The Postcolonial Turn: Re-Imagining Anthropology and Africa

Chapter 13. Christian Moderns: Parody in Matricentric Christian Healing Communnes of the Sacred Spirit in Kinshasa

367 13 Christian Moderns: Parody in Matricentric Christian Healing Communnes of the Sacred Spirit in Kinshasa René Devisch Matricentric healing communes described below concern those whose activities are associated with the independent church movement in the Congolese Capital Kinshasa, known as Mpeve Ya Nlongo. This name can be loosely rendered as ‘of the [ancestralcum -sacred] spirit of the other world’. As will be detailed below, these communes are generally, but not invariably, the preserve of mothers. Within the healing communes, women participate freely in common prayer and healing sessions, as well as organise themselves for mutual support at the neighbourhood level. It is probably this double dimension of spiritual and material healing that distinguishes the faith-healing communes of the sacred spirit from other, rather male dominated, independent Christian churches or neo-Pentecostal ones. The healing communes will be understood in connection with people’s estrangement vis-à-vis European modernity and the Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary churches. I will show that, notwithstanding their historical and cultural association with many other faith-healing communes of the neo-Pentecostal movements, these matricentric communes of Mpeve Ya Nlongo have particular critical devices, including the gift of ‘speaking in tongues’ (glossolalia) and parody. The theme of parody depicting these healing communes is meant to express the way in which members make excessive use of liturgical texts and ritual to mock the shattered dream for Western modernity. In the Democratic Republic Congo –named Zaire from 1972 to 1997–, the state of disillusionment with social, cultural 368 The Postcolonial Turn and economic modernisation is well grasped through the fact that people have for so long been denied that dream. Since the postcolonial era, the collective longing to assume Western identity has been underscored by, and has led to, attending formal school and university education, undergoing Christian conversion, setting up bureaucratic state administration and embracing capitalist economic development (Devisch 1995). Since the late 1980s, however, growing doubts have settled in the face of increasing misery and squalid living conditions in the suburbs. Hardest hit are mothers with dependent children. Indeed, women take on the burden of most households today, and manage to eke out a meagre existence on the slim profit margins of street-vending activities. From their subaltern position, they chiefly resist and mock the globalising and individualist models of civility and consumerism, which are deemed Eurocentric. Some of these women drum up mutual support in the contexts of their matricentric Christian healing communes –naturally seen as forms of sisterhood and brotherhood–, which cut across kinship and educational or economic divisions. In this study, I attempt to capture and interpret the way how these healing communes act as a crucible of hope in building up trust and mutual support at neighbourhood level for the resolution of such problems as delivering care at childbirth and funerals, driving thieves away from homes and streets, and keeping up of minimal hygienic standards. Those women who come together in fellowship and prayer operate as grassroots social movements, parallel to the neighbourhood councils of elders and local and informal rotating credit associations known as moziki. They parody the Christian liturgy style and its soul saving mission. I take it for granted that, through parody, the healing communes conjure up and emend or retort the highly moralised views cast on them by the coloniser, missionaries, and experts in development.1 I assume that, marginalised by reformist modernisation, liberating Christianisation and economic development, members of healing communes seek to recast their erstwhile communitarian commitments and their religious values and spiritual search. My argument is that Westernstyle modernity has, in the special case of women in Kinshasa,2 decisively relocated tradition- and community-bound localisms in the specific context of faith-healing communes. The spontaneously local character of these communes grants women the privilege to 369 Chapter 13: Christian Moderns – Parody in Matricentric Christitan Healing assertively share in the activities of their association and neighbourhood. An argument of this sort, seeking to identify spiritual healing concerns with economic survival, must draw for support on a rather wide range of anthropological evidence, both from field research and the literature. The discussion will focus on six sets of problems or issues. The first is specific: it presents some data, methods as well as the context within which research for this study was conducted. The second is the examination of the master scenarios of Westernising modernisation and citizenship among the dwellers of Kinshasa. The...