacred land of the village.” The governor general presented the chief's denial as a native prerogative, in keeping with the constitutional principle of religious freedom. 43 “Missions in Belgian, French, and Portuguese Colonies, IMC Paper ‘A,’” box 3, folder 6, IMC Papers, MRL, UTS; “Relations of Missions and Government,” Congo Mission News (Jan. 1924): 13. In strictly religious matters, he insisted, the Belgian government did not play favorites. They had no role in legislation, but traditional rulers were used as agents to collect taxes and recruit labour; uncooperative rulers were deposed. He urged everyone to read the Bible and obey the Ten Commandments, and he often preached on Exodus and the story of David and Goliath in ways that his audiences reportedly applied to their own circumstances. The country has one archdiocese and seven dioceses. Often, they worked against the expressed wishes of the missionaries and took church teachings in directions the latter had never anticipated.Footnote 80 As in many other instances of colonial humanitarianism, the missionary campaigns for religious freedom had served more to bolster than to challenge colonial rule in the Congo. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Far from an anti-colonial call for independence, this was a colonial secularism and a vision of “freedom” that accepted the racial hierarchies and obscured the violence of colonial rule.Footnote 77, But that was not the end of the story. Their initial memorandum to Governor General Maurice Tilkens warned that these unfair conditions would only create more Kimbangus and Mwana Lesas, and that religious freedom was essential to the stability and the civilizing mission of the colonial state. Many Protestant missionaries were initially optimistic about the Prophet Movement, seeing it as evidence of an emerging indigenous Christianity. Arguing that colonial authorities had misunderstood “the purely religious character of certain manifestations,” they nevertheless acknowledged that the government “had to take severe and immediate measures to check the ‘Prophet Movement’ which [had become] rapidly favourable soil for propaganda hostile to all white men, endangering civilization itself.” Thus, they granted legitimacy to the government's concerns while still placing Kimbangu (and the missions) clearly on the religious side of the religious-political divide. On European debates over indirect rule, see Pedersen, Susan, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In 1920 Pope Benedict XV had reiterated instructions, first promulgated in 1880, that missions were to avoid meddling “in any kind of political or temporal interests” and “banish any idea” among colonized populations “paving the way to a political awareness of their nationhood.” The Catholic missions were advised to quell any “political” activity, a term placed here in opposition to the “religious” and associated entirely with anti-colonial agitation. Published online by Cambridge University Press:  The Belgian Congo was supposedly deeded by a hazily defined group of local rulers to a private organization, something called the International Association of the Congo, a supposedly philanthropic, international development agency. The colonial dynamic helped prolong the influence of impressionism in Belgium, especially because of the light in the colony, and it contributed to the development of expressionism during the interwar period. Formerly: Zaire, Zairians, Belgian Congo, Congo (Léopoldville). Hoping to avoid further trouble, Protestant missionaries in the colony turned inward and followed the recommendations of the ecumenical missions movement to tackle common concerns across denominational and national lines.Footnote 20 In 1910, the Congo Continuation Committee (CCC) replaced the loosely organized Congo General Conference. On Stanley and the figure of the explorer, see Fabian, Johannes, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kimbangu turned himself into the authorities that September and was sentenced to death the next month. But the covenant did follow the precedent set in Berlin by mandating humanitarian treatment for colonial populations, who were judged unready to govern themselves. 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. As the Congo Mission News explained, he had taken “pains to make the Government attitude understood and appreciated by missions of other nationalities.” A year later, when the Liberal Louis Franck stepped down from his post as the Minister of the Colonies, the Catholic Party gained control over colonial policy. Most European and North American missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries held ethnocentric and sometimes explicitly racist views. They stressed their “utmost loyalty to Belgium” and their care in teaching the same loyalty to their converts. British delegates at Berlin had Protestant missionaries in mind when they advocated for the General Act of Berlin, an international treaty among European colonial powers that provided ground rules for colonial acquisition and governance.Footnote 15 The Berlin Act specifically guaranteed the “Freedom of Religious Worship” for “natives as well as to other subjects and to foreigners,” and protected “[t]he free and public exercise of all forms of worship, the right of erecting religious edifices, and of organizing missions belonging to all creeds.” But indigenous traditions were not generally included in these protections. On Catholic missions in the Congo, see Lokando, Richard Dane, Le Saint-Siège et l’État Indépendant Du Congo (1885–1908): L'organisation Des Missions Catholiques (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2016)Google Scholar. 22 Kabongo-Mbaya, L’Église Du Christ Au Zaïre, 25. Belgian Congo. When the conservative Baptist missionaries in Kivu refused government educational subsidies, which violated their commitment to church-state separation, Congolese Baptists protested that their communities desperately needed the practical benefits that subsidies provided. Congolese demands for leadership in the churches had corresponded to and arguably helped foster the national independence movement. "comments": true, Both Protestant and Catholic missions in the Belgian Congo were part and parcel of the imperial enterprise. More often, religion of the right kind (good religion) is construed as an ally that legitimizes the state.Footnote 12 In the Belgian Congo, the governing model of secularism delegitimized both Protestant and indigenous movements by calling them illegitimately “political,” outside the legitimate bounds of religion. Leopold II (1835-1909) wanted his country to join the league of European empires, but the Belgian state refused to finance its part in western Europe’s expensive scramble for Africa. To ensure that Belgian power remained intact, the colonial government of the 1920s expanded the cooperation between (Catholic) church institutions and state power. Attributing the excitement to “religious mania or some form of faith healing,” he suggested that the prophet be given a “rest cure” in the hospital. 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. Not even a year, Belgium simply dumped the Congo in 1960 with minimal preparation or notice and scuttled back to Europe. Attributing communal crises to witches, and executing them, provided a means of resolution that did not directly challenge the authorities but attempted instead to purify the colonized society from within.Footnote 49. Religion. Historians studying the same dynamic in the British colony of Bechuanaland (now Botswana) have found that some local chiefs chose to allow one (and only one) Christian mission in order to foster cultural cohesion and, ultimately, to facilitate anti-colonial nation-building within the territories they governed. Large plantations (growing cotton, oil palms, coffee, cacao, and rubber) and livestock farms were developed. Feeding this dynamic were the cultural, linguistic, and political divisions within Belgian society, which had three “pillars”—Catholic, Liberal, and Socialist—each with its political party, trade unions, newspapers, charities, and clubs.Footnote 18 All three parties sought to heal the nation's internal divides by inviting Belgians to unify behind the national project of colonization. 80 Young, Crawford, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Dunn, Kevin C., Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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