Afrika seminar: Helligåndens biografi – profetier og nationsfølelse i DR Congo

TIME: Thursday, 8 November, 15.15 – 17.00

VENUE: Centre of African Studies, Aud. 12, Købmagergade 46, 4. floor, 1150 Copenhagen K.

All are welcome, no entrance fee

TIME: Thursday, 8 November, 15.15 – 17.00

VENUE: Centre of African Studies, Aud. 12, Købmagergade 46, 4. floor, 1150 Copenhagen K.

All are welcome, no entrance fee

Despite (or because of) having been in prison for most of his life, Simon Kimbangu (1887-1951) was an important figure in colonial Congo, whose messianic influence among colonized Congolese has been analyzed by major authors such as Balandier and MacGaffey.

Today, the role Kimbangu played in the articulation of an anti-colonial discourse and practice has been vindicated and reassessed by the Congolese government, who has nominated him a national hero in gratitude for his suffering and for his role in nation-making.

For many millions of Kimbanguists worldwide, however, Kimbangu is, far beyond a political figure and a hero, the personification of the Holy Ghost. This paper analyzes the tension in understandings of Kimbangu’s persona, and the role that discourses about him have played in colonial and postcolonial political imaginations.

Ramon Sarró is a University Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of Africa, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Before joining ISCA he has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (2002-2012).

He did his PhD on iconoclasm, politics and religion among Baga (Republic of Guinea) at University College London (1999). Between 2000 and 2002, he held the Ioma Evans-Pritchard Junior Research Fellowship at Saint Anne’s College (Oxford).

In 2009 he published the monograph The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone (EUP for the IAI), which was co-winner of the ‘Aumory Talbot Award’ of the Royal Anthropological Institute of the UK and Ireland.

In 2010/2011 he was an internal fellow of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale. Since 1992 Sarró has conducted fieldwork on prophetic movements in West Africa (Guinea and Guinea Bissau), Central Africa (Congo and Angola) and Europe (Portugal), focusing on the diaspora of the Congolese Kimbanguist church.

He is currently editing, with Simon Coleman, the annual journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research (Berghahn books). At present he is researching into the interface between prophecy, art and the ‘invention of writing’ in Central and West Africa.