Seekers and Things: Spiritual Movements and Aesthetic Difference in Kinshasa 9781785336706

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 ‘Light in the Darkness’: Towards a Congolese Spiritual Movement ‘from Japan’
Chapter 2 Occult Sciences: (Il)legitimate Secrecy and the Infrapolitics of Suspicion
Chapter 3 Blossoming Boundaries: (Re-)production and Contestation of Japanese Flower Practices
Chapter 4 Cleansing the City: Touch, Rubbish and Citizenship
Chapter 5 Experiencing Faith: Crisis, Miracles and Spiritual Healing
Chapter 6 (In) Touch without Contact: Johrei and the Aura of the Self
Chapter 7 Vibrating Words: Performative Silence and the Power of Words
Chapter 8 Imported Tradition: ‘Ancestor Worship’ as Reverse Orientalism
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Seekers and Things

Seekers and Things Spiritual Movements and Aesthetic Difference in Kinshasa

Peter Lambertz

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2018 Peter Lambertz All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78533-669-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-670-6 ebook

to Ana

Contents

I Contents List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgementsx Introduction1 Chapter 1

‘Light in the Darkness’: Towards a Congolese Spiritual Movement ‘from Japan’

35

Chapter 2

Occult Sciences: (Il)legitimate Secrecy and the Infrapolitics of Suspicion

69

Chapter 3

Blossoming Boundaries: (Re-)production and Contestation of Japanese Flower Practices

95

Chapter 4

Cleansing the City: Touch, Rubbish and Citizenship 124

Chapter 5

Experiencing Faith: Crisis, Miracles and Spiritual Healing 143

Chapter 6

(In) Touch without Contact: Johrei and the Aura of the Self

164

Chapter 7

Vibrating Words: Performative Silence and the Power of Words

195

Chapter 8

Imported Tradition: ‘Ancestor Worship’ as Reverse Orientalism

225

Conclusion257 Bibliography267 Index291

I Illustrations 0.1 Prayer cards in Kabasela’s wallet. The seeker Kabasela carries a number of ‘prayer cards’ as protection in his wallet. These include, from top to bottom, Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity; Dada Lekhraj of the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University; Simon Kimbangu, the founder of the Kimbanguist Church, who is depicted along with the seventeenth-century Kongo prophetess Kimpa Vita; a card of the Guru Siyag’s Siddha Yoga organisation; two portraits of Ching Hai (founder and head of the International Association of the Supreme Master Ching Hai); as well as a picture of TMAJ’s prosperity goddess Daikokokuten (cf. Chapter 1). 15 0.2 Taxi-bus Japonnais. In Kinshasa the Japonnais [sic] is not only an outstanding car mechanic. Among the members of la SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elégantes), he is a Sapeur of overpowering elegance. In the public championship of speed, endurance, public appearance and humour on Kinshasa’s overcrowded roads, taxi-buses and their teams claim to be irresistible and outstanding like a Japonnais. 21 1.1 The two worlds. The spirit world (monde spirituel) is stratified in 180 degrees with 60 at the top (paradis, heaven), 60 in the middle (purgatoire, purgatory) and 60 at the bottom (enfer, hell). The position of one’s yukon on this scale determines one’s ‘spiritual level’ (niveau spirituel) in the material world (monde matériel). The result is a level of either superior, intermediary or inferior (mis)fortune. From a teaching session in Kinshasa in August 2010. 49 1.2 Lingala version of Japanese teaching. Bokeseni ya lobiko ya Eglise Messianique Mondiale (Particularity of salvation in EMM), page 1/3. Teaching by Meishu Sama of 5 October 1949, presented in Mokali, Kinshasa, May 2012. 51 3.1 Taxi-bus with proverb: Bakatisaka ebale pona komona elengi ya mboka te (nobody crosses the river only to contemplate the beauty of the country), Kinshasa, March 2012. 95

Illustrations • ix

3.2 and 3.3 Flower in a washing closet behind a Messianique’s house in Mikondo, Kinshasa. 106 3.4 Preparing an Ikebana flower arrangement for home purification. 108 3.5 Blossoming boundaries (seasonally without blooms) around a house in the neigbourhood of Kingabwa, Limete. The owner has planted these fololo as a floral boundary that protects his house from nightly spirit intrusions. 118 4.1 Public cleaning (salongo) at Rond-point Victoire, June 2011. 127 4.2 Bosoku Ekunde, L’inondation (2009). 136 4.3 Transmitting Johrei in public during a salongo cleaning session, Kinshasa, June 2011. 139 5.1 Johrei given jointly to a woman suffering from high blood pressure, Mokali, Kimbanseke. 152 6.1 EMM’s ‘altar’. The Goshintai calligraphy and Meishu Sama’s portrait. 166 6.2 Two seekers transmitting Johrei in TMAJ’s unit of Petrocongo, Masina Sans-Fil. 167 6.3 (left) MOA’s amulet. 175 6.4 (bottom right) EMM’s Ohikari with the Izunome sign in its centre. 175 6.5 (top right) The Hikari sign. Encapsulated inside the Ohikari is a miniature calligraphy of the letter sign for ‘light’. 175 7.1 Bosoku Ekunde, Le Pasteur (2010). 214 7.2 Mantra chanting in Mangengenge. Praying the Amatsu Norito ‘prayer’ before labouring at EMM’s organic farming site. 218 8.1 Salt, rice and water (in Japanese pots), as well as fish, fruit, money, bread and names as offerings to the ancestors. 233 9.1 Messianique with flowers from his garden on his way to an Ikebana workshop, Kinshasa, June 2011. 265

I Acknowledgements This book would not exist without all those in Kinshasa who tirelessly offered me their time, knowledge and trust in my quest to become familiar with their city and their lives. I am especially grateful to all the seekers and missionaries linked to the movements of the Eglise Messianique Mondiale and the Temple Messianique Art de Johrei who offered me their assistance and hospitality during seventeen months of fieldwork between 2009 and 2013. Thanks also go to Idriss Okenge, Jean Semaraza Kabuta and JeanClaude Kamanga and to Jean-Jacques Thiyoyi and his family for their careful guidance and continuous hospitality. François Mboyongo, Serge Mukendi, Bosoku Ekunde, Pamela Ekanga, Germaine Lusamba, Gérard Ntumba, Michel Kokolomami and Bravo Ikulu have also offered me support and provided direction. I am deeply grateful to Birgit Meyer and Adam Jones for their scholarly advice and tireless enthusiasm during the years of my Ph.D., which has been a school beyond the confines of academic scholarship. The research has also strongly benefited from the interest and friendship of fellow researchers: Katrien Pype has been especially supportive as a guide, dialogue partner and friend. Pedro Monaville has been like a brother in the field. Filip De Boeck’s warm advice and encouragement have been precious at various stages, both in Kinshasa and in Europe. Léon Tsambu, Clara Devlieger, Kristien Geenen, Thomas Hendriks, Daniel Tödt and Lesley Braun have become close associates and friends. I also warmly thank Dimfomu Lapika and Gaston MweneBatende for their advice at different stages. The research was possible thanks to the graduate school ‘Critical Junctures of Globalisation’ (Leipzig), funded by the German Research Council (DFG), a travel grant from the German academic exchange agency (DAAD) and the support of the University of Utrecht. In Leipzig and Utrecht a number of colleagues and friends have assisted me throughout the various stages of this book, including Claudia Böhme, Ulf Engel, Geert Castryck and Rose Marie Beck, Daan Beekers, Markus Balkenhohl, Irene Stengs, Jojada Verrips, Murtala Ibrahim,

Acknowledgements • xi

Bruno Reinhardt, Marleen De Witte and Martha Frederiks. My warmest thanks also go to Elisabetta Porcu and Ugo Dessì, who have triggered and stimulated my interest in Japanese religion. I warmly thank Ramon Sarró and Peter Geschiere for their advice, as well as John Janzen for his discussion about some of the chapters. Next to the ‘ancestral’ support from my family in Belgium, Germany and India, Julius Popp, Stefan Binder, Abdoulaye Sounaye as well as my old friends in Belgium are an indispensable, priceless back-up. Joel Glasman has been a crucial friend and dialogue partner throughout the writing process. In Kisangani, where I completed some of the chapters, I thank the Priests of the Sacred Heart (SCJ) as well as the students and staff of the Philosophat Edith Stein for their curiosity and hospitality. During the later stages I also received sparkling scholarly input and kind advice during a visiting scholarship at the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin) and from my new research team in Dakar. All those concerned are warmly thanked. My gratitude also goes to the editors at Berghahn and the two anonymous reviewers for their sound advice and diligent efforts. This does not lessen the responsibility that I alone bear for all mistakes contained in the chapters of this book. The journey enclosed in the upcoming pages would not have been the same if Anandita and I had not met. I cannot thank her enough for her never-ending inspiration, support and the sharing of awe and astonishment, of the conviction that life is liberation and that ‘our world’ is possible. Dakar, May 2017

I Introduction ‘Mobutu knew that the light was in the country. He knew that some people had gone to Japan and brought it back from there’, Joseph told me. The sun had set on the terraced slope of Kinshasa’s Mongafula neighbourhood, where we had been talking for a good two hours. In his early fifties, Joseph is a husband, a father of four children, and a missionnaire (missionary) for a local branch of a Japanese ‘new religion’ (Japanese: shinshûkyô) that reached Congo via Brazil and Angola. The ‘light’ he mentioned refers to the invisible healing energy of Johrei, which initiated members of this movement channel towards other people as a divine force to purify, heal and empower each other. Joseph remembers how in the heyday of Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko’s rule in the 1980s, when he was still an ordinary follower of an older local branch of this Japanese movement, many prestigious Zairois from the political and economic elite were seeking to be initiated into the teachings and practices of this non-Christian movement. Healing powers from Japan could be tapped for protection and distinction by actively embodying a feeling of being special, through silence, motionless sitting and focused looking at each other, generating an atmosphere of being powerfully different, and differently powerful, from the increasingly abounding crowds of the loud, crowded and ever-moving city of Kinshasa. Many of those who were close to Mobutu were followers of nonChristian spiritual movements, and when on 16 February 1992, Mobutu’s soldiers brutally dispersed the protest walk known as La Marche Chrétienne amid bloodshed, the regime jeopardised what little remained of its popular credit. In the wake of repeated looting in Kinshasa,1 the Mobutist state elite gradually dissipated, and the elitist spiritual movements lost many of their followers, including Joseph. Today, however, things are different. A new nation, the Democratic Republic of Congo is reconstituting itself with new elites, a new president, a far larger and much younger capital city and a thoroughly transformed urban religious field. Many ‘spiritualists’ are today from a younger generation who, during their lifetime, knew neither Mobutu nor Zaire. Socio-economic backgrounds of ‘spiritualists’ also differ. If

2 • Seekers and Things

in Zairian times the Catholic Church, together with the Protestant and Kimbanguist mainline churches, were the unquestioned pillars of official religiosity, today the religious landscape of the city is marked by the highly public and sensationally domineering Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCCs), locally referred to as Eglises de Réveil (Churches of Awakening). Many of them have transnational ties to Brazil, South Korea, Nigeria and the United States, and are no longer dependent on geographical ties inherited from colonial times. In this field-based study, I examine the ways in which Congolese followers of two spiritual movements of Japanese origin and inspiration (re-)produce and ‘make sense of’ seemingly alien religious practices in the urban environment of Kinshasa. The ethnography revolves around the movement Eglise Messianique Mondiale (henceforth EMM), French for Sekai Kyûseikyô (henceforth SKK: Church of World Messianity) which was founded by Mokichi Okada (Meishu Sama: Lord of Light) in Japan in 1935, and the Temple Messianique Art de Johrei (henceforth TMAJ), a local schismatic offshoot of the former from 2012. All pioneers and followers are Congolese, which sets this study apart from studies of religion in a diasporic context. The book explores the role of a non-conformist religious minority who are critical of Pentecostal Christianity and consider themselves to be the vanguard of their time. EMM and TMAJ’s key religious practices are historicised and discussed in the context of West Central Africa’s tradition of religious renewal (Janzen 1977), while focusing in particular on contemporary diversification within the religious landscape of Kinshasa. By offering an account of the tensions that these non-Christian practices generate in the lives of their followers, mainly by manipulating spiritual matters, this study aims to contribute to scholarly insights into the religious production of difference, conflict and authority, on the micro-social level of contemporary urban Africa. I have opted for an aesthetic and thing-based approach that goes beyond discourse and takes the materiality of practice seriously. In order to assess a plurality of contrasting and putatively conflicting religious practices, this appears to be a promising method. The ‘aesthetic’ approach is grounded in Aristotle’s understanding of aesthesis as the realm of ‘our total sensorial experience of the world and … our sensuous knowledge of it’ (Meyer and Verrips 2008: 21). ‘Sense making’ is thus understood as the production of both sensory experience and of meaning, without the two being separate domains. The aim has been to overcome the analytical distinction between a phenomenological focus on experience on the one hand, and a mentalistic concentration on meaning on the other hand. ‘Sense’ can thus be seen as generated

Introduction • 3

through a full-body engagement and sensory friction with the world, a process to which meaning is not opposed but rather a constitutive part, as will become clear from the analysis in the following chapters. Like the followers of other religious movements, including PCCs, the followers of non-Christian ‘spiritual movements’ are attracted by the promise of health, prosperity, power and overall fortune. Movements of Asian origin are generally expected to procure these favours in abundance, because of Asia’s, and particularly India’s, reputation of overtly hosting the world’s most powerful secrets of magic. Many are also attracted by the close and individual ‘pastoral’ guidance offered continuously by missionaries like Joseph. Given that reliable authority structures are often missing and moral insecurity is rampant in Kinshasa, personal counselling is highly valued. Others are attracted by a nostalgia for the spiritual teachings and practices of their African ancestors, many of which they see as being repeated, or at least revalorised, by spiritual movements like EMM and TMAJ. Despite their ‘non-African’ allure, these may therefore be seen as neotraditional (De Witte 2012) or, at least, alter-traditional religious movements, offering a way to valorise and deal with Africa’s cultural heritage. African traditional religion was unjustly diabolised by missionaries, many spiritualists explain, and power objects were stolen by the colonial authorities in order to serve their own hegemonic goals. Another motive may be found in the millennial programme of ethical renovation, moral renewal and superiority that spiritual movements advocate. This offers followers a voice for and an opinion of themselves and their situation in the wider world. Youngsters especially thus obtain the opportunity to study, experience and explore the things of life, which in the highly unstable and directionless cosmos of the city of Kinshasa is an increasingly attractive venture. Lastly, urban religiosity is a powerful means for people to make themselves and their world aesthetically, i.e. with their bodies and senses, including the mind.

City of Seekers The concept of ‘crisis’ has been deployed to depict the situation of many inhabitants of the Democratic Republic of Congo ever since the 1990s, when dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s power started dwindling. It was only in 1997 that he fled the country under the pressure of Laurent Désiré Kabila’s rebel army, which had made its way to Kinshasa all the way from the east of the country. After this first of the two Congo Wars, seven different national armies from neighbouring countries were involved in the occupation and defence of parts of the territory.

4 • Seekers and Things

What has been called ‘Africa’s World War’ (Prunier 2011) ended only when EU- and UN-brokered peace agreements were signed in 2002 and 2003. After a transition phase, Joseph Kabila, whose father Laurent Désiré was murdered in 2001, was officially elected president in 2006, and his chief opponent Jean-Pierre Bemba imprisoned soon after by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Thus Mobutu’s thirty-two years of kleptocratic regime were followed by almost a decade of war and political turmoil, which remains unresolved in parts of eastern DRC to this very day. Congo’s population has been depicted as being in a situation of long-term crisis ever since (De Boeck 1998, Trefon 2004), which points to the question of the analytical usefulness of the ‘crisis’concept, as it produces and thus inadvertently legitimises Congo’s situation of ongoing exceptionality (cf. Roitman 2013). Despite the acclaimed growth of DRC’s national GDP in recent years and an obvious building boom in the capital Kinshasa and other urban centres, for most the trickle-down effect far from materialised into reality. Thus for the larger part of Kinois the insecurity about any upcoming future persists, forcing people into la débrouille (the art of improvising to get by). In view of a largely absent formalised and accountable economy, the importance of the ‘miracle’ concept becomes clear, as has been advocated and popularised by the innumerable bornagain churches, which have spawned in Kinshasa ever since Mobutu formally introduced ‘democracy’ in 1990.2 Not only in Kinshasa, but also in other African cities, the general trend to liberalise the economy and the media has led to a transformation of the public sphere where the mediating qualities of audiovisual media were soon discovered to be homologous to the workings of the Holy Spirit (Meyer and Moors 2006, Pype 2012). For many followers of Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCCs) the main objective of the technology of prayer is to assure well-being and, ideally, to evoke a miracle. It is as if the ‘invisible hand’ of the market needed to be bribed so as to generate a favour and grant a miracle out of the crisis at least for a while. Drivers of motorbike taxis (wewas) in Kinshasa, for instance, explain that their daily income is highly volatile and ranges between 5 and 30 US dollars. Much depends on one’s daily horoscope, they explain, which is the amount of one’s daily spiritual favour that determines whether one will find a lot of clients or only a few. It does not come as a surprise that many wewas are therefore also ardent churchgoers. For most, praying remains the only technique that impacts on one’s market situation so as to improve the private horoscope. In this situation of material insecurity and economic unpredictability, the feeling that one’s life and the economy at large are governed by more than merely

Introduction • 5

human hands is rampant, as has also been documented and discussed by a significant number of scholars.3 It should be stressed, however, that the idea of ‘occult economies’, as Comaroff and Comaroff (1999) call it, is from a Central African point of view not new and feeds on a longstanding history of human-spirit relations, as I also discuss in Chapter 8. This persistent unpredictability and uncertainty, and the resulting dearth of order, control and physical security, is one of the causes of the eclectic and sprawling presence of varied religious movements, whether Christian or non-Christian. Next to the larger compounds and buildings of the Catholic and Protestant mainline churches, which are well inscribed in the city’s urban landscape, many highly visible and neatly fenced mega-temples have been constructed by the LatterDay Saints (Mormons) and a number of born-again organisations. The church Message du Temps de la Fin (Branham Tabernacle), which follows the teachings of U.S. prophet William M. Branham (1909–1965), the Assembly of God and, increasingly, the Nigerian Winners’ Chapel of Bishop David Oyedepo have all been building impressive megachurches. They are some of the possible alternatives followers can choose from besides the countless local church foundations. Like Congo’s famous music orchestras, churches are usually referred to by the names of their charismatic leaders: there are the churches of Neema Sikatenda, son of Iyadi Sikatenda (Nzambe Malamu, Church of the Good God), of ‘Général’ Sony Kafuta ‘Rockman’, of Bishop Pascal Mukuna (Assemblée Chrétienne de Kinshasa), of Maman Olangi (Combat Spirituel), Léopold Mutombo (LMK Ministries / Ministère Amen), Denis Lessi (Arche de Noé) and many others. Over the past twenty-five years the longstanding dynamic of schism and renewal has led to an intense multiplication of pastors and their churches. This is particularly visible in Kinshasa’s cités (from the former cité indigène), as the poorer and more densely populated suburbs are called in distinction to the city’s glossier administrative and political neighbourhood of la ville. Most branches of Congo-originated Pentecostal churches in the cités have smaller buildings, if any at all. In the absence of striking architecture, what makes them noticeable to passers-by is the persistent sound of distorted microphone preaching and rumba rhythm of Congolese religious music, which is performed live during the daily evening prayer sessions. On 25 May 2010 I had the privilege of witnessing first-hand the militaristic allures of the Kimbanguist Christmas ceremonies at their headquarters in the neighbourhood of Kasa-Vubu.4 Despite a recent schism in the Eglise de Jésus-Christ sur Terre par son envoyé spécial Simon Kimbangu

6 • Seekers and Things

(EJCSK), Kimbanguism remains an important pillar of religious life and Congolese self-identification in Kinshasa, as well as a striking example of Weber’s ‘routinisation of charisma’. Less routinised examples of the tradition of Kongo ngunza prophetism, which gave rise to the ‘Modern Kongo Prophets’, such as Simon Kimbangu (MacGaffey 1983), include a number of Eglises des Noirs. These are known in Kinshasa through the figures of the military prophet Atoli, for instance, who combines his activity as a prophet with a military vocation and allure. Like Atoli, figures like Papa Nkusu frequently participate in TV debates to defend the decidedly Afrocentric and anti-imperialist position inherited from the Kongo prophets, which remains critical of external cultural influences and reminiscent of the anti-colonial struggle.5 The most radical movement in this regard is Bundu dia Kongo, whose members suffered a military crackdown by a special commando of the Congolese police in 2008 (cf. Wamba-Dia-Wamba 1999, De Boeck 2004a: 106–107, CovingtonWard 2016). In Lower Congo,6 after this violent incident, many followers joined the Eglise Chrétienne Union du Saint Esprit (ECUSE) church, which was founded by ngunza prophet Tata Gonda (cf. MacGaffey 1983). Their initiates wear so-called sacs, although their appearance in public is restricted to certain areas of the Lower Congo province. More publicly visible in Kinshasa are the aesthetically impressive white gowns, sticks and beards of the Babas, as Kinois call the followers of the Church of John Maranke from Zimbabwe (cf. Jules-Rosette 1975). On Saturday mornings they gather for prayers in the open. Many Kinois denounce them for presumed polygamy, which indicates that next to aesthetic markers of buildings, dress codes and sound infrastructure, moral precepts of purity are also important boundaries in the urban religious landscape: Branhamists, for instance, like other Pentecostals, are known for their abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, skirts and sleeveless shirts. Given its sheer size, the panopticum of religious movements in Kinshasa cannot be exhaustively presented here.7 Despite certain similarities with other more recent popular trends such as African Pentecostalism, spiritual movements remain stigmatised minorities and are often qualified as ‘occult sciences’ by Christians in Kinshasa. This is directly linked to the common conviction that Mobutu and his clique, who were ardent followers of non-Christian ‘secret societies’, had in fact sacrificed the country and driven it to ruin (B. White 2005). In turn, a formal opposition to and explicit criticism of Christianity, in particular of the numerous Eglises de Réveil, persists among the followers of such movements. Yet, similarities are equally striking. Much of Joseph’s emphasis on the spiritual nature of Congo’s problems, or on the abundance of

Introduction • 7

demons in the city, closely resembles the ‘Pentecostal worldview’ in Africa (Kalu 2008: 169). Misfortune in general, EMM teaches, should be confronted spiritually. Another theme that spiritual and born-again movements share is the production of miracles. It is not surprising, therefore, that Joseph and his fellow Messianiques (EMM’s followers) refer to their movement as a ‘church’ (Fr./Li. église). Moreover, one of EMM’s ‘ministers’ sometimes enjoys wearing a black tenu de pasteur (pastor’s uniform) with a priestly collar, and Messianiques refer to their healing activity of Johrei as a ‘prayer’ in action (i.e. without words). The Christian ‘Our Father’ prayer has become part and parcel of the movement’s liturgy during the ‘prayer’ gatherings in its different units. This tendency to mimetically connect and attach oneself to the semiotic realm of Christian churches differs strongly from the times of Zaire, when non-Christian movements were elitist, secretive and often the result of trans-African elite networking with ties to the former colonial metropoles (Louveau 2012). Today, most movements openly invite new followers to public conferences through posters and banderols distributed throughout the city. Even ‘initiation’ ceremonies are sometimes announced publicly. As the case of EMM exemplifies, geographical trajectories have also diversified. After local precursors assured their contact with Japan via France and Belgium, EMM was transplanted to lusophone Africa by missionaries from Brazil. It is from Angola that fellow Congolese ‘pioneers’ imported EMM to Kinshasa. Similar South-South connections apply to Soka Gakkai International, which was imported from West Africa, or the neo-Hindu Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University, which reached Africa directly from India. Thus, despite obvious differences in historical experience between Latin America, India and Africa, there is much to indicate that a democratisation and mainstreaming of alternative spirituality, as has been observed in Brazil (Carpenter 2004) is also on the rise in contemporary Africa. Africa’s cities especially have an increasingly young population, which is gradually growing more curious about the knowledge, spiritual techniques and discoveries of a wider and increasingly multipolar world. Lelo tokomì na tango ya mondialisation (‘Today we have reached the age of globalisation’) explained Kabasela (43), who is from Kasai province and speaks Lingala and Tshiluba but no French. During the Congo Wars he was a soldier under Laurent Désiré Kabila before he left the army and turned to selling mobile phone airtime at Kinshasa’s international airport. Explaining why he is interested in Japanese spirituality, he argues that ‘today all things belong to the people of the entire world. For example minerals, intelligence kept in Europe, aeroplanes,

8 • Seekers and Things

motorcycles from China, and so on. Everything belongs to everyone’ (Kabasela, Mikondo, July 2013). In Angola, where EMM’s African headquarters have been located since 1991, an estimated 37,000 followers have joined the movement.8 In DRC about 2,500 members have been steadily frequenting the various units since EMM was set up in 2001, and this number is on the rise (figure from June 2012). Followers are a kaleidoscope of Kinois society and include elite nostalgics, clerks, employees and students, but also a large number of those who have not had access to secondary school or any higher education. In terms of differences from Brazil or Japan, the majority of Messianiques in Congo are male (see Chapter 1). Reminiscent of the ‘cultic milieu’ in the West (Campbell 1972), most followers like Kabasela call themselves ‘spiritualists’ or ‘seekers’ (Fr. and Li. chercheurs). Given that in French chercheur can mean ‘seeker’ as well as ‘researcher’, this seems to be less an adaptation of Western New Age terminology than an expansion of research jargon from universities. Being a chercheur implies being a legitimate non-affiliated nomad on the search for knowledge, experience and miracles. Many seekers are university students who wish to complement their curricula with the insights and principles of ‘spirituality’, enabling them to discover how the world really works. Many younger seekers have impressive conversion careers (although it is questionable whether the ‘conversion’ concept can still grasp the fluidity and volatility of many such seekers’ wanderings, cf. Kirsch 2004). Being a seeker does not imply denouncing Christianity altogether. Many seekers I encountered have had or still continue to have close engagements with one or several Christian churches. Yet a verbose criticism, especially of born-again Christianity as too dogmatic and too pastor-centred, is a persistent tenor among seekers. Recurrent are the claims that all the pastors of the born-again world who have made it big have at one point or another in their career been in close contact with the teachings and practices of the spiritual movements they so ardently diabolise. If these claims are to be trusted, then the Pentecostal field is much less hermetic and feeds on a much bigger variety of religious experiences and insights than much of the recent academic literature on the subject suggests. Kinshasa, in a way, is in itself a city of seekers. Kobeta libanga (to crash stones) – the hardest and most menial work possible – is the expression commonly used for the art of getting by, no matter by what means. The curiosity to learn, grasp and experience how things in the city’s largely informal economy work so as not to ‘crash stones’ all the time is part and parcel of this task and for many a vital necessity. The inclination to ‘seek’, in a wider sense, is therefore a crucial mode of existence in this

Introduction • 9

‘place of meander and dérive’ (Monaville 2013: 9), where infrastructure continues to exist chiefly as an architecture of words and bodies (cf. De Boeck 2004a, 2006). In the last decade Chinese, Lebanese, Indian and Congolese entrepreneurs have erected signs of promise and hope in the urban space: hotels, fountains, sidewalks and executive towers, such as the building called the ‘Modern Titanic’ (cf. De Boeck 2011). The phallic height of these buildings in the administrative centre of la ville is complemented by a number of newly renovated boulevards. Smaller roads in la cité are often repaired only hastily and tend to erode and break up much sooner than expected. The road network in these densely populated areas resembles the social and professional networks many Kinois attempt to entertain. Both seem perpetually short-lived and threatened by overloads of expectation. Similarly, seekers’ quests are driven as much by the excitement for the miraculous as by the hardship of perpetual disappointment. Again and again, erosion causes recalibration, reconnection, perpetual death and resurrection.9

Foreign Technologies of Power Already from the mid-1970s onwards, what had emerged in the Japanese interbellum as an innovative adaptation of an older ShintôBuddhist healing ritual, came to be interlaced in Central Africa with a historically rooted penchant by those in power for the manipulation of invisible forces. Anthropologists have repeatedly pointed to the need to seriously consider that there are ‘assumptions and understandings of … relevant causal forces in politics (that differ from) Western political and social scientific paradigms of politics and the state’, as Schatzberg (2001: 139) phrases it.10 This older logic, which states that there are secrets of invisible forces at work in the world, had also been applied to missionaries, who were held to have purportedly kept a number of important secrets from their African followers so as to safeguard their hegemony. As will be shortly explored in the following, this logic became apparent especially in first-contact situations as well as in the foundation of African Independent Churches (AICs). A striking account of such a first-contact situation is recounted by Isichei (1995: 202), who quotes a Catholic missionary in Lower Congo, who had exclaimed: ‘Guess what! The biggest fetisher [sic] of the whole district thinks he’s a Christian! He knows Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph and Saint Anthony, who carries the baby Jesus in his arms’ (cf. Isichei 1995: 202, footnote 87). Isichei comments that anthropologist MacGaffey considered this conversion ‘Christian veneer, created as a

10 • Seekers and Things

protective screen to shield an ancient cult from the missionaries and the colonial administration.’ ‘Both hostile missionary, and sympathetic anthropologist’, she goes on, ‘concur that the movement was not genuinely Christian.’ Yet, she writes, ‘there is nothing in the data to suggest this, and perhaps they simply chose to practice a new religion in familiar ways’ (ibid.). The position of the Catholic missionary mentioned by Isichei resembles that of a Japanese delegate of one of the Japanese new religions in Kinshasa (Joseph’s former movement), whom I met in Brussels. Explaining to me what the Congolese do with the practice of Ikebana in Kinshasa (cf. Chapter 3), he stressed that in Congo ‘they have always said that, if the flower is for therapy, then it is magie’ (interview, Brussels, September 2012). In his opinion, arranging flowers entails tranquillity and serenity and therefore has a healing quality, but this had nothing to do with magic. Would it be possible to suggest that, instead of getting the message wrong, we can say with Isichei that Kinois who practise a Japanese religion ‘simply chose to practice a new religion in familiar ways’? Indeed, as for many the practice of Japanese religion in contemporary Congo is a first-contact situation, this might be a valid answer. However, taking into account the pluralistic religious field in a city like Kinshasa, where the mutual positioning with regard to other religious movements influences affiliations and interpretations, it cannot be the only answer. The assumption of hidden secrets also became apparent in the founding moments of African Independent Churches, whose charismatic prophets (ngunza in Kikongo) in West Central Africa ‘emphasise[d] the Spirit and protection from witchcraft, and stress[ed] persistently the idea of the secret teaching of Jesus’ (Isichei 1995: 202). Kimbanguism (MacGaffey 1983) and the Nigerian Aladura movement (Peel 1968) too, had already phrased their revelations as the recovery of the ‘hidden power of the Whites’ (cf. H. Turner 1978) that missionaries from the mainline churches had concealed from them. Later, especially since independence, it appeared that the West’s real secrets were not so much inherent in Christianity, but rather to be sought in those forces that Christianity itself was trying to quarantine as its own constitutive Other. This included the realm of freemasonry (cf. Cohen 1981), nineteenth-century occultism and also non-Christian religions from Asia. Thus, also in the times of Congo’s postcolony, lodges of Freemasons and Rosicrucian orders, or the prestigious Grail Movement, started attracting novel elites, while Mobutu encircled himself with private spiritual experts including Indian magicians, marabouts and most powerful African ngangas. Still today rumours circulate about the

Introduction • 11

infamous demonic gatherings of his private secret society called ‘Prima Curia’, which were triggered by a number of speculative newspaper articles in the 1980s (cf. Braeckman 1992). Mail order systems, linked to Rosicrucianism, made sure that magical assets could be ordered directly from Europe (MacGaffey 2000: 16), while a trade in power objects from India had been underway via West Africa since early on in colonial times (Drewal 1988). Movements of Asian origin and inspiration such as Sukyô Mahikari, Eckankar and the Mokichi Okada Association International (MOA) were associated with the spiritual powers and secrets necessary for success. Still today the imaginaries of Asia and the Orient, of China, India and Japan, as well as the ‘hidden’ side of Europe, resonate powerfully with notions of magical power. No doubt the cultural pride and determination with which many Asian nations, in particular Japan, tackled colonial subjugation and its legacy, must have impressed African leaders like Mobutu in the aftermath of the Bandung conference. In a recent study, Wuaku (2013) historically analyses the implantation and popularisation of Hinduism in Ghana. He emphasises the role of ‘folk ideas about outside sources of spiritual power’ in the appropriation of incoming religious traditions (Wuaku 2013: 12–13), and that notions of Indian religion as a most powerful form of magicoreligious power have been crucial to the development of Hinduism in Ghana. These notions are historically rooted, he explains, in contacts established by Ghanaian soldiers who served in the colonial armies of the British Empire in India, Sri Lanka and Burma during the Second World War, as well as by Bollywood films and local ambulant magicians practising ‘Indian’ magic on African streets.11 Though Congo was not part of the British Empire, Indian movies and ambulant magicians were responsible for the same stereotypical moral geography whereby Congo’s inhabitants regarded India as the world centre for magic.12 Wuaku points to the importance of ‘magico-religious power’, or ‘spiritual power’, which he defines, like Hackett, as the ‘ability to transcend the normal course of events, to possess knowledge beyond the human ken, to be able to effect the miraculous, to possess spiritual gifts, which may be beneficial to the individual or the community, to ward off harmful forces or adversaries, and the ability to realise the objectives of life, that is to raise a family, enjoy economic self-sufficiency and good health’ (Hackett 1992: 285). As will be discussed below, spiritual power, rather than being merely the result of ‘belief’, is intimately tied up with the practice and performance of social and aesthetic difference. Religious movements of Asian and in particular Japanese origin, have a lot to offer in this regard. Moreover, EMM and TMAJ’s missionaries

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have sufficient proof of the benefits of their spiritual discipline, which has been able to protect one of them even from a bullet.13 The notion of a continuum of non-African technologies of power that are superior to African sorcery, conflating Asian magic with the ‘hidden power of the Whites’, became obvious to me when one of EMM’s missionaries, who considers himself a local expert in Japanese spirituality, asked me to look for a particular book for him in Europe. The author was a certain Papus (G.A. Encausse, 1865–1916), whom Wikipedia identified as a French esoteric and Rosecrucian. As a child this missionary had personally observed how an Anglican missionary from Europe had handed this book to one of his African Anglican colleagues, in secret, he had told me. The book’s title La science des nombres, as indicated by him, matched with what I could find on the internet; the book was a treaty on numerology. The aura of secrecy surrounding it somehow vanished, however, when I showed the missionary how to download it straight from the internet. While Mobutu’s friendship with Mao Zedong is well known – Mao’s outfit was the template for the anti-European Zairian male dress, the ‘Abacost’ (from à bas le costume, down with the suit) – many also remember Mobutu’s visits to India. Still today, India is considered the hotspot of magical power, which Mobutu is said to have consulted on his visit to Indira Gandhi in 1973. It is common knowledge in Kinshasa that India has never been allowed to participate in a football world cup game, because of its reputed magical superiority, which outlaws Indians from competing in any sporting competition (this also demonstrates that the Congolese do not know how competitive the Indians are at cricket). But the Chinese also appear to be skilled magicians, which they demonstrate through their engineering skills. The following vignette is illustrative in this regard. In the first days of May 2012, a rather unusual video clip, five minutes in length, circulated on the city’s mobile phones.14 It showed an ugly little monster with an upright torso sitting on top of the rolled-up pile of its snake-tailed body. The head of the motionless alien was covered with long golden hair, and two little green arms suggested, along with the blonde hair and the gazing open eyes, that it was no animal, but, despite its anthropomorphic appearance, nor was it human. A small group of people were recording the footage in awe, and a repetitive shrieking sound had been added to it from a digital source so as to imitate the creature’s voice and lend it an overall horrifying impression. The attraction of the clip was further enhanced by the explanatory narrative that circulated at the same time. Both on Radio Trottoir (cf. Ellis 1989) and in a number of news programmes on TV, the little video

Introduction • 13

received substantial public attention. The creature had been captured, it was said, en face (on the other side), in Congo-Brazzaville, which is Kinshasa’s closest national and geographical Other on the other side of the Congo River. There it was now waiting for scientific examination in the hands of the other Congo’s authorities. The creature had been captured by none other than Chinese spiritual experts, who had been called in for assistance by the Chinese construction company in charge of building a bridge as part of an infrastructure project ordered by the government. Multiple times construction had to be stopped and started from scratch, the story went. According to the narrative, the water spirits were opposed to the construction of a bridge to the extent that workers had even been killed in unusual accidents. The foundations of the bridge had dissolved and floated away into the water several times. As a result, the construction team from China had called in the help of their spiritual experts. In the words of a neighbour, they were ‘Buddhist monks’. This delegation of spiritual experts had taken to the river in a little rowing boat and performed unknown rituals and incantations on the water. Again complications had occurred and two of the monks had drowned. Eventually, after six hours on the water, the leader of the delegation himself had returned, bringing with him the captured creature that he had pulled out of the river’s depths. This is how the monster, which was commonly referred to as le monstre de Brazzaville or le démon du fleuve, was captured, and thus the bridge could eventually be built. Many, after receiving the video, had watched, discussed but then deleted it from their phones for fear of the demon in the telephone being able to bewitch (Fr. envoûter, Li. koloka) them. One spiritualist called it a media trick, a fake that doubtless came from West Africa, where internet criminality is known to be big business. Others, including highly educated interlocutors, were convinced the video rather confirmed the real existence of such water creatures. A member of the Grail Movement and self-declared expert in spiritual matters pointed to a book he had at home which dealt with this kind of creature. Clearly, the démon du fleuve video fed well into the existing repertoire of urban legends that circulate in Kinshasa’s shared imagination.15 About two decades ago, comic strips were the media that materialised and supported the circulation of rumours as ‘the printed equivalent of Radio Trottoir’ (De Boeck 2004a: 185). Today mobile phone technology has come to replace the comic strip in this regard. But more than this, the story of the monster makes indisputable reference to the magico-spiritual techniques of the spiritual experts invoked by the Chinese engineers to overcome the resistance of the water spirits. If we take into account the idea that rumours generally undergo a process of

14 • Seekers and Things

levelling, sharpening and assimilation, after which the result allows for a rough estimation of what story is considered valid for the collective sensitivity (Stewart and Strathern 2004: 42, L. White 2000), the account is telling. I gathered numerous accounts from older Congolese who told me of engineering projects, in particular the building of bridges, that were haunted by spiritual obstruction. In one such account, which the pastor of a local Assembly of God church shared with me, the former Belgian colonial authorities had constructed a bridge working exclusively at night, fearing the locals would discover their secret techniques necessary for such engineering. Clearly, as the rumour about le démon du fleuve tells us, the theme of foreigners having spiritual secrets and techniques that they keep from their African counterparts (H. Turner 1978) also remains powerfully present when it comes to Asian actors.

