| This research is a historical analysis of important trends in the history of the Congos (The Democratic Republic of Congo and The Republic of Congo) since the arrival of Portuguese in 1482 that birthed local religious movements that we term 'Revival Churches.' Their archeology is rooted in the uncontestable confusion set by the participation of European missionaries in the slave trade and their articulation of the Christian message. As early as the fifteenth century, Congolese revolted against European Christian message, which was unable to explain the place and dignity ascribed to the black race, and started Africanizing Roman Catholicism. This failure would lay historical and anthropological basis for the emergence of local prophetic movements in the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, and the 'Revival Churches' of the twenty-first century in central Africa. Prophets and movements as, Dona Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement 1684-1706, Simon Kimbangu and the Kimbanguism in the 1920s, Simao Toko and the Tokoist Church, and the Kitawala, at their dawn, rose as voices of conscience for Congolese and challenge to European Christianity. The historical aftermath of colonization and globalization in the twenty-first century have turned the 'Revival Churches' from a voice of conscience to a destructive force of Congos' mental estate, ancestral, and cultural heritage. |
