On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Congolese independence, Louvain’s centre for the Study of religion, culture and society, KADOC, hosted and organised an international conference on the religious dimensions of processes of (de)colonisation of Congo between 1885 and 1960. Most presenters trained as (church)historians, some of them have exchanged academia for positions in (humanitarian) NGO’s or diplomacy which explains the salience of some contributions (Viaene and Cleys in particular). Some contributors (bibliographically) updated their papers published in this edited volume. This bilingual volume focused on one specific (post)colonial setting represents a mix of ‹old›, but also of ‹new› approaches of religion and colonialism represented in recent anglophone scholarship in particular.
Its three sections proceed, as the editors explain, from the political to the sociocultural and personal order, yet, each section exemplifies the deep entanglements of these domains. The authors aim to put religious agency at centre stage, focusing on the cultural interface created by the missionary encounter. This approach highlights both the interplay between objectives and interests of consecutive colonial administrations, policies of Protestant and Catholic missionary organisations, practices of missionaries on the ground and mediation and appropriations by their converts: African Christians who became key players in carving out multiple meanings of religion in Congo.
The first section opens with Jean-Luc Vellut’s exploration of the ethical implications of Christianity in Africa entangled with the multiple – and often brutal – aspects of colonialism. Vincent Viaene’s rich analysis of the Congo Question (1875–1905) elucidates the impact of intricate connections between religion and imperialism on transnational political and humanitarian dynamics. The Congo Question exemplifies how transnational Christian missionary organisations used and depended upon imperial connections for executing their humanitarian agenda, and vice versa. These connections compromised this agenda on account of economic interests, specifically invested in local slave trade which international humanitarian activists attempted to undermine. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo explains that to Portugal, that attempted to uphold historical claims on the Padroado Africano in the context of escalating imperial rivalry of the late 19th century, Catholic missions afforded territorial penetration, cultural and political influence as well as diplomatic channels in Europe including the Roman Curia. On the ground, missionaries such as the Jesuits since 1890, were charged with carrying out the mission civilisatrice. This was imposed upon the Belgian king Leopold II as the Berlin Conference entrusted him with the administration of Congo. The principles laid down by this conference in 1885 clearly favoured the improvement of the moral and material conditions of local populations, at the same time safeguarding their freedom of conscience and religion. Anne-Sophie Gijs explains that in practice, some Jesuits indeed insisted on these principles and thus risked conflict with the colonial administration, whereas others educated and raised (formerly enslaved) children and youngsters to become loyal subjects in line with European, Christian tenets. Bram Cleys concludes the first section with an analysis of the spatial strategies of Catholic missionaries, the Fathers of Scheut. This analysis underlines territorial reconfigurations of Congolese space as the primary form power takes (123, quoting geographer Robert David Sacks). Cleys’s approach poignantly reveals the decreasing distance between these missionaries and the colonial state. Whereas the original blueprint of their mission stations (1890–1905) favoured relative isolation and therefore autonomy, the colonial state induced a networklike organisation fixed in existing villages. There, the missionaries connected to the established colonial administration that undercut their earlier autonomy and enforced their investment in colonial conceptions and policies of territoriality.
The second section, devoted to intermediaries, opens with Anne Cornet’s contribution on music. Missionary sources elucidate to what extent sound and spectacle of musical performances contributed to the missionary dynamics. Cornet implies a power struggle in and via music in which missionaries aimed to literally drown out local music and dance rituals they denounced as pagan. Filling local hearts and minds with western music represented both a colonizing practice, as well as an rather undefined cultural space for encounter and exchange through music. Marie Bryce concentrates on the training of Congolese health workers at the staterun École Unique des Assistants Médicaux Indigènes in Léopoldville during the Interwar period. The housing of the students sparked off a dispute between Catholic and Protestant missionaries as this represented the hold of these Christian patrons over this relatively small group of indigenous professionals who could potentially deeply influence Congolese society. The weight attached to religion is also illustrated by Emery M. Kalema’s exploration of the Catholic counterpart of the École Unique in Kisantu. This was run by Jesuits, who required candidates to be Catholic and whose strict moral and religious teachings shored up the medical training and practice. Using a questionnaire of 1950, Kalema demonstrates how (male) indigenous healthworkers incorporated Catholic tenets as a lived religion in their medical practice, amalgamating them with the local Congolese practices familiar to their (female) patients. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi concludes the second section with family history that methodologically connects disparate primary sources (photographs, identity cards, personal testimonies) to questions of generational memory, orally translated to stories that, in this particular case, relate a microhistory of the ‹adoption› of faith. This term expresses not only the conscious choice of the author’s father for Catholicism, but also his genuine desire to connect this to his sense of being African.
Piet Clement’s article on Placide Tempels OFM bridges the second and the third section devoted to the crisis of the colonial missions post World-War II. He addresses this missionary’s reflections on adaption of Christianity to Congolese ideas about (after)life and humanity. Rather than adapted Catholicism local charismatic repertoires offered possibilities for religious renewal that were, however, taxed as threatening the colonial order of things on account of their socio-political dynamics. Dominic Pistor explores developmental colonialism as a strategy that Belgian colonial authorities, similar to other colonial powers such as England and France, implemented in order to shore up colonial authority. He concentrates on Kitawala, an at times violent off-shoot of the Jehova’s witnesses considered to be politically dangerous in their rejection of established government and religion. Simultaneous to incarceration and repression, colonial authorities invested in the improvement of the material conditions of those Kitawala they considered as potential allies. Colonial rule gave rise to such religious-political movements that breathed and infused nationalist aspirations in which, as Zana Etambala explains, Catholic missionaries were regarded and attacked as agents of colonialism, no matter their internal differences of opinion on religion and colonial rule. In the postwar era, Sindani E. Kiangu, charismatic leaders such as Pierre Mulele, challenged colonial authorities with a nationalist social-political agenda that served as a creed to his followers. Its intricate connections between the local, the social, the political and the religious help to comprehend the challenge of such movements to the by then more firmly rooted and indigenized Catholic Church in Congo.

Zitierweise:
Monteiro, Marit: Rezension zu: Viaene, Vincent; Cleys, Bram; De Maeyer, Jan (eds.): Religion, Colonization and Decolonization in Congo, 1885–1960. Religion, colonisation et décolonisation au Congo, 1885–1960 (KADOC-Studies on Religion, Culture and Society 22), Louvain 2020. Zuerst erschienen in: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte, Vol. 116, 2022, S. 444-446. Online: https://doi.org/10.24894/2673-3641.00127.