Issues at Stake Spiritual Movements and their Study In the context of demographic explosion and rapid urbanisation, the aura of secrecy, which many spiritual movements carry also due to their Zairian and elite-connoted past, is turning into an increasingly popular and accessible resource of power for an increasingly large number of people. Often seekers actually enjoy performing secrecy and the production of aesthetic difference. Similar to the Pentecostal programme to democratise access to spiritual power, spiritual movements also appear to be more democratic than before. Currently present in Kinshasa are Soka Gakkai International (SGI), Eckankar, the Grail Movement (Message du Graal), Christian Science, Sukyô Mahikari, Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University (Raja Yoga), Guru Siyag’s Siddha Yoga,16 Sekai Kyûseikyô (SKK) with three different branches – the Mokichi Okada Association International (MOA), Eglise Messianique Mondiale (EMM) and the Temple Messianique Art de Johrei (TMAJ) – the Unification Church of Reverend Moon (Moonies), Bahá’í Faith (Foi Baha’i), the Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association, etc. Despite the public prominence offered to Jesus Christ by PCCs, Jesus is clearly no longer the only spiritual superhero whose power circulates in Kinshasa today. In her census of religious movements in the Nigerian town of Calabar, Rosalind Hackett (1989: 153–165) was the first to notice the importance of these new religious movements, mostly of Asian origin, which she baptised ‘spiritual sciences’, or ‘spiritual science movements’ (cf. Hackett 1986a, 1986b, 1989, 1992). As Wuaku

Introduction • 15

Illustration 0.1 Prayer cards in Kabasela’s wallet. The aforementioned seeker Kabasela carries a number of ‘prayer cards’ as protection in his wallet. These include, from top to bottom, Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity; Dada Lekhraj of the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University; Simon Kimbangu, the founder of the Kimbanguist Church, who is depicted along with the seventeenth-century Kongo prophetess Kimpa Vita; a card of the Guru Siyag’s Siddha Yoga organisation; two portraits of Ching Hai (founder and head of the International Association of the Supreme Master Ching Hai); as well as a picture of TMAJ’s prosperity goddess Daikokokuten (cf. Chapter 1). Photo by the author.

summarises, and to a large extent similar to Pentecostalism’s assets, these are known to stress the precedence of the spiritual over the material, ‘the human ability to use the mind or words to manipulate the material world, the importance of empowering oneself by acquiring secret formulae underlying the unseen world, and the need to engage in spiritual exercises such as meditation, to gain personal spiritual advancement etc.’ (2013: 64, note 7). In the Africanist literature, ‘spiritual sciences’ has become the common term to use for what in Kinshasa is often referred to as movements spirituels. At the time of Hackett’s study, published in 1989, popular Pentecostal actors had not yet conquered the public sphere with the popularising effects of audio-visual media. Also, the reality

16 • Seekers and Things

of urban religious diversity was only just starting to generate scholarly interest. Spiritual science movements naturally appeared to scholars as an ensemble of alien, non-African movements that were odd, at best, when compared to the older African religious initiatives, and especially difficult to penetrate. Despite Hackett’s pointed findings, none of the subsequent literature reviews on religious movements in Africa mentions them (Ranger 1986, Ellis and ter Haar 1998, Meyer 2004). Recent francophone work on contemporary religious pluralism (Dorier-Apprill 1996, 2002, 2006, Lasseur and Mayrargue 2011) also ignores spiritual movements (but see Louveau 2011). A reason for this might be an anthropological bias towards ‘world religions’, especially Islam and Christianity, and what we may call ‘denominational nationalism’, i.e. the tendency to focus on denominational boundaries by ignoring dynamics of mimesis and cross-­fertilisation as part of the pluralisation of urban religiosities observable today.17 Religious diversity in the city and also the mutual conditioning of urban and religious space (Kirsch 2004, Lanz 2013) are today an undeniable reality. Even without having to choose or convert to any particular denomination, the bodies, senses and mindsets of contemporary African urbanites are unavoidably modulated by a variety of religious influences. Given the increasing presence of religion in the public sphere, this occurs both directly and indirectly, through more or less conscious attention but also inattention (cf. Larkin 2014). Contemporary urbanites grow up with a range of discourses, practices and moulding religious experiences. Therefore, this study goes beyond the internal dealings of EMM and TMAJ. Both these movements serve rather as vantage points from which to consider the bigger religious landscape of the city as a continuously recalibrating web of associational configuration whose ultimate nodal points are the bodies of practitioners. In academic literature spiritual (science) movements mostly appear only as Christianity’s Other (Adogame 2010: 485–486, Kalu 2008). Historical studies have pointed to the creative potentials released in the foundations of Zionist and African Independent Churches. That creativity and experimentation continue to thrive18 and have been exceeding the boundaries of Christianity, and Islam seems to be often ignored; moreover, except for Simon Kimbangu and Kimpa Vita, none of the spiritual leaders depicted in Kabasela’s wallet are, ethnically and geographically speaking, more or less ‘African’ than Jesus Christ. Would it not be helpful and do more justice to seekers like Kabasela if we considered these movements as religious movements within the scholarly tradition of studying religion in Africa? This study prompts

Introduction • 17

us to confront the question of what is, from the perspective of a seeker like Kabasela, so different between a spiritual movement ‘from Japan’, and a ‘Christian’ religious movement, apart from the obvious historical precedence that the latter can claim in Africa and, concordantly, in Africanist scholarship. So far a spiritual movement has not yet been studied in its own right within a diversifying urban setting such as Kinshasa. Except for Hackett’s initial ground research, Wuaku’s recent study (2013) and Louveau’s internal ethnography of Sukyô Mahikari in France and West Africa (2012), spiritual movements are only slowly generating interest as legitimate topoi of inquiry in the field of African studies. This despite the fact that they have much in common with other religious movements, as this study shows. The reason for this may lie in the relative inaccessibility of these formerly often elitist movements, as well as latent normative understandings of what ‘Africa’ is and should be in terms of religious creativity and expression. Ranger reminds us that ‘we should see mission churches as much less alien and independent churches as much less “African”’ (Ranger 1987: 31, quoted in Meyer 2004: 454–455), which reverberates in the main thesis of Wuaku’s study: ‘while Ghanaians appropriated and deployed the alien Hindu world through their own cultural ideas, in the context of this new encounter the worldviews of worshippers would themselves be transformed as they engage Hindu ideas in dealing with their day to day modern lives’ (Wuaku 2013: 4). In Meyer’s terms, ‘essentialist differences between Africa and the world or the local and the global are impossible to maintain’ (Meyer 2004: 463, see also Bayart 2000). This truly anti-­ essentialising assumption is the starting point of the present study. Auspicious Alterity Japan The Brazilian TV series Inde, Une histoire d’amour was a big-impact hit in Kinshasa. This soap opera, to the surprise of many, was entirely produced and directed in Brazil and consisted of a complete Brazilian cast.19 It dealt with the themes of love, especially forbidden love and juvenile delinquency, the Indian ‘joint family’, jealousy and witchcraft, traditional Hindu arranged marriages, the practice of dowry etc. It covered the time span of India’s transition to democracy in the 1950s through to the socialist era of the 1970s and the neoliberal 2000s, also engaging with the theme of diasporic Indians. The ‘old’ and the ‘new’ India are enacted in the series through the intergenerational trajectories of a family and its connections in Brazil, Rajasthan and Dubai. In Kinshasa, a growing feeling of cultural resonance between Asian

18 • Seekers and Things

and African cultures is noticeable. Indian-style clothes have recently become fashionable during parties and in music videos. Moreover, if until about a decade ago the main destination for hospital treatment was South Africa, today it has become India with New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai having become impressive hubs of medical tourism from Africa. Considering the queue of youngsters who in 2013 tried to enter the Indian embassy in Kinshasa in the mornings, it would seem that Indian universities are adding considerably to the increasing flow of people between Congo and India. In a way this compensates for the rise of Indian, mostly Gujarati, traders in Kinshasa, who have come to dominate the trade in electronics around the commercial centre of Avenue du Commerce. Studies of Asian cultural influences in Africa have remained restricted to South Africa,20 West Africa21 and East Africa.22 As in the case of Ghanaian Hinduism, studied by Wuaku (2013), the cultural traffic in these regions was encouraged by intercontinental connectivity during the time of the British Empire. Central Africa, however, and francophone Africa more generally, has been overlooked so far (but see Louveau 2012). A turn towards the East in this area appears even more a creative deviance from, if not a defiance of, older, historically shaped, geographical trajectories. By fashioning new networks and creative cultural flows via the lusophone world, EMM and TMAJ’s leaders seem to shake off the historical thrust of their Congolese colonial geography. These novel trajectories seemingly deterritorialise cultural flows and lift them out of their historical embeddedness in former colonial spatial orders. The increasing intensity of cultural cross-fertilisation between Africa and other non-Western parts of the world, which today has come to include, more prominently, China, India, Brazil and Japan, points to the theoretical debates about the patterns that underlie the putative ‘globality’ of cultural flows. This entails problems of how to approach cultural difference in an ever more interlacing world. Persistent economic inequalities notwithstanding, the centre-periphery model is today no longer valid in the face of the multilaterality of cultural flows that govern local cultural creativities. Flows of people, ideas, money, technology and media, as Appadurai’s (1996) -scapes model suggests, have come to employ, and mould, novel trajectories, which reshuffle and multiply proximities and distances that come about through instances of appropriation, transculturation, domestication, hybridisation, etc. How can we conceptualise such flows from a local perspective? In order to emphasise the fluidity and ongoing circulation of cultural forms, I suggest the notion of (re-)production because of its unambiguous

Introduction • 19

praxeological emphasis on human agency without discarding the possibility of structural factors conditioning the process. Adding the hyphenated prefix re- opens up a spectrum between creative and original production, which is totally agency based, and mimetic reproduction, suggesting the interference of a process of cultural patterning, mostly guided by intuitive knowledge of a putative tradition (one is influenced by something that is thought to have been there before) or of a putative elsewhere (one is influenced by something that is thought to be practised elsewhere). When describing transnational trajectories, we unavoidably encounter a dilemma: how can we describe and interpret phenomena that cross existing geographical, social and symbolic boundaries, without naming the spatial entities contained within these boundaries and hence reiterating and reinstating them by using objectifying spatialising categories? Considering that concepts have ontogenetic power, the question arises as to whether scholars, by employing spatialising language and categories, are not therefore often inadvertently complicit in (hegemonic) projects of world construction? The dilemma resembles what Brubaker (2004) terms ‘commonsense groupism’, i.e. the impossibility of talking about ethnicity without thinking in groups and hence reiterating their presumed essence. In the same vein, we cannot think of flows and trajectories without thinking in spatialising terms. The creation of new spatial concepts, which reflect the realities on the ground, as for instance Gilroy does with the concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (1993), can barely be a solution for the transnational case analysed here, whose spatial ties extend from Japan to Brazil and Africa, etc. Descriptive spatial(ising) concepts such as Japongo or Japilongo would cause amusing provocation by pointing beyond the spatialised cultural containers of ‘Japan’, ‘Brazil’ and ‘Congo’, but can they be viable analytical alternatives, especially if none of the actors involved uses them? The national level remains a chief organisational and identificatory spatial entity, which matters strongly to Messianiques in Kinshasa. Hence my suggestion to consider the movement of EMM/TMAJ as a Congolese spiritual movement ‘from Japan’ (cf. Chapter 1). ‘Repertoires of resonance’ (Wuaku 2013: 6) are dependent upon perceived cultural affinities and identification. In the case of Japan, for instance, Congolese are indeed aware of certain affinities. The name Kasai is known to be popular both in Congo and Japan: Kasai is the name of a Congolese province and at the same time a common surname in Japan.23 Moreover, there is an awareness of a comparable cultural heritage, as is apparent in EMM and TMAJ’s practice of ancestor worship (cf. Chapter 8). Even more striking than these perceived affinities

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are the differences that Congo and Japan share vis-à-vis the West. A repeated credo among spiritualists in Kinshasa is that the West is too ‘materialistic’ and focused on a ‘Cartesian’ understanding of science, lacking the ‘spiritual’ side of things. For Messianiques in Kinshasa, ideas of Japan as a hub of ‘spirituality’ and of this being the key to its technological development lends comforting support in the endeavour to distance oneself from the West. While EMM’s responsables (people with a formally allotted task) stress that they practise a ‘religion’ in its own right, as ‘spiritualists’ their aim is to simultaneously add the spiritual workings of the world to the ‘materialistic’ discoveries of science. Japan is known in Kinshasa for car manufacturing and information technology, but especially for martial arts and haute couture. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood of N’Djili are renowned for repairing, recycling and remaking spare parts and cars. One of the streets where workshops specialise in Japanese cars is known as petit Japon (little Japan). In addition to Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Suzuki, Lexus and Yamaha, Sony and Toshiba are also well-known Japanese brands. The notion of Japan stands out, however, when it comes to fashion design. Names of Japanese designers such as Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo are well known, especially among those Kinois attracted to the world of elegance. This is reflected in the impact of kimono fashion among Sapeurs, the members of the Congolese Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elégantes (la SAPE) (cf. Gandoulou 2000) as well as during ritualised combats between local youth fight groups. As Pype (2007) has found, so-called sportifs are inspired by the heroes Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee and Arnold Schwarzenegger in their efforts to appropriate foreign martial arts, while fights are organised in the gangs’ training grounds called dojon. Also the centre of the Japanese religious movement Sukyô Mahikari in Kinshasa is called dojon, which is openly identifiable as such by the letter signs on the outer wall of its prestigious building next to the military camp Kokolo. In the realm of music a mutual admiration exists between Congo and Japan: while Congolese rumba star Zaiko Langa Langa celebrates Japaneseness on his album entitled Nippon Banzai (1986), the Japanese band Yoka Choc emulates Congolese rumba with such astonishing perfection that many Congolese do not believe their ears and eyes when watching them on Youtube.24 However, compared to India, Japan offers a different, and more restricted, ‘repertoire of resonance’ in Kinshasa. Rather little is known about Japanese history and culture, which gives local leaders of movements such as EMM and TMAJ considerable room for freedom and creativity, also to translate ‘Japan’ into a feeling, a mood or a sensuous inclination towards the embodiment of difference, expertise and

Introduction • 21

Illustration 0.2 Taxi-bus Japonnais. The Japonnais [sic] is not only an outstanding car mechanic. Among the members of la SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elégantes), he is a Sapeur of outstanding, overpowering elegance. In the public championship of speed, endurance, public appearance and humour on Kinshasa’s overcrowded roads, taxi-buses and their teams claim to be irresistible and outstanding like a Japonais. Photo by the author.

sophistication within the local situation. The fact that so little is known about it, just like about so many other parts of the world, entitles Messianiques and their local leaders to enjoy a wider interpretational freedom, which often serves the cause of building emically valid cultural resonances. Things, Difference and Authority Aesthetic difference would not be of interest to anyone were it not for its ability to generate and grant authority. Before anything else, authority is the capacity to be the author of one’s life. Inherently expansive and dependent on regimes of personhood, it often also extends to the capacity to author others’ lives. Authority is always a relational achievement and thus dependent on things, persons and the assemblage, continuum or network through which they exist (cf. Latour 2005). Like these networks themselves, authority also requires perpetual generation and negotiation, sustainment and stabilisation, and ideally, institution and infrastructure, in order to be perpetuated.

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The ethnography presented here offers insights into the use of material things, spiritual technologies and an aesthetic repertoire that generate boundaries, tensions and sometimes conflict. This brings us to the question: what role do religious movements play in people’s negotiation and production of authority? The importance of this question becomes particularly clear in light of the wider absence of formalised authority structures and ethical reference points in Kinshasa, a densely populated city of urbanites seemingly in need of structuring authority. It has already been observed that the above-mentioned ‘occult economies’ argument is not the only one that explains the upsurge of religious activism in urban Africa since the late 1980s. A significant factor is the generation of moral authority and the ability to foster a kind of personhood that encourages the agency and expressivity of the individual (Meyer 1999). Differently put, it is the fostering of a subjectivity that suits the conditions of urban life (Marshall 2009). The building of the person, or the subject, is inherently intertwined with authority, be it on the smaller, interpersonal level of authoring oneself, or on a wider, collective scale of shaping feelings of collective personhood. Messianiques’ production of aesthetic difference is a welcome resource in this regard. Referred to locally as one’s ‘aura’ or one’s ‘spiritual level’ (cf. Chapter 6), aesthetic difference equates to embodied authority and is generated in association with thingly matters, whose usage and ‘sense’ in the local understanding is at times divisive. The matters concerned include flowers (Chapter 3), Johrei healing (Chapters 5 and 6), silence and Japanese mantras (Chapter 7), ancestor worship (Chapter 8), as well as the respective theories and interpretations that Messianiques promote regarding these things. Suspicions about witchcraft (see Chapter 2) catalyse the perceived aesthetic difference, which is thus fabricated in an ongoing mutual positioning of both insiders and outsiders of spiritual movements and their things. This positioning process ties in with the understanding of the African city as a demiurgic continuum in which actors author themselves and their urban world on both an intellectual and sensory level. This draws on previous work that has stressed the agency and creativity of mainly young urban actors.25 De Boeck’s understanding of the city as an ‘architecture of words’ (2004a, 2006) is therefore a persistent theme in this study, with words being simultaneously vehicles of mental representation as well as sonic things that have a capacity to reach out to the body and the senses as the building blocks of world (cf. Chapter 7).

Introduction • 23

The Aesthetic Approach The aesthetic approach relies on the material turn in the study of religion, placing things and materiality at the forefront in the study of religious experience and spiritual presence.26 There were three crucial reasons for choosing the aesthetic approach. Firstly, in the context of religious diversity it would be easy to fall prey to the simplicity of a symbolic categorisation of movements in terms of the respective ‘belief systems’ they advocate. Such an attempt would disregard the fact that in a city with a highly sensational religious public sphere the body and the senses are constantly moulded by a variety of religious influences. To evade the above-mentioned ‘denominational nationalism’ it is necessary to study difference and authority praxeologically and not on the basis merely of ‘representations’ such as distinct dogmas or theological traditions. The aesthetic approach promises to see emically perceived continuities beyond seemingly different formalised symbolic repertoires. Secondly, authority is not just about making people adapt and live according to a certain abstract discourse, but also about making them sense the world and their existence therein in a particular way. The senses and the body are prime sites for religious difference and authority production. Thirdly, many spiritual theories I encountered among seekers in Kinshasa strikingly resemble and dialogue well with the theoretical concerns of religious aesthetics, materiality and the agency of things in recent scholarship (cf. Lambertz forthcoming). To put it otherwise, the aesthetic approach corresponds well with emic ways of reasoning. Webb Keane (2007) has studied the missionary encounter between Dutch Calvinists and the inhabitants of the Indonesian island of Sumba at the beginning of the twentieth century. Matthew Engelke (2007), on the other hand, has studied the Friday Masowe Apostolic Church in Zimbabwe and the refusal of this church to use the Bible because of its too material nature. For the Friday Masowe Apostolics, the Holy Spirit inevitably has to be ‘live and direct’. In both Keane and Engelke’s cases, there are rival attitudes regarding the role of things as legitimate or illegitimate carriers of spiritual agency. Similarly, in the increasingly Pentecostalised setting of Kinshasa, Messianiques encounter difficulties in validating their usage of religious things such as flowers, amulets and sacred calligraphies as material technologies to mediate spiritual presence.

24 • Seekers and Things

Surface as Depth: Aesthetic Boundaries, Iconic Chains and Atmospheres To study these religious things and their usage in the urban context, a number of conceptual tools are helpful. Both Keane (2007) and Engelke (2007) emphasise the role of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic triad of symbol, icon and index. A symbol’s relation with that which it signifies is arbitrary and based merely on negotiated convention. This reflects the older trend of Saussurian semiology, which had insisted that the sound of language, for instance, carries in itself no meaning. Peirce contradicted this assumption by adding the icon and the index, both of which stress that a sign’s material qualities, as for instance its sound, also matter in the generation of its meaning. In the case of the index, the sign has a common origin or shared material causality with that which it points to. Thus, the index ‘indicates’ the cause that brought it about. Classic examples include the thermometer, which indicates the temperature of a feverish body, or the weather vane, whose direction indicates the direction of the wind. An example relevant to Central Africa is a child’s illness, which in the event that ordinary therapy does not help is often seen as pointing to a bigger moral or social problem in the wider family. In the case of the icon, the sign’s sensory or aesthetic surface resembles, or is identical with that which it stands for.27 The icon, to a certain extent, stands as that which it stands for. In a way, it imitates, but it forgets that it does so and thus becomes or substitutes what it was meant to imitate. It is or does its meaning, which, in turn, cannot exist without its respective form or aesthetic surface. By making the distinction between meaning and matter, between depth and surface, disappear, Peirce’s notion of the icon lends itself well to the study of spiritual presence from a material point of view. The icon is an aesthetic actor in its own right, or, as Webb Keane (2003: 411) phrases it, it offers to ‘undo the sign’s withdrawal from its worlds’. Birgit Meyer (2009a) has suggested that rather than being ‘imagined’ by offering a cohesive meaning to a community, as Anderson’s (1991) notion of ‘imagined communities’ suggests, as ‘aesthetic formations’ social groups are always fabricated on the basis of cultured, organic entanglements of things, persons and their senses. In the pluralistic context of Kinshasa, and especially because of the contested nature of EMM and TMAJ, the role of thing-made boundaries vis-à-vis respective aesthetic Others, deserves particular attention. In the absence of a bigger infrastructure of distinction, aesthetic difference that can be embodied is a particularly helpful resource for performing confidence and self-respect. To understand the role of things in such boundary making, it is necessary to go beyond an understanding of boundaries

Introduction • 25

as merely symbolic. Hence the notion of ‘aesthetic boundaries’, which are drawn and come about thanks to the aesthetic, and atmospheric, performativity things inevitably have as a result of their own localised sensual history. The concept of performativity is understood in line with John Austin’s (1962) theory of performative speech acts (cf. also Fischer-Lichte 2004). If extended to things, performativity is what things do, if their thingly and instrumental ‘speech acts’ are felicitous, to people on the sensory level. An emphasis on the role of aesthetics and the iconic quality of things opens the door for a number of non-objectifiable, yet thing-related factors, such as styles (Meyer 2010a: 744), moods, atmospheres or sensory inclinations. In his ‘new aesthetic theory’ entitled Atmosphäre, the philosopher Gernot Böhme (2013: 15) contends that before we perceive something, our senses are always already ‘tuned’ (gestimmt) by the atmosphere of the place where we are located. From such a perspective it becomes clear that the aesthetic effect of things cannot be estimated if they are treated in isolation. Rather, they have to be seen in their respective iconic entanglement. This aesthetic interlocking, or intermedial conflation, is what I have tried to capture with the notion of the ‘iconic chain’, opening the door for synaesthetic, inter- or transsensorial, and inter- and transpersonal experience. By being iconic, the aesthetically entangled assemblage of the iconic chain does not only indicate or mean a boundary of difference by arbitrarily standing for it. It actively does and performs the aesthetic boundary of difference by standing as its material embodiment. EMM and TMAJ’s iconic chain comprises a range of things, including the body and the hand, the Ohikari amulet, the Goshintai calligraphy, flowers, EMM’s founder’s photograph, dreams, prayers and silence, which, as I argue in Chapter 7, is also a thing. The notion of iconic chain involves all these things as a sequence of mutually dependent, interrelated and interlocking elements, which perform an aesthetic synergy on the practitioner’s continuum of senses. Semiotic Ideologies Webb Keane’s study focuses on the role of things and their respectively generated agencies as the basis of tensions and debates. He introduced the concept of semiotic ideologies as an expansion of the notion of language (or linguistic) ideology. Drawing on Michael Silverstein he defines such ideologies (note the plural) as ‘sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalisation or justification of perceived language structure and use’ (Silverstein 1979: 193, quoted in Keane

26 • Seekers and Things

2007: 16). Keane explains that ‘language ideologies, however, do not just reflect on language as it is given: people act on the basis of those reflections. They try to change or preserve certain ways of speaking and criticise or emulate other speakers. These efforts can be as subtle as the intuition that people from certain backgrounds are not quite trustworthy, or a hesitance to express certain values in one’s mother tongue; they can be as violent as the state suppression of minority languages’ (Keane 2007: 16, my emphasis). Put differently, language ideologies are what people know, explicitly or implicitly, about what language can do. They determine what they can do with it and what others can do with it to them. But Keane’s theory is not limited to the use of language. With the concept of semiotic ideologies, he extends the perspective to what people know about what ‘music, visual imagery, food, architecture, gesture and anything that enters into actual semiotic practice’ (Keane 2007: 21) is granted to be doing, or what people (know they) are entitled to do themselves with these practices in particular situations. These situations are, as in fact any situation is, governed by respective semiotic ideologies. This has important consequences for one’s co-subjectivity and co-agency with things: one’s actions and interactions, one’s intuitive knowledge about one’s power or agency are always conditioned, or tuned, according to currently valid semiotic ideologies, which mould and determine what one considers can be done as a possible, authorised action (in association/assemblage) with a thing’s sensual, iconic surface and respective technological utility. It goes without saying that the one who is more aware than others about valid semiotic ideologies may tune and orchestrate not only his own, but also other people’s actions, by modelling their sensual attitudes with regard to the thingly world. Thus, like the above-mentioned concept of (re-)production, the concept of ‘semiotic ideologies’ lends itself to overcoming the analytical divide between agency and structure: some people might be less aware than others about the fact that their daily practices follow the guidelines of semiotic ideologies. For these, semiotic ideologies act as conditioning structures. Others, however, know a great deal about their particular members’ resources (Fairclough 1989: 24) and may consciously manipulate certain semiotic ideologies so as to generate authority over others. Differently put, on the one hand semiotic ideologies condition and determine what people subconsciously do by behaving putatively ‘automatically’, i.e. out of unaware, precognitive intuition, reflex, or within the framework of their habitus. On the other hand, more ‘reflexive’ individuals can employ their awareness to ‘set the tone’ and claim authority by making others follow particular semiotic ideologies.

Introduction • 27

‘Ideology’, by tending towards expansion and persuasion, indicates that authority will be granted to those who can determine the semiotic ideology others ought to follow and will themselves continue to promote. The promotion of a semiotic ideology is therefore tantamount to an authority claim. This makes the concept suitable for the analysis of different religious formations in a pluralising urban religious landscape. As already mentioned, authority is not just about making people ‘believe’ certain things, but about making them sense the thingly world and their existence therein in a certain way. The concept of semiotic ideologies conflates both these dimensions and therefore lends itself well to the rival and conflicting ways in which people and things relate to each other. These relations are far from stable, but are volatile and driven by interest and intention. The rival tensions, frictions and debates about what things are and what they may do is precisely what the concept of ‘semiotic ideologies’ allows us to grasp on the micro-social level.

Architecture of the Study The organisation of the study seeks to reflect the proposed methodology and its focus on seekers’ things. Chapter 1 discusses the Japanese origins and global trajectories of the EMM movement, as well as its implantation and schismatic multiplication in Kinshasa. Chapter 2 introduces the degree of suspicion and condemnation levelled against non-Christian spiritual movements, mostly by born-again Christians. A central argument here is that in the context of the city, suspicion must be understood as an infrapolitical resource, which explains why the boundaries between Christian and non-Christian movements so ardently persist. The remaining chapters revolve around the various things EMM and TMAJ put into practice: Chapters 3 to 8 single out the most important of EMM and TMAJ’s practices so as to historicise and contextualise them one by one in the religious history of West Central Africa and the pluralistic religious environment of contemporary Kinshasa. Each of the chapters constitutes a separate ethnographic essay on the basis of the same methodological framework: Chapter 3 discusses the (re-)production of Ikebana flower arrangement. Chapter 4 zooms in on ritualised rubbish removal and the sensory generation of citizenship through touching urban public soil. Chapters 5 and 6 address the healing energy of Johrei in the context of religious and medical pluralism, which is followed by the matter of ‘vibrating’ Japanese mantras and the power of

28 • Seekers and Things

vocal sound and silence (Chapter 7). Lastly, the ‘imported tradition’ of ancestor worship is discussed in Chapter 8. Aesthetic difference and authority recur as leitmotifs throughout all chapters. Persistently faithful to the aesthetic approach, they all reveal continuities and disjunctions between spiritual movements and Christian ones from the actors’ point of view.

The Research: Seeker among Seekers The study is based on a total of seventeen months of fieldwork in Kinshasa between February 2010 and September 2013. Despite shorter visits to Lower Congo, the Bandundu province and Kisangani, it was chiefly carried out in Kinshasa’s cités. Getting to know ‘how this city works’, with all its intensities, surprises and challenges, was as timeconsuming as it was indispensable. It allowed me to grow familiar with the ways in which people connect and get around, both socially as friends and family, as well as physically in the city’s public transport system. Before I took to motorbiking so as to gain time, mainly for home visits, taking taxis and minibuses enabled me to have some of the most extraordinary encounters, intense experiences of heat and physical proximity, and probably the biggest traffic jams possible. It also taught me the precautions, reflexes and interaction skills necessary to feel secure at any moment. With EMM, TMAJ and their bandimi (followers) being dispersed all over Kinshasa, I was thus able to frequent various different neighbourhoods. The ethnographic research meant participating in as much of EMM and TMAJ’s church life, and in as many life situations of their followers, as possible. This also meant getting in touch with followers of other churches and spiritual movements, including PCCs, Catholic missionaries, Kimbanguists, and the spiritual movements of Sukyô Mahikari, Mokichi Okada Association, Brahma Kumaris, the Grail Movement, Rosicrucians (AMORC), Soka Gakkai International, the Moonies and Freemasons. As the research focus progressed, the vantage point from which I learned to perceive the city gradually became that of EMM, TMAJ and their bandimi in combination with those of my local friends and families in the neighbourhoods in Masina Sans-Fil and Kingabwa. The situation of EMM and TMAJ being stigmatised minorities did not render research very easy. When in May 2010 I met a professor Mwene Batende at the University of Kinshasa, he was thrilled about my idea of doing an ethnography of a spiritual movement. Clearly aware of their understudied situation, his excitement was less about the topic

Introduction • 29

itself, however, than about the fact that I was a European. This kind of research can only be done by somebody from outside, he said, pointing to the fact that any local researcher would be suspected by spiritualists of wanting to misrepresent their non-Christian teachings as diabolic. His encouraging insight reconfirmed that my white complexion as a mundele, and my European, Belgian origins were going to influence the relationship I would have with any interlocutor at any given moment. What had encouraged my interest in the EMM movement was that in none of the various initial talks with the responsables and bandimi of this movement did I feel pressured to state my religious background or affiliation. More generally in Kinshasa, the question Osambelaka wapi? (Where do you pray?) is among the first that people ask, and indicates the importance of denominational affiliation for one’s group identification. I soon understood that having sincere discussions about agnosticism and atheism was not a viable option in a heavily Pentecostalised setting, so I eventually turned to evoking another facet of my biography by answering Nabotama na libota ya baCatholiques (I was born in a Catholic family). EMM explicitly invites followers to combine different religious affiliations. Peter Clarke recounts how the former head of the Brazilian section of World Messianity (on which Kinshasa indirectly depends) presented the movement as an ‘ultra religion’, totally supradenominational, going beyond and underlying all other existing religions, and ‘encapsulating the fundamental principles of them all’ (Clarke 2006c: 131).28 In Okada’s writings this feature is termed ‘super religion’ (Okada 1999 [1984]: i). The founder justified it by calling his movement a ‘department store Church’: ‘like a large store that includes many kinds of departments our teachings encompass Christianity, Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, general philosophy, science and fine arts. … we must extend our hands to help everyone and everything that exists on earth’ (Okada 1999 [1984]: 15). While many Messianiques were actually taking advantage of this openness, I would find out in the course of the research that EMM’s responsables were often less embracing as the doctrine suggests. Below the surface of EMM’s official tolerance they perceived especially Kinshasa’s Eglises de Réveil as denominational rivals, which was encouraged, no doubt, by the discrediting tone these other Eglises are used to voicing regarding EMM (cf. Chapter 2). In May 2010 I attended an ‘initiation ceremony’ at EMM’s headquarters in Gombe. To my surprise, not a shred of secrecy was perceivable. The initiation, which was done on a Sunday morning, consisted of the initiate offering 50 USD in an envelope to his ancestors and receiving the Ohikari medal around her/his neck in front of the entire church community in a cordial prayer-like gesture by the delegate from Angola.

30 • Seekers and Things

In some cases, a confession ritual called réflexion profonde, which was abandoned by TMAJ, as well as some study of Meishu Sama’s teachings, were required. This meant participating in teaching sessions with an open question and answer round at the end. EMM’s ‘initiation’ was clearly much less linked to a ritual death and rebirth as a new person, as it is known from traditional initiation in Africa (V. Turner 1968), than the ‘baptism’ of born-again Christians. Although I knew that the non-denominational openness was probably part of a wider proselytising strategy of a minority movement, I was surprised by the overall openness and interest of many seekers and bandimi who frequented this ‘Japanese’ church. In May 2010, I thus asked EMM’s local ministre for permission to do an ethnographic study of EMM in Kinshasa. His welcoming and positive response was combined with an invitation to be initiated, which I understood to be part of his missionary duty. Would it not grant him and his movement an additional prestige to have initiated a European student? Or was it perhaps the idea of my initiation fee that encouraged him? (In 2012 the amount was raised to 100 USD.) I had gotten used to the fact that in Kinshasa my presence was being used for a lot of different purposes. I also knew that each time I had followed somebody to his born-again church, for instance, the person whom I had followed would do everything to present me to the pastor so as to politicise my presence for his/her own personal honour. Formal conversion was clearly not a necessary element for my presence to be instrumentalised, nor could it stop this from happening. I therefore accepted the ministre’s invitation to be initiated, knowing that this would also allow me to establish an even more serious relationship with my interlocutors. At the same time, I would have the possibility to explore the aesthetic practice of Johrei from both the receiving and the giving end, while wearing an amulet for a while has been an equally rewarding ethnographic experience (cf. Chapter 6). In the context of systematic condemnation, this was indeed a trust-enhancing measure, while I have always, in every dialogue and conversation, stressed my identity as a student who is doing anthropological fieldwork. During my third research stay in 2012, the schism occurred and TMAJ was founded (cf. Chapter 1). This placed me in an uneasy situation of seemingly having to choose between factions, given that I knew both the followers of EMM as well as those of the novel TMAJ movement. I took this incident as an occasion to increase my distance from both movements and encompass a wider perspective. I thus stopped wearing my amulet and no longer transmitted Johrei. A research day would generally start with a writing phase in the early morning. Then the day would either be spent at one or several

Introduction • 31

prayer sites so as to practise Johrei, participate in prayers and teaching sessions, and talk to Messianiques. Alternatively, a day would include home visits and meetings with interlocutors. I thus came to visit many homes beyond EMM and TMAJ’s different units in Gombe, Kinshasa, Lemba, Kimbanseke (Mokali), Mpasa-Maba, Nsele (Inforbank), Masina (Petrocongo), Mbinza, as well as Mbanza Ngungu in the Lower Congo province.29 I also participated in several public cleaning campaigns (salongo) (Chapter 4), as well as collective gardening sessions in EMM’s garden of ‘natural agriculture’ in Mangengege (bilanga) (Lambertz 2016b). The constitution of a core focus group of interlocutors was interesting precisely because of the gradual regular distancing of some members from their respective movements. It was often difficult to visit people at their homes, since it was usually impossible to speak openly about non-Christian spiritualistic matters in the vicinity of their family members. I therefore carried out home visits especially with those in the position of responsable, i.e. with a formal responsibility in one of the movements, and whose families were usually also Messianiques. Given that they consider EMM or TMAJ to be very similar and comparable to Christian churches, they had much less difficulty with being outspoken at their homes. Others encouraged home visits but requested that I be diplomatic concerning matters of the church. To protect the interlocutors both from in and outside the spectrum of spiritualists who are present in the text, all names in the present study are pseudonyms. It should be noted that this is an urban ethnography from the vantage point of a religious minority. Just like other ethnographies, such as Katrien Pype’s study of Kinshasa’s born-again Christians (2012), for instance, it is not representative of the entire city’s population. It should be stressed that there were striking similarities between the endeavours of ‘spiritualists’ and my own ‘scientific’ endeavours. Most spiritualists call themselves chercheurs, which in French can mean both ‘seeker’ and ‘researcher’. Given that I was also a chercheur, though one who was paid through a university stipend, this designation made me their fellow chercheur from Europe. My research was seen as having the same aims and intentions as that of a local chercheur, be it to gain insight into the ways in which visible and invisible things work among humans and in the world at large, into techniques of healing and becoming prosperous, as well as the aspiration to wonder and discover by way of experiencing, by sensing and modulating the body (what else is ‘participant observation’?), or by way of ludic sensory friction with the unknown. Is anthropology’s quest really different from the quest of ‘spiritualists’ in Kinshasa? I gradually came to sense what Harry West

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describes in Ethnographic Sorcery (2007), that this local understanding of my own ‘work’ was in fact telling me a lot about myself, my passion for anthropology, and about the implications of power, status and also my own aesthetic difference that, in my case, I was unwillingly carrying with me as my skin. The present book can therefore be read as both an ethnography of inquiry and an inquiry into ethnography. I have come to accept, and have increasingly started triumphing at the thought, that although differently framed and encouraged by more material resources, the research I present here is essentially very comparable to the quest of seekers in Kinshasa, and that in the end I have been, and I continue to be, a seeker among seekers.

Notes  1. Kinshasa was looted in 1991, and again in 1993 (cf. De Villers and Omasombo 2004, Jewsiewicki, Mbuyamba and Ngombu 1995).  2. Given the persisting hardship in the 1990s this project was locally perceived as démoNcratie (cf. Yoka 1999).  3. E.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, Geschiere 1997, Marshall-Fratani 2001, Marshall 2009, Moore and Sanders 2001, Van Dijk 2000.  4. Special thanks to Katrien Pype for making me join her on this unforgettable day.  5. See in this context the classic study by Balandier (1953), as well as MweneBatende (1982).  6. Given that the data gathered for this book was collected before the province of Bas-Congo was renamed Kongo Central in 2015, the name Lower Congo is used instead of Central Kongo.  7. For religious pluralism in Kinshasa, see also De Boeck 2004a: 75–138 and Pype 2012: 27–62.  8. Cf. http://www.izunome.jp/​en/​border/​africa/​, accessed 13 December 2014.  9. This study builds on existing ethnographies of the city of Kinshasa. The works of De Boeck (2004a) and Pype (2012), in particular, are indispensable references. 10. Cf. Bernault n.d., 2005, Ellis and Ter Haar 2004, Geschiere 1997, Ndaywel è Nziem 1993, Schatzberg 1993, 2000, 2001: 111–144. 11. On cultural ties between India and Africa, see Hawley 2008. 12. In addition to the circulation of chromolitographs studied by Drewal (1988) dance videos featuring Bollywood actresses dancing to the tune of a snake charmer became influential in Kinshasa in the 1950s on local understandings of India. Cf. the film Nagin (Hindi: female snake) from 1954 (available on YouTube). In the 1980s the image of India was popularised in Congo through films like Nagina and Nigahen: Nagina Part II. Here, actress Sridevi, well known in India, turns into a snake at night while dancing uncontrollably to the typical tune associated with the snake charmer (interview with

Introduction • 33

Mr Kirit Vohra, Gombe, March 2013). Cf. https://www.youtube.com/​watch?​ v=​​IaJ2_​CehkoQ, and https://www.youtube.com/​watch?​v=​Ish42wa35B4, accessed 12 December 2014. The apparel of the actresses in such videos, usually shiny snake- or mermaid-like clothing, has most probably also influenced the Congolese imagination of Mami Wata. 13. This reminds of the protective magic of rebel leader Pierre Mulele (Isichei 1995), for instance, or of the Mai Mai in Eastern Congo (Vlassenroot 2012). 14. https://www.youtube.com/​watch?​v=​GrEsuhMZNxc, last accessed 12 December 2014. 15. See the chapter ‘Mythologie de la violence à Kinshasa’ in Yoka 1999. 16. The website of the Indian organisation Guru Siyag’s Siddha Yoga (GSSY) – the Hindi title of the organisation translates as For Economic Prosperity and Removal of Diseases – has sections in Kikongo, Lingala and Swahili. Cf. http://www.the-comforter.org/​How_​to_​Meditate_​Lingala.html, accessed 13 December 2014. 17. The abounding religious diversification in many cities around the globe prompts us to think about the affiliation between anthropology and socalled ‘world religions’. The ‘anthropology of Christianity’, for instance, initiated by Joel Robbins (2003, 2007) as a ‘self-conscious, comparative project’ (2003: 191), has gradually grown into an accepted subfield of the discipline. For obvious reasons, the presence of non-Christian, yet truly global spiritual movements, challenges such a world-religion perspective. While the Church of World Messianity (EMM) calls itself an established ‘religion’ in Japan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, the United States, Brazil and now Africa, would it therefore qualify as a ‘world religion’?​ Or should we attempt to inaugurate an ‘anthropology of spiritual movements’, or of ‘new religious movements’?​Analytical concepts have ontogenetic power. By reiterating, and indeed institutionalising, Christianity as a ‘world religion’ with its personal group of scholars and research departments, do anthropologists not risk becoming accomplices in the hegemonic endeavours of those who wish to label themselves as part of a ‘world religion’?​While it is unquestionable that the anthropology of Christianity has benefitted from and triggered the most outstanding scholarship, the data presented in this book prompts us to ask whether an ‘anthropology of religious pluralism’ would be a rewarding analytical alternative. 18. But see recent work on the Nigerian movements of ‘Chrislam’ (Janson 2016) and Nasfat (Soares 2009). 19. Caminho das Índias is a Brazilian Emmy-winning television telenovela (soap opera) produced by Rede Globo. It was first broadcast in Brazil from 19 January to 11 September 2009. 20. Cf. Chidester, Tobler and Wratten 1997, Kumar 2000. 21. Cf. Larkin 1997, Vander Steene 2008, Wuaku 2009, 2012, 2013, Drewal 1988, Rush 1999, 2009, Dovlo 1993, 1994, 1995, 1998. 22. Cf. Srinivas 2008, Younger 2010, Eisenlohr 2006. 23. Not forgetting Okada, the Japanese founder of EMM, which is also the name given to motorbike taxis in Nigeria. Cf. Beekers and van Gol 2012.

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24. See for instance https://www.youtube.com/​watch?​v=​exll4j9XcEg, accessed 24 March 2017. 25. Cf. De Boeck 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2006, De Boeck and Honwana 2005, Simone 2001. 26. See Meyer 2008a, 2008b; Meyer and Houtman 2012; Espirito Santo and Tassi 2013; Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007; Keane 2008. 27. In Peirce’s own terms, ‘an icon is a sign which refers to the object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses, just the same, whether any such object actually exists or not’ (Peirce 1940: 102). 28. Thus, in Brazil and Bolivia, Catholic clergy have also become sympathisers and practitioners of World Messianity, and in recent times it has attracted some 300 Theravada Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, who now both receive and transmit Johrei (Clarke 2006c: 570). 29. A visit to Mbuji Mayi and the novel units of Lubumbashi and Kenge was unfortunately not possible, and nor was a visit to the African headquarters in Luanda, Angola.

I1 ‘Light in the Darkness’ Towards a Congolese Spiritual Movement ‘from Japan’

On 2 June 2010, 28 days before the DRC was to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its independence from Belgian colonialism, Kinshasa’s EMM community celebrated the tenth anniversary of their existence in Congo at their headquarters in the central neighbourhood of Gombe. One of the local founding members, Jacques, had attached the cordless clip microphone to his collar and started testifying how he and the other pioneers present in the room had managed to attach themselves to EMM’s global organisation, which they had brought to Kinshasa. Jacques recounted how, via a contact they had had in France, their written letter of request had reached the Japanese headquarters in Tokyo. From there it had been passed on to Brazil, where the movement’s president, the Reverend Tetsuo Watanabe, had travelled in order to celebrate the yearly service of the ‘elevation of ancestral souls’ at the ‘holy soil’ of Guarapiranga near São Paolo. It was here, in Brazil, that he decided that the new branch of EMM Congo should be attached to the newly founded headquarters of the Igreja Messiânica Mundial de Africa in Luanda, Angola. In his testimony, Jacques recounts a decisive moment for EMM’s mission to Congo: when the request to bring EMM to Kinshasa reached the Japanese headquarters of the movement, he recounted, The Reverend [Watanabe] was not there, he had just left for Brazil for the celebration of ancestors of 2 November. Thus, when our request later reached Brazil, a lucky coincidence arose: over there, an ‘incorporation’ [i.e. a spirit possession] had occurred, and it was Patrice Emery Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the DRC [whose spirit had appeared]. He had said the following: ‘Why have you forgotten the Congo? The Congo is thrust in darkness, you must do all you can to bring light over there.’ The incorporation had fallen into the hands of a [EMM] minister [of a smaller locality], who had reported it to the Reverend Watanabe. The latter then

36 • Seekers and Things

informed the minister in France with whom we were in touch that it was the Reverend Francisco Fernandez [in Angola] who would from now on be responsible for EMM in Congo. The minister in France then called us in November [2001] to announce this happy news.1

The passage evokes the transnational ties that the Church of World Messianity has established on the multiple trajectories of its missionary project. The movement’s established success in Brazil and Angola, known to members in Kinshasa, allows Jacques to generate pride and self-esteem by emphasising these connections to the wider world. As an asset in their local identification as Messianiques of the Eglise Messianique Mondiale, these connections are important for the followers. This chapter has two objectives: firstly, it provides important background information to the case of EMM and its ‘Japanese’ and indeed global history. It would be misleading to assume that the characteristic of being a ‘globalising’ religion was a privilege of Pentecostalism. The presence of other movements with an equally global trajectory has perhaps been unjustly overlooked. Secondly, the movement’s local history, organisation and subsequent stages of implantation in the city of Kinshasa are discussed against the background of schism and renewal, which have happened interdependently at local/urban and transnational scales. The discussion will shed light on the inevitable importance of locality when it comes to the study of putatively transnational movements. Notwithstanding how thorough transnational ties may develop, just like any other space-related ‘beyond’, the transnational is fashioned locally, with acts, knowledge and things. Jacques’ account of Lumumba’s spiritual appearance in Brazil, which aimed to incite the organisation to extend its ties to Congo, provokes special curiosity. In the months preceding 30 June 2010 (date of the Cinquantenaire festivities), Patrice Lumumba had again become a protagonist on the airwaves of Kinshasa’s Radio Trottoir. Many Kinois were debating whether he was really to be seen as the national hero that Mobutu and his followers had declared him to be, after de facto removing him from power in 1960. Opposing voices argued that Lumumba’s excessive stubbornness had upset the Belgian authorities and made them withdraw too hastily, leaving the country unprepared, which hindered the success of the yearned-for independence project. This version suggested that, instead of being a hero, Lumumba was to be held responsible for Congo’s enduring crisis. At one stage the issue was even raised in the national parliament, where it was rapidly dismissed as irrelevant, however. Whether lauded as a national hero or dismissed as an irresponsible leader, Patrice Lumumba is certainly alive in the memories of the Congolese.

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Jacques’ testimony indicates how an ‘incorporation’, as Messianiques call spirit possession both in French and Lingala, by one of Congo’s best-known national ancestors in a place as distant as Brazil is discursively produced as the foundational event of EMM in Congo. From Jacques and the overall movement’s perspective, the incident elucidates EMM’s irrefutable claim to liberate and save the nation, just like Patrice Lumumba himself once did. At the same time, it repeats a more longstanding principle of spiritual authorisation and charismatic legitimisation, validating a prophetic movement by means of a calling by a possessing spirit.2 A common invisible spirit world coincides here with the elsewhere of the ‘transnational’. Jacques later shared with me that he had heard of Lumumba’s Brazilian apparition during a public talk by the late Brazilian Reverend Francisco Jesus Fernandes in Angola.3 A former star of the Brazilian national football team, and thus accustomed to fame and fancy, Fernandes had played a leading role in EMM’s expansion from Brazil to Angola and Mozambique in 1991. His calling upon Lumumba to ‘bring light’ into ‘the Congo thrust in darkness’, as was clearly repeated by Jacques in his talk, reflects the discursive climate in which EMM’s Brazilian missionaries, and also their Angolan followers, conceived their missionary duty to save the Congo, whose image has been subject to discrediting representations by the international media ever since Joseph Conrad’s famous novel Heart of Darkness (cf. Dunn 2003, Kabamba 2010, Hunt 2008).4 By late 2012, some of EMM’s Congolese pioneers came to feel ‘orientalised’, as one may call it, by this discursive attitude towards the Congo as the apocalyptical place ‘thrust in darkness’. The contrasting opinions between some Angolan and Congolese missionaries about what the Congo is today have been one of the contributing factors for the schism between EMM and TMAJ, which will be discussed in the last part of this chapter.

Japan, Brazil, Congo: Trajectories of a Global Religious Movement Japan, Africa and the World Sekai Kyûseikyô, i.e. the ‘Church’ or ‘Teaching’ of ‘World Messianity’, or Eglise Messianique Mondiale, is one of Japan’s so-called ‘new religions’ (Jap. shin shûkyô) and thus inextricably linked to modern Japanese history. Precursors date back to the early nineteenth century, but a first

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generation of ‘new religions’ emerged along with the restoration of the Meiji Empire in 1867/8. These have come to be considered popular reactions to rapid urbanisation, industrialisation and the more general cultural rift linked to the Japanese elite’s attempts to overcome ‘the West’ by emulating it, which implied that ‘modernisation’ was essentially promoted as being something inherently ‘Japanese’. Pointing to the influential role of initial pioneering movements such as the Shintôinspired and highly millennial Ômôtô movement, sociologist of religion Peter Clarke writes that the ‘harsh conditions of modernisation under the Meiji (1868–1912), the new taxes on land, the rapidly expanding money-based system of exchange, and the new criteria of success and failure all contributed to the emergence of the most intensely millenarian movement in the modern history of Japan, … Ômôtô [Jap. Great Origin, founded in 1892], which used every possible symbolic and ritual means to oppose the new order’ (Clarke 2006a: 263). Second-generation movements of the 1920s and 1930s include the Shintô-inspired Sekai Kyûseikyô (Church of World Messianity), and Seichô-no-Ie (Home of Infinite Life, Abundance and Wisdom), both of which are recipients of New Thought ideas from the United States and will later make it big in Brazil. For both the first and second generations of Japan’s new religions, sociological interpretations mainly stress anomie as their cause, i.e. the social and economic uncertainties and hardships of new urban populations who were looking for new patterns of social and cultural security (Clarke 2006a). The traumatic effects of Japanese imperialism and the Second World War later exacerbated the strains and social challenges faced by the Japanese working class. Rural exodus and the resulting urban hardship resemble situations known from many of Africa’s contemporary metropolises, Kinshasa being a good example. There are indeed parallels and diachronic similarities between the historical developments of new religions in Japan and of religious movements in urban sub-Saharan Africa today. Of the thousands of new Japanese religions that exist today, nearly all, to a greater or lesser extent, have integrated elements of the more longstanding Japanese traditions of Buddhism and Shintô. The latter has been of constitutive influence on the formation of Sekai Kyûseikyô. Shintô, or ‘the way of the kami’ (gods, spirits, ancestors, or other foci of worship) is largely seen as the result of an institutionalisation of Japanese folk religion, or shamanism, during the long Tokugawa period before the Meiji restoration. The governing authorities laid claim to a number of these ‘shamanic’ features, such as visions and revelations during dreams and possession, ancestral spirit veneration,

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the protective power of amulets, etc. so as to constitute a nationalised and state-prescribed system of worship for all those of Japanese ethnicity. It should be noted here that in Japan, national and ethnic identities converge. Examining the heritage of Shintô, Clarke contends that new religions, such as Sekai Kyûseikyô and others ‘created new versions and explanations of old healing rituals, systems of education, which focused on the importance of internal, subjective understanding and development, which could provide a bulwark against the harsh and unpredictable effects of social and economic life’ (Clarke 2006a: 263–264). However, Clarke’s dialectical way of presenting these historical convolutions risks suggesting too blunt an image of new religions as resistance. By soothing the effects of these transformations among their participants, the new religions also decisively contributed to and actively nourished them, as well as culturally ‘implementing’ them at the grassroots level, similar to the role of many African Independent Churches (cf. Devisch 1996). It is difficult not to notice the striking synchronicity of the first two generations of Japanese new religions, including SKK, with earlier African Independent Churches, many of which appeared in the midst of intense social change and strife during colonial times.5 Kimbanguism, Harrism and the Central African Watchtower offshoot Kitawala are good examples. In both Japan and Africa, ‘religious’ movements offered social, emotional and intellectual answers to deep social and radical political and economic changes, which made them powerful contributing factors to these very transformations. This was especially so for those who felt marginalised in this process, as MacGaffey (1983) has shown for the followers of the ‘Modern Kongo Prophets’ in the Lower Congo region. In Japan it has become a pattern of new religions to promote a cosmology and ritual techniques revolving around and empowering the self, stressing its self-transforming potential (Hardacre 1984). This is also a feature of the contemporary Pentecostal trend to produce ‘Christian subjects’ as part of the wider ‘Pentecostal revolution’ (Marshall 2009). This happens along with, and as part of, the socio-economic developments that have been observable both in Japan in the 1920s to 1930s and in contemporary urban Africa. Both settings have witnessed rapid social change (especially for rural migrants who come to the city), and an increasing level of inequality and perceived deprivation. An important feature of Japanese new religions is that they are powerful expressions of the Japanese tradition of religious ‘syncretism’ (Robertson 1992: 93–94), where an interweaving of Shintô, Buddhist and Confucian elements in people’s everyday lives suggests a decisively non-Westphalian situation. All of these traditions have been practised

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as a syncretic assemblage in the everyday lives of Japanese people for a long time, and Voyé (2004: 209) summarises that the Japanese have been participating simultaneously in ‘Shintô for life [i.e. prosperity], Buddhism for death [ancestor veneration and funeral assistance], and Confucianism for ethics’. Robertson’s argument is that Japan’s heritage and the ready availability of a multiplicity of purification rituals has enabled the Japanese to ‘purify’ and thus easily integrate foreign cultural elements into acceptable constituents of their own ‘Japanese’ cultural repertoire. Thus, noting the country’s orientation to the world, after a long period of isolation, and its ability to have transformed itself into one of the leading industrialised economies, Robertson (1992: 88) diagnoses a ‘contribution of religion to the structuring of a mode of societal involvement in the global situation’. McFarland, in his study of Japan’s new religions (1967: 22–23), explains that Japan’s tradition of syncretism as the religious mainstream is due to what Carpenter and Roof (1995: 43–44) rephrase as a ‘basic principle of Oriental thought’: ‘the reconcilability of opposites’, wherein ‘the discovery of the real does not result from the elimination of contradictions; it comes instead from an awareness of the unity of opposites’. While such metaphysical claims are less frequently advocated when it comes to Africa, it might be helpful to consider similarities to Appiah’s (1992: 130) understanding that African religious thought manifests an ‘accommodative’ rather than an ‘adversary’ attitude to novel cultural elements and change.6 With a view to explaining a variety of recent movements with a global missionary project, such as Soka Gakkai International and the Unification Church of Reverend Moon, Robertson (1992: 81) emphasises that ‘the idea of harmonizing worldviews has a very long history’ in east Asia at large, a statement worth verifying for Africa as well. Also Clarke (2006a: 263–264) diagnoses an underlying trend in Japan’s new religions to look to ‘the integration of Eastern and Western civilizations’, which, as will be discussed shortly, Mokichi Okada, the founder of EMM, has turned into an explicit programmatic value of his movement. All this privileges Japanese new religions to ‘globalise’, both at home and abroad, pointing to an important specificity of Japanese cultural nationalism as inherently pluralistic and syncretic. The stress on the ‘Japaneseness’ of some new religions with a more nationalising appeal does not therefore stand in opposition to a harmonising and integrating world view or a propensity to cultural adaptation and openness. Sekai Kyûseikyô is undoubtedly a good example. Such an opposition arises only if one considers ‘religion’ from within the Westphalian tradition of religious history in the West.

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Sekai Kyûseikyô and its Founder Sekai Kyûseikyô was founded in 1935 by the layman Mokichi Okada (1882–1955).7 Considering the popularity and importance of EMM’s founding figure among Messianiques in Kinshasa, where he is referred to as Meishu Sama (enlightened master), a short overview of his personal history is useful. Like most founders of Japanese new religions, Okada was a charismatic figure with a lay background, who underwent moments of extreme personal crisis in his life and thus embodied an archetypal model of self-transformation. His personal charisma linked up to a pattern observed in ascetic mendicants of the pre-Meiji period, but which is also observable in the biographies of most founders of new religions (Reader 2005: 440). The hardships of his life are generally well known to Messianiques in Kinshasa and were often narrated to me when commenting on the photograph of their ‘messiah’ Meishu Sama. Not unlike many Kinois today, Okada was a self-made trader, a perfect débrouillardeur,8 as Kinois might say, who had himself overcome an endless sequence of hardships. Okada’s presence is assured by means of an A3-size portrait photograph, which adorns prayer halls and the homesteads of members. Upon initiation, every new member receives such a photograph in order to frame it and hang it on a wall in his/her home as a focal point for prayer.9 Offner and Van Straelen (1963: 77) contend that up until the end of the First World War, Okada had been a ‘confirmed atheist’. But owing to the hardships of business failure and health problems, as well as the death of his wife, he started seeking spiritual help in the abovementioned Ômôtô movement, in which he enlisted in 1923. Here, he became an accomplished mediator of the healing practice chinkon kishin, a variety of which he later transformed into his own healing technique of Johrei. Chinkon is a Buddhism-inspired meditation technique to increase one’s power of thought. In 1928 he finally gave up his business career to become a full-time missionary of Ômôtô in Tokyo. Here he healed people and conducted experiments with spirit possession (cf. Staemmler 2009: 267–274). In line with historical patterns of charismatic authority in Japan, Okada’s charisma is based on an intimate relationship with the Japanese goddess of mercy, Kannon (Offner and Van Straelen 1963: 79). This relationship began in a revelation event on Mount Nokogeri in 1926 and continued in the form of permanent possession, as it is also known by Central African prophets.10 Kannon is equated in Japan to the returning Buddha Maitreya. The goddess had come to him, says the narrative, to use his body to perform mankind’s salvation for the first time by means of the ‘divine light’ of Johrei healing

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(cf. Chapter 5 and 6), which he was to distribute to others for the rest of his life. In Kinshasa, Okada’s revelation is retold and remembered with some important pictorial details, quite similar to the way in which Kimbanguists remember the extraordinary miracles of their founder Simon Kimbangu. Okada’s spiritual power, for instance, is remembered by means of the account that God (most Kinois ignore the fact that Japan is not monotheistic) placed a fireball in his belly. The reception of light as a sign of divine charisma or ‘enlightenment’ has a history in Congo as well. Linked to longstanding indigenous imaginations of spiritual force, light has been Christianised with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a thoroughly Protestant book (see Hofmeyr 2004, Meyer 1999, Maxwell 2011), as well as thro ugh Catholic missionary endeavours. Pype (2009a: 138) recounts how missionaries of the Belgian Scheut movement (CICM: Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae) integrated light and fire into films ‘to incorporate the illusion of magic and miracles’, because ‘enormous flames manifest divine powers [which] lead to the victory of Christianity’ (see also Chapter 3). Thus, in 1928, Okada established his own organisation called Dinihon Kanonkai, i.e. the ‘Japan Association for (the Worship of the Bodhisattva) Kannon’, focusing on communion with divine beings and the therapeutic healing of disease. Initially, his treatments consisted of finger pressure, hand pressure and herbal medicine (Clarke 1999b: 226). At the time of the Japanese interbellum, the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘medicine’ was well established in Japanese public order (cf. Josephson 2012; Mullins 1992: note 39), especially because it served the government to control popular movements such as Ômôtô, which was forcibly dissolved in 1936. Shortly before Ômôtô’s dissolution, which occurred in the authoritarian context of the pre-war period, Okada had broken away from the movement in 1935 and dedicated himself entirely to his own organisation. In the preceding years, when Okada had been experimenting with his healing qualities, tensions with Japan’s government had intensified and he had been ordered to choose between a ‘religious’ or a ‘therapeutic’ purpose for his association. He and his followers had then chosen the therapeutic healing goal, changing the name of their group to the Nihon Jôka Ryôhô (Japanese Association for Therapy through Purification) (Clarke 1999b: 225). As a result, in 1936, after Ômôtô had been dissolved, he opened a faith healing ‘clinic’ in Tokyo, making use of the spiritual light rays revealed to him, while paying lip service to the governmental order of practising ‘medicine’. Nevertheless he was arrested by the government for ‘fraud and violation of medical regulations’ (Offner and Van Straelen 1963: 79).

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Given that the government was already pursuing him for distributing ‘fake’ spirit photographs showing the spiritual image of Kannon above his head (Ellwood 1974: 122–123),11 the regime eventually forced him to close down his clinic in 1937. In Kinshasa, EMM’s responsables know about the photographic apparitions of Kannon above Okada’s head, which are invoked in sermons and teaching sessions to prove Okada’s charisma, although the photographs are not physically available. This is similar to the use of photographs with miraculous signs of light and fire and the logic of photographs and movies as media of revelation. After the Second World War, the situation in Japan radically changed when, in 1947, religious freedom was granted. Okada reorganised his movement under the name Nihon Kannon Kyôdan (Japanese Kannon Church), attracting more than 300,000 followers within three years (Offner and Van Straelen 1963: 80). From 1950 onwards, he made his followers call him Meishu Sama, Lord of Light. During his lifetime, Okada identified himself as the living embodiment of the Bodhisattva Kannon. Inspired by the contact he had had with Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Salvation Army in Tokyo (Clarke 2006a: 263–264) – yet another similarity with Simon Kimbangu – later he even called himself the ‘Messiah’ (Clarke 1999b: 225), a title powerfully repeated by Messianiques in Kinshasa. As the incident of the ‘fake’ spirit photographs indicates, Okada seems to have been a witty manipulator of the semiotic ideologies of his time. He also asserted this skill when he contended that his power to heal could be transmitted to others through the medium of the Japanese letter-sign of ‘light’ (Jap. hikari) (as discussed in Chapter 6). This enabled him to print the letter on paper and sell it for 2,000 yen (then $5.50 USD). A personal meeting with him apparently cost 20,000 yen (Offner and Van Straelen 1963: 80). By the 1940s, Okada’s perspective on the world was no longer comparable to the narrow pre-world war attitude, which had seen Japan as the ‘cultural, political and spiritual centrepiece’ (Clarke 2000: 154) of the world. His vision focused now on East-West cooperation and understanding, ‘a perspective found also in Indian new religions, among others, including Theosophy’ (ibid.). Clarke contends that, although he is largely ignored in Western accounts of the New Age movement, Okada can indeed be seen as one of its first modern ‘prophets’. He framed his theory of global unification by elaborating a theory of equilibrium (Jap. Izunome) between the oriental principle of verticality (shôjo) and the principle of horizontality (daijô), which, according to him, guides the occidental attitude. Hence the cross with bars

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of equal lengths representing Izunome between East and West as the movement’s chief symbol (cf. Ellwood 1974: 128, Clarke 2000: 154–155). This post-war openness towards the world contrasts strikingly with the anti-Western stance of the early Ômôtô movement, which Okada had frequented alongside the Salvation Army when he was in his twenties and thirties. Ômôtô had aimed to isolate Japan’s cultural heritage from Western influences. Later generations, on the other hand, sought to locate their ‘Japaneseness’ precisely in an open and embracing attitude vis-à-vis the world. In light of this, it was in 1950 that he reformatted his organisation finally into Sekai Kyûseikyô, replenishing the spatial concern by removing ‘Japan’ from the name of the movement, aiming from now on at nothing smaller than the world. When Okada died in 1955, his second wife Yoshiko took over the leadership of SKK for seven years. She broadened the scope of the movement’s activities, which under Okada had been restricted to healing and purification. In 1962 their youngest daughter, Itsuki Fujieda, followed as leader, and in 1992 their grandson Yôichi, who chairs the organisation today. The genealogy of the Okada lineage is present in Kinshasa’s EMM offices by means of photographs of each member of Mokichi Okada’s family, with him and his daughter Itsuki wearing a kimono, while the Reverend Yôichi Okada (Kyôshu Sama) wears a black business suit. Ideational Eclecticism SKK’s central doctrine is the coming of paradise on earth through an increased in-pouring of divine light, eventually turning the world from the ‘old age’ of the night into a ‘new age’ of the day, with Okada being the Messiah at the turning point. The millennial vision of a dawning ‘New Age’ corresponds to notions of the Aquarian Age and the later New Age movement. This reveals the popularity of globally circulating ‘spiritual’ literature in Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it also illustrates how characteristic a feature millennialism is of many new religions in Japan, where it has its own longstanding history.12 In Mokichi Okada’s millennial scheme, suffering and disaster are purifying signals of change, both at the individual and the collective level. This hints at the way in which Sekai Kyûseikyô fundamentally intertwines millennialism and aetiology. Thus, when somebody falls ill among Messianiques in Kinshasa, it is said that aza na purification (he/she is in/under purification). Commenting on the earthquake and tsunami catastrophes that hit Japan in March 2011, Kyôshu Sama wrote:

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The image we have of an earthquake is that it displaces tectonic plates by bending them. But, in reality, in His plan of the ‘great harmonisation’, God utilises all his creatures as his instruments, and he has created the earthquake in order to correct the deformations both of our feelings and of all things, with a view to putting into order a situation in disharmony. As I see it, it happened to save humanity, to save our planet.13

Okada had promoted the idea that the role of humanity is to assist in this process of gradual purification. For him, the intended state of ‘paradise’ was a world without disease, conflict or poverty. This reflects Sekai Kyûseikyô’s foundational three value pillars of physical health, social peace and economic prosperity, which mirror the conception of the American New Thought movement.14 The natural course of affairs, or ‘destiny’, including the vicissitudes of history, is pushing the universe to evolve towards this state of paradisiacal bliss. These and others of Okada’s ideas, such as the understanding of man’s nature as inherently good, evolved under the influence of Western Spiritualism and Ômôtô’s New Thought tradition (Clarke 2006a: 24). This transpires from his theory on the so-called ‘law of attraction’ or the ‘law of cause and effect’, according to which le hasard n’existe pas (nothing happens randomly). Messianiques in Kinshasa passionately apply this slogan whenever it fits. When I first encountered it, I could not help making the connection with what many had explained to me about death and illness never occurring without a cause, meaning witchcraft. Given the centrality of this teaching among ‘spiritualists’ of other spiritual movements as well, it merits closer scrutiny.

Le hasard n’existe pas: The Doctrine of Performative Thoughts EMM teaches that anything that exists materially has a spiritual side. Nothing can exist without there being a pre-existing idea that has made it come to life and that is inaccessible to the ordinary human senses. Maman Anto, one of EMM’s responsables, once phrased it like this: Le monde spirituel, c’est le monde de la pensée (the spiritual world is the world of thoughts) (Lemba, September 2013). Hence two maxims, which have gained the status of dogma among Messianiques in Kinshasa: le spirituel précède le materiel (the spiritual precedes the material), and le hasard n’existe pas (nothing happens randomly). The dualism between the spiritual and the material, which is reminiscent of nineteenth-century spiritualism in the West, is reflected in one of Sekai Kyûseikyô’s most important teachings. In a lecture entitled ‘Secret of Good Fortune’ given

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on 3 February 1954, Okada repeats the core principle of New Thought’s intellectual allure: There are things that are hard for people with little knowledge of the spiritual side of the world to understand. … The source of good fortune or happiness, of all things, lies in that core, the invisible part. … When man moves, his body does not do so of its own volition, but is directed by his mind. The same principle applies to good fortune; it is the inner, invisible part that is important. The surface, the superficial side is the physical world, and the interior part is the invisible world of ether, that which we call the spiritual world. Such is the way the universe is constructed, the way God has created it. The spiritual world activates the physical world, just as the mind activates the body, and in all matters the spiritual realm takes precedence over the physical plane. So, good fortune follows the same rule: a person can become fortunate only when his spiritual self has become fortunate in the spiritual realm. His condition there reflects upon the physical plane to make him fortunate in this world (Okada 1999: 279–280).

This notion of ‘positive thinking’, as it can also be called, is the key message of the recent New Thought-inspired commercial documentary movie with the suggestive title The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.15 Featuring a seemingly endless sequence of testimonies, mainly by ‘successful’ American individuals who have made it from being exploited victims to capitalist winners replete with fortune and happiness, the movie presents the ‘secret’ art of persistently thinking about what you want and persistently not thinking about what you do not want as a centuryold secret. This secret had always been well protected by secret societies throughout the world, this TV documentary claims, but now it reveals all. While the movie also circulates among spiritualists in Kinshasa, where I could borrow a pirated DVD from a fellow Messianique, it has generated a more intense level of curiosity and attention in the fortunethirsty metropolises of neoliberal growth projects such as in India and Brazil, where the DVD can easily be purchased in shopping malls.16 As the reception, appropriation and recirculation of new Japanese religions like Sekai Kyûseikyô and Seichô-no-Ie illustrates, the semiotic ideology of the powerful mind and the performative power of thoughts has an obviously ‘global’ history. It has precedents in Japanese Buddhism (Staemmler 2009), the American New Thought movement, and is clearly African, too: here its instrumental application is either called ‘prayer’, if it carries a positive intention, or ‘witchcraft’ if the intention is negative. Despite the obvious link to local notions of ‘how to do things with thoughts’, as one might put it, many in Kinshasa consider this insight ‘ancient wisdom’ and a powerful secret from the whites. Especially if presented as a seemingly sacred power guarded

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by unspeakable secret societies, as is presented in The Secret, its identification with the longstanding rumour about ‘the hidden power of the Whites’ (Turner 1978) is not surprising and today constitutes a key attraction for spiritual movements in Kinshasa and beyond. How physical and mechanic, or indeed scientific or Aristotelian, the understanding of the link between one’s visible and invisible bodies is, is suggested by the notion that organic food impacts on the wellbeing of one’s invisible body, just like invisible light does when channelled during Johrei. It is tempting to diagnose an analogy between the spiritual-material divide (or the invisible-visible) on the one hand, and Plato’s dichotomy of a pure and detached world of ideas and an impure and corrupted material world, on the other. Thus, in a section entitled ‘A Double World: Plato’s Cave Reconsidered’, Stefan Bekaert (2000: 72–73) writes about the Basakata ethnic group in DRC’s Bandundu province: Sakata believe that the tangible world in which we believe is not the only one – not even the most essential one. There is a parallel world ordinary people are unable to see, that influences – if not determines – what happens around them. Members’ accounts about the location and impact of this other world differ a lot from person to person and from one situation to another… The weaker version [of Sakata cosmology] holds that invisible beings – ancestors, spirits, sorcerers – manipulate the visible order of things. According to the stronger version however, every tangible being or object has an intangible ‘double’ in the other world. Again, according to the latter version, the latter is more essential, more original, and eventually also more determining than its tangible appearance. The double somehow resembles the platonic pure idea but the link between every object or being and its double is more direct. Whatever happens to the visible object or being must necessarily have happened to the invisible double. And what affects the double will sooner or later become manifest in the visible object or being. The invisible world is ‘first’ (Bekaert 2000: 72–73).

The similarities between the Sakata’s world view described by Bekaert and what Okada explained in his lecture on the ‘secret of good fortune’ are striking. But they do not stop here. What Bekaert writes about the double, which every tangible being or object has, is neatly rephrased in Okada’s writings on the Japanese concept of yukon (lit. ‘mystic soul’, or ‘numinous soul’). Each human being has a yukon as a sort of representative or archetype of himself in the spiritual world (cf. Okada 1999: 79). As an EMM missionary in Kinshasa explained to me upon my very first encounter with EMM, every visible thing is but the ‘photocopy’ of the more real yukon, which resides in the spirit world. The corresponding Lingala concept Messianiques use for this idea of the ‘photocopy’ is elílí

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or elilingi, meaning shadow, double, picture (cf. Van Wing 1959: 376, De Boeck 2005: 29).17 While he is seemingly fascinated by a putative similarity with the Platonic world view, especially in terms of the apparent temporal precedence of the double/shadow (i.e. the yukon or elílí) over its corresponding material entity, Bekaert is aware that ‘the double [only] somehow resembles the platonic pure idea [while] the link between every object or being and its double is more direct’ (ibid., my emphasis). Indeed, this link is much more direct and the ‘invisible’ or ‘spiritual’ is not understood to be aphysical nor is it spatially removed in an axial directionality. On the contrary, it is constitutively part and parcel of the world, where it acts directly, like magnetism, wind, or the air of the human breath.18 Albeit its heuristic temptation, it would therefore be misleading to grasp the notions of the yukon, elílí, the ‘double’ or the ‘shadow’ as analogous to Plato’s pure ideas. Any reference to the ‘symbol’ concept whatsoever is actually misleading. The invisible world is not a detached world of abstract meaning and symbols. If ‘the spiritual world is the world of thoughts’, as Maman Anto put it, the latter are physically powerful and active, which points to a realm of active iconicity rather than an abstract sphere of mental representations. This invites the approximation of the yukon with the idea of vital force rather than with a Platonic ideational archetype. Vital force (nguya ya bomoyi, nguya ya Nzambe) can increase or decrease within one’s lifespan, according to the ‘fortune-misfortune complex’ (De Craemer, Fox and Vansina 1976). Okada has theorised the dynamic nature of the yukon by means of a scale of 180 degrees on which one’s yukon, just like our ancestors’ souls, can rise and fall. In this way the yukon is a barometer of an individual’s progress towards purity and fortune. The appeal of this concept is the underlying assumption that man can actively affect his/her destiny by trying to make his yukon rise up on the spiritual ladder between fortune and misfortune. This process was repeatedly explained as improving one’s karma (komatisa karma), which can be achieved by ‘purifying’ oneself (komipetola), by avoiding all evil, doing good deeds and removing the burdens of guilt and sin. Constant attention should be given to purifying one’s spiritual body through natural food and Johrei, so as to make it ‘lighter’, to allow it to rise up on the invisible scale in the direction of Meishu Sama and God.19 The biophysical, mechanical or indeed technological imagination of spiritual processes is a systematic feature of Meishu Sama’s teachings and must be seen as an equally powerful coincidence or parallelism with nineteenth-century spiritualism, new Japanese religions and African spirituality.20

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Illustration 1.1 The two worlds. The spirit world (monde spirituel) is stratified in 180 degrees with 60 at the top (paradis, heaven), 60 in the middle (purgatoire, purgatory) and 60 at the bottom (enfer, hell). The position of one’s yukon on this scale determines one’s ‘spiritual level’ (niveau spirituel) in the material world (monde matériel). The result is a level of either superior, intermediary or inferior (mis)fortune. From a teaching session in Kinshasa in August 2010. Photo by the author.

TMAJ’s locally composed booklet Nos ancêtres, nos racines: Les liens spirituels (2013) (Our Ancestors, Our Roots: The Spiritual Ties)21 contains a passage entitled Les fils spirituels et les objets (Spiritual Ties and Objects): A human being has a relation with the house in which she/he lives and with the goods she/he possesses or uses all the time. The more she/he loves her/his clothes, her/his jewellery or objects of personal use, the bigger becomes the spiritual tie that links the two. To illustrate this point more extensively, I will cite an article published in a North American journal on the subject of spiritualists. It is about a woman who had the strange faculty to see and to describe, through an object, the physiognomy, the age, the recent deeds and other attributes of its owner. According to the story, she could see, if she concentrated, the physiognomy and the characteristics of the owner. We can conclude to what extent the activity and the interference of the spiritual tie is in the relationship between man and the beings [êtres] that surround her/him (TMAJ 2013: 18, my translation).

Such theory is welcome knowledge to the many theory-thirsty youngsters who are ardent receivers of such intellectual clues that

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explain the workings of the world including those of ‘traditional’ religious practices. By offering a scientific language and appeal, Kinshasa’s spiritual movements are truly competitors with, if not already to a certain degree substitutes for, the bureaucratic universities whose diploma focus is of questionable pragmatic utility with regard to the intellectual and practical necessities of Kinshasa’s population on the whole. By remaining vague and sufficiently general, the laws taught by spiritual movements encourage individual intellectual speculation and thereby agency. The idea that everything is wrapped in an ordained ‘destiny’ and that nothing happens randomly, especially regarding one’s own or another person’s (mis)fortune, constitutes the bottom line of commonplace ‘African’ spirituality. It has been phrased as the baseline of culturalising conceptions of personhood in Africa as well (e.g. Wiredu 2005). In line with local discourse, anthropologists usually translate the technological mechanics of attaining and reaching out to the invisible spirit world by means of mental processes, or thought with a performative capacity, as witchcraft (Li. kindoki, Fr. sorcellerie). This decidedly negative terminology obliterates the intrinsically ambivalent nature of the power of thought, which, like the power of speech (cf. Chapter 7), can have both destructive as well as constructive, cursing as well as blessing effects. In this way, spiritual movements like EMM in Kinshasa can be seen as attempts to rehabilitate the constructive side of their practitioners’ indigenous spirituality, which has been obliterated and demonised by Christianity ever since the early missions. Most local EMM and TMAJ missionaries have their own five volumes of Okada’s Fondations du Paradis Terrestre (Foundations of Paradise on Earth). But emails with singled-out teachings in Portuguese also reach the headquarters in Kinshasa, where they are translated into French and Lingala, printed on A4 sheets and read out during services as the respective teaching (Fr. enseignement, Li. mateya) of the week. Access to EMM’s written foundational texts was perceived by many as insufficient. This was one of the reasons for the breakaway of the local founders of TMAJ.22 Okada’s interest in Christianity, which in Japan was usually considered the religion of ‘the Other’, is responsible for teachings such as, among others, ‘the Last Judgement’ or the inclusion of the Lord’s Prayer in EMM’s liturgy. Notably, the name of World Messianity hints at Okada’s own role as Messiah at the cosmic turning point, which became important especially after the cataclysm of the Second World War. The global focus is not only visible in the renaming of his movement as the Church of World Messianity. The teachings are full of reverence

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Illustration 1.2 Lingala version of Japanese teaching. Bokeseni ya lobiko ya Eglise Messianique Mondiale (Particularity of salvation in EMM), page 1/3. Teaching by Meishu Sama of 5 October 1949, presented in Mokali, Kinshasa, May 2012. Photo by the author.

for the West, in particular the United States, while a latent Japanese cultural nationalism persists, as is well known from new Japanese religions, in particular Mahikari (cf. Cornille 1999). After Okada’s death in February 1955, his spirit continued to appear and instruct his widow Yoshiko, whom he had prepared to be his

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successor. These appearances resemble Simon Kimbangu’s mystical visits to his wife Mama Mwilu during his imprisonment in Lubumbashi, as is well known by many Kimbanguists. One such revelation ordered the construction of a holy sanctuary, which was built and completed in autumn 1961 at the site of Hakone in Japan. Like the ‘holy ground’ of Guarapiranga in Brazil, which since 1995 has spared Brazilians the expensive pilgrimage to Japan, the building was understood to act as a model of paradise on earth and a catalyser for the divine light of God, and the movement’s mission was to spread this into the world. The Hakone model paradise site, like the one later constructed at Atami, were idealised arrangements of buildings and gardens, with Atami not only becoming the headquarters of the movement but also the proclaimed geographical and artistic centre of Japan. SKK’s administrative headquarters remain in Shizuoka-ken, Japan, while the two holy centres and realisations of paradise on earth in Atami and Hakone – a third is located in Saga/Kyoto – host a renowned museum of Japanese art, reminiscent of Okada’s love of art and displaying his collection. It should not be forgotten that among the thousands of new religious movements that have come to exist in Japan, SKK is particular in that it promotes Japanese traditional arts as part of its religious endeavours. As a passionate collector of artworks and advocate of Japanese traditional arts (tea ceremony, Nô theatre, calligraphy and Ikebana) it was Mokichi Okada who laid the foundations for much of the contemporary reputation of SKK in Japan as a harbour of art.

Going Global In the post-war period, many new Japanese religions adopted a world focus. Okada sent followers to the USA, and from the early 1950s onwards to the Japanese diasporas in Hawaii and Brazil. Since 1968 an active presence has also been noted in Thailand.23 Brazil proved to be particularly receptive, initially because of its important Japanese community, mainly based in São Paolo. A number of Japanese new religions became successful, most prominently Soka Gakkai International, Seichô-no-Ie and Perfect Liberty Kyodan. With the mainstreaming of alternative spirituality since the 1990s (Carpenter 2004), most adherents of these Japanese new religions were Brazilians of non-Japanese descent, predominantly of the female, educated, urban middle classes of European descent (Oro 2000: 117). For Brazil, recent publications explain this trend through doctrinal affinities with previous ‘beliefs’ and practices in Kardecism (Port.

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Espiritismo), Candomblé and Umbanda (Oro 2000, Matsuoka 2007). Matsuoka explains SKK’s success in Brazil with the movement’s stress on individual counselling and the fact that Johrei ‘makes a person useful’ (Matsuoka 2001, see also Chapter 6), which would have favoured a recuperation of former Catholic believers, who were dissatisfied with the stress on original sin and the collectivist approach of Liberation Theology (Matsuoka 2007: 53).24 EMM and TMAJ’s transnational trajectories raise the question of how religious movements move and organise themselves on a scale that exceeds the perspectives of places, nations, states and continents. This requires organisational skills, communication and mobility, a refined structure of authority, as well as, in the ideal scenario, a reflexive awareness and management of the movement’s cultural adaptability to local sensitivities and needs. On the one hand, this necessitates openness and accommodativity. On the other hand, a certain ritual and ideational integrity must be safeguarded by remaining culturally ‘impermeable’. Many of these skills challenge the usual denomination of such movements as solely ‘religious’, because they are cultural, legal and economic organisations as well (cf. Spickard 2004). EMM is known as a movement keen to safeguard its ‘Japaneseness’ on its journey across the globe. Matsuoka (2008) discusses how this goal is achieved through a training scheme assuring that the movement’s key positions are always occupied by somebody who has been trained directly in Japan. For Angolans, the reference is Brazil, and for Congolese, Brazil is mediated by Angola. Here they are taught by mainly Brazilian leaders, who have been taught in Japan so as to safeguard the movement’s Japaneseness abroad. In Kinshasa, this stress on ‘Japaneseness’ locally translates into aesthetic difference. As the upcoming chapters will show, the obvious informational asymmetry is not an impediment for local ­(re-)production of ‘Japaneseness’ in Kinshasa, but rather an encouraging opportunity for centripetal globalisation. While contacts between SKK and Kinshasa have existed since 1983, as will be presented shortly, a lusophone connection between Brazil and Angola was made in 1991 when a Brazilian delegation under the above-mentioned Reverend Franciscò Jesus Fernandes started the Igreja Messiânica Mundial de Africa in Luanda. Sekai Kyûseikyô’s Japanese website informs us that in Angola, at the time of writing, ‘there are about 37,000 members in and around the centre of the capital, Luanda’, and that in 2006 the government of Luanda provided them with about 274 ha of land located in the suburbs of Luanda, where they are planning to open a nature farming school and an operational nature farm.25 This lends some credence to reports that

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the movement enjoys the sympathy of Angola’s political class and that Angola’s president José Eduardo Dos Santos has apparently already received Johrei. Peter Clarke (2006a: 179) has argued that the movement’s Brazilian missionaries of African descent saw their transatlantic endeavour motivated by ‘making reparation for the wrongs committed by their ancestors who sold their kin into slavery’. At the same time, writes Clarke, ‘like the Neo-Traditionalist movements [in Brazil], [this] serves for several of [EMM’s] Brazilian missionaries of African descent as a vehicle for the discovery of their African roots which Catholic Christianity in Brazil is perceived to have destroyed’ (Clarke 2006a: 179). The historical interconnection and transatlantic influences and cross-fertilisations have already provoked a range of conceptual efforts to overcome the continental divide.26 The fact that a ‘Japanese’ religious movement, exotic indeed in the sphere of the Atlantic, may contribute to the mutual cross-fertilisation of the pan-Atlantic space, advocates that the ascription of or identification through cultural heritage or belonging is no longer territorially bound, but can be mobilised in culturally unrelated spheres, such as for the pursuit of a ‘transatlantic’ heritage. Moreover, EMM’s globalising trajectory, and especially its expansion from Brazil to Africa, shows that the presence of South-South transnationalism (Van de Kamp and Van Dijck 2010) is operational beyond the field of Pentecostalism. However, as the next section shows, it would be a mistake to see the Church of World Messianity merely from a global perspective and in light of its transnational spread and diffusion. As the Congo example shows, new religions feed into and attach themselves powerfully to local historical patterns and continuities, which are indispensable for understanding what actually drives the putative ‘globalisation’ of a religious movement.

Transnational Schism and Renewal Long known as a sociological commonplace in the history of religious movements in Africa (Barrett 1968, De Craemer, Fox and Vansina 1976), schism and renewal is also a well-known phenomenon for scholars of religion in Japan.27 Sekai Kyûseikyô has known an impressive number of offshoots. The most well-known is by far the new religion Sukyô Mahikari (Davis 1980, Louveau 2012), which was founded in 1959 by Yoshikazu Okada, a former member of Sekai Kyûseikyô. The latter took on quite a number of elements from Sekai Kyûseikyô’s ritual and

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doctrinal repertoire, including the channelling of spiritual light, which Mahikari’s followers refer to as Okyome. It is understandable that movements do not celebrate their historical connection to other movements, which would make them appear to be avatars and reduce the originality of their charismatic ingenuity (and thus their power of persuasion). In Kinshasa, historical connections between movements are not talked about, if not outright denied. Despite the ethnographic virtue to take notice of such emic discourses about the putative originality of one’s movement and its founder, as demonstrated for instance by Frédérique Louveau’s decision to dedicate an entire chapter to Mahikari’s founder (2012: 73–108), it seems crucial to historicise the offshoots and genealogies of a movement so as to reconstruct historical influences. Louveau indeed mentions that Mahikari’s founder Yoshikazu Okada (called Sukuinushi Sama) was a member of Sekai Kyûseikyô before splitting off (2012: 102), but nowhere in her ethnography, which also contains an entire chapter on the Okyome ritual, does she mention that Okyome was in fact derived from Sekai Kyûseikyô’s Johrei, which in turn was a development of Ômôtô’s miteshiro otoritsugi ritual.28 Birgit Staemmler attests that ‘the similarities between (the three healing rituals) are striking and that the historical connection is undeniable, as Sekai Kyûseikyô’s founder was a missionary in Ômôtô and Mahikari’s founder a member of Sekai Kyûseikyô (Staemmler 2009: 261–266, Davis 1980: 73–80). In Japan, Sekai Kyûseikyô entered a severe crisis in 1986 and split into three major organisational bodies: firstly, Sekai Kyûseikyô Izunome Kyôdan, internationally known as the ‘Church of World Messianity’ or in Brazil, as Igreja Messiânica Mundial. Its director is the Reverend Tetsuo Watanabe and its headquarters are in Atami.29 This branch is often also referred to as Izunome (Jap. equilibrium). Secondly there is SKK Tôhô no Hikari, which in 1986 announced that New York was to be the place of its foundation. This faction is more commonly known as the Mokichi Okada Association International (MOA), whose representatives call their branch the ‘scientific’ or ‘cultural’ branch of SKK, so as to distinguish themselves from Izunome’s ‘religious’ orientation.30 MOA runs ‘hospitals’ in Japan offering the ‘Okada Purifying Treatment’ (OPT), which in practice resembles Johrei but is legitimised by a discourse of ‘scientific’ efficacy. Clarke (1999b: 227) suggests that this swing away from magico-religious practices had been undertaken with a view to SKK’s expansion to the West. Tôhô no Hikari points to an important difference with Izunome, by accusing the latter of worshipping Okada’s successors as their Messiah rather than the founder himself.31 As I found out from the head of MOA Belgium in Brussels,

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‘little by little’, and surely not formally, MOA has ‘(re)introduced a little bit of religion’, by which he meant the ritual dimension of the healing technique (interview, Brussels, July 2012).32 All three movements discussed so far (including Sukyô Mahikari) are present in Kinshasa, where the ‘same’ schisms have occurred, although in a different order and chronology, as a result of Congolese leaders and adherents acting in their own interests, and by mobilising locally valid resources to produce argumentative conviction.33 Schisms in Congo Thus, EMM, as it emerged in Kinshasa in 2001, was the result of two successive local schisms, which brought about three organisationally different, but, with regards to ritual and message, rather similar religious movements. All three stem from the same cluster of Shintô-based Japanese new religions of the Ômôtô lineage. Sukyô Mahikari was the first movement of Japanese origin to be imported by a Congolese individual to Kinshasa (from Brussels in 1966).34 This happened before it reached Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal in 1974–75 and Benin in 1979. The transplantation to these countries was favoured by French-African networks (cf. Louveau 2011, 2012). The first schism occurred in 1983, when a handful of ‘pioneers’ seceded from Kinshasa’s Dojon (i.e. school), as Mahikari’s affiliates call their centres, so as to import and establish a local branch of Sekai Kyûseikyô, arguing that it was more ‘original’ than Sukyô Mahikari. In light of the schism in Japan and the foundation of MOA International in 1986, the local branch of Sekai, as it was referred to in Kinshasa, became a branch of MOA International, whose European headquarters were in Brussels. It is via Congo’s former colonial metropolis Brussels that the transnational tie was thus established between Japan and Zaire. After contact with SKK in Brussels had been established in 1983, three Congolese individuals were trained and initiated there, then returned to Kinshasa to prepare the terrain for a larger round of initiation, which occurred under the guidance of maître Nagasawa, who later became one of MOA’s representatives responsible for Africa, based in Belgium, but visiting Kinshasa annually ever since. All initial dissidents of the 1983 secession were Tshiluba-speaking Kasaians and members of the Luba ethnic group, whereas the leader of the local Mahikari group they were seceding from belonged to the Kongo ethnic group. This hints at the role played by ethnicity in socioreligious formation in the early 1980s, which explains why Kinshasa’s newly imported SKK movement attracted mostly people from a Luba

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background. This holds true also for the second generation of ‘pioneers’, who later seceded from MOA to found EMM in 2001 (see below). However, in the last decade ethnicity has decreased as a bonding factor for affiliation. Also a shift away from socio-economic affiliation has been noticeable. Thus, if during SKK’s first years in Zaire in the 1980s, most members were part of the country’s upper class, i.e. lawyers, functionaries and ministers of Mobutu’s one-party state administration, today also les classes basses (the lower classes) are seeking affiliation, as one of MOA’s responsables explained. According to him most affiliates of the 1980s were among those on the quest for effective spiritual protection against the dangers of Mobutu’s reputed occult superpowers, who could arbitrarily remove a minister and/or destabilise someone’s fortune. It should not be forgotten that Mobutu and his surroundings were ardently keen on magic and fétichisme, Mobutu himself being surrounded by the most reputed expensive spiritual experts from as far as India and beyond.35 A Japanese responsable of MOA who visited Kinshasa in the 1980s shared with me how the Zairian leadership of Sekai/MOA wanted to present him to Mobutu as their private spiritual superstar, which, embarrassed, he had politely declined. With the end of Mobutu’s one-party state in 1990, and the increasing impact of Zaire’s bankruptcy, the stability of the elites’ livelihoods was undermined. If the accounts of Sekai members from the 1980s are to be trusted, up to a hundred people had been initiated every month. At this time Sekai gatherings were still organised on the huge ground of Kinshasa’s Fikin fair, before it moved to the 10th street of Limete and then to Ave. Poids-Lourds at the 14th street. This was also the time of the movement’s expansion to the Kasaian capital Mbuji Mayi, where it became increasingly popular. However, since the 1990s and the reconfiguration of the religious landscape, and also owing to the increasing Pentecostalisation of the public realm, the number of initiations has declined. Sekai’s (i.e. MOA’s) responsables themselves stress that besides the structural changes in the Zairian economy and society, also the Pentecostal discourse of demonisation accounts for much of the decline of its membership. But there was also the endogenous factor that many did not accept the implementation of the ‘scientific’ orientation that resulted from the foundation of MOA International in 1986. It entailed relegating the ‘church’-like gatherings with all their ‘prayer’ activities, including the healing technique of Johrei, to individual homesteads. The ‘church’ was thus transformed into a ‘hospital’ that no longer offered Johrei, but a purchasable healing service referred to as the Okada Purificatory Treatment (OPT). Although nearly identical from an

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aesthetic point of view, Johrei had thus been turned into a scientifically approved medical treatment, executed by trained ‘therapists’. Such a radical privatisation was not well received by MOA’s membership, and currently MOA is still ‘learning how to promote the non-religious aspect’, I was told, which explains why, although in different rooms, today both Johrei and OPT are practised inside the same compound. In the later 1990s the climate for another secession was ripe: once again inner tensions, a handful of adventurous ‘pioneers’, a successful quest for a transnational network and a more ‘original’ message, framed the event. The tensions this time were also intergenerational: the old generation of MOA’s ‘pioneers’ did not approve of the younger generation’s youth initiatives. In 2000, contact was established with the newly founded Igreja Messiânica Mundial de Africa (SKK Izunome), based in Luanda (Angola). As indicated in the opening vignette, Congo soon became a preoccupation for the Brazilian missionaries. The Latest Schism When I returned to Kinshasa in March 2013, upon reaching what I had known as EMM’s Johrei center in Commune de Kinshasa, Maman Gisèle was chatting with someone in front of the entrance. The first thing she did after greeting me warmly was point out the name change on the wall, explaining: ‘Papa Ntumba is now représentant légal of our church! Resprésentant légal!’, visibly proud of the fact that her family’s homestead had now become the Congolese headquarters of another independent ‘Japanese’ spiritual movement. The new name on the wall no longer stressed that it was an église (church), but announced the presence of the Temple Messianique Art de Johrei (TMAJ). Like EMM, as she and another missionary explained to me, TMAJ was a Japanese movement following Meishu Sama’s teachings (as one could gather from Johrei in the name), which had arisen in Brazil and, like EMM, had started expanding in Angola. Several Messianiques had thus been put in the situation of having to make an uncomfortable choice between two different organisational bodies of a movement with largely the same doctrinal apparatus. Did this not diametrically oppose everything I had been so proudly explained by EMM ministers and missionaries about EMM being a non-denominational ‘ultra religion’? Most had made their decision by following the missionary they had been closest with and who had guided and oriented them according to EMM’s ideal of pastoral care of proximity. Also, the geographical proximity of the respective unit vis-à-vis one’s home mattered, as most were trying to keep transport

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expenses low. Social and geographical proximity, trust and convenience, seemed to be more important factors in this choice than the ideological arguments TMAJ’s missionaries had formulated as the reasons for their break-up. Others, repulsed by the nature of the conflict, were pushed into sincere doubts about whether they should continue at all. As Alain put it (September 2013) the conflict had been ‘of such a low spiritual level that even the police had to intervene’. The final moment of secession had indeed occurred in an atmosphere of physical strife. Stones had been thrown and the police had arrested two Messianiques for some hours. Alain was so shocked that since the separation he had not gone back to any of the movements. What bothered him even more was the doubts that were cast on the veracity of former teachings and practices: ‘So everything they have taught me during all this time, all of this is now all of a sudden supposed to be wrong?’, he explained. The reasons for the secession forwarded by TMAJ’s leadership were mainly allegations that EMM’s sacred calligraphy Goshintai (cf. Chapter 6) was not truly ‘authentic’, as one responsable put it, because it had been drawn by Mokichi Okada’s wife and not by Meishu Sama himself. This is a classic allegation known from so many schisms in the history of religion worldwide, attacking the authenticity, and hence the utility, of the other body’s goods of salvation. The theme had also framed religious dissent in Japan when MOA and other factions of SKK broke up in 1986. One of TMAJ’s older missionaries announced that, indeed, they were now much closer again with MOA, out of which EMM’s pioneers had initially developed. TMAJ’s schism was also repeatedly explained by the dissatisfaction vis-à-vis the way in which EMM’s prayers and especially Johrei were performed. EMM was accused by TMAJ’s responsables of being on the way to becoming akin to an Eglise de Réveil (Church of Awakening), by invoking the ancestors’ power like the Holy Spirit, especially in the prayer called Pratique ya Sonen, which undermined the role of individual free will and responsibility (cf. Chapter 7). The change to become a temple and no longer an église reflects this. It also illustrates the divergent interests of followers, some seeking healing and publicity, the others secrecy and power. What was striking was the repeated accusation that EMM had been ‘hiding’ (Fr. cacher, Li. kobuka) a number of Okada’s writings, teachings and prosperity techniques, including special prayers and the statue of Daikokokuten. The statue was a small wooden figurine with the spirit of the Japanese prosperity goddess of Daikokokuten, which is one of the seven Japanese gods of good fortune (Jap. Shichifukujin). In Japan these are among the most well-known deities in contemporary

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Japanese popular religion, made up of a mix of figures from Shintô folklore, Buddhism and popular Chinese Daoism (Graham 2007: 109). TMAJ’s members accused the EMM’s Angolan leadership of having hidden and reserved it for their private benefit, to secure their leadership position by excluding ordinary members from accessing the powers of Daikokokuten. The statue was installed next to the altar on Avenue Lufuluabo, and a number of Japanese ‘prayers and poems for everyday use’36 were added to the ritual repertoire. TMAJ obviously presented itself as a Robin Hood who was democratising the sacred knowledge and ritual efficacy EMM’s leadership had allegedly kept for themselves. The underlying root causes of the conflict resemble those of the other schisms: money, influence, leadership and recognition. But they remained largely implicit. An atmosphere of rivalry and dissatisfaction was perceptible already in early 2012, after the Angolan leadership had replaced EMM’s chief minister with a young enthusiastic former musician, who barely spoke French. According to many, he ‘had not had any proper education’ and was therefore not able to lead a unit. Insufficient intellectual qualification also recurred as a charge against the Angolan minister, who permanently resides in the building of EMM’s headquarters in Gombe. This impression could easily arise from the fact that, except for one of the Angolans who supervised EMM in Kinshasa, none spoke Lingala, French or any other Congolese language. ‘The Angolans only send us their petits,37 although in fact the Eglise Messianique in Africa had started over here in Congo. We have many more experienced people than them’, explained Alain (Kinshasa, April 2013) by pointing to the history of SKK/MOA in Zaire and DRC. TMAJ’s responsables had the feeling that, having imported the movement from Angola, they now found themselves in a situation of tutelage and domination. This impression could easily arise if one listened to the sermon of one delegate, who in June 2011 repeatedly emphasised how ‘spiritually low’ the DRC had sunk in the last decades, and stated that it was clearly still in a situation of ‘darkness’ to which EMM had to bring light. Every missionary, by virtue of their task, is eager to bring light, and may generate self-esteem from the ‘denigration’ of others whom he/she may ‘enlighten’. No missionary likes to be told by his supposed ‘superiors’, however, to bring this light first to himself. In the months preceding the schism of November 2012 the Angolan delegates must have crossed this sensitive line. Moreover, from the perspective of TMAJ’s responsables, it was simply no longer acceptable that EMM continued to rent a building for 1,600 USD per month in Kinshasa’s town centre,38 while the Angolan delegate

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in residence occupied half the building. Apparently he had refused to shift his residence to a cheaper part of town. Given that EMM’s money policies are guided by the aim of national self-sustenance, it can easily cause outrage to see that the money one deserves as remuneration for missionary work goes to pay rent. That TMAJ’s new représentant légal himself owned a large compound with a temple infrastructure already installed, made the decision to secede even easier. The trigger, however, was the decision from Angola to promote a number of Congolese responsables to the rank of ministers. This was done during a public ceremony in Luanda. The dividing line between those who would travel to Angola and become EMM ministers, and those who felt they were refused a promotion they deserved, neatly matches the two camps that were created through the schism. Thus EMM lost, initially at least, at least half of its membership. Responses to the allegations ranged from sincere regret to counteraccusations such as that TMAJ’s teachings were no longer in line with what Meishu Sama had really taught, or that TMAJ’s responsables had been led astray by their greed for money and power. This was supported by an ethnic argument about the Luba ethnic group, who, as I was told, ‘are known to be proud, greedy and eager for power’. While the group of TMAJ dissidents indeed counted a number of members who would consider themselves Luba, the argument seems to be a good example of how the ascription of ethnic difference and identity is always motivated by perceived socio-economic interests and power relations. The case of local schism and renewal thus presented elucidates how knowledge about and access to ritual paraphernalia (the Daikokokuten statue), to money, honour and promotion, and on the more visible side also how theological or ideological debates about the authenticity of practice are the forces that drive the actors in urban Africa’s pluralising religious landscapes. The dynamic of transnational schism and renewal indicates furthermore the extent to which the connection with the wider world, with the transnational, has become a key stake so as to authenticate the truth of one’s message and the efficacy of ritual practices. Followers and Units While in Angola an estimated 37,000 followers have joined the movement,39 in DRC about 2,500 members have been steadily frequenting the various units since EMM was set up in 2001, with this number on the rise.40 These official figures translate into an average of 20–50 visitors per day, depending on the day of the week, the activity offered and

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which unit is concerned. The frequency of visits is meticulously monitored by a system of ledgers that await every visitor at the entrance of each unit. Upon arrival one notes one’s name, status (membre or sympathisant) and the home unit one belongs to. This bureaucratic system of neoliberal appeal mainly serves to supervise the performance of each respective unit when on Sundays all units assemble at the siège for the weekly Sunday service. EMM’s siège or centre de formation, as Messianiques call their headquarters, is located in a hired building on the periphery of the Gombe area, which is the political and economic centre of the capital. On the first Sunday of each month, a special service for ancestral veneration is added to the usual dominical culte (service). Given that it is virtually impossible to predict how long it will take to get into town by taxi-bus (in 2012 a journey varied between twenty minutes and two hours), members who do not pray at the siège belong to a Johrei center (more than a hundred members, called as such in American English) or to a point de Johrei (more than ten members) of a neighbourhood in less distant proximity. Even smaller entities (fewer than ten members) are called foyers de lumière. Before EMM and TMAJ’s schism in 2012, Kinshasa had three Johrei centers in the neighbourhoods of Mokali (Kimbanske), Lemba and Kinshasa. A fourth Johrei center has been established in Mbuji Mayi in Kasai. In addition, nine points de Johrei are operational, in Lukjunga, Ndjili, Camp-Luka, Nsele, Pascal, Masina sans-fil (Petrocongo), Mpasa-Maba, Kingasani and Mbinza Ozone. Initiatives to introduce EMM also to other urban centres of the country include Mbanza Ngungu, Kenge, Matadi and Lubumbashi. A number of attempts to set up foyers de lumière and Johrei centers have failed, including in Kingabwa and Gbadolite. Given that much depends on the will and initiative of individual followers to offer their homestead as foyers de lumière, and given the volatility of affiliation, it is probable that this geography will undergo further change in the years to come. But who are those who dare to transgress the established boundaries of mainline church affiliation and born-again mass Christianity? That a short and simple answer cannot be given reflects both Congo’s volatile history of protracted political and socio-economic instability, as well as the experiential enthusiasm of younger, but in EMM/TMAJ’s case also older Kinois, who make their city such a vibrant place. The truly kaleidoscopic nature of those who frequent spiritual movements in Kinshasa reflects the volatility of a country where economic fortune rarely exceeds a generation’s lifetime and where, as a result, urban life in itself resembles a quest rather than an answer. This might explain why, unlike in Japan (Staemmler 2011) and Brazil (Oro 2000), the majority

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(about seventy per cent) of Messianiques in Congo today are men, many of whom explain that they suffer from the structural unemployment (chômage) of the country. At times they spend several hours a day in the Johrei unit closest to their home (the choice is mostly made on the basis of transport costs) engaging in Johrei transmission and reception. In the absence of a job, many see this as a way to impact on their destiny and actively do something for their lives. Kinshasa’s dense population, dictatorship, war and longstanding hardship has eradicated many older social stratifications and material resources to produce and stabilise social difference and distinction. Here, the need and creativity to redraw boundaries and delineate the social space so as to situate oneself and loved ones has become an urgent necessity for many. Thus, in contrast to the 1980s, when Japanese spirituality was elitist, nowadays the affiliation with spiritual movements is socio-economically heterogeneous. While it is true that Sukyô Mahikari, the Grail Movement, AMORC and surely also the Freemasons, stand out to some extent by continuing to host a certain elitist upper class (in 2012, one of DRC’s national ministers was among Sukyô Mahikari’s initiates), Sekai/MOA has, just like EMM and TMAJ but also Eckankar, started attracting members from Kinshasa’s larger classe populaire, which makes them indeed resemble the city’s uncountable églises rather than elitist loges. Spiritual movements are sources of honour and distinction for elite nostalgics, who once occupied an economically favourable position in the volatile Zairian neopatrimonial administration and/or business world, which they lost in the turmoil of the 1990s. Their spiritual activity and role as responsables allows them to commemorate, recycle and actively (re-)produce the special status they once enjoyed. Thus, among EMM’s senior members there is a former mayor of one of Kinshasa’s municipalities, a former board member of the Zairian Central Bank, the son of a former Zairian diplomat, a formerly important diamond trader (who enjoys EMM’s ambiguous position regarding his unapologetic polygamy), a former owner of a small transport business that went bankrupt in the 1990s. All of these individuals had once access to honour and wealth, both in terms of money and people. To a minor extent EMM and TMAJ also attract clerks, journalists and employees with a stable or semi-stable income, as is the case in West Africa, where Sukyô Mahikari attracts mainly clerks and teachers (Louveau 2012). Given Congo’s long-term political and economic instability, accumulation, if at all possible, is mostly extensive and, under the pressure of Kinshasa’s short-term if not presentist temporality, ephemeral. Unlike in other African cities, tendencies of accumulation have not led to a

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longer-term stratification of the urban class continuum beyond the duration of a generation. Hence the largest group of Messianiques are those who identify as chercheurs, and whose quest for spiritual insight, fortune and authority resonates well with the interests of the abovementioned elite nostalgics. Both, in a way, are active participants in, and contributors to, Kinshasa’s overwhelming classes populaires with their powerful Kinois popular culture of extravagance and la Kinoiserie. Regardless of one’s fluency in French or official education level – many seekers are indeed university students, others are illiterate – spiritual movements allow the generation, embodiment and aesthetic performance of personal self-esteem and self-respect as an alternative to the behavioural codex of a Western-style middle class. The Charisma of the Transnational One may wonder why the seceding missionaries of TMAJ did not simply create their own ‘Japanese’ religious movement ‘from scratch’. Transnational connectivity seems to matter, so as to assure the efficacy of the proposed goods of salvation. These include ritual paraphernalia and techniques such as the Goshintai calligraphy, Ohikari amulets, flowers, a variety of prayers, the respectively ‘correct’ way to perform Johrei and, in TMAJ’s case, the statue of Daikokokuten. TMAJ has been in need of lending its own new ‘goods of salvation’ credence and authenticity so as to generate faith, or confidence, in the performativity and efficacy of its repertoire of ritual things. Given that a schism necessarily reduces the number of those who participate in a formation of confidence, the connection to a movement ‘known to be successful’ elsewhere, can be a powerful resource. Transnational connectivity, here, is not a ‘centrifugal’ force. The connection to the world is sought out of very ‘centripetal’ interests. These interests are grounded in and directed to the locality of actors, who themselves do not travel. This explains why, with increasing religious pluralisation in the African city, the ‘transnational’ is an increasingly powerful local resource. It carries, in a way, a charismatic power of persuasion. It does not, however, ‘deterritorialise’ people from their locality, but rather provides a resource to stage and anchor oneself even more firmly within one’s longstanding social and geographical space. The conception of religious transnationalisation as something that occurs when ‘people move and … take religion with them’ (Adogame and Spickard 2012: 7–8) ought thus to be completed with the perspective of people who mobilise transnational connectedness in situ, by importing a ‘foreign’ religious movement and performing their

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affiliation to the ‘foreign’ in their home vicinity. Clearly, what appears as a ‘deterritorialisation of religious identity’ (ibid.: 19) can have powerful territorialising effects.41

Notes   1. Testimony by Jacques Makamba, Kinshasa, 2 June 2010.   2. This is well known from the region of Lower Congo, where the prophet Kimpa Vita, for instance, was possessed by St Anthony (see Thornton 1998). For other prophets, see MacGaffey 1983.   3. Reverend Francisco Jesus Fernandes (d. 2010) complemented his career as a high-ranking official of EMM Brazil after having gained recognition as a Brazilian football star (popularly called Chiquinho Pastor), who was part of the Brazilian national team in the 1970s.   4. Few countries’ names carry an article in English as the Congo does. Countries like the Netherlands, the Philippines, the Maldives, the Seychelles, the Bahamas etc. carry the article ‘the’ in their names to qualify their multiplicity. In other cases, the article is added to indicate the noun describing the kind of state, for e.g. the Republic of China, the United States of America, the Dominican Republic, the Commonwealth of Australia, or also the Democratic Republic of Congo. In German there are die Schweiz, der Iran, der Irak, der Gabon. This discursive detail is not insignificant in that in English and German, at least, it enables an easy linguistic objectification of the thing called ‘Congo’. Especially in German where one travels in den Kongo (into the Congo), as in the French form le Congo, the use of the article objectifies the space and reminds of the old cliché of Congo being Africa’s, or perhaps the world’s, ‘heart of darkness’. In order not to blindly contribute to such a construction, and given that in Lingala there is no such article to the country’s name, I have preferred throughout the text to omit the article, despite the international convention. An exception has been made for the places where the article is an explicit part of the discursive construction of Congo’s ascribed identity.   5. E.g. the discussion by Jules-Rosette 1975.   6. Appiah (1992: 127–136) suggests this binary opposition as an alternative to Robin Horton’s (1967) dichotomy of the open vs. the closed predicament, criticising Horton’s opposition of ‘African thought vs. Western science’ as too overtly culturalising.   7. In Japan, the family name (Okada) is mentioned first, followed by the forename (Mokichi). I have decided to follow the way in which my Congolese interlocutors refer to the founder of their movement, placing the family name last.   8. With large parts of Congo’s economy being informal, se débrouiller is the term commonly used also in Lingala (azali kosedébrouiller: he is fending for himself) to indicate the improvised efforts to make ends meet.   9. For Mokichi Okada’s life in more detail, see Staemmler 2009, Offner and Van Straelen 1963.

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10. Frère Raphael Minga, for instance, who founded of the Nzete Ekauka movement (Notre Dame du Désarmement) in Kinshasa-Kimbanseke (quartier Mokali), is continuously possessed by the Virgin Mary and her son, whom he receives in acoustic messages (cf. Ndaywel è Nziem 1999). 11. This is reminiscent of the visual effects shown in pictures, which are circulated in Kinshasa to prove the presence of the Holy Spirit as a ‘column of fire’ (see Pype 2012). In contemporary DRC it is anything but problematic for a pastor to preach about or distribute such effects. 12. Particularly influenced by Buddhism, the saviour is generally considered to be the returning Buddha Maitreya, also called Miroku and associated with the Japanese Bodhisattva Kannon, whose arrival announces a period of upcoming bliss (Hambrick 1979, Shimazono 2004: 143–163; Yamashita 1998, Clarke 2000). 13. Kyôshu Sama, ‘Extrait des paroles de Kyôshu Sama à propos du Tremblement de Terre survenu dans la région de nord-est du Japon’, 13 March 2011, unpublished document received in Kinshasa, my translation. 14. New Thought considers ‘physical and emotional health, material prosperity, and personal relationships’ as the three core values for human life (Hanegraaff 2005: 6583). There are many parallelisms between the precepts of ‘New Thought’ and those of the Ômôtô movement and its follow-up factions Sekai Kyûseikyô and Seichô-no-Ie (House of growth). The connection between Ômôtô and New Thought is due to both coincidence and contact (cf. Carpenter and Roof 1995: 45–46; Melton 2006: 459). Based on Mesmer’s magnetic theory, ‘New Thought’ gained momentum in the United States during the nineteenth century and can be considered the essential forerunner of the New Age movement. Its most important institutionalised expression is the Christian Science movement, which is equally present in Kinshasa, cf. http://lobservateur-rdc.com/​science-chretiennedecouvrir-lesverites-de-la-bible-3-makengo-ma-pululu-le-livre-science-et-sante-avec-laclef-des-ecritures-de-mary-baker-eddy-explique-la-b/​, accessed 24 March 2017. 15. The film was produced by Rhonda Byrne and directed by Drew Heriot. It was released on 26 March 2006. Cf. also the bestselling book by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, New York: Atria Books, 2006. 16. The same is true for the recently published follow-up book version entitled The Hero by Rhonda Byrne (New York: Atria books, 2013), which was on the bestseller lists in New Delhi in March 2014. 17. Elílí not only means 1. ‘shadow’ or 2. ‘image, photograph, portrait, symbol’. It also refers to 3. ‘the material body of a person, but invisible; namonaki elílí ya tata o ndótó: I have seen father in a dream (his normally invisible material body has shown itself to me in a dream)’ … (Van Everbroeck 1985: 48, my translation). This supports my argument that the ‘invisible’ double of a thing or a person does not have to be seen as immaterial. The spiritual side of a thing or a person should not be seen as less material in the way a (Neo) Platonic idea is understood. 18. Cf. the discussion of the ‘occult’ as conceptual interface and the medieval scientific concept of qualitates occultae in Chapter 2.

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19. This points again to an Aristotelean (meta)physics rather than a Platonic one Cf. Lambertz 2005. 20. Seichô-no-Ie too promotes such a view, as is summarised in a book coauthored by Seichô-no-Ie’s founder Masaharu Tanaguchi and New Thought writer Fenwicke Holmes: ‘the Bible teaches: “for we are all one body”. The whole universe is a living organism and so though unseen, the network of what may be called the cosmic nerve tissue spreads ­everywhere, so that when a man wants something, that desire is transmitted to the organ whose function it is to gratify it. This is what we call in Seichono-Iye [sic] the “Boundless Supply” or “Everything granted at will”’ (Holmes and Taniguchi 1962: 210, quoted in Carpenter and Roof 1995: 47). 21. Referencing being sparse and inchoate, I have not been able to reconstruct the stemma of the booklet. 22. The booklet entitled Les Temps Nouveaux (EMM 2011), translated into French from Portuguese and with the rather expensive price tag of 5 USD, could not undo the impression that far too few of Okada’s original teachings are available in writing. 23. Theologian Elizabeth Richards (née Derrett) (1983, 1991), who has studied Sekai Kyûseikyô’s presence in Brazil and Thailand in the early 1980s, attests to an estimated 900,000 members in Japan in 1983. Beyond Japan, the movement was particularly strong in Brazil and Thailand, where the membership exceeded 160,000 at the time, rising to more than 300,000 in 2000 (Derrett 1983, Richards 1991, Oro 2000). 24. Peter Clarke has found that further activities of SKK and MOA abroad include ‘funding an elementary school in Peru, the establishment of an agricultural training school in Mexico as well as several centres for cultural classes on Japan and Japanese language schools worldwide including Brazil, Argentina, U.S.A, France, Belgium, Portugal, the U.K., Taiwan and Southeast Asia’ (Clarke 1999b: 226). 25. http://www.izunome.jp/​en/​border/​africa/​, accessed 12 July 2012. 26. Bob White (2002), for instance, talks of Congolese rumba as cosmopolitanism. Matory (2005), focusing on Candomblé and inspired by Gilroy (1993), has suggested the concept of ‘Black Atlantic religion’; Rauhut (2012) talks of the Santeria’s ‘globalisation’ in Cuba; and Blanes and Sarro (2009) discuss the Kongo prophetic movements of Kimbanguism and Tokoism as ‘religious lusophone Atlantic’. Clarke’s finding that with EMM a transatlantic imaginary is also at work in the expansion of a ‘Japanese’ new religion is a noteworthy addition. 27. For India, see Anindita Chakrabarty (2009). 28. The latter had been ‘invented’ by Ômôtô’s co-founder Deguchi Onisaburô to substitute the meditation ritual of chinkon kishin. Miteshiro otoritsugi consists of the ritual of laying on or close to a rice ladle, either touching it or not, to induce healing in patients. 29. See http://www.izunome.org, accessed 24 March 2017. 30. Cf. http://www.moainternational.or.jp/​en/​intro/​intro1.html, accessed 26 May 2012.

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31. This critique was repeated in 2012 when TMAJ split off locally in Kinshasa (see below). 32. Sekai Kyûseikyô’s third branch is the much smaller Su no Hikari Kyôdan. See http://sunohikari.com, accessed 22 December 2015. Other Japanese subgroups were created that followed or at least were inspired by Mokichi Okada’s philosophy. Among them are Jieido, Mikuro Shinkyo, TenseiShinbikai, Gorona Daieikai (J-Healing), Tsukuino-Hikari Kyodan, Kyusei Shinkyo, Koumyo- Miroku-kai, Shinji-Shumei-kai, Kyusei Shinkyo (Kyusei True Religion), Johrei Gijutsu Fukyu-kai, Kyusei Shinkyo, Ômôtô-hikarino Do, Seimei Kyo, Reimei, Society of Johrei, among others (Xu 2006: 135). 33. In Japan, an agreement was reached in 1997 to reassociate the three SKK organisations, at least nominally, as a single comprehensive religious corporation with Yôichi Okada and Tetsuo Watanabe as religious and administrative leaders. However, the aim of a de-facto reunification still seems currently out of reach (interview with a chief responsable of MOA Belgium, Brussels, July 2012). 34. Interview with a leading official of Sukyô Mahikari, Kinshasa, May 2012. 35. Interview with Mobutu’s personal intendant Albert-Henri Buisine, Kisangani, October 2015. 36. This was the title of a leaflet issued by TMAJ in June 2013. 37. Petit (little, little one) is commonly used in Kinshasa by someone who wishes to indicate that he/​she enjoys a status of patron or tutor over an inferior person at his/​her command. 38. This is the amount I was told in June 2011, without fluctuations or increase. 39. Cf. http://www.izunome.jp/​en/​border/​africa/​, accessed 13 December 2014. The figures mentioned in this section relate to the situation before the local schism between EMM and TMAJ. 40. Figures as per June 2012, before the latest schism. 41. See in this regard also Lambertz 2016.

I2 Occult Sciences (Il)legitimate Secrecy and the Infrapolitics of Suspicion

André’s Unease André (34) went to school at the Catholic seminary of Lodja in today’s province of Sankuru. Initially, he wanted to become a priest, but before his ordination he abandoned this plan in order to go to Kinshasa and study law, graduating in 2005. He was fortunate to find a job as a supervisor in one of the Kinshasa offices of the Western Union money transfer company. That is where I met him during my first visit to Kinshasa in 2009, following the recommendation of a Congolese friend in Belgium. Given his impressive language skills and his passion for writing, in summer 2010 I asked André to transcribe a number of interviews that I had conducted with the members and responsables of EMM. Given that he had lost his job with Western Union, he was happy to take on this task. By listening to and transcribing the conversations I had recorded, André got to know some of the matters I had been discussing with my interlocutors, as well as the voice of EMM’s responsable Jérôme (55), among others, whom he would later meet. In addition to his eloquence in French, thorough education and general knowledge, André appeared to have an attitude of intellectual reflexivity and curiosity, an analytical distance vis-à-vis the world in which he lived. His occasional doubts about the discipline of anthropology, which were often a common denominator in our exchanges, have helped me to keep on questioning and reflecting upon my own activity as a chercheur, and not lose track of my role and position as a mundele (Li. white, European, foreigner). This ‘second order’ attitude was the tone in which André and I had talked on multiple instances about the reputation of non-Christian spiritual movements such as EMM, which are popularly referred to as

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sciences occultes, and easily run the risk of being suspected of magie or fétichisme.1 By then, I had come across this categorical condemnation only in academic texts and some initial conversations with Messianiques. André’s seeming openness was promising and I was looking forward to the discussions and reflexions about my data and my position as a researcher, a Belgian and a mundele. The fact that André was an ‘oldschool’ Catholic had encouraged my assumption that he would be more reflexively distanced than others vis-à-vis the Pentecostal demonisation of so-called ‘occult sciences’. Indeed, today even the Catholic Church is often seen as an occult science itself (cf. Hackett 2003). Hegemonic power relations are often grounded in perceived socioeconomic difference. How impossible it has been to really undo this difference between my interlocutors and myself became brutally clear when, in August 2010, I had to interrupt my first fieldwork period due to an inherited back problem. I suffered paralysis of my left leg, a classic sign of a slipped disc. I had to call my European health insurance, who booked a first-class seat for me to get to Brussels where the next day the slipped disc was surgically removed from my lower back. It was very difficult and cumbersome to explain, especially to Messianiques, many of whom frequented EMM for Johrei treatment (some also for symptoms similar to my back issues), that I would be flown back to Europe to be operated on. Before my sudden departure, I had asked André to return two books for me, which one of EMM’s senior teachers, Papa Jérôme, had lent me. One book was a volume of the French edition of Mokichi Okada’s Foundations du Paradis Terrestre (Foundations of Paradise) (cf. Okada 1999 [1984]), and the other entitled Le Culte des esprits by the Congolese Catholic missionary Nkongolo wa Biye (1974). Jérôme had given me the latter explaining that ‘today, they often say that spirits do not exist, that they are a pure result of our imagination, but as Meishu Sama and also this author show, in fact they do exist. Maybe you want to have a look at it’ (Jérôme, Kinshasa, May 2010). Back in Europe, after the operation, I got back in touch with André via telephone and asked him to return the two books. The same evening he called me to say that the job was done, that he had indeed met Papa Jérôme at EMM’s unit in Commune de Kinshasa. To my surprise he added that, if possible, I should not ask him again to go back to this place. Somewhat taken aback, I asked him what had happened and he indicated that completing the transcriptions for me was fine but that he would not like to visit the place again because of the things people were saying about this kind of movement. That even André had difficulties with a short visit to EMM back then truly baffled me, especially the idea

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that I had inflicted a negative experience on him. At the same time, the event aroused my curiosity, and the next day I asked André by email if he could summarise his impression of the visit to EMM in writing. I thought that, despite the ‘artificial’ context of its production, such a ‘report’ could be of ethnographic interest and I was curious to know how André would phrase his experiences. I felt that by taking his impressions seriously by inviting him to write it down, I would pay tribute to his agency, which I had violated when asking him to return the books. The text he sent me some days later was more than an eye opener. It not only stressed the role of things, such as the books and EMM’s prayer site, as related to the local conception of sciences occultes; I also read in his text a hint of vengeance against me, which I saw as an attempt to distance, dissociate and thus to ‘purify’ himself from the potential doubts the cooperation with me and my putative ‘scientific discipline’ might have generated vis-à-vis his own moral agency. ‘What are you looking for around here?’ My collaboration with Peter Lambertz in the context of his doctoral research has caused friction with [Fr. frotté à, literally to rub against] several realities. ‘Caused friction with’ is just the right expression because these realities were somewhat brutal. I felt especially constrained to face them, although I wasn’t really obliged [Fr. contraint] by anyone. The concepts, figures [Fr. personnages] and even the people [Fr. personnes] I got to know seemed to me at times as if they had come out of a forbidden world. I could feel it in my own fears, but especially in the cross-examination, which I was continually subjected to in my surroundings. To begin with I had to convince my wife of the non-dangerous nature of my work. In fact, in Kinshasa where I live, oriental religions, the notion of the other world [Fr. l’au-delà], and nearly all other metaphysical concepts, which tend to be different from traditional Christian teachings, are considered as rooted in magie, in fétiche. The danger is said to be located in the fact that people recur to it in order to make fortunes and get rich, and the problem is that there is always a counter-gift to that fortune: human sacrifice. This everyone knows. My wife understood me, but I am not sure if the other people around her would understand. Myself, though, I feared a certain attack or the appearance of spirits in the middle of the night. But Jesus Christ would appease me. When it happens that I work on these matters [of transcription] during the night, I do not leave my Holy Bible. One day, when Peter was at the end of his stay in Kinshasa, he asked me to go and return two books to Mr Jérôme, an influential member of EMM. I concealed my horror when I saw the titles on the covers of these two books. In fact, I took them from Peter’s hands with non-admitted reluctance. Me, in love with books, with reading, for once I would have nearly profaned real books. Don’t ask me about the titles of these books,

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because I had sworn to myself to forget them on the spot. And this is what was done! And then [I have to] say that I kept them in my bag for three days! And I had to arrange a meeting with Mr Jérôme, who works in the ville. My wife, would she believe me if ever she caught me with these books in my bag? And what about the others? I would no longer be anything but an ‘occultist’, a magician ready to use [i.e. to steal] their ‘chances’ (Fr. chance), to cast them an ill will (Fr. jeter un mauvais sort), and eventually to eat them. This is nearly the ordeal of banishment (Fr. supplice de bannissement). And all this because of two books! It was high time I got rid of them, but how? Because I did not have enough money then to contact Mr Jérôme, who is on another phone network from me, these books were still in my bag. Every time I remember this I do not omit to say a little prayer inside of me. Yes, I was right to be anxious, because I did not want to be visited by spirits; I did not want to be an occultist, nor let this kind of suspicion weigh on me. [Then] I received an SMS from Peter in Leipzig, informing me that Mr Jérôme was currently at 144 [Avenue] Lufuluabo, so I could go and return these books to him. 144 Lufuluabo. This reminded me of something. This was where EMM is located! And [it was] also only some metres from where a friend of mine lives. Peter’s message from Germany obliged me to go there and, above all, it would not give me any time to think of anything else, except for the favour I would have to return him as a friend. Here I am finally on [Avenue] Lufuluabo, after a long journey on a bus. Let’s call it that because there is no other name for this van full of German writings transformed into a bus. I was looking out for number 144 when I was struck by fear about a painted cross on a white wall. And yes, there was something to be anxious about! A cross, not like the ones one is used to seeing. It had something like a luminous circle right where the two bars of the cross meet. Realising this instilled in me an absurd certainty, telling me: these people are fetishists! And what’s more, they don’t even conceal it! But I think what made me especially uneasy was realising and knowing that I had reached the [house of the] Devil! Sorry, EMM. I hesitated several times before entering, but I did not have any choice. Only once inside the compound I was guided by a voice, which was the voice of Mr Jérôme, whom, by the way, I had never met nor seen [before]. I recognised his voice, but also his accent, that of a Congolese tribe I know well: the Mongo. Without this [accent] his French would have been perfect, really. But there was no familiarity, really. On the contrary, this only confirmed the fact that I was indeed at a place where I really should not be. From the moment I had presented myself at the door, a man carrying an open book stared at me from above his glasses. He came over to me and greeted me with warm friendliness. ‘But what should I care about your friendliness? You’re an occultist! This does not change [anything]’, I told myself. When I announced to him that I had come on behalf of Peter,

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he smiled even more. I handed him his books. The open door behind him allowed my eyes to perceive a little group of people, followers no doubt who were being very studious. [Right now] I seemed to be the focal point of their attention. [But] I did all I could not to meet any of their eyes, fearing somebody among them might recognise me and could go and say that, me too, I was an occultist. [In fact], one would believe it easily because, more than two months ago I had lost my job and [people could easily think] that I must have gone looking for new chances, for easy money. I even thought I recognised somebody in there, to be precise, a Mongo student whom I had known at university. When I crossed the threshold of the exit… what deliverance! I rather hurried, while making up [Fr. échaffauder] some arguments in my head that could serve as plausible responses to anyone asking me right there: ‘Hey, where do you come from? What are you looking for around here?’

How could it happen that I had not grasped how problematic it was for André to return these books for me? Was my understanding of books so radically different? Or was something being done with them in Kinshasa that I was not aware of? André’s account confronts us with two main themes that are crucial to this study: suspicion on the one hand, and the role of things on the other. His account is replete with the categorical condemnation that non-Christian movements such as EMM and TMAJ systematically face. This condemnation follows the pattern of longstanding witchcraft discourses, which this chapter analyses by summarising three distinct schools of interpretation. On the other hand, in the opening lines of his account André mentions that he had been ‘rubbed against’ (Fr. frotté à) a number of things that were unpleasant to him. This hints at the sensuous nature of what is generally referred to as ‘the occult’. André’s fear of his wife discovering the books in his bag, or a friend seeing him at the site of EMM, clearly points to the role of things in the micro-politics of suspicion in the city today, where material evidence for belonging to a movement of putative ‘occultists’ allows a coercive threat of suspicion to be created. The focus on the materially available surface of the world as a starting point of ‘religion’, as many spiritual movements also call their activity, contrasts with older interpretations of ‘religion’ in Africa as a ‘belief in the spirit world’ (e.g. Ellis and Ter Haar 2004). This aesthetic focus, which both the actors and this analysis share, sheds light not only on the condemnation but also on the attraction associated with spiritual movements such as EMM/TMAJ. It is a well-known feature of African secret societies that secrecy is aesthetically ‘performed’ with masks, costumes, dance and music, things that have often been identified as ‘artworks’.2 These artworks

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serve to cloak the identities of members of society as they assume the personality of spirits or ancestors. The expression ‘performed’ must be understood here with both its dramatic (Goffman 1959) and its aesthetic (Fischer-Lichte 2004) dimensions: a mask, for instance, may ‘play’ or act as if it were a spirit, which it thus imitates in a ‘performance’, while its aesthetic ‘performativity’, in the sense of Austin’s ‘performative’ speech acts, may have a ‘felicitous’ effect on the perceiver’s senses where it does more than ‘symbolise’, ‘signify’ or ‘mean’ a spiritual presence, but rather does this very presence.

‘Occultist’, ‘Magician’: Topoi of Suspicion Kinois use the concepts of ‘occultist’ (Fr./Li. occultiste) and ‘magician’ (Fr./Li. magicien) interchangeably to express suspicion vis-à-vis somebody’s fortune, success and moral quality. Both concepts usually designate a male individual, who is suspected of having been initiated into and belonging to a secret society. It is believed that this exclusive membership endows them with secret knowledge and magical techniques, which are intentionally hidden from non-initiated outsiders. It is assumed that these techniques enable the occultist/magician to mysteriously manipulate the course of his life so as to satisfy his private self-interests. This is understood as being detrimental to others, in particular to his kin and offspring. Hence the notion that an occultist mostly sacrifices his own children. Success, especially if sudden and unaccounted for, which is neither shared nor redistributed within the kin group, may cause the owner to be suspected of having resorted to the help of magie or sciences occultes. His private benefits, obtained through magical means, are understood to be obtained by sacrificing somebody from the kin group, which conflates popular aetiology and notions of the origins of illness and misfortune with perceived inequality within the group. This illicit process is locally referred to by the concept of magie, which is normatively used in the way it was introduced by Protestant and Catholic missionaries. What Evans-Pritchard (1976 [1937]) had singled out as ‘sorcery’ was thus demonised as pagan ‘superstition’. Given the proximity of the figure of the magicien or the occultiste to that of the witch, however, Evans-Pritchard’s distinction between sorcery and witchcraft is not very helpful for our purpose. As is well known, in francophone Africa ‘sorcery’ goes today by the name of fétichisme, or kosimba fétiches (to touch fetishes). Magie differs from fétichisme in that it carries a connotation of being of non-African origin. Yet the link to

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sorcery makes magie even more clearly identifiable as the structural opposite, in terms of moral quality and origin, to the Holy Spirit’s miracle.3 Provocatively put, miracles are the ‘magic’ induced by God, while the results of magie are the ‘miracles’ effectuated by the Devil. Whether in miracles or magie, the Holy Spirit and the Devil are both actors with a global history and outreach. Here lies the difference with fétichisme, which is mostly understood to be of African origin. The same is true for the classical theme of the nightly gathering of witches that appears as a generic model, unstable and adaptable enough to be applied to any circle of people suggesting secrecy and wealth. Spiritual movements such as EMM and TMAJ, as well as business corporations and of course the lodges and brotherhoods of Freemasons and Rosicrucians, etc. appear to be the ongoing confirmations of this theme, especially because they are explicitly non-Christian and therefore, in the bornagain Christian view, the embodiment of evil. This also inscribes them, from the Christian perspective, in the local tradition of secret societies. The Pentecostal demonisation discourse has become a powerful moral authority in Kinshasa today. Pype (2012: 43–44) informs us that for Kinshasa’s born-again Christians, the preferred loci for demonic forces to gather are non-Christian religions, anything ‘traditional’, ‘la Kinoiserie’ (Kinshasa’s culture of music, dance, beer and sex), as well as, perhaps importantly, political and educational institutions. Pype does not pursue the line of ‘science’ and the university (see below), but she is explicit when she writes that ‘this selection reflects the major pre­ occupations of the born-again Christian leaders, inasmuch as they desire to increase their power by devaluing their opponents: other religions, “traditional” practices, and the major attractions of urban life’ (2012: 44), while the spaces of political and intellectual meaning making, including the parliament and the universities, are distrusted and demonised too (cf. also Hackett 2003). At the same time, the ‘revelatory’ role of the audio-visual ‘television’ media has been well documented (Pype 2012, Meyer 2016). The impact of Nollywood productions from Nigeria cannot be underestimated in this trend to demonise. In the words of a friend of mine, Michel: ‘one has to take into account all these films from Nigeria, like Karachika or The Bishops, all this mentality a little bit magical has a lot of influence here in Kinshasa. They are selling all the DVDs on the market in town’ (see also Wendl 2004, Pype 2012).

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The ‘Occult’ as Conceptual Interface In his review of academic literature on this theme, Terence Ranger (2007) condemns a ‘lumping together’ of an ‘African occult’ and encourages instead an approach that may disaggregate and historicise the phenomena gathered under this conceptual umbrella. Ranger’s critical position has generated a lively debate among Africanists. Meyer (2009c) and also Geschiere (e.g. 2013) have argued that Africans often aggregate phenomena linked to the occult themselves.4 Also Kinois use the notion of the ‘occult’ in a rather polysemic and flexible way. Some use the word normatively as a synonym of ‘evil’ and the ‘satanic’ while others stress in mere descriptive fashion that ‘occult’ is merely what cannot be seen and is therefore not necessarily dangerous or negative.5 Both these positions are particularly relevant to the notion of ‘occult sciences’. Wyatt MacGaffey points to the role of experts with regard to occult knowledge: ‘although it is often used to refer to the “supernatural”, it means simply that which is hidden from view or known only to the initiated, to experts’ (MacGaffey 2000: 240). Such a descriptive view makes ‘occult’ knowledge appear similar, if not identical, to what counts as ‘scientific’ expert knowledge, to which, in local terms, one also has to be ‘initiated’. Does this suggest that, emically, for many Kinois, ‘modern sciences’ and ‘occult sciences’ share certain similarities? Wouter Hanegraaff (2013) has sketched a European history of the notion of ‘occult sciences’, which reveals an oscillation between normative and descriptive understandings in the history of the ‘occult’ concept. Used today by historians as shorthand for associating magic, alchemy, astrology and often also divination and witchcraft, in the early Middle Ages the Roman Church authorities blamed ancient Greek sciences and particularly astrology as pagan superstitio. This attitude shifted considerably in the times of scholastic sciences and the first medieval universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As a result of the reception of Aristotelian natural philosophy, the expression of qualitates occultae (occult qualities) emerged, which helped to emancipate the ancient Greek sciences from the domain of superstitio. As Hanegraaff shows, this was possible because the ‘occult’ concept provided a ‘cogent scientific argument for claiming that many “wondrous” or “marvellous” phenomena of nature, which the common people tended to attribute to demonic or supernatural agency, were in fact purely natural’ (ibid. 6–7). Seen as such, the concept of qualitas occulta was really an ‘instrument for disenchantment’, as Hanegraaff puts it, ‘used to withdraw the realm of the marvellous from theological control and make it available

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for scientific study’ (ibid., 7). A disenchantment, or at least a rationalisation of the marvellous is also the endeavour of spiritual movements today. It is in a descriptive, ‘scholastic’ way that spiritualists in Kinshasa conceive of the ‘occult sciences’ they are interested in. This understanding has little in common with ‘occultism’ in the sense of its modern, nineteenth-century normative meaning, which resulted from transformations of the notion in the early modern times. One would expect that the Enlightenment’s focus on empirical science and rationality would render ‘occult sciences’ such as alchemy and astrology simply irrelevant. However, as Hanegraaff shows, ‘the separation between “occult” and “normal” sciences in the Enlightenment period had less to do with the seeming irrationality of astrology and alchemy, for instance, than with the Protestant attack on ancient “pagan” knowledge that had been hyped by the nostalgic resurgence of Neo-Platonism during the Renaissance, when the “occult” had returned to being the “privileged sanctuary of divine mystery in the world”’ (ibid: 8, 23). Strictly speaking, in Europe it was less the advent of modern ‘scientific’ thinking and the triumph of reason that made the ‘occult sciences’ the relevant shorthand for irrationality and superstition, but the Protestant fervour against paganism. This also resembles the situation in contemporary Kinshasa where Protestants, in particular Pentecostals, condemn the wisdom of any non-Christian tradition as ‘occult science’ not because it is, epistemologically speaking, ‘irrational’ but because of its ‘pagan’ and therefore immoral in nature. To sum up, for the seekers within a spiritual movement such as EMM or TMAJ, there is, emically speaking, indeed little if any difference between the sciences practised, taught and sought at the universities and those taught at spiritual movements, where many ‘seekers’ often go after their university classes. Protestants, in particular Pentecostals, however, condemn and diabolise this knowledge as ‘pagan’ in the same way that Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century considered any non-Christian form of African ritual and knowledge as the work of the Devil (cf. Meyer 1999). Thus, in Kinshasa, both understandings, the seemingly scholastic and descriptive use of the ‘occult’ concept, as well as the normative and demonising Protestant one, coexist. The dividing line appears to be identical with the boundary between the inside and the outside of spiritual movements, where the ‘occult’ concept serves as a ‘conceptual interface’6: it performs a misunderstanding between insiders and outsiders, which appears to be ludic, if not ‘joyful’ at times, mutually enhancing and beneficial to both sides. For insiders of spiritual movements the awareness that outsiders demonise their putatively ‘pagan’

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endeavours creates a distance of danger or distinction; while for those outside, an ‘occult science’ movement is the perfect ground for condemnation, i.e. the hub to locate the Devil, who has become so ‘good to think with’ in times of material unpredictability and moral insecurity (Meyer 1999: 111, Hackett 2003, Marshall 2009).

Accounting for Suspicion As the history of African studies shows, the witchcraft phenomenon and its sociological implications are too encompassing and complex to be reduced to a singular explanatory reading. Neither is there an interpretative school of thought that can be considered free of academic trends and methodological fashion, nor can any of the functionalist, intellectualist, or instrumentalist tendencies be considered wrong or fully obsolete at any stage. Only a synoptic combination promises to circumspect the phenomena of occultisme and magie. Hence the decision to summarise in the following two main analytical approaches: after the slightly functionalist notion of the ‘paradox of autonomy’, which is particularly important to understand the origins of the notion of sacrifice, a psychologically informed reading of witchcraft as the ‘flipside of kinship relations’ is presented. Thus the role of secrecy in Central African conceptions of power is clarified. On the basis of these historical insights, the last section of the chapter presents suspicion as an infrapolitical resource, a currency in the negotiation of power. The result is a multifaceted understanding of the suspicion and condemnation the followers of EMM and TMAJ, at times willingly, endure as interested practices rooted in agency rather than ‘belief’. The role of things, which share this agency, will persistently recur. Accumulation and the Economy of Constipation The figure of the occultist points to an apparent paradox. While the idea of a good life replete with honour, money and people is rather unproblematic and unanimously shared, the ways in which this prosperous state is to be achieved is much less unproblematic and unanimous. Many seem to be convinced that to enter a business career or work at one of Congo’s telecommunication companies, for instance, they will have to conclude a pact with the Devil and be initiated into magie and occultisme. In her ethnography of the Mende of pre-civil war Sierra Leone, Marianne Ferme (2001) points to the importance of accumulation and

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consumption for local constructions of power. Local power dynamics, she writes, are based on the ‘discursive and spatial expansion of a person’s status, a kind of aura’ (159), which is the basis of the social construction of ‘big people’. Besides this important aesthetic dimension, which points to the body being an icon of accumulation, the social anchorage of their power lies in what she calls the ‘paradox of autonomy’. ‘Big people’ are ‘relatively autonomous and in control of others, but also depend(ent) on them to remain in power’ (2001: 171). A ‘big person’ is granted his/her respectable status and entitlement to privileged consumption precisely by making others participate.7 In a similar vein, Filip De Boeck (1998: 797) notes how among Zairian diamond smugglers in Angola, ‘the construction of male identity is ambivalent insofar as it evolves around two opposing aspects – that of singularized, autonomous manhood, a model which seems to be idealized by many youngsters – and a second aspect of social responsibility, highlighting the elders’ capacity to weave the social network and give a tangible form to ties of reciprocity and solidarity’. Wyatt MacGaffey (2000: 33) also points to the paradox of autonomy when he reminds us that the ideal Kongo society was not libertarian: ‘Bakongo do not believe that the pursuit of self-interest is conducive to the greatest good of the greatest number.’ On the contrary, ‘personal profit is always supposed to be achieved at the expense of others; competition gives rise to jealousy, kimpala, which is the source of witchcraft’ (kindoki). The paradox of autonomy-cum-dependence implies that the distribution of wealth to one’s followers is a condition for honour and self-realisation, so as to maintain a flow in the circulation of gifts. This reflects the historical ethical principle of ‘wealth in people’ (Guyer 1995, Guyer and Belinga 1995), which also accounts for the gifts that politicians distribute to voters in the run-up to elections,8 for instance. The same applies to the locally legitimate payments that ‘big people’ are expected to offer to journalists for favourable coverage, known in Kinshasa as coupure.9 In Kinshasa, if a music or television star is met in public, fans do not ask him for an autograph but for money, which he mostly willingly gives. The ties with one’s followers are thus regularly cared and catered for. Also the construction of the power of Pentecostal pastors depends on the loyalty of their followers. Known to be powerful accumulators owing to their privileged connection with the Holy Spirit, it is clear that they do not distribute financial gifts, but rather generous charismatic spiritual gifts to their followers. Meanwhile, pastors of large churches, with a large financial turnover, are careful to demonstrate the reinvestment of their receipts to the benefit of their followers. When I asked a respected pastor of

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a local Pentecostal ‘Assembly of God’ Church in Kinshasa about the new constructions underway on the impressive church compound, he replied that this was for the new school building, adding that ‘it is very important to show that the people’s money is reinvested.’ It would not be the first time that a pastor loses his followers and his credibility due to suspicions about him being a faux pasteur (false pastor), driven by the devilish interests in his own private benefits. Economic success is rather unlikely to be accepted as a purely individual achievement devoid of communal duties. The occultist/magician epitomises the figure of the illicit accumulator and ‘constipator’ of economy. By virtue of being stereotyped as wealthy and successful, he is quite automatically associated with witchcraft because ‘the figure of the accumulating, non-sharing individual, the successful PDG,10 entrepreneur or diamond trader coincides with the figure of the witch’, in what appears, in De Boeck’s terms, per se as an ‘economy of constipation’ (2004a: 195).11 In line with the notion of millennial capitalism proposed by Jean and John Comaroff (2001), this interpretation sees the figure of the occultist/magician as a critical reaction to novel forms of wealth, including capitalism as such. It would be a mistake, however, to see the figure of the occultist/­ magician as an innovation of the ‘neoliberal’ era. Not only is the longstanding pattern of the paradox of autonomy far from new, whose contradictory tensions have been on the rise at least since the time of the Belgian colonial introduction of the évolué as a model of social achievement. Boosted by independence, and again with Mobutu’s Zairianisation in 1973, Congo/Zaire’s entrepreneurial elite has epitomised the model of the urban big man. De Boeck emphasises that ‘for a certain urban elite … the “dinosaurs” of the Mobutu regime for a long time exemplified and provided a role model for this ideal entrepreneurship’ (2004a: 195), which, in his understanding of two competing models of manhood, is at odds with the ideal of the sharing caretaker, but seems to have taken advantage during the Mobutist years. Put differently, it is with the concentration of this model of masculinity, accumulation and capitalist entrepreneurship in the city that the paradox of autonomy became particularly tense. De Boeck (2004a: 195) writes: When one tunes in to Radio Trottoir, the window on the popular imagination, it becomes clear to what extent this imagination views the successful entrepreneur and politician, or the rich person, in powerful images of witchcraft and cannibalism, for example in connection with the figure of the Satan, the ndoki, or the mami wata who provides money in return for the lives of one’s own offspring, thus embodying the ultimate blockage and reversal of the lifeflow.

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How the blockage of money corresponds to the blockage of fertility also appears clear in Ferme’s book.12 She explains this by relating children to power: [Such] suspicion suggests that to acquire power through wealth and dependents, some people are willing to sacrifice their children and dependents – that is, the only really lasting source of wealth. This is because there is a link between becoming a big person and having many children. By contrast, infertility can be either a sign of illicit, excessive accumulation of wealth – involving secret transactions with evil forces – or a harbinger of imminent disaster (Ferme 2001: 173).

Very often the illness or death of a child is linked by outside observers such as neighbours, friends or siblings etc. to the question of whether the child may have been sacrificed by one of his/her parents or kin. A befriended researcher from the University of Kinshasa explained to me that each time he travels to Europe to attend a conference, he warns his children not to fall ill during his absence so as to prevent suspicions against him. It emerges that suspicion of witchcraft or a related accusation appears as a patrolling force, a ‘levelling mechanism’ (Geschiere 1997), which assures the flow of fortune within the kin group under the threat of spiritual sanction. Beyond their intellectualist potential to account for sudden (mis)fortune, both the threat of suspecting and of being suspected coerce the successful individual to redistribute within the family. This perspective corresponds with older functionalist explanations of capitalism disrupting closed corporate societies, which are mainly organised on the basis of gift circulation and reciprocity. Hence, from this point of view, the rumours and suspicions that somebody may be an occultist or a magicien appear to be critical reactions to capitalism and, when there are more frequent suspicions, to the increase in novel forms of capitalism, wealth and their social consequences. Increasing mutual suspicion may thus be translated as a form of popular awareness regarding the divisive logic of capitalism, i.e. the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion it creates and the difficulties in overcoming them. This explanatory model is no doubt valid as an interpretational grid for many phenomena related to suspicion, and for many parts of Kinshasa’s population. Despite its functionalist overtones, and therefore its putative distance from lived experiences such as those recounted by André, it would be impulsive to deny its validity en bloc, especially because the model of the kin group based on blood relations does not simply vanish as soon as people come to the city or when they start trying to break them under the aegis of Pentecostalism

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(cf.  Engelke 2010). On the contrary, although under a different garb such as the church community itself (Pype 2011a), and despite the trend to strengthen the individual vis-à-vis the kin group, the communal notion of personhood is reinvented and (re-)produced in the city while it is also constantly present by virtue of demonising and trying to break away from it (Meyer 1998, 1999). However, a number of questions remain unresolved: does the urban situation not incite us to also account for challenges and transformations of this model in terms of personhood, social organisation and spatial relations? Also, suspicion does not come about by itself without being triggered, motivated and actually socially generated by actors, who do not ‘blindly obey’ or ‘follow’ an essential ‘belief’ in witchcraft. Hence the question of agency as linked to intentionality and interest, which is based on tensions between larger dominant and subordinate groups, as well as in the context of socio-psychological dynamics on the micro-scale: who gains what from suspecting whom? And what about those cases where certain individuals appear to wilfully provoke others to suspect them, with a view to benefitting from the state of being themselves under suspicion? Trust and Treason: Flipsides of Intimacy These questions point to a major critique of much existing work on witchcraft, which has been formulated by Peter Geschiere (2012, 2013). His central point is the tacit resilience in academic literature (going back to Max Gluckman’s notion) that witchcraft expresses kinship under stress or in crisis. Indeed, in light of the paradox of autonomy and capitalism as an economy of constipation, witchcraft appears as a response to transgression. Geschiere however holds that witchcraft is not the ‘opposite of kinship’ but that it must be considered a persistent feature and inherent part of it. The crux of this move is to place not the witch and what he/she does at the centre of attention, but those who generate suspicion or accusation against him/her. My choice to focus on ‘suspicion’ rather than ‘witchcraft’ reflects this insight.13 Geschiere agrees that ‘witchcraft is at the interface of the private and the public: between the intimate world of kinship or the house, on the one hand, and the outer world and its fascinating opportunities for self-enhancement, on the other’ (2012: 64). Yet, ‘neither (do) kinship nor witchcraft (present) themselves as closed systems. The poly-interpretability of kinship relations – in practice each and every relation appeared to allow for contestation and different ­interpretations – match(es) the surprising dynamics of conceptions concerning (witchcraft)’ (2012:

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63–64). Geschiere’s critical stance vis-à-vis the model of the closed kin group and the idea of gift circulation and reciprocity as a basic pattern of family sociality is the more relevant in the contemporary African city. He expresses his discontent also regarding recent scholarship on intimacy, which, in his view, is too positive and romantic. Geschiere stresses that ‘witchcraft discourse implies a view of sociality as a constant struggle’ (68), pointing to intimacy as a ‘tension-ridden sphere’ (70). One may think that under the impact of the transnationalisation of family ties, as in the case of the Kongo traders ‘on the margins of the law’ between Congo and Paris (Bazenguissa-Ganga and MacGaffey 2000), or in the context of respatialisations of kin relations in the urban setting, the importance of kinship may be decreasing. Yet, as in the case of the Kongo traders, in many cases they continue to be systematically reproduced and remain strikingly important. Peter Geschiere (2012: 62) phrases it: ‘despite all novelty and increase of scale, the most dangerous attack is still supposed to come from inside, and the family is still the obvious locus of this inside’ (2012: 66). This resilience is due, he adds, to remarkable fluidity of the concept of the ‘house’, which may at times encompass members of the compound, or neighbours and friends, who persistently partake, if not in the blood ties necessary for witchcraft to work, then in the production of suspicion. The influence of children, maids and nurses cannot be underestimated. Their contribution to the generation of suspicion, but also to its prevention, can be considerable. This can be seen in André’s fear of suspicion not only from his wife, but by one of his acquaintances from university. Jewsiewicki’s (2008: 113) image of the living room that has ‘exploded’ under the immense demographic pressure may thus also apply to relations of intimacy and the house. The focus on suspicion reveals how in the city socio-psychological pressures emanate not only from within the family, but from all sorts of actors. But it is not only suspicions that may come from outside the kin group. Accounts of occultists seeking their prey reflect the dangers of capitalistic relations of exploitation at work in the city, which are amplified by anonymity. When a house has been bought or built by an occultist with mbongo mabe (evil/polluted money), it is said that the members of the owner’s family whom he had sacrificed to earn that money remain attached to the house and will haunt and possess those who live in it. This happens regardless of whether the house is rented out to kin or non-kin members. André, for instance, attributed his job loss to the evil spirits attached to the house he had started renting in the neighbourhood of Mongafula. The house had probably been built, he explained, with the

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dirty money of its owner.14 Understandably, when he finally managed to find not only a new house to live in, but also soon after a new job, his suspicions about the old house were confirmed. Similar accounts exist of demonic spirits that attach themselves to vehicles, be it to taxi-buses or motorbikes, which were bought with ‘illicitly’ generated money.15 Mbongo mabe can also literally be a medium to ensnare victims, for instance by an innocent passer-by picking it up, or unknowingly touching and using it, as this contaminates him with the devilish intention of the occultist. Clearly, the occultist/magician and his ‘occult sciences’ can be seen as the urbanised version of the witchcraft theme, which mainly thrives on the violence of anonymity, which is inherent on the capitalistic system. Occultists/magicians are also said to mutually attack themselves as if they were a (pseudo-)family where they celebrate the negative intimacy Geschiere describes for the family. In line with the old topos of the nightly witch gathering, as soon as they are sealed and bound to their ‘lodge’ (loge), ‘mystical association’ (association mystique) or fetish church (église ya nkisi) through initiation, they are said to become each other’s witch-kin, as if they were a closed kinship group whose members betray their original homesteads. Hence also the rumour about sodomy as an initiation ritual to consume the affiliation as an inverted marriage-like sexual act with fellow witches.16 Traditionally, the only person whose witchcraft could transgress the boundaries of the house was the nganga. This leads to the approximation of members of initiation-based spiritual movements to banganga. In EMM/TMAJ’s case, this idea is enhanced by Messianiques’ active role in healing: on several occasions I heard that Messianiques were associated with guérrisseurs or banganga.17 Suspicion can be raised in a seemingly unlimited number of different, even contradictory, circumstances. If power through accumulation is so dependent on redistribution to assure and maintain its legitimacy, it is obvious that the dividing line between legitimate and illegitimate accumulation is very thin and often a matter of interpretation and subjective evaluation. This is where suspicion may become a micro-political instrument to pressurise people into redistribution or in order to account for their not doing so. Also, André explicitly mentions in his account the possibility that others might see his job loss as a reason for him to look for rapid and easy money. If obtained wealth is unaccounted for or accumulated too rapidly or against the background of a dire situation of crisis, as in his case, any sort of fortune may be interpreted as a potential illicit act of acquisition and, as a result, may provoke suspicion about the morality of its origins.

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But not only sudden fortune but also unforeseeable misfortune may provoke suspicion, or at least the possibility for people to grow wary. How circular and seemingly watertight this logic is was demonstrated to me when I asked my host brother in Kinshasa why several youngsters had told me that Jean-Paul (53), a neighbour in our vicinity, was a magicien. Jean-Paul, who lives alone and gains about 1,000 FC (1.1 USD) per day from renting out a pousse-poussette (a metal cart with two car wheels that is pushed by hand), does not conceal his long-term membership of Eckankar. He regularly hosts reading and discussion groups in the empty space behind his house and often wears an Eckankar T-shirt or openly carries one of the many books this movement offers followers to buy. Although it was quite clear that he was economically poor and that his practice of Eckankar had definitely not procured him any fortune whatsoever, my housemate and his friends commented, laughing: ‘Ah, but these people also sacrifice each other among themselves’, explaining that Jean-Paul’s chance had been taken by the superiors of his movement, thus accounting for the neighbour’s poverty with the same logic of occultist affiliation as for the well-being of others. It follows that not only sudden fortune, but also misfortune, may give rise to and encourage suspicions. Inversely, and paradoxically, suspicion can also serve to defend the morality of a family member. As discussed by Fisiy and Geschiere (1991), in Cameroon the logic of suspicion has not only come to demonise certain kinds of accumulation but also to generate its legitimacy. Also in Kinshasa one hears of stories in which a family member suspected of occultism is defended by his group, stressing that he does not redistribute his wealth in order not to contaminate his family with dirty money illicitly gained. Non-redistribution, or the blockage of gift circulation, appears morally noble in this case (cf. Geschiere 2012: 65).18 These elements provide indispensable background information necessary to the chapters of this book. Yet, a last element has to be added to our analysis. The following section elucidates the ambivalent proximity of trust and treason via an invitation to historicise the secrecy of the powerful as an ambiguous threshold between secrecy as a legitimate resource of power and its illegitimate use with evil and harmful intentions. (Il)legitimate Secrecy and the Ambivalence of Power ‘Secrets’ may be ‘empty’ and yet sociologically significant. Georg Simmel 1992 [1907] has shown that, regardless of their content, secrets are like in- and exclusive boundaries between the groups that keep them (cf. also Nooter 1993).

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Beyond this important insight, secrets can be perceived as either legitimate or illegitimate, which is of significant importance for the understanding of spiritual movements in a city like Kinshasa. To undo too romantic an understanding of ‘intimacy’, Peter Geschiere turns to Sigmund Freud’s treaty on Das Unheimliche (1982 [1919]) to conceptualise the ambivalent nature of the family, which is not only a harbour of trust, but also a ‘hotbed of aggression and guilt’.19 The key is to combine familiarity with fear, trust with treason. Heimlich (lit. homely) is used in German to qualify an action or a process that is not disclosed to outsiders, but legitimately so. It is rare that secrecy among the members of a family or a house is seen as a conspiracy against outsiders. The term heimlich thus denotes what is legitimately secret, or private, and serves to protect the institution of the family. Something becomes unheimlich, on the other hand, when it becomes harmful and thus illegitimately secret. Freud’s treatise is interesting precisely because he describes how the one can turn into the other: what is heimlich, familiar and legitimately secret, can transform into something unheimlich, uncanny and illegitimately secret. Freud’s treaty also stresses the important role things play in the fabrication of secrecy with its ambivalent positive and negative flipsides.20 This is important because the indicators of these often unpredictable shifts in perception are always aesthetic and based on multisensory experience. Thus, the experience of something as unheimlich, i.e. uncanny, indicates that a formerly homely secret has turned ‘illegitimately secret’ and has therefore become threatening. In this case, doubts arise about the morality and correctness of things and processes. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate secrecy, which accordingly is either heimlich or unheimlich to the senses, is a matter of sensory interpretation and perception, and depends on the respective (corporeal) eye of the beholder. Consider this article from the Kinshasa-based newspaper L’Observateur: Justifying himself on his clothing style, Matata Ponyo: ‘There is nothing mysterious behind my red tie.’ The Congolese Prime Minister’s choice to wear a red tie is interpreted by many people in a certain way according to their temperament. Some neglect any notion of colour symbolism and suppose that the daily wearing of a red tie by the Prime Minister Matata Ponyo proves his belonging to a lodge. Others, on the other hand, estimate that the act of putting a red tie does not necessarily mean that one is a magician. It’s a simple question of [personal] preference [i.e. taste]. Hence I don’t see anything bad or mystical when Matata Ponyo puts on a red tie. In this thorough confusion, which harms the personality of the head of the Congolese government, as well as his family, it was indispensable

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to set things straight. This is why the Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo has now broken his silence. In an exclusive interview with Télé50, a television chain broadcasting from Kinshasa, he explains the real meaning of his three preferred colours; namely red, white and black. According to his explanations, these three colours symbolise his oath before the Congolese Nation. It should be noted that from the outset of his return to office, Augustin Matata Ponyo was committed to consent to a lot of sacrifices so as to work with rigour and discipline for the greatest well-being of the Congolese people. Thus according to him, the colour red, which causes so much controversy, symbolises sacrifice, work and abnegation, which the public cause arouses in him. Consequently, the misunderstanding about Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo’s three preferred colours has been resolved. Because, ‘there is nothing mysterious behind the colours red, white and black’, which characterise the clothing style [tenue vestimentaire] of the head of the Congolese government.21

What has led many Kinois to deem former Prime Minister Matata Ponyo’s tie mysterious and uncanny is its red colour, which is charged with the symbolism of blood, war and liminality, as is a well-known and popular commonplace (Pype 2012: 45, Jacobson-Widding 1979). In addition, there is a pattern of consistent repetition in Ponyo’s decision to wear a red tie on a daily basis. Stubborn repetition in one’s style of appearance arouses suspicions about it being a potential ritual requirement from a circle of magiciens. The same applies to unusual hairstyles, especially if left to grow long, as well as to beards. Other potential indicators are pins, rings, glasses, chains, pens, books, amulets, perfume, etc. Well known to many Kinois are the glasses but also a little chain, no doubt of a pocket watch, worn by former Mobutist Kamanda wa Kamanda, for instance. Matata’s tie exemplifies how a seemingly ordinary symbol of legitimate statesmanship can turn into an aesthetic indicator of illegitimate secrecy. The ambiguity between familiarity and fear is reflexive of, if not analogous to or even identical with, the longstanding ambivalence of power in Africa, i.e. the ability of the powerful to give life as much as to take it, to protect and fertilise as much as to threaten and kill (e.g. Nooter-Roberts 2001, Vansina 1990, Hunt 1999). This is a longstanding pattern in African conceptions of power. Among the Bakongo, the figures of the nganga (healer), the mfumu (chief) and the ndoki (witch) epitomise this dual power, but also postcolonial leaders such as Mobutu Sese Seko followed the same pattern. Wyatt MacGaffey (1983: 141) stresses that ‘chiefs (mfumu), initiated to particular titles, supposedly wield the same power as witches and magicians (kindoki), with the difference that

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a chief wields it on behalf of the community, whereas a witch (ndoki) uses it to benefit himself or satisfy personal grudges’. It is through the perceived shift from public/communitarian to personal interest that the ‘uncannisation’ occurs. The chief’s legitimate secrets – those techniques allowing him to govern and care for the collective – are suspected of being abused for his personal well-being. In this case, the mfumu becomes a ndoki, or a magicien as in the case of the occultist. As will be developed shortly, because of the proximity of these two, witchcraft and suspicion appear as currency for political dispute, or indeed as indigenous anti-corruption mechanisms in a way. As MacGaffey puts it, ‘the difference is not an empirical one, but a matter of political judgment’ (ibid.). The newspaper article about Matata’s red tie shows that distrust and suspicion that is generally directed towards contemporary elite circles, as can be seen from the manifold expressions of uncanny sensations vis-à-vis Congo’s political, economic and intellectual elite, are often phrased in terms of occultisme and magie. As Matata’s tie indicates, these uncanny sensations grow in a soil of the senses and are induced by aesthetic experiences. Similar to Matata’s tie, in Congo/Zaire it is former president Mobutu Sese Seko who has demonstrated how the figure of the postcolonial chief could shift from the ‘homely’ père de la nation (father of the nation), whose secrecy was legitimate and heimlich because it protected the interests of his ‘children’, the Zairian people (cf. Schatzberg 2001), to an uncanny ‘dinosaur’ (Braeckman 1992) demolishing these interests for the sake of his own private benefits based on exploitative deeds and powers that were from now on illegitimately secret.22 In the older secret societies, regalia of belonging and iconic expressions of magical power such as masks, staffs and headdresses were permitted icons of power and distinction that suggested the presence of legitimate secrets and activities that were heimlich. By being a ‘coherent part of the methodologies of certain systems of knowledge’, as Nooter (1993: 56) reminds us, secrecy was not inherently bad but rather a necessary and legitimate precondition of power. When the power of the postcolonial leaders turned illegitimate in the public perception, however, their regalia of power turned unheimlich, indicating that they had lost the ability to exercise power legitimately. A major driving force in the shift has been the demonisation of traditional ‘pagan’ forms of magic-based authority by the colonial state and Christian missionaries, which more or less continues explicitly to this day. Nancy Rose Hunt (1999: 329) illustrates this in her discussion of Mobutu’s well-known carved walking stick depicting a pregnant woman who, in Hunt’s view,

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carries in her womb the Zairian nation, which Mobutu as the father has been able to give life to but which he can kill at any moment: ‘it was a representation of a cunning sorcerer blocking birth, of a nation with lokwamisa (blocked birth), of a citizenry who knew as he did that birth is death’. Kinship, das Heimliche, ‘legitimate’ secrecy and the power of life on the one hand, and witchcraft, das Unheimliche, illegitimate secrecy and the power of death on the other hand, are intimately connected flipsides of one another, which inhabit a single person and which may dynamically shift between both these normative ends (see also Lambertz and Lokengi Mputu 2016). Next to politicians, it is the university milieu that is regularly identified with occultism and ‘mystical’ movements.23 Science and the idea of expert knowledge and its culture being per se, in a way, about (the performance of) withholding knowledge, especially university science is prone to being compared to sorcery (cf. West 2007). The putatively demonic background of professors’ endeavours sediments on the surface of things and the senses. Accounts circulate of professors who use particular perfumes, for instance, to ensnare their students and bring them in touch with ‘occultism’. Others are known to openly speak about their secret ‘sciences’ such as those of Sukyô Mahikari, the Grail Movement or Eckankar.24 To grasp the aesthetic dimension of power in Africa as linked to secrecy and closure (cf. Murphy 1998), Abner Cohen (1981) has suggested the analytic concept of a ‘power mystique’, with ‘mystique’ being defined in an English dictionary as ‘a fascinating aura of mystery, awe, and power surrounding someone or something’.25 This brings us back to the important role of things in the production of awe and spiritual power. Mobutu’s stick, Matata Ponyo’s tie, the assortment of things related to administrative and economic leadership and which embody the power of the magiciens, all these things iconise power relations in the dominant local semiotic ideology between those who trust and those who aim to be trusted. It is in things that the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate secrecy, between heimlich and unheimlich, trust and treason, is located. They can be seen as the renewed versions of traditional regalia of the powerful, which have been powerfully ‘uncannised’ in the meantime. Strikingly, their presence is signalled in Kinshasa by the concept of mystique, whose use resembles that suggested by Abner Cohen, but which has acquired the additional meaning of indicating the presence of unaccountable, mysterious and potentially diabolic forces.

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Magic and Suspicion as (Infra)political Currency In this last section I argue that the driving force behind this tenacity and pervasiveness of witchcraft-related suspicion lies in the agency that suspicion grants its generators. In the densely populated areas of the city, where the intense occupation of a common urban space encourages the drawing of boundaries in an ever more creative manner, suspicion can easily appear as what James C. Scott (1990) has termed ‘infrapolitics’. He describes this concept as an ‘appropriate shorthand’ for ‘an unobtrusive realm of political struggle. … The circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups, is like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum’ (183). Pentecostal pastors no longer refrain from condemning non-­ Christian movements as occultistes or magiciens. It is tempting to interpret such a handling of suspicion – or accusation in case it is rendered public – in continuity with the history of Christian diabolisation ever since the first missionaries started their endeavours in Africa. However, suspicion and accusations of magie and kindoki (witchcraft) have a long history also without reference to Christianity as a pattern of negotiating power, and must be seen as part and parcel of Central Africa’s political culture. Commenting on the magical power of the chief among the Kongo ethnic group, Wyatt MacGaffey (2000: 31) notes that: the difference between innocent and anti-social behaviour lies not in the activity itself but in the moral judgement rendered about it, supported by political power. The chiefs themselves, in real life if not in the abstract, were also nganga and therefore open, like anyone else, to the accusation of being witches. In short, these values and labels (such as nganga, mfumu (chief), nkisi or ndoki (witch)) are not descriptions of what everyone in fact did; they are the currency of political dispute. To ‘be’ a witch (ndoki) was simply the object of a successful accusation, carried out through an institutional manner.

The suspicion wielded against EMM and TMAJ also has to be seen in light of this important historical feature. Christian discourses of demonisation have to be seen as feeding into local patterns of suspecting and accusing, at best catalysing these dynamics. If the labels of nganga (healer), mfumu (chief) or ndoki (witch) ‘are not descriptions of what everyone in fact did; [but rather] the currency of political dispute’, are the categories of occultiste and magicien not simply the urbanised postcolonial updates of these former titles of might? From such a historicising perspective the performance of belonging to a secret society of putative occultistes or magiciens appears

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as a longstanding strategy to stage one’s power rather than a new phenomenon of novel, urbanised forms of ‘religiosity’. Suspicion, on the other hand, appears equally as a longstanding infrapolitical measure that pulls into doubt the theory of it being a phenomenon of crisis or a novel form of resistance against millennial capitalism as the sole explanatory logic. This points to a far less problematic status of magic and suspicion as an (infra)political resource than what appears as satanic if we follow contemporary Pentecostal discourses of demonisation (Hackett 2003). The resource of secrecy was a legitimate privilege to those granted to use it. What the nganga or the mfumu did away from the eyes of putative observers rather resembled a legitimate right to ‘privacy’ (i.e. legitimate secrecy) rather than illicit secrecy. The same is true for so-called ‘secret societies’, whose secrecy was often openly performed in masquerades and ritualised settings. Like the chief, the healer and later also the prophet could be seen legitimately performing certain secret rituals etc. hidden from other peoples’ view, i.e. heimlich or in private. As is the case in contemporary Hinduism, whose moral world view has not been divided by the dualism of Christian virtue vs. sin, as has been the case in other parts of the world (cf. Robbins 2004), ‘magic’ was not problematic and controversial here, just as the thaumaturgic capacities of the French monarch to heal the people from scrofula during the Ancien Régime was a precondition rather than antithetic to his power (cf. Bloch 1983 [1924]). From this perspective, Matata’s tie, but also Jérôme’s books, which André returned to him, or the perfume used by professors, are like a mask to the initiate, or a headdress to the powerful, while the suspicion launched against those who wear such things follows a longstanding pattern of contesting, yet also acknowledging their power.

Notes  1. Magie is used in Kinshasa, both in Lingala and in French, as a normative concept connoting an illegitimate or evil use of magic as opposed to the blessings obtained through Christianity. Throughout this chapter I distinguish between such a normative use and an analytically descriptive use of the term by employing the French ‘magie’ for the former and the English ‘magic’ for the latter meaning.  2. Nooter pointedly summarises that ‘the aesthetic effect of a work of art in Africa may depend on the deliberate obstruction, obscuring, or withholding of its presence’. MacGaffey remarks: ‘modern art theory assumes that the gallery or museum-goer can or should be able to see, and so “grasp”, the work, which is taken to be, as it were, open. The essence of African

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 3.  4.  5.

 6.

 7.  8.  9.

10. 11.

12.

art may be that in “seeing” you do not see. Not surprisingly, some of the most respected objects are rarely seen by anybody.’ (Personal comment in Nooter 1993: 56, and 102, note 4). For the history of opposition between Christianity and other religious traditions in Belgian Africa, see Kalulambi Pongo 1993. Ellis and Ter Haar (2009), on the other hand, have argued that Ranger himself appears to use the ‘occult’ concept as a relevant analytical tool without himself historicising or ‘disaggregating’ it. Yet another popular etymology hints at the presence of the syllable -cult, which, according to some, is another proof that the ‘occult’ is a sphere of forbidden, demonic ritual. For existing scholarly interpretations and the meaning of the ‘occult’ notion in Kinshasa, see De Boeck 2004a: 195–206, Pype 2012: 45–49 and B. White 2004b. I draw the notion of ‘conceptual interface’ from Bajpai (2015), where she describes the Indian prime minister’s usage of the ‘secularism’ concept, showing that to the putative inside of India’s population, the rather different semantic repertoire of ‘religious pluralism’ is signified by the same notion of ‘secularism’, which for an ‘external’ public means rather ‘a-religiosity’. Bayart (1993: 275) writes: ‘The sanctioned accumulation of power is expressed through the language of consumption’, as quoted in Ferme 2001: 159. For a critical and relativising discussion of ‘corruption’ that points to the embeddedness of the practice in the moral economy of power in Africa, see Olivier de Sardan 1999. The figure of the journalist has become important in the urban setting as she/​he is one of the most influential followers in the concentric circles of a big person’s publicity. Much of the big person’s aura of honour depends on her/​him. In a logic very similar to that of wealth in people, the journalist assures the big person’s following and hence their power. In the spatial set-up of the city, she/​he assures the outreach of the big person to her/​ his dislocated followers through public media presence (see also Pype 2011b). PDG: Président directeur général is the French equivalent of CEO. De Boeck writes: ‘in the Congolese imaginary the capitalist logic of buying and selling easily adapts to and even exemplifies the nocturnal logic of witchcraft. As Mauss has shown, within the logic of reciprocity and gift, closedness and blockage of flow is seen as socially negative. This blockage, with the conflicts and violence it entails, is often expressed in terms of sorcery and witchcraft. In the autochthonous popular understanding of the capitalist logic, blockage is viewed to be necessary to make profits and maximize capital. In this interpretation, capitalism becomes an “economy of constipation”, in which local notions of “kula-like” circularity and personalized reciprocity of the gift seem to be transformed into a linear and exclusive, negative model of transaction to which access is much more restricted’ (2004a: 195). The theme of constipating wealth in exchange for one’s offspring is also known in other parts of Africa, where with little variations most of the

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canonical lines of the argument are repeated. See for instance Droz 1997, Bastian 2001. 13. In this understanding, suspicion, which mostly remains rather tacit, becomes a proper witchcraft accusation in the moment of its socialisation at the scale of the house or another relevant group. 14. With the disappearance of banks during the Congo Wars, money was commonly invested in the construction of houses. The conviction that the spirits of people who were sacrificed for the sake of money are pegged to the objects that are purchased with this money is in line with a more general logic of ‘occult economies’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999) that has been witnessed throughout sub-Saharan Africa. 15. Motorbikes only started appearing in Kinshasa after the diamond price fell  in 2007 and people from the diamond areas in Kasai moved to Kinshasa,  where they invested their remaining capital in motorbikes. It is not surprising to find, especially in cars and on motorbikes, stickers with mottos such as Cette voiture ne voyage qu’avec Jésus (This car travels only with Jesus) or other slogans, which guarantee that the vehicle was purchased with clean money that was not earned to the detriment of somebody’s kin. 16. Homosexuality is seen by many as an import from the West, which, under the impact of occultism, is seen to be on the verge of losing its moral orientation. For many this popular theory was confirmed in 2013 when the news arrived that France had legalised same-sex marriage. 17. However, even the nganga is not fully independent of his family, as Geschiere recalls for Cameroon: ‘people will whisper that in order to be initiated into all this dangerous knowledge a nganga had to sacrifice a close relative, who has to be “given” to his/​her “professor” as a reward for all the lessons’ (Geschiere 2012: 66). 18. Geschiere writes: it is the ‘circularity of these discourses and the ease with which all sorts of possible conceptual distinctions are glossed over that make them so all-pervasive in present-day African society’ (2005: 221). 19. ‘[Freud] definitely leaves behind a view of intimacy as a domain of harmony, and even more … he suggests steps for undertaking the complex intertwinement of security and fear in people’s experiences of intimacy’ (Geschiere 2012: 71). 20. Freud’s basic intention in his piece on the uncanny was to psychoanalytically approach the aesthetic ‘not by limiting aesthetics to the teaching of beauty, but to describe it as the teaching of the qualities of our feeling’ (Freud 1982 [1919]: 1, my translation). 21. Cf. http://www.lobservateur.cd/​index.php?​option=​com_​content&​view=​arti cle&​id = ​8788 : se - justifiant - sur - son - style - vestimentaire - matata - ponyo - qil ny - a - rien - de - mysterieux - derriere - ma - cravate - rouge - q&​catid = ​48: actualites&​Itemid=​78, accessed 4 December 2012 (my translation). 22. Similarly, François Ngolet (2000) has shown how in Omar Bongo’s Gabon the entire political elite, including members of the government and other high-­ranking officials, systematically enrolled in Gabonese Freemason sects, which were directly or indirectly presided by Bongo himself.

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23. See e.g. Placide Nzeza (2010), ‘Occultisme et Immoralité à l’Université de Kinshasa’, Fédération des Congolais à l’Étranger, 01 February 2010, available at http://www.f-ce.com/​cgi-bin/​news/​pg-newspro.cgi?​id_​news=​ 1egraaf8. 24. Some eminent professors of Zaire/​DRC’s past are renowned for having belonged to these movements, such as the lawyer maître Nimy Mahidika Ngimbi, who was the director of Mobutu’s cabinet (1977–1986) and a member of Sukyô Mahikari when he fell out with the Zairian president in 1992 after Mobutu’s ‘democratisation’ project. Another well-known figure was the law professor Kalongo Mbikayi, who was responsible for the reformulation of DRC’s new post-Mobutist constitution and at the same time a founding member of MOA International, whose chief responsable remains his wife until this day. 25. A second meaning is ‘an air of secrecy surrounding a particular activity or subject that makes it impressive or baffling to those without specialized knowledge’ (New Oxford American Dictionary 2009). Related terms are ‘charisma, glamour, romance, mystery, magic, charm, appeal, allure’ (Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus 2009).

I3 Blossoming Boundaries (Re-)production and Contestation of Japanese Flower Practices

Three youngsters are sitting on plastic chairs under an umbrella selling airtime for mobile phones at the entrance of the little sandy road where the Johrei center of Lemba is situated. Not far from one of Kinshasa’s well-known roundabouts, this unit of EMM is located in the heart of a densely populated suburb. The compound is too close to the main road to be totally disconnected from the thundering of the taxi-buses that are backing up at the nearby crossroad. Further down the little road, children play soccer in the sand. A cat and some chickens are there, taking delight in digging through the earth of the little flowerbed that is meant to separate the dirty sand of the road from the white wall of this Johrei center. On the opposite side, an unfinished two-storey concrete building, visibly devoid of doors, windows or furniture, hosts one of Kinshasa’s larger young family constellations. I enter the narrow

Illustration 3.1 Taxi-bus with proverb: Bakatisaka ebale pona komona elengi ya mboka te (nobody crosses the river only to contemplate the beauty of the country), Kinshasa, March 2012. Photo by the author.

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iron door of the Johrei center, where three pairs of plastic chairs stand facing each other in a neatly paved, clean little courtyard. Three men and a woman practise Johrei. The centre is hosted at the compound of the Onyemba family who run EMM’s activities here. On top of the big wooden letterbox for donation envelopes is a tray with little single flower blooms fixed in tiny sponge cubes, neatly wrapped in shining aluminium foil, waiting to be taken home by members or distributed to passers-by on the street. Next to them is the visitors’ book in which I write my name. I am seated in the adjoining prayer room (the family’s former living room), now empty and hosting the Goshintai, EMM’s altar calligraphy, which is decorated with a neat bundle of Ikebana flowers that the daughter of the house has arranged for the next morning’s Sunday service. Old father Onyemba finally arrives. Now in his late sixties and father of thirty-four children, he was a wrestler in his student years, before becoming a functionary within Mobutu’s Zairian state elite. Today he remains the head of a well-connected and house-owning family. We start our conversation about his life as a member of EMM, the role and importance of flowers within the movement, and, prominently, the contestation that the movement’s flowers triggers within members’ families because people allege that Messianiques use them as a nkisi, an object with spiritual power. After a good hour and a half, Onyemba begins the following account: ‘Yes, [many] also abandon the church for this reason [of others alleging that their flowers are evil]. … Just like here, at the entrance [of our road], on the corner, the youngsters who are sitting there, [when you pass by with a flower in your hand], they call out to you: “Hey, where are you going with that?” – [and you reply:] “Oh, this is something from the church.” – “Aah. Throw it [away]! This is a very evil thing!” And then, people throw [the flower away]. And somebody like this, when he has actually thrown the flower away, will he ever return here? He doesn’t come back.’ Peter: ‘And, in your opinion, is this because of the youngsters’ ignorance or is it because they are spiritually opposed?’ Onyemba: ‘Well, not only ignorance. There is the reality of their camp, because – something one doesn’t know, one cannot refuse categorically something one doesn’t really know! For example, this tape recorder, if you told me: “Papa Onyemba, please hold this thing for a minute, I have to go to the toilet.” I will hold it. But if you told me: “Beware! This thing will heat up to 100 degrees!”, I will, of course, say “No”, because I will know that I will burn myself. And with regards to the flowers, these youngsters over there who are talking so much about us here, it is them who are witches! They can see the flowers! Because, when they pass by at night, they find that these flowers here are emitting fire [Fr. donnent du feu]. And then, if you have told people over here to take the flowers home,

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these youngsters will think “Ahh, they took these fire-flowers from over there! Hey you! How can you take these flowers that carry fire, don’t you see?”

Onyemba’s account illustrates how the distribution of flowers to individuals by EMM in Kinshasa not only attracts new adherents, but is also met with resistance. Outsiders, such as the youngsters he mentions, associate EMM’s flowers with the powerful imaginary about secret societies practising magie and what is generally known as ‘occultism’ by sacrificing their victims (usually family members) through spiritual killing. Messianiques face these allegations relatively frequently, which puts them in a situation of a stigmatised minority. Onyemba’s reaction to the question of why these youngsters are against the flowers, on the other hand, reveals how Messianiques themselves consider active opponents of their flowers to be witches because they react to the ‘fire’ that emanates from them spiritually. Were it not for these people’s ability to see the flowers’ invisible side, such as only witches can do, says Onyemba, why would they protest against the flowers otherwise? Meanwhile, he is well aware that, like my tape recorder, which he invokes as an example, the flower is and does what people say about it. The passage exemplifies how the discursive production of opinion and reality, in both Onyemba and the youngsters’ case, is embedded in a context of socio-economic and, in this particular case, clearly also intergenerational cleavage that determines much of the relationship between the Onyembas (who are well off) and many in the surrounding neighbourhood. In this case, it leads to a pattern of accusation and counter-accusation, which gravitates around the topos of the flower, and, more specifically, hints at struggles of authority over the ability to determine what the flower does, and especially whether it is wholesome or dangerous. In line with recent work in the field of material religion, EMM’s flowers illustrate how religion can essentially be understood as a practice of mediation, both between people and ‘between human beings and a spiritual or transcendental force that cannot be known as such’ (Meyer 2009a: 11). The role of media, understood in the very broad sense (ranging from television to the human body), is central to such a perspective, and Birgit Meyer has proposed the notion of sensational forms, which can help us to ‘explore how exactly mediations bind and bond believers with each other, and with the transcendental’ (2009a: 13, 2010a, 2011). By offering insights into the semiotic ideologies at work in contemporary Kinshasa, this chapter attempts to clarify why the contestation that EMM generally faces in Kinshasa is particularly strong with

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regard to the movement’s flower practices. After some introductory remarks on flowers in Kinshasa, a first section will present the seeds of EMM’s flower culture, i.e. SKK’s teachings concerning flower arranging with their underlying Japanese philosophy. In the following section the seeds become flowers, in that our perspective shifts to how these teachings unfold and grow into practices in Kinshasa’s local cultural soil. The question raised is how EMM’s flowers are locally (re-)produced by embracing and mobilising locally valid semiotic ideologies or by adapting them to innovate with new ones. In the last part, the analytical focus shifts to the wider social field in which EMM is striving to flourish by collecting the elements responsible for the contestation of EMM’s flowers.

Floral Kinshasa Natural flowers are extraordinary in Kinshasa. Given the weight of demographic pressure on the soil in public spaces, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find flowerbeds in the open. Even in private compounds blossoms are generally only those of a few purposefully planted bushes. Undoubtedly, this corresponds with Jack Goody’s argument that biologically there are ‘no flowers in Africa’ (1993) except for a few rare species in the forest.1 Today, Goody’s point may have to be complemented, however, by perspectives from contemporary metropoles such as Kinshasa: next to the city’s general hospital, almost an entire street sells large flower girdles as part of the lucrative funerary industry that has strategically settled here. But these colourful ensembles do not offer the olfactive arousal that is suggested to the eye from afar, because they are made of plastic. During funerals, plastic flower girdles and uncountable single plastic flowers have become important requisites, which, beyond their purpose of materialising condolence, are tossed into the tomb to accompany the coffin. Similar white plastic roses are carried during the festivities of the Kimbanguist church, whereas Catholics are renowned in Kinshasa for decorating their churches and mission compounds with fresh natural flowers ever since the arrival of Catholic missionaries in Central Africa. But there are also flowers beyond the realms of death and institutionalised religion. Little plastic bouquets are offered as signs of recognition to professors, for instance, or used during wedding ceremonies, just as they decorate many homes of those seeking upward mobility, or adorn the stands on the yearly university fair, where smartly dressed students proudly garnish the displays of their faculties with these prestigious artefacts. They, too,

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are of plastic though, just like the ones one finds in many of the bigger Pentecostal churches, or as decoration on top of or within TV sets. Like the widely available Chinese-made posters of Western kitchens and living rooms that decorate many Congolese households with flowers and fruits,2 extending the here into a space within a space, these plastic flowers express the mobility of the now, the distinctiveness of participation in Kinshasa’s urban popular culture and class. To historicise the natural and artificial flower in Kinshasa as natural and artificial expressions of status would no doubt also reveal continuities with the bouquets promoted by early missionary domesticity,3 later promoted by so-called foyers sociaux, i.e. centres for domestic education (Hunt 1990), reflecting colonial endeavours to socially engineer a new class of évolués who were entitled to distinguish themselves, including through decorative table bouquets. This decorative beauty of belonging seems to be repeated by more recent attempts to commodify the rose as an indispensable regalia of love on St Valentine’s Day.4 This is done by the new supermarket-like shop that is run by one of the fancy returnees of the Congolese diaspora who decided to specialise in selling imported alcohol, flowers, vases and other decorative artefacts that provide privileged customers with the possibility to turn their life (as in the German Leben) into a form of living (as in Wohnen), in accordance with the fancy aesthetics of respectability of the colonial évolué. For many Kinois, this aesthetic resonates loudly in the aesthetics of non-Christian spiritual movements. Besides MOA, and since 2001 its dissident sister branch of EMM, it is the Grail Movement, known from Nigeria (Hackett 2003: 64), which has an explicit doctrine that considers flowers as the hosts of wholesome nature spirits, thus intellectualising them in ways reminiscent of more long-standing spiritual ontologies as those of the Kongo universe, for instance, where the favour of bisimbi spirits was for a long time seen as a precondition for much of the output legitimacy of the chief (MacGaffey 1986). The vast majority of Kinois, however, who live in Kinshasa’s suburbs (la cité), do not have access to such flowers. One may argue that in a city where many wish for more and cheaper edible greenery rather than decorative beauty that requires a lot of care and water, the priorities of most are set by necessity. The many cassava and other vegetable beds, neatly cared for and watered in open public spaces, support such a view of an agrarian urbanity (De Boeck 2004a: 34, 2011: 72).5 In line with Goody’s argument, decorative flowers can be seen as an exotic import to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet they have become part and parcel of a certain culture of distinction. The aesthetic connection clearly stems from the politics of distinction that Congo’s évolués took

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up and mimicked from colonial attempts at domestic ‘embourgeoisement’ (Tödt 2012, 2014). Based on courses in so-called foyers sociaux, these attempts included gardening courses and most-beautiful house contests with flower decorations (Hunt 1990). Many Kinois tend to want to dissociate themselves from any sort of natural fololo (Lingala for flower) or decorative living plant on their compound, including grass (Li. matiti), which is mostly systematically cut and removed. The flower of distinction is usually a plastic flower, not only because it does not fade or request additional care, but also because the manipulation of plants and herbs, more generally speaking, remains linked to esoteric expert knowledge, traditionally of the nganga. It is not rare that people who cultivate plants and flowers raise suspicion and are often rumoured to be magicians. In Kinshasa, the concept of fololo6 applies to any plant that grows in the domestic sphere or in a garden, and which, at first sight, serves only for the ‘beautification’ or spatial boundary-drawing between different private compounds or houses. When it comes to the names for different flowers, a general absence has been noted.7 Mazrui informs us that ‘the vocabulary of most African languages (other than Swahili) have a floral deficit – a shortage of names for specific flowers’ (2004: 5).8 Hence, before they are anything else, flowers are conceived within the domain of plants, and these are generally seen as part of a complex of healing the body, be it through eating or medicinal therapy (Janzen 1978, MacGaffey 1986: 124). Even when guiding conversations explicitly to the theme of flowers, the healing power of plants was often exemplified to me by the bark of the mango tree that apparently has the medicinal capacity to treat amoeba.9 Another register involving plants concerns the specialist and reputedly secret knowledge of the magical use of herbs and plants in practices of spiritual healing and sorcery. The petty version of such knowledge and plant usage consists of plants that keep snakes away if planted at strategic spots in one’s compound, and which many houses in Kinshasa have. Another plant works as a lightning rod (because it ‘contains a lot of water’, i.e. it can prevent witchcraft attacks carried out through lightning), as I learned both from a ‘herbalist’ selling bafleurs on Boulevard Lumumba and from a nganga on the outskirts of the city.

Travelling Seeds We Messianiques, we can really make a difference … through the cleaning activities that we realise in our homes and in the streets. But, in addition

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to the cleaning campaigns, I would like every one of you to engage in the campaign ‘one flower for a better world’, by offering an Ikebana and the ‘flowers of light’ to people with the aim to make them happy.10

Thus ends a monthly orientation address by the president of the Igreja Messiânica Mundial de Africa (headquarters in Luanda, Angola).11 Such orientations reach Kinshasa and all other African national headquarters, where they are read out to the community of adherents as part of a Sunday service. The rhetoric of making a better world by spreading cleanliness and happiness reflects the middle-class context into which EMM has grown in Brazil (Matsuoka 2007). There, the Igreja Messiânica Mundial do Brasil managed to distribute about a million flower blossoms for ‘joy and happiness’ in their campaign entitled ‘one flower for a better world’ (Clarke 2000: 162). This urge to spread peace globally, on the basis of the cultivation of joy and happiness, is a well-known feature of Japan’s new religions (Kisala 1999). It is reflected in Mokichi Okada’s writings, which express the importance and pride of traditional Japanese handicrafts and art, including Ikebana.12 In his writings Okada encourages the popularisation of beauty, and flowers should play an important role in this regard, given that they are prominent contributors to the core doctrine of the creation of paradise on earth. Flower arranging was introduced to Japan in the seventh century by Zen Buddhist monks from China as an aspect of miniaturised nature on their altars. In the fifteenth century it then evolved into the separate art form of Ikebana (Japanese meaning to place in water) (Herrigel 2000 [1958], Frese 2005). According to Ôhashi (1994), the essential character of Japanese traditional art lies in its entanglement with nature. The role of the artist is to ‘cut free’, purify and liberate the ordinary ‘naturality’of existence from the superfluous, the unnecessary and excessive, in order to make apparent its deeper and underlying form. By means of abstraction, the ‘cut’ (Jap. kire, which also means beautiful) turns the existing into a higher disposition, which expresses the mode of existence of the world and of man in a purer form. Thus, the role of art is not artistic manipulation, the transformation and domination of nature, but rather the liberation, concentration and purification of what is already there (Ôhashi 1994). From this practical perspective, ‘art’ and ‘religion’ are essentially the same. Flower arranging, then, can be seen, as the practical discultivation of what is excessive, both outside and inside, resulting in a meditative yet sensory contemplation of one’s deeper inner nature, which strives to disintentionalise the self. It is in this sense of the undoing of the self that Okada conceived of flowers as being able to ‘uplift human consciousness through beauty’.13 He thought that

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flowers could have a powerful effect by appeasing people’s minds and hence ‘considerably alleviate the negativities of today’s world’ (Okada 1999: 272).14 When in 1972 Sekai Kyûseikyô founded its own Ikebana school Sangetsu (mountain moon), the promotion of beauty through flower arranging became a programmatic third ‘pillar of salvation’ (besides Johrei and organic farming), expressing the urge to proselytise abroad by lending its public image overseas a practicable touch of performable Japanese authenticity. Hence, while also being ‘symbols of transformation in Messianity Spirituality’ (Clarke 2000: 162), EMM’s flowers are sensational forms with the quality to aesthetically tune the movement’s (self-)appeal (cf. Meyer 2009a). The distribution of flowers in public has become a trademark of SKK/EMM across the world, which is favoured by Okada’s call for simplicity: the Sangetsu school being known for its minimalism; a single flower, when properly picked, cut and prepared, reflects the purity of natural beauty, harmony and simplicity.15

The Flower In Kinshasa, EMM’s Sangetsu workshops are carried out on a more or less weekly basis in groups of between six and eight people, gathering to compose their arrangements out of little twigs, freshly cut flowers from EMM’s flower garden, and grass and other greenery which is carefully cut and tied together. They are headed by Maman Marie-Louise, one of the constant stream of envoyées from the African headquarters in Luanda. Given that the required materials for proper Ikebana are sparse (especially vases and the sponges one places inside them to fix the twigs and flower stems), Ikebana courses often restrict themselves to the fashioning of miniature Ikebana, so-called fleurs de lumière, that are subsequently distributed in public. They consist of a single blossom placed in a tiny sponge that is wrapped with shiny foil and tape. This material penury encourages the local leadership to make of Sangetsu an especially intellectual practice: in the form of debates around ­university-like exposés, in which EMM’s ‘professors’ of Sangetsu explain all possible connections between the role of flowers and the movement’s philosophy. EMM provides tuition in the different units on the most diverse domains of spiritual interest. Such sessions can last up to sixty minutes or longer and the debates offer interesting insights into local commonalities. The exposés draw from Okada’s original teachings, written instructions from Brazil (EMM 2011), but especially the materials that the second Sangetsu professor, Barbara, has

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herself assembled in a five-week Sangetsu training course in Luanda, where she was taught by a Brazilian lady. On the intellectual level of the debates, the meditative aspect of Ikebana as self-cultivation is secondary: the central message is rather that flowers are channels of divine power that, in concordance with Meyer’s concept of sensational forms, link the individual owner to both the spirit of the founder and thus to God, but also to other people. When presenting Okada’s revelation on Mount Nokogiri in 1931, professor Barbara imagines how God must have spoken to him in his vision in which he received the order to propagate Johrei healing, organic farming and beauty: ‘In your belly I have planted a ball of light, and you will take a paper and will write on it the word “light”, which in Japanese is hikari. This word, “light”, which you will transmit to others [by means of amulets containing a strip of paper], will coat [Li. kolatisa] other people, so these will have the power [Li./Fr. force] of the founder. They will lay their hands on people and these will be healed. Secondly, you will make them touch the earth of their ancestors, of which they eat healthy fruits, without chemical fertilisers for good health, but also to elevate their ancestors in the spiritual world. And thirdly the third column of salvation – and this is the reflection of paradise, it is the sign of beauty – you will have the strength [Li./Fr. force] to transmit your own power [Li./Fr. pouvoir] through the flowers that one can find in nature. It is only by means of this flower that you give to another person, that this person, who receives this natural flower on the material level, will also receive it spiritually.’ Then he descended from Mount Nokogiri and transmitted all of this to his disciples. He painted some calligraphy with the word ‘light’, made plantations of natural/organic agriculture and flower gardens for the distribution of flowers.16

Purifying the Spiritual Atmosphere Rather than flowers being portable beauty to serve the purpose of contemplation, Ikebana professor Barbara’s understanding is determined by their role as a medium of divine intention and force, which credits flowers with an agentive capacity. When speaking about their flowers, Messianiques interchangeably recur to notions in Lingala and French: flowers emit light (Li. moyi, Fr. lumière), which is assimilated to power/force (Li. nguya, Fr. puissance/pouvoir/force), vibrations (Li./Fr. ba/­vibrations) and importance (Li. tina, Fr. importance), but the role (Li./ Fr. rôle) of flowers and their good deeds (Li. bolamu nionso, Fr. bientfaîts) or influence is also expressed. The language that is used to explain the Japanese teachings illustrates how flowers are locally (re-)produced

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and validated by most of EMM’s adherents in Kinshasa as an active and instrumental technology rather than as a means for contemplation or as static decoration. In line with Barbara’s teachings, the flowers’ ‘light’, ‘force’ or ‘beauty’ can be used to ‘purify the spiritual atmosphere’ of a house, which links it to the (re-)production of another important Buddhist teaching in EMM’s repertoire. All houses and persons have a certain spiritual atmosphere that reflects and radiates its/his/her respective spiritual level, which, in Kinshasa, is thought to determine one’s overall fortune and misfortune (cf. EMM 2011: 57). The teaching says that the ‘atmosphere’ of houses and persons can be intuitively ‘sensed’ by others, which remarkably resembles the German philosopher Gernot Böhme’s aesthetic theory (2013: 15). Before perception may occur, Böhme contends, our human senses are tuned, and in a way positioned, by what he calls atmospheres. In Kinshasa this seems a well-known lived reality, beyond the vicinities of Messianiques. The difference lies in the fact that instead of drawing in concepts equivalent to Sinnlichkeit or ‘atmospheres’, the semiotic ideology applied is one of active spirits. Messianiques explained to me that the ‘spiritual atmosphere’ resulting from the spirits living in a house permeates the people who live in it (see also below). The teaching thus corresponds with local psychological conceptions, or semiotic ideologies, concerning the body-mind continuum and all the things surrounding it. The stress lies on the affectability of the spirit of the individual by the spirits of its close social and spatial environments. Barbara formulated it like this: ‘everything you utter from your thoughts stays in the atmosphere’ (Barbara, Ngaba, June 2011), stressing that this includes both thought and speech, which, if negative, can have blocking effects on others living in the house. While the written teaching does not mention flowers, the inclusion of their mind-appeasing effect in this psychological scheme appears to be a logical extension: the flower’s mediative ability to channel its divine force is presented as actively ‘purifying the spiritual atmosphere’ of a room or house. There is no written translation of such spiritual explanations of floral beauty by Mokichi Okada. It has been taught orally in Kinshasa, though, by a Japanese maître, as Kinois call him, who has visited Kinshasa on a yearly basis as MOA’s Japanese envoy for Africa. The survival and popularity of the unwritten teaching indicates its logical adequacy for the local semiotic ideologies of flowers and spirits more generally: placing it in a room will purge the room of all ‘spiritual impurities’ that potentially reign there. ‘The natural power of the flowers has transformed the humour of the individual [often referred to also as “feelings” (Fr./Li. ba-/sentiments)], so the atmosphere of the place,

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which was a little bit contaminated by the anger of the one was a little bit improved’, as missionary Joseph put it.17 Clearly, this is ultimately not very different from the concept of giving flowers in order to cheer someone up, to please or to generate joy. A commonly repeated theme is the conviction that some rented houses may have been built with ‘dirty money’ (Li. mbongo mabe, Fr. l’argent sale), i.e. with money that the owner of the house has earned by resorting to the help of magie by sacrificing family members. The vengeful spirits of the latter, once dead, attach themselves to the house that was built with the money for which they were sacrificed. Placing flowers in such a house appeases these spirits, who tend to cause misfortune in the lives of the inhabitants, Messianiques explain. EMM’s Albert (23) explained it thus: Flowers give light to the compound on which we live [Bafleurs nde sik’oyo epesaka lumière na mapangu tovandaka]. For compounds, even, given we are tenants, certain compounds are compounds [which includes the houses on them] they have bought with [the money earned through] nkisi. The landlord has done his fetishes [asalisa bakisi na ye], he has killed persons from his family, and all those spirits [milimo nyonso] he sacrificed, they are still there on the very compound [usually in the house]. Now, through the flowers we take from the church, we install light, which makes all these spirits flee for us to live in peace (Albert, Lingwala, June 2011).

Thus EMM’s flowers are used to counter precisely the same evil of which others allege them to be the origin. Moreover, the flower’s beauty, which Okada had designated to ‘alleviate negativities’ by ‘uplifting consciousness’, i.e. by increasing awareness of the deeper nature of world and self, is reproduced in Kinshasa within a semiotic ideology in which the flower may have a performative effect upon its social surroundings (including spirits). The idea of strengthening the self and making it peaceful is conceived of in its relationality to others by increasing one’s own spiritual force as against or in competition with potential wrongdoers. The latter abound as a result of the overall material and spiritual uncertainties and are exacerbated by the Pentecostal discourse of demonisation, turning the city into a perceived ‘apocalyptic interlude’ (De Boeck 2005). The spiritual light that flows from the flowers is compared to the light transmitted when practising Johrei. Light (Li. moyi) and fire (Li. moto) obviously continue to have an important place in Central Africa’s religious imagination, be it in Kinshasa’s Pentecostal churches or in other local religious traditions. ‘For the Christians, being filled with divine power means that a shield of invisible fire is erected around one’s double’ (Pype 2008: 146).18 MacGaffey indicates how ‘whoever

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should attack his fellow by witchcraft will be killed with his whole clan by the furious nkisi, which drives them mad and burns them with fire’ (1988: 201, see also 2000: 65). For born-agains in Kinshasa, on the other hand, fire can be used both by God and the Devil (Pype 2008: 147). Messianiques make use of this ambiguity: by emphasising the protective and purificatory workings of the flower, they stress that the light that flows from it pleases and elevates the ancestors of the inhabitants of the house. Hence their flowers can be used for ‘positive’ ends only, because they only cleanse people’s living space by illuminating and pleasing evil or unhappy spirits, thus reconciling with them, and not chasing them away: ‘so if you put the flower there, the [evil] spirits that are in this place will be forced to change their feelings, and gradually they will leave the area’. But this rhetoric is not unanimous. Like Albert in his above-mentioned explanation, outsiders especially describe the flower practices in less euphemistic terms: in the above-mentioned flower shop, for instance, where imported flowers from Kenya and South Africa are sold (including roses for Valentine’s Day), and where EMM regularly buys fresh ‘natural’ flowers, the salesman told me that ‘they use them to chase demons’, hence feeding into the Pentecostal discourse of the world as a spiritual battleground.

Illustrations 3.2 and 3.3 Flower in a washing closet behind a Messianique’s house in Mikondo, Kinshasa. Photo by the author.

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The Spiritual Thermometer Besides the ritual invitation to place a flower next to one’s home photograph of Meishu Sama, the ‘purification of the spiritual atmosphere’ is the chief reason for Messianiques to take their loose flowers or mini-­ Ikebanas home. This can be seen as part of the more widespread assumption that ‘the domestic space [is] the ultimate locus of occult invasion’ (Pype 2012: 152). Inside the house, the little arrangements are placed in a vase, a cup, a small plastic or glass bottle or any other improvised container. Initiated members generally have a small organic vegetable garden surrounded by flowers. These serve as a supply for flower arrangements inside the house. Outsiders contest both the practices of home cultivation and the placing of flowers inside the house. Favourite locations to place flowers are those where the danger of contamination is very high, such as washing closets. Especially when located close to the main living space, these spots are said to emit ‘bad wind’ (Li. mopepe mabe) which obviously arouse olfaction, the primary sense for locating invisible workings. Formerly trained as a Protestant pastor and now by far the most didactic orator among Messianiques, Jérôme explained on the talk show Zoom on Canal Kin in March 2010 that ‘we insist that concerning our flowers, we distribute them even in public places for people to take them home, so they will get to know the utility of art in their lives’. Some months later, in a teaching session, he explained the theme already raised above by Albert: The flower is one of the pillars with which we’ll save a lot of spirits. In the houses where we live, there are spirits, they are there. If you are renting a house, you enter it only with your suitcase, with your bed, with your kids. But the history of this compound, the landlord, how did he get the money to buy this house? You don’t know! There are spirits who have been living there for years and years. You see somebody’s life which doesn’t properly move on [ezali koévoluer te], it is time we start purifying even the spiritual world of the house. … If you go and enter such a house which is inhabited by evil spirits, ancestors who were sacrificed, abortions that were done at this place, all these spirits are attached over there. With the flowers there is light which can save them, can guide them towards God. So we don’t use flowers only for decoration or for their aesthetic aspect, there are also spiritual dimensions. Evil spirits [Fr. esprits pervers, Li. milimo mabe] can’t stand beauty, you can test this. Where there is beauty, wicked spirits cannot operate. It’s like this that in our country, instead of beauty it’s the rubbish that has multiplied. You see, please, what does the spirit world [of this country] look like? [Laughter] (Jérôme, Kinshasa, July 2010).

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Beauty is clearly not only joy and pleasure. One can use it strategically to affect places and people’s sentiment. The opening proverb of this chapter somewhat strikingly summarises this instrumentalist understanding of art in a context like Kinshasa, where bakatisaka ebale pona komona elengi ya mboka te: ‘nobody crosses the river only to contemplate the beauty of the country’. The placing of flowers in impure spaces can be compared to the placing of cards with Bible verses, or the writing of Bible verses, at the entrances to houses (Pype 2008: 136). One Messianique explained to me how the flowers he regularly installs in his shower indicated to him that his aunt, who used the same shower, was a witch and how the flowers had helped him to confirm his suspicions: inside his room the flowers would last up to three or four days, whereas in the shower they would fade after a single day. The reason for this, he said, were the impurities that his aunt deposited in the shower when she washed herself. The flowers had to absorb a lot in that location and hence they faded rapidly. This usage of the flower as a technology for measuring the ‘spiritual temperature’, as it is called, is a common theme among Messianiques in Kinshasa, although it is contested by some of EMM’s responsables. This gives insight into the imaginative and verbose creativity around

Illustration 3.4 Preparing an Ikebana flower arrangement for home purification. Photo by the author.

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the similarities of technology and indigenous spirituality, which Heike Behrend has historically traced and summarised as ‘electrical cosmology’ (2010: 190). As the spiritual flower thermometer shows, globally circulating spirituality of the ‘New Age’ spectrum, feeds into, fertilises and vivifies this particular historical conflation of European technology with the indigenous cosmology of power and force. A striking similarity appears with regard to television: through its fading beauty, the flower serves as a divinatory device that renders visible what is generally concealed. As such, it is a medium that reveals the realities of the invisible, similar to movies of the Nigerian or Ghanaian film industries (Larkin 2008, Meyer 2016), but also to those made in Kinshasa (Pype 2012) whose audiences perceive them as authentications of their lived realities. Thus, for Messianiques the flower as a sensational form is a technology of truth that materialises and authenticates suspicions. The Flower as Gift The instruction from the Brazilian and Angolan headquarters to distribute flowers on the streets in order ‘to make people happy’ is taken seriously, not least because marche des fleurs (flower walk), as the campaigns of flower distribution are called, is part of EMM’s prescribed requirements for ritual purity, while at the same time repeating a proselytisation strategy that seemed successful in Brazil. Little fleurs de lumière are thus distributed in front of the different units by delegated members, who are in most cases EMM’s own two allocated missionaries (which means that they receive a little money at the end of the month). In a notebook entitled marche des fleurs, each unit keeps a record of this activity by noting down the names of people who visit the centre for the first time, apparently attracted by the flowers offered. Marche des fleurs is also practised during public clean(s)ing sessions of roundabouts and crossroads called nettoyage (cleaning) or salongo, recalling Mobutu’s weekly collective work sessions (cf. Chapter 4). Inspired by the ritual exercise of ‘cleaning floors and sweeping the mind’ (cf. Reader 1995) performed in Buddhist temples in Japan, the idea is to perform, in the midst of Kinshasa, a model of the creation of paradise on earth. Similar cleaning campaigns are organised by the Pentecostal church Liloba, ‘the word’ (of God), who, Messianiques claim, are copying their own initiative. This effort may seem surprising, and perhaps grotesque for the many Kinois who rather consider their city to be lifelo, that is hell on earth (Gondola 2012), and resort to mocking it as Kin-la-poubelle (Kin the rubbish bin). Along with the distribution

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of flowers, cleaning campaigns are also part of EMM’s strategy to go public and combat, albeit without much success, their image as a secret society. Outsiders’ reactions to the flower gifts are not always positive, ­however – not surprisingly, given the rather unusual character of such a gift and given that in Kinshasa it is rare that one gets anything for free. Reactions range from surprise about the intention of the act to careful interest in the movement, but unless the recipient is a child it is rare that the flower is freely accepted – although, according to EMM’s responsables, this has started to change. The general reticence about accepting the flower supports De Boeck’s argument about the gift logic being the socio-cultural critical juncture of the African city, the focal point of urban transformations in the field of kinship and witchcraft accusations. While, more generally, ‘the logic of reciprocity and gift is the most constitutive part of the basal structure that underpins the field of kinship at large’ (2004a: 161), the crux of ‘the new patterns of witchcraft is the emergence of the notion that one can be tied by a gift which poses as such, but which in reality creates a debt obligation’.19 He continues, ‘witchcraft has always been transmitted by means of the gift (whether through food, sex or other interactions)’, but ‘what poses as gift in the social interaction is no longer what it appeared to be. Underneath the visible lurks another invisible pattern which corrupts regular patterns of exchange’ (2004a: 203). How what is presented as a visible icon of bliss is used to cover up invisible evil intentions has also been described by Meyer (2006, 2010c), who discusses how in a Ghanaian movie a demonic charm is hidden behind a Jesus picture. Both the flower and the Jesus picture can be seen as visible icons of salvation, whose semiotic surfaces are in the urban imagination partially corrupted by a poisonous invisible underneath. For unaware outsiders, the suspicion of secrecy being at work is obvious: for them, EMM’s flowers epitomise what can be called a performance of secrecy, as they display the presence of an intention, whose real and trustworthy ‘underneath’, however, remains undisclosed. Hence EMM’s flowers speak loudly not only about the local (re-) production of ‘globally’ circulating ‘spiritual’ practices, but also about the social complexities of urban Africa at large. As a response, EMM’s rhetorical strategies to effectively distribute their flowers are numerous and, to a certain extent, invoke awareness and sensitivity with regard to local semiotic ideologies. Some refer to Adam and Eve living in a paradise of flowers, as proof of Kinois’ biblical eloquence and thereby legitimising themselves with Christian knowledge. In these instances, the flower is referred to as paradisiacal

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beauty, which should evoke peace and pleasure. Others speak of love, beauty and joy without reference to Christianity. Yet others outspokenly refer to the effective utility of flowers in ‘purifying the spiritual atmosphere’ of a house. And in line with this, yet another version was revealed to me by Joseph, who himself instructed followers to explicitly tell people on the street that the flowers actively chase evil spirits: ‘to go straight to the point’, he told me ‘we tell them: if you take it, it will chase away the evil spirits [around you]. And then, you will see, [the person] takes it easily. … There is no discussion, when it is about being protected against the attacks of evil spirits, everyone comes. … It is a strategy for diffusion as well as for clean(s)ing.’20 Joseph’s conscious choice to employ ‘evil spirit’ discourse for the sake of distributing flowers – which worked rather well – clearly manifests his awareness about how the flower can be actively inserted into and assigned a valid place within the locally predominant semiotic ideologies that are governed by people’s needs. This ability constitutes his practical authority in that he may determine what is valid and therefore true, which bestows him with a certain command over what makes people follow what he says. This illuminates how processes of cultural (re-)production feed on deliberate and strategic decisions by local actors in their particular local setting, thus making space for cultural materials (such as flowers) to develop a credible career of their own in a given cultural environment. It should be noted that Joseph’s initiative to extend the meaning of the flower from an object of contemplative beauty for the inner self to an active interpersonal technology that protects against spiritual attacks also suits his own needs and regime of validity. But he is well aware that a single explanatory strategy cannot suffice to successfully distribute flowers in Kinshasa, because here a variety of semiotic ideologies coexist. Given that resistance in public persists, it is legitimate to ask why the distribution of flowers, if it does not regularly contribute to EMM’s expansion, is not discarded. Joseph considers the resignification of flowers within the dominant semiotic ideology a totally legitimate intervention as long as it serves the distribution of the flowers. On an ideational level, the very practical purpose of this is to ‘save’ (fr. sauver, li. kobikisa) people by offering them spiritual light and thus elevate their own spirit as well as that of their ancestors. This salvatory messianism, seen as exclusively positive and practised as a calling and an indispensable duty, illustrates EMM’s self-understanding and underpins most of the movement’s activities. Along with the distinction and respectability that this messianism generates socially (once the burdens of contestation have led to pride and self-esteem) – as any philanthropic or charity

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enterprise implicitly seeks to do – it has to be taken seriously. The prestige it offers is strengthened and legitimated by the ‘branchement’ (Amselle 2001) in a worldwide organisation with globally synchronised practices. Moreover the marche des fleurs is one of the twelve ritual requirements and therefore indispensable to achieve the state of ritual purity. The importance accorded to this aspect may derive from the fact that ritual purity is a long-standing motif in the history of Central African healing movements (Devisch 1993, Janzen 1992). The different instances we have discussed all indicate that SKK’s flower teachings are (re-)produced in Kinshasa in relation to locally valid semiotic ideologies. Barbara’s intellectual virtuosity and the debates that ensue from her and others’ Sangetsu teaching sessions construe the flower as having a force, which is the force of the Divine that it can mediate. This conception transpires in the multiple concepts and tropes (such as light) that are used to describe the flower. This finding is substantiated by the linkage of the teaching of the flower actively ‘purifying’ the spiritual atmosphere. While EMM’s texts on flowers and the one on the spiritual atmosphere do not contain any explicit connections whatsoever, within the semiotic ideologies at work in Kinshasa, linking them up appears perfectly normal. This manifests itself especially in the practices of putting flowers next to toilets and showers. The process of (re-)production is seemingly ‘automatic’ here, and governed by the invisible hand of habitus, while it is at the same time strategically steered by the visible hand of local actors, such as Joseph, who is relatively ‘aware’ of what the flower can do within local semiotic ideologies, and therefore of what he can do with it to others, namely to make them adhere to EMM (and his/its authority) and succeed in their religious practices.

The Field Floral Magicians Franklin is twenty-nine and an EMM missionary at the Johrei center of Mokali. He was born into a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, became a Catholic, then joined the Kimbanguists and subsequently the Église des Noirs, before turning to the Unification Church of Rvd. Moon. Then he became a born-again Christian, but eventually converted to Islam. For one year now he has been a devoted member of EMM, spending most of the time he does not work for a guarding company in the Johrei center of Mokali in the commune of Kimbanseke. About six months before I

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met Franklin, as he told me, his friend with whom he had been living announced to him one morning that he had to leave the house. It was because of his church, says Franklin, and especially because of the flower he would put on top of the TV. His friend’s father did not want him to stay in their house any longer, fearing he would harm them and cause people to fall sick because of the flower in their house. As a result, Franklin then moved to his own father’s compound, but nor did the latter like his flowers. After his father moved to another house, Franklin was finally able to plant as many flowers on the compound as he wanted, he proudly announced. His father regularly visits the compound though, even in Franklin’s absence. On these occasions he cuts the flowers, says Franklin, laughing: According to my father, I have become a magician. So he thinks, ‘Ah, he is a magician, he will sacrifice us.’ [The flower, he thinks] is one of the instruments that helps, according to him, that creates a possibility to sacrifice somebody at the place where you put the flowers, so he thinks. So it is as if you wanted to enthrone evil spirits there.21

Irrespective of whether tensions existed between Franklin and his former landlord or his own father, his account indicates to what extent EMM’s flowers have the potential to become the material locus of contestation among neighbours and family members. Similar stories abound in the common memory of Messianiques. Testimonies delivered in church meetings, which are moments of laudation and reification of founder Meishu Sama’s miracles, quite frequently refer to tensions between family members or neighbours due to allegations of magie based on EMM’s use of flowers. Conflicts around the flower mostly occur between adherents who are renting a house and their landlords. While a landlord is free to do what he/she likes, Messianiques who rent a house and place flowers inside it often find themselves in a situation in which they must either quit the house or abandon their church. Finding an affordable place to live is very difficult in Kinshasa. Hence, a middle way is frequently chosen, i.e. to be as discreet as possible in displaying one’s religious affiliation to EMM, and sometimes even denying it. (For some, however, this causes problems of conscience with regard to ritual purity.) One of EMM’s missionaries, Didier, once begged me to accompany him home, assuring me his flowers were magnificent. Upon our arrival, his two sisters with whom he was living disappeared into the back room and came back in shiny white sweatshirts with Catholic prints. On one of them was a photo of ‘His Holiness Pope John-Paul II’, while the other wore a picture of the Congolese archbishop Monsengwo. The walls of

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the little living room were decorated with Catholic insignia, and I rapidly understood that it was no coincidence that not a single messianic flower was to be found in the room. Yet Didier would not stop telling his sisters about me being a brother from his church. After we left, and before responding to my bothering questions about the missing flowers, Didier accused me almost angrily: I should have helped him convince his sisters about the benevolent nature of EMM, to which they were so radically opposed. The reason for the missing flowers, then, was clear: ‘they accuse me of being a magician’. Among EMM’s adherents, and especially among the hard core of the membership, there are clear interpretative strategies to cope with such accusations. Partly, this can be observed in instances of laughter during testimonies (Li./Fr. expérience de foi) indicating transgression and uneasiness, and at the same time mocking the challenges and conflicts around EMM’s practices, its sensational forms and its overall ascribed identity. Criticism is thus being ridiculed and downplayed into onslaughts by spiritual inferiors and ignorants. From this perspective, if an adherent’s flower is not accepted by someone in his/her compound or house, little doubt exists that the person who protests does so because he/she feels spiritually disturbed (Fr. dérangé) by the flower’s powerful and purifying energy (the same is said about Johrei). In other words, the protester him/herself is thought to possess negative (i.e. satanic) energy stemming from either him/herself having a nkisi at home or from him/ her being a witch. Thus, challenges from the outside are categorically turned into reaffirmations of the unquestionable superiority of EMM’s own collective self. Some such cases have received elaborate narrativisation and have been canonised in the oral repertoire as stories that prove and exemplify EMM’s spiritual superiority. These stories are not only entertaining and illustrating; they are also powerful authenticating mechanisms for EMM’s miraculous power. The stories evoke flowers as nightly fires that combat witches and the powers of negative sorcery. In one instance the actual killing of a witch, who was burned in the nightly flames of the flower, is involved; but later I learned that this way of presenting the flower was unorthodox, because it compromised EMM’s image of exclusive positivity, i.e. of a community of spiritualists that help their inferiors rather than fight them. ‘It’s a Nkisi!’ Though not reflecting on the crisis of the gift, Messianiques are well aware of the problem raised by their flowers. Sangetsu professor

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Barbara, for instance, warns her audience to be well prepared for the suspicion that people have in this regard: In EMM, when you come [here], you should ask a lot of questions, so you cannot be led astray once you go out of here. People will tell you ‘These flowers, they are simply magie! If you put them in your house, they will spit fire!’ … And it’s true, they really spit fire because they have power [Li./Fr. force]. And we use them because by nature they have a force, which they seek to exert. People with four eyes, you will see: they cannot bear them. They will immediately panic: ‘it’s a nkisi!’ But we, we know it is the power of the good God that we use.22

As already mentioned, the concept of fololo applies to self-planted or purchased plants that do not produce any fruit or edible produce. Green plants, in pots, on meadows or in beds next to the external walls of a compound are also referred to as fololo, regardless of whether they bloom or not. Yet, as living plants, fololo are part of botanical nature and, like any plant serving the body by feeding or healing it, they are susceptible to being accorded a certain functionality beyond their decorative beauty. This brings us closer to the understanding that flowers may hold a certain divine power (Fr. force divine, Li. nguya ya Nzambe), or, as in the case of the accusations, a power that may harm. Goody’s observation that ‘historically, the flower seems to have been the promise of fruit, not a thing in itself’ (1993: 17) reflects the idea of the flower being an announcer, a harbinger of upcoming bliss or favour. This theme also underlies the myth of the water hyacinth, which is popularly referred to as Congo ya sika (the new Congo). According to this myth, which has been studied in Butembo by Kristien Geenen (2012), in the late 1950s, the Belgian colonial authorities attempted to eradicate, or at least contain the spread of this invasive species of Amazonian origin, which was jeopardising the navigability of the Congo River and its tributaries. Thus, Geenen recalls, inhabitants of Butembo were incited by the Belgian administration to eradicate the plant wherever it appeared. Butembo’s inhabitants, however, suspected that ‘what the Belgians really wanted, was to take the forceful flower to the metropolis instead of having it destroyed’ (Geenen 2012: 451). They concluded that the special powers of this flower did not arrive in Butembo without a reason, and interpreted its appearance as a sign of Butembo’s chosenness at the heart of Congo’s modernisation plans.23 Hence the flower was seen as a harbinger of a Congo ya sika, a new Congo full of bliss.24 The argument that, as special plants, flowers have invisible and secret faculties, follows a general pattern of Central African medical traditions (Janzen 1978, Koni Muluwa and Bostoen 2011). From a variety of conversations with older spiritualists, ‘flower’ sellers on

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Kinshasa’s streets as well as missionaries themselves, it follows that this instrumentalist understanding of flowers has been generated or triggered by early Catholic and Protestant missionaries. John Janzen (1978: 168) discovered the flower nti wa ‘bonne année’ in a nganga’s garden in Lower Congo, while, according to the flower sellers in Kinshasa, the red hibiscus flower is particularly favoured by people from Katanga who use it to increase their fortune. In 2013 a nganga on the outskirts of Kinshasa showed me a plant in his garden for warding off lightning, as I also learned about from a ‘herbalist’ selling bafleurs on Boulevard Lumumba (see also Janzen 1978: 168). He also proudly pointed to a plant on his compound, stressing its potential to emit ‘electroshocks’ to fend off attackers. This notion also persists on more popular levels, as the flower hedge of Mr Jerry shows (cf. Illustration 3.5), who was at one stage the cook on our compound. This kind of blossoming fololo, he explained to me, had the capacity to fend off evil spirits that might attack his house at night. But he had not received it from a nganga, nor from anyone linked to a spiritual movement. In his case it was his pasteur who had given it to him, who refused, however, to meet me. Kinois refer to nkisi also as fétiches or gris-gris (cf. B. White 2004b). MacGaffey (1986: 165) informs us that, traditionally, a nkisi (or kisi) charm is generally composed of a container (a statue, snail shell or bottle etc.), a herb compound that is attached to it or introduced in its centre (if a statue, then it is generally placed in the belly, behind the mirror often covering the hole), and a spirit which is attached to the ensemble. Nkisi can mean ‘spirit’, but it can also refer to the container as such. More generally it is thought of as portable spirit, i.e. a material object that, with the help of herbs, serves to enshrine a human soul. Minkisi (Li. Bakisi) are charms used as much to do good as to cause evil (although this is a relative matter), but MacGaffey also remarks that ‘the meaning of N’kisi was modified under the pressure of missionary inquiry and indoctrination, which took for granted the reality of a unitary idolatrous phenomenon called fetishism, whose sinister promoter was the “witch doctor”, “fetisher”, or “sorcerer”, the nganga’ (MacGaffey 1986: 139). As such, from a contemporary point of view, the accusations of EMM’s flowers being bakisi suggests not only that Messianiques are placed into the same old missionary category of diabolic evil, but that their flowers carry some secretive intentions that are not revealed. The stress here is less on the content of the secret itself than on the socially powerful suspicion that there has to be a secret. Similar to Behrend’s ‘electrical cosmology’ (Behrend 2010), Pype writes that ‘modern technology inspires Kinois to describe interaction between

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the visible and the invisible: witches bewitch others in order to install “antennae” in their houses’ (Pype 2012: 147). How Pentecostals imagine demonic activities basically as sorcery is also explicit in Kirsch’s elaborate ethnography on Spirits and Letters (2008). He mentions how a Pentecostal pastor he interviewed ‘compared the denominational publications of the Jehovah’s Witnesses with the witches’ insengo, claiming that their publications are distributed in order to provide demons with points of orientation concerning whom to approach with their malevolent activities’ (Kirsch 2008: 140, my italics), which is obviously similar to Pype’s ‘antennae’.25 Kirsch’s finding is that, according to his Pentecostal interlocutors, the materiality used in demonic activity to direct and orient spiritual activity radically opposes the Pentecostal logic of the Holy Spirit being a fundamentally ‘evanescent’ entity that cannot be materially fixed. EMM, however, explicitly conceives of their own flowers as channelling and mediating devices that have powerful effects. Mechanically speaking this is de facto not different from what a nkisi is known to be doing. Concerning the making of a nkisi, there are also substantial similarities. During Ikebana workshops, professor Barbara reminds participants that the process of fabricating a mini-Ikebana should be done with feelings (basentiments) of gratitude (botondi) and love (bolingo). Only then will the flower accomplish its duty to successfully acheminer, i.e. advertise and attract newcomers towards EMM. Gell (1998: 59–62) stresses in his analysis of the Kongo ‘nail fetish’, as he calls it, that it ‘has the capacity to act … because it has been acted upon’ (62, emphasis original). This also resembles early appropriations of medical drugs as part of colonial and missionary attempts to biomedicalise health. Medicines and charms were well known for being intrinsically ambivalent and potential purveyors of both health as well as sickness (cf. Janzen 1978). The success of a drug depended less on its correct selection and use than on the healing powers of the person who acted upon it and who administered it (Hunt 1999: 70). EMM’s flowers, in their arranged composition as miniature Ikebanas, clearly show that they have been acted upon. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that a nkisi statue is activated by the manipulation of herbs by a spiritual expert. These are attached as herb compounds to it, or introduced into its centre (MacGaffey 1986: 165). The cut Ikebana flower is also a manipulated plant, suggesting the presence of expert knowledge. Given that flowers were introduced in Central Africa by the ‘ritual experts’ of Catholic and Protestant missions,26 it is not surprising that, even when intended as an object of ‘decoration’ in the domestic context, the cut flower must have soon triggered suspicions that it was a ‘hidden power of the Whites’ (Turner

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1978) and that, like ‘African art’ more generally, it reveals that something is concealed (cf. Nooter 1993). Blossoming Boundaries The notion that flowers are spiritual technologies to either fend off or attract certain spirits also explains the assumption that flowers are fancied by Mami Wata, the beautiful mermaid spirit from the invisible depths of the river or the ocean, who grants access to the material comforts of modernity, while at the same time depicting the unpredictable dangers of capitalism. Joseph once told me about his neighbours’ reactions to his flowers soon after he had joined the movement: ‘there were reactions, sometimes even very weird reactions’, he said. ‘Hey wait, this man …’ – he imitated their astonishment – ‘because I was renting a flat alone, on my own, and I was beautifying my compound with flowers, they were asking themselves “He is there, he is lonely, he has work, he does not want to get married, with all these flowers there, beware! He could have a Mami Wata back there, inside!”’ Yes, he explained to me: ‘there are people who consider flowers to be the nkisi of Mami Wata, do you know what Mami Wata is? It is something that likes cleanliness, beauty and all that.’

Illustration 3.5 Blossoming boundaries (seasonally without blooms) around a house of in the neigbourhood of Kingabwa, Limete. The owner has planted these fololo as a floral boundary that protects his house from nightly spirit intrusions. Photo by the author.

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The connection between Mami Wata’s taste for shiny Western luxuries and flowers has also been represented in popular paintings from Kinshasa. Kinois painters Cheri Cherin and Cheri Benga, but also the Zairian painter Mansuela have directly depicted Mami Wata with flowers.27 Indeed, the appearance of flowers is a recurrent pattern in representations of Mami Wata. It should be noted though, that all paintings in which this synchronicity appears were produced in Kinshasa.28 The pattern of linking flowers to the Mami Wata mermaid and the ensnaring powers of the yearned-for yet feared luxuries of material modernity, as is frequently depicted in movies,29 recalls the assumption that Mobutu and his clique, known for their unprecedented conspicuous consumption, are said to have had lots of flowers in their compounds. It becomes clear how the accusations levelled against EMM’s flowers echo what was said about people who sacrificed their close ones in order to keep their Mami Wata spirit, just as it was said that Mobutu did himself (Jewsiewicki 2003: 116, De Boeck 2004a: 195). But spiritual movements and their practices have also undoubtedly impacted on Kinshasa’s floral imaginary. Sukyô Mahikari and MOA are, like EMM, known for their gardens and flowers, while the elitist Message du Graal movement with their impressive, perhaps paradisiacal temple resort in the neighbourhood of Ma Campagne does not lack its own exquisite flower doctrine. Similarly, the Rosecrucians of AMORC are said to have a flower cult, although it is unclear whether this rumour originates from insider information or whether it is rather a popular deduction from the Rosecrucians’ name, which might not be underestimated in the mystification of the flower as a magical plant. The Yield As objects manipulated by what is perceived as a secret society, EMM’s flowers are embodiments of the paradox of simultaneous revelation and concealment, a logic that underpins most of what has been called African art (see Nooter 1993). Since Simmel’s work on secrecy (1992 [1907]) we know that the putative content of secrets is less important than the social cohesion they generate. Accordingly, the question of whether there really is a secret in the flower, as this can be denied at least for the Japanese background of the Ikebana teaching, matters less than the question of whether flowers are perceived as carrying a secret. As plants related to the liminal and as something extraordinarily beautiful,30 EMM’s flowers combine several features that make them receptive to ascriptions of secrecy. This is all the more so because they are employed in a non-Christian context, which many Pentecostalists

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consider satanic. Given that in Congo, all putatively ‘traditional’ practices have also come to be banned into a ‘darkness of secrecy’ by a fervently publicity-seeking Christianity (cf. Meyer 2006), EMM’s problems with the medium of flowers resemble the difficulty that neotraditionalists like the Ghanaian Afrikania movement have with mass media (De Witte 2005, 2008b, 2010). While for the Afrikania movement the ‘aim of reforming and making African Traditional Religion public clashes with the performance of secrecy’ that is requested by traditionalist shrine priests from within Afrikania (De Witte 2005: 285), EMM’s aim of making their religion public by distributing flowers as social media on the streets clashes with the external expectations of a performance of secrecy by outsiders of the movement. EMM’s attempts to distribute flowers as performances of publicity are therefore perceived by many others to be performances of secrecy. For outsiders, these attempts to undo the boundaries of difference and minority by distributing the embodied beauty and joy of flowers, appears to strengthen the boundaries between secrecy and publicity, and hence suspicion thrives. It has been shown that the medium of film is seen as revealing the workings of the invisible, thereby reifying and authenticating it (Meyer 2016). EMM’s flowers carry the potential to be ascribed a similar faculty of revelation that can materialise and authenticate Kinois’ imaginary about invisible agencies. In this way, EMM’s flowers are sensational forms par excellence. They are not merely material forms that serve as ‘authorized modes of invoking and organizing access to the transcendental’ (Meyer 2009a: 12), as is supported also by EMM’s Japanese flower teachings. For both the outsiders and insiders of EMM they also ‘creat[e] and sustain links between believers in the context of particular religious power structures’ (ibid.), to which they are an arena of negotiation. EMM’s floral practices are locally inserted into the register of plants and herbs and thus trigger utilitarian expectations with regard to their use. The beauty of plants being seen mainly instrumentally and their use for spiritual purposes bound to the domain of traditional expert knowledge and secrecy (especially since Christianity has become so prominently public), EMM’s flower distribution in public provokes curiosity. If placed inside the house, EMM’s natural flowers generate suspicion, which might add to the explanation of why most floral decorations to be found in African households are usually made of plastic. As aesthetic boundaries, EMM’s flowers have the potential to reveal to outsiders that Messianiques are indeed magiciens, while for Messianiques themselves, the resistance of outsiders to their flowers (just like the flower as a spiritual thermometer) reveals that other people carry evil spiritual intentions against them. One may say that

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this process of reciprocal suspicion is the protraction of the mutually enhancing misunderstanding, a lustvolles Missverständnis, that resembles what MacGaffey (1994), when describing the mutual stereotypical perceptions by Bakongo and Europeans, has called a ‘dialogue of the deaf’. * After returning from six months in Kinshasa in September 2010, I stayed for several weeks in a friend’s rooftop flat in my Belgian hometown, to convalesce from a slipped disc operation. The flat was located on the top floor of a neatly renovated two-storey building in a former factory complex. My friend’s neighbour, Robert R. was an older and very shy man, who lived alone and had an obvious alcohol problem. Four weeks into my stay, his letter box started overflowing and to our utmost shock it was us who noticed that he had passed away in his flat unnoticed. Two days after the police, the doctors, the ambulance and his brothers had all come to take his remains away for burial, I bought a large white flower from the flower shop next door and placed it in front of his door. It was not really a calculated act, but I felt I wanted to do something to counter the horror of smelling death so close by. EMM’s teaching about the purification of the spiritual atmosphere turned out to be convenient and I explained to my friend that the flower would purify the house and please and uplift Robert R.’s spirit. We felt indeed somehow relieved. The next day, however, the flower was gone. So I went to the flower shop and bought the same flower again. Two days later, Robert R.’s brother came to empty his brother’s flat. Before he left, he rang at our door. I opened it, and he was carrying this second flower in his hand. He only wanted to thank us for thinking of him by buying him flowers, repeatedly. Obviously, I had myself become the author of a thorough misunderstanding based on contrasting semiotic ideologies. This chapter is dedicated to Robert R.

Notes   1. Goody argues that, firstly, there is an overall biological scarcity if not an absence of flowers in sub-Saharan Africa. Secondly, agriculture has long been extensive to the extent that Africans did not differentiate the agricultural processes necessary for the separate cultivation of flowers. And thirdly, linked to this, a less marked social stratification in pre-colonial times did not enhance the cultivation of artefacts like flowers for the purpose of social distinction.   2. There seems to be continuity between these Chinese posters and the artistic production of still-life paintings of flowers and fruits, taught at and

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promoted by the Institut des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa, where they are sold. It is difficult to resist the interpretation of both as protractions of the semiotic ideology generated by the upper class of so-called évolués, who, in Belgian colonial times, celebrated Western-style aesthetic ‘beauty’ as symbolic boundaries of distinction and respectability. For similar tendencies elsewhere, see Lamont and Fournier (eds) 1992.   3. See for example the photographs in Hunt 1999: 83, 153, 249, 254.   4. Since 2007 the flower shop Zimbali has advertised Valentine’s Day on large billboards and posters.   5. For example, under the trees lining Boulevard Lumumba, next to Ave. Poids Lourds or on the university campus.   6. And not lombè as the flower is called in traditional Lingala.   7. Ngo Semaranza Kabuta, personal communication, June 2011.   8. This is different for the domain of fruits, however, where African languages are fully competitive. Ali Mazrui argues that this has to do with the fact that ‘Africa celebrates the product (the fruit) rather than the intermediary state (the flower)’ (2004: 4).   9. Like malaria, amoeba are an ‘illness of God’ (Li. maladie ya Nzambe), i.e. an illness that has ‘natural’ origins and is normally not caused by sorcellerie. 10. Église Messianique Mondiale/​R.D.C., Culte Mensuel de Gratitude du Mois d’Avril 2011, Orientations du Ministre Claudio Cristiano Leal Pinheiro (trad. Fr. Clément Kabamba), Kinshasa, April 2011, p. 3 (my translation). 11. The president, Mr Claudio Cristiano Leal Pinheiro, is one of the AfroBrazilians who, in 1992, brought EMM from Brazil to Africa. 12. Though one of EMM’s required practices, The Foundations of Paradise, Mokichi Okada’s main compilation of his teachings mentions flowers in only three of the 227 chapters. 13. See http://www.izunome.org/​Ikebana_​Sangetsu.html, accessed 13 Nov­ ember 2011. 14. Such normative tones must have met open ears in 1949, when Okada issued his essay on the ‘role of flowers in the constitution of paradise on earth’, which can be seen as a purposeful reminder of the Japanese philosophical and artistic heritage in the context of Japan’s tragic post-world war period. 15. See http://www.izunome.jp/​en/​action/​art/​, accessed 24 March 2017. Okada’s emphasis on flowers and flower arrangements being miniature paradises and thus antecedents and harbingers of the ultimate bliss of order and beauty illustrates EMM’s millennial ideology. It also reflects a more general Japanese understanding of flower arrangements as microcosms. In Ellwood’s terms, they ‘may be seen as the smallest and most abstract of gardens, a garden indoors, the ultimate miniaturization of nature’ (2007: 225). 16. Teaching session on flowers, Gombe, summer 2010. Barbara seems to be unaware that in Okada’s writings flower practices are highly peripheral and that they became a programmatic value of SKK only after the foundation of the Sangetsu school in 1972. 17. Responsable Joseph, interview in Kinshasa, June 2011. 18. Drawing on research by De Boeck, Devisch, MacGaffey and Douglas, Katrien Pype discusses the imagination of light, fire and heat in Kinshasa’s

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Pentecostal churches as grounded in autochthonous religious traditions but also linking up to the Bible (2008: 146–147). 19. EMM’s flowers strongly resemble the inviting gifts in the stories recounted by De Boeck of children, ‘who are being pulled into the second world by unknowingly accepting a gift that does not reveal its true nature at first, mirror[ing] the mechanisms of debt creation that they experience in the first world reality’ (2004a: 204). 20. Interview with responsable Joseph, Kinshasa June 2011. 21. Interview, Mokali, June 2011. 22. Teaching session by Barbara on flowers, Kinshasa, July 2010. 23. The threat of the water hyacinth to navigation is also mentioned in the novels by V.S. Naipaul 2002 [1979] and Graham Greene (1960). A biological study has been undertaken by Berg (1961). According to Geenen, this myth has had lasting consequences for the self-understanding of Butembo’s elites. The theme of the flower being an indicator of bliss also appears in Congolese author Ngoma Binda’s novel La zone aux Fleurs (The Flower Zone) (2003), a tale about three sons who must find a miraculous flower, the finding of which will assure the owner the heritage of their father’s Kongo throne. The story blends the biblical parable of the distributed talents (Matthew 25:14–30) with the matter of moral choice as plotted in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (see Hofmeyr 2004), while it remains unclear whether the theme of the quest for the magical flower is really inspired by Central African notions of floral power or by German romanticism à la Novalis, or both. 24. A type of fish sold in Kinshasa’s markets also carries the same name and is known to be of foreign origin. 25. Kirsch writes that in Zambia ‘witches were said to posit spirits in the objects, which would then – when, for example, located at the homestead of the victim – lead to illness or death’ (2008: 140). 26. Note that in Lingala a Catholic missionary is also referred to as nganga ya Nzambe (healer of God). 27. See http://lepoignardsubtil.hautetfort.com/​archive/​2010/​10/​12/​une-sirenedes-rues-encore-mami-wata-la-suite-a-paris.html, accessed 20 December 2011. Cf. Cheri Benga’s painting in Jewsiewicki 2003: 112. As well as Cheri Cherin’s Mystique congolaise (1999), Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna (Cf. Jew­sie­wicki and Plankensteiner 2008). In both cases the flowers are water hyacinths. 28. Notably paintings by Sim Simaro (1983), Vuza Ntoko (1990), Marcano Tajho (1992) and Lusavuvu (2003). More comparative research still has to be undertaken. I warmly thank Professor Bogumil Jewsiewicki for his interest and for looking through his collection of paintings for me. 29. For Mami Wata in movies, see Meyer 2003, Pype 2012: 211–212. 30. Just like Mami Wata, things of extraordinary beauty and attractivity have a long history in sub-Saharan Africa of playing the sensational nexus between the visible and the invisible, of being the aesthetically accessible interface between the hidden and the revealed, and therefore to be a tangible source of power (see Nooter 1993).

I4 Cleansing the City Touch, Rubbish and Citizenship

On 23 September 2013 an article appeared in the Congolese newspaper L’Observateur. EMM’s recent cleaning activities in a well-known school complex in Lemba had attracted the curiosity of the press: Église Messianique Mondiale: An Exemplary Evangelisation by Way of Action For several decades now l’Église Messianique Mondiale (EMM) has been in Africa and ipso facto in the DRC. Differing from the Churches of Awakening and others who, in order to win new souls, organise evangelisation campaigns with loud sound systems, the Messianic church wants to be pragmatic by positing acts which denote love, God himself being love. One of the representatives of this church, Maman Anto, who is herself a medical doctor, having contacted the authorities of the Mokengeli school complex in Lemba, went over to this teaching institution with about ten members of her unit, carrying brooms, rakes, squeegees, buckets and disinfectant. For two whole days, from 19 to 20 September, they have been attacking everything that can possibly be cleaned: the students’ toilets, those of the staff, the grass in the courtyard, and all the rubbish … to such an extent that before leaving the place on the last day, everything was utterly spotless. Always working for charity and beauty, the responsable of this unit has expressed her wish to see the government, through the Mayor of Lemba, install a large rubbish bin on the school compound. … She explained that it was through doing such deeds that a person attracts light and benedictions, thus chasing away impure spirits who can cause evil. [Such cleaning action is also carried out] in public places such as markets, crossroads, hospitals and elderly homes in order to remove all the saletés [dirt] from them. (Valentin Wakudinga)1

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As proselytisation by way of preaching is against the ideal put forward by Meishu Sama, EMM uses public cleaning sessions, locally referred to as salongo, to attract public attention, to get in touch with people and to garner publicity. The underlying idea is that the church should be a model community, whose lived values ought to be emulated by the wider society. Active ritual cleaning in public, especially of graves, originates in Japan’s tradition of Zen Buddhism, but has also been popularised there by several new religions.2 EMM’s cleaning campaigns, such as the one in Lemba’s school complex, also extends to the city’s cemeteries. Concerning the official opening of Kinshasa’s new cemetery of Nsele in August 2010 on the north-eastern outskirts of the city,3 Minister Joseph explained: I told you that there is a new cemetery, which has been opened on the periphery of Kinshasa. This, we have been expecting this! Why? Because we are a model: we had started organising cleaning activities [faire le nettoyage] on the cemetery of Gombe. The idea was not to clean all of Kinshasa’s cemeteries, but rather to produce a model, in order to make the authorities aware that one also has to think of the dead (Joseph, Matonge, June 2011).

How surprising such ritual labour is in Kinshasa, especially in graveyards, becomes clear against the background of the apparent attitude of abandonment, neglect and alienation that Kinois generally entertain vis-à-vis public places. While cemeteries are popularly avoided,4 empty spaces in public, especially crossroads or roundabouts, often fill up with litter. While EMM’s cleaning campaigns implicitly also address the state’s responsibility to care for public cleanliness and hygiene, they meanwhile advocate a particular attitude and semiotic ideology to urban public space, which contrasts with Kinois’ more general attitude of disdain and mockery. Henri Lefebvre conceived space as a simultaneous production of material/physical space, symbolic/mental space and social space.5 If we apply this didactic tripartition to the literature on religious movements and the transformation of spatial orders (also called ‘globalisation’), it appears that, with regard to religious actors, most authors have been concerned with transformations of social and symbolic spaces, and not with material ones.6 How surroundings are transformed, how cities and their aural, visual and tactile architectures are shaped by religious actors, as well as the ways in which religious movements affect popular perceptions of material space by tuning their followers’ senses: all of these point to the more phenomenological aspects of space as, above all, the result of (im)mediate sensual confrontation, perception and

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experience. Perhaps it is too obvious that it is the materiality of space, as the perpetual ‘atmospherical envelope’ of human activity, that is the first-hand building material necessary for any social or symbolic space to come about. This chapter focuses on the relationship between material space and the human senses without pointing too hastily at the social and symbolic ramifications that followers of religious movements develop with regard to soil, territory and the spatial surroundings and landscape in which they live. As ‘aesthetic formations’ (Meyer 2009a) religious movements (including, in the widest sense, mainline churches) play an important part in the process of shaping or tuning embodied attitudes to space. These attitudes can be located on a spectrum between territorial attachment, or ‘identification’ with space, on the one hand, and detachment, i.e. alienation or sometimes even aversion vis-à-vis one’s ‘own’, one’s home territory, landscape or home turf, on the other. The detachment – attachment dichotomy aims to grasp the presence or absence of a sentiment of belonging, an embodied sense of identification with a place, also in terms of civic engagement and responsibility (see also Lambertz forthcoming). While the proffering and proliferating of spatially relevant rhetoric enhances this process, embodied attitudes to soil and territory are mainly shaped through sensory engagement with one’s spatial surroundings. Religious movements encourage such engagement by prescribing ritual activities, which involve the material environment and thus tune their adepts’ sentiments, feelings and attitudes towards soil and landscape. This renders territorial belonging a multisensory and ongoing bodily experience, which both exceeds and precedes the symbolic levels of discourse and the social allocation of moral geographies.7 Asking how religious movements influence embodied attitudes to space and landscape, by promoting styles and aesthetics, leads straight to the question of how this tuning works in time. When joining a religious movement, one’s first experience of its values and sensational regime is through participation in its prescribed ritual activities. If the sensual friction thus generated is persistently repeated over time, it generates the potential to lose its ritualised character and to settle into an everyday routine. Thus ritual action can become habitual and eventually even banal in the sphere of the everyday (Lefebvre 1991 [1958]), where it is no longer seen as explicitly ‘religious’ or belonging to the ritual set-up of a particular movement. It thus installs itself like software in the body of the adept, as an implicit cultural pattern which, at times, may even run unnoticed. Hence the analytical dichotomy of ritual vs. routine. With regard to Buddhist practices of cleaning and cleanliness

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Illustration 4.1 Public cleaning (salongo) at Rond-point Victoire, June 2011. Photo by the author.

in Japan, Ian Reader (1995), addresses the issue of how everyday routines and ritual actions mutually adjust to and tune (in with) each other. How does action that is explicitly ritual, and thus considered extraordinary within the sequences of everyday activity, undergo an ‘osmosis’ to the extent of becoming part of this wider, more ‘secular’ range of everyday ordinary routine? Reader maintains that Japan’s culture of cleaning and cleanliness provides an ideal example of this transformation, or conflation, of ritual into/and routine. In Japan also, ‘the borderlines between religious and cultural actions [have become] virtually inseparable in many respects’ (Reader 1995: 228). Thus, the question asked is how values, which were at first restricted to spatially and temporally confined practices of extraordinary appeal and attention – hence the notion of ‘ritual’ – may morph into everyday routines of wider acceptance and relevance. It is here that non-­conformist religious minorities may encourage social and cultural change, beyond their proportionally small size.

Cleansing the City Next to the weekly activity of bilanga (Li. field work, gardening) at EMM’s crop field near the holy mountain of Mangengenge in the

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outskirts of Kinshasa (cf. Lambertz 2016b),8 EMM organises salongo, also referred to as nettoyage or nettoyage public, in monthly intervals at alternating locations in the city. The salongo concept refers to the weekly public cleaning service that President Mobutu Sese Seko introduced as obligatory civic service, aimed at encouraging a national work ethic through collective public cleaning work.9 On a smaller scale, EMM organises it more regularly, once or twice a week in the neighbouring streets and immediate vicinities of its prayer sites. On a daily basis, cleaning is carried out within the compounds that host the unit. Nettoyage is a key word in Messianique vocabulary and refers to the overall paradigm of cleaning, cleansing, cleanliness and purification, which EMM and TMAJ’s multiple messianic efforts of flower arranging, Johrei and the chanting of mantra prayers are all about. The entire movement can indeed be seen as a transnationally organised clean(s)ing campaign, driven, as it claims, by the messianic project to create paradise on earth in its diverse locations around the world. Though EMM and TMAJ’s cleanliness standards do not live up to those of Kinshasa’s impressive Dojo of the Sukyô Mahikari movement, where shoes are removed and feet must be washed before entering the smartly carpeted prayer hall, the attention given to cleaning and cleanliness of the much more modest, at times still somewhat improvised, prayer sites of EMM and TMAJ nonetheless closely resembles that of a Japanese Zen Buddhist temple.10 Likewise at EMM and TMAJ in Kinshasa, every morning at a set time, usually around eight o’clock, the respective site is swept with a broom and cleaned by a responsible missionary. He/she also wipes the altar and Meishu Sama’s photograph, and occasionally freshens up or replaces the Ikebana flower arrangement that decorates the altar. This also applies to the more improvised buildings such as TMAJ’s Johrei center close to Ave. Petrocongo (Commune de Masina), which in 2013 was still a structure of wooden poles with corrugated iron sheets and pagne cloths for walls. Or EMM’s unit of Mpasa Maba in the sandy north-eastern outskirts of Kinshasa, set in an unfinished, roofless house construction built around a wonderfully preserved and shade-offering mango tree, with bricks bearing the painted initials EMM in big red letters. Nettoyage is furthermore carried out during home visits to individual members or sympathisers. Soon after a new sympathiser has started frequenting one of EMM or TMAJ’s units to receive Johrei and decides to give the remaining ritual repertoire a try, a group of two to five Messianiques pays a visit to the respective homestead, equipped with brooms, cleaning products and the usual fervour that accompanies cleaning campaigns. On one occasion when I participated in such a

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house-clean(s)ing session in the neighbourhood of Mikondo, the team attacked the house and its ‘dirt’ with an attitude close to aggression, I thought. In particular, ‘old things, which are of no use anymore’ were thrown out, such as a broken television set, empty cardboard boxes, old rags and worn-out clothes from a dusty corner of a shelf and other things causing ‘impurities’ to stay inside the house. Upon agreement with the owner (a somewhat coercively induced agreement), these things were removed from the house and burned as a matter of ‘purification’ (except the television set, which the owner agreed to remove herself). This can be seen as a ritualised disjunction from past dependencies. All walls, ceilings and floors of the different rooms were swept with brooms, paying particular attention to the removal of cobwebs, considered the ‘nets of Satan’ (filets de Satan). The floors were washed with water and liquid soap, before flowers (partly brought, partly picked in the garden) were arranged and placed, and the collective chanting of EMM’s key prayers began, and was then repeated in the different rooms. Finally the little community spent a good thirty minutes transmitting Johrei to each other in the living room of the house. Ritual house cleaning for spiritual purposes has obvious precedents in Central Africa. The missionary ethnographer W.F.P. Burton (1961: 124) describes a thoroughly ritualised house-cleaning session among the Luba, where a ‘medicine man’ visits a home to remove an upset ancestral spirit. In the reported case, the husband of the family had reviled his mother’s spirit, who now blocked his wife’s fertility. The ‘medicine man’ sweeps the house with the help of what Burton calls a ‘magical broom’ made from the nerves of the oil palm, with which he collects dust and dirt from the house, which is ritually burned by the woman of the house and later disposed of as ashes on a nearby crossroad to prevent other spirits from coming back.11 But more routine cleansing is also persistent in Kinshasa. The sandy soils on the inside of private compounds, for instance, are swept on a daily basis in the early morning hours with a broom, a task usually done by women or girls, but also by the elderly.12 Early morning sweeping of the area in front of one’s house is most probably a practice inherited by the city from the rural hinterlands. During fieldwork in a village among the Bayombe ethnic group in Lower Congo in 2006, I learned that sweeping was ‘formerly’ done every morning to remove unwanted spirits of the night. Morning sweeping draws neat and orderly lines in the soil, generating a pattern of order and alignment, visualising accomplishment and control.13 In Kinshasa such sweeping is limited to the private, domestic space, however. Since the ‘explosion’ of the living room under the density of

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population (Jewsiewicki 2008: 113), public space outside the walled boundaries of privately owned compounds has become the arena for private activities such as funerals as well, to an extent which makes the analytical dichotomy between private and public more and more questionable (cf. De Boeck 2004a: 28, 53–54). Certain public areas, streets in particular, are cleaned and their rubbish is burned by private inhabitants during the salongo hours on Saturday mornings, or also, if used on a daily basis, by market women or merchants who run a business or a malewa street restaurant there. Many corners and crossroads, however, which cannot be clearly ascribed to the supervision of a particular interested individual, remain untouched by these cleaning efforts. It is these bisika ya pamba (places good for nothing), especially when located at an important crossroad, that EMM and TMAJ’s ritual cleansing efforts most directly address. The places EMM chooses for the monthly salongo public cleaning session are decided upon to a large extent according to their spiritual significance. Once, for instance, the community carried out a cleaning campaign in the market of Simbazikita next to Kinshasa’s Ndolo domestic airport, where on 8 January 1996 an aeroplane crashed into the market crowds and killed 237 people on the ground (the event is popularly remembered as accident du marché Type K, while press reports talk about La Catastrophe de Kinshasa).14 In a chapter entitled ‘Various Aspects of Life after Death’, EMM’s founder Mokichi Okada writes: ‘Another significant aspect of unusual deaths [is that] all of the spirits of those who died from violent causes, including murder and accidents, become earthbound for they cannot leave the site of their deaths for certain periods of time. Generally, they are confined within radiuses of about twenty to two hundred feet. As a result of their extreme solitude, they try to draw companions to them, which is why we often note similar deaths occurring on railroad tracks where a fatal accident happened in the past, or on a river where there was a previous drowning, or on a branch of a tree where a suicide by hanging once took place. These earthbound spirits, in most cases, cannot leave the sites of death for thirty years, but this period can be shortened considerably if proper memorial services are performed. Therefore, memorial services for those who have met with violent deaths should be given from the heart with even greater, more special care than that with which services for others are given. For all spirits, especially those who committed suicide, the sufferings of the last physical moments persist into the life after death… (Okada 1999 [1984]: 96–97).

Okada’s teachings on the consequences of unnatural deaths such as accidents, suicide or murder directly correspond to interpretations that have been documented among the Kongo or Luba ethnic groups.15

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Accordingly, in their teaching sessions, EMM/TMAJ’s responsables predicate that the spirits of people who died in unfortunate circumstances such as accidents or suicide must be looking to avenge their unhappy fate by wandering close to the place of their physical demise. Here they seek to possess other living beings to continue partaking in a material existence. Hence the necessity of ritually cleansing this market and its surroundings as a form of memorial service, in order to appease and uplift those spirits. If possible Amatsu Norito prayers (see Chapter 7) are also sung on these occasions, although much is done to prevent the negative curiosity of ignorant passers-by. Therefore the cleansing is done through the physical removal and burning of waste, the sweeping of avenues and the distribution of flowers. In entertaining fashion Reader narrates how, as a young researcher, he spent several months in different temples of the Sutu sect of Zen Buddhism in Japan. Every morning, after meditation, he was expected to carry out the ritual sweeping of the courtyard, regardless of whether or not there were any leaves or dirt to be removed. One morning in a temple at which he had only recently arrived, a compelling incident occurred: as a visitor to a temple whose set-up he did not know very well yet, Reader was the last to get to the shed where the tools were kept. Hence he found himself ‘broomless’, as he writes: for the temple clearly possessed only five brooms, and there were six of us. In reality, in terms of the assigned task of sweeping up the leaves, I did not need a broom for there was hardly a leaf in sight; it was, after all, late winter and those who had swept the garden on the previous day had done a thorough job. In fact I could have picked up what leaves there were by hand. My suggestion that we might as well go in and have a cup of tea (rational enough from the stance of my British work experience) fell upon shocked ears. We were there to clean the garden and sweep the leaves during the period, which normally lasted for around forty-five minutes or so, so clean it we must, and clean it we did. In actuality we went through a rather theatrical performance of work that was as much concerned with its avoidance as with its enactment. Those with brooms found it easy to go through the motions; I, broomless, had a more uncomfortable time … How does one sweep the leaves up without a broom when there are no leaves to sweep? (Reader 1995: 229).

A city like Kinshasa is not quite a Buddhist temple. There are many leaves and things such as plastic sachets and increasingly also plastic bottles to sweep. In particular, the sachet culture has transformed parts of the urban soil into a gooey paste, as rainwater is no longer able to seep easily through the earth. In certain places, walking here feels like walking on a huge roll of kwanga (fermented cassava, Fr. chiquangue). The sensory intensity of city life, as in many urban centres in Africa

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and beyond, is challenging for unaccustomed visitors. When walking on one of the sidewalk-less boulevards or on the smaller roads in areas that lack sewage or waste removal systems, the oral, aural, visual, haptic and, not least, olfactive senses can easily be overwhelmed. In the absence of a functional rubbish evacuation system, rubbish heaps tend to invade paths and streams. The latter are sometimes blocked and prevented from smoothly evacuating sewage water, at times creating dams. In this context it is not surprising that EMM’s nettoyage public in many regards lacks the contemplative side of the broomless sweeping in a leafless Buddhist temple courtyard described by Ian Reader. Thus, EMM’s prescription of ritualised clean(s)ing and cleanliness is executed with corporeal strain, sweat and fervour, an attitude seemingly indispensable in the face of persistent rubbish. But does this pragmatic efficiency divest the practice of its ritual and metaphoric overtones? My own cleaning experiences as a participant in EMM’s salongo sessions are diametrically different from Ian Reader’s in Japan, yet they manifest similarities. When sweeping the courtyard of the town hall of Commune de Kalamu, for instance, my broom got stuck in old pieces of cloth, which were half dug into the earth. Pulling one out revealed the presence of another, which now lay half open in this wound I had scratched into the ground. So I decide to bury the latter again. Taking to the broom again meant taking up the fight with all those sachets, which get easily entangled in the broom. Pulling one out of the soil usually meant that another appeared, making the task somewhat elliptical and myself feel like Sisyphus. Clearly, the cloths and sachets in this soil were hydra-headed, making my activity highly ritual as the perspective of its pragmatic utility vanished. In this sense, my ritual cleaning of Kalamu’s hydra-headed sachet soil was remarkably similar to Reader’s broomless sweeping in a Zen temple in Japan. The touching of soil, I was told, had a strong soothing effect on the spirits. It would appease unhappy spirits residing there, thus transforming them into peaceful ancestors. Another place that has benefitted from (or has been subjected to) one of EMM’s clean(s)ing campaigns is the abandoned space between Avenue Huileries and the Stade des Martyrs (de la Pentecôte, formerly Stade Kamanyola). The latter was renamed by Laurent Désiré Kabila to commemorate the four ‘martyrs’ of Congolese independence, whom Mobutu had killed in June 1966 in an effort to display and consolidate his authoritarian rule. As influential ancestors of the nation, I was told that the martyrs deserved EMM’s tribute of salongo there. Other places that have been clean(s)ed are the frequently jammed and high-risk accident zones of Rond-point

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Ngaba (Commune de Ngaba) where the trucks to and from the ports of Boma and Matadi in the Lower Congo enter and leave the city; the Pascal crossroad (Boulevard Lumumba – Route de Mokali, Commune de Kimbanseke); as well as the Point Chaud crossroad in the neighbourhood of Kingabwa (Commune de Limete). The latter crossroad has come to carry this name ‘officially’,16 as a result of being the hotspot of aggressive anti-Kuluna (street gang) measures by a renowned police major. Neighbours remember that suspected evildoers who were caught were exposed in the sun, handcuffed and bound up here, visibly suffering at this ‘point of heat’. In 2013, motorcycle taxi drivers (wewas) stationed at Point Chaud explained the meaning differently, referring to the many non-uniformed police men in civil clothing (Bureau 2) there who, according to some, extort drivers for putative offences against the traffic law. Be that as it may, Point Chaud is a place of much confrontation, disharmony and ill will, which explains why some Messianiques had asked EMM’s responsables to plan and carry out a cleaning campaign there.17

Rubbish, Refusal and Model Activism Since Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger (1966), it is well known that what counts as dirt and cleanliness in a particular socio-cultural setting is part of a deeply rooted symbolic, and often embodied, order that has grown and been negotiated over time and is therefore culturally specific and not universal. As a result, what is ‘clean’ or considered ‘dirt’ can only be taken for granted with difficulty in a postcolonial city like Kinshasa, which is so intensely ‘chaotically pluralistic’ and where ‘it is in practice impossible to create a single, permanently stable system out of all the signs, images and markers current in the postcolony’ (Mbembe 1992: 8). Yet, here also applies one universal principle: Douglas (1966) argues that what counts as dirt or ‘impure’ is always ‘matter out of place’, i.e. something that exceeds or does not fit into an existing symbolic system of categorisation. Although Douglas does not address this matter much, knowledge about purity and danger is ‘embodied’ knowledge at its best: cleaning and tidying up is a process of making decisions, of classifying the thingly world and imposing order, often without thinking about it. The environment is thus put into a particular relation with one’s own body and its senses, a relationship of distance and proximity, alienation and identification, visceral attachment and detachment. Also in Kinshasa, the question of what is pure and what is danger is hence one of relation building between the body and the world.

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But it is also always one of relation building between people: especially between those with authority, who advocate a particular regime of purity, and those who are, in their view, to implement this regime. The historical depth of such relations can be strongly sensed to this day, and EMM’s clean(s)ing efforts are moments of revelation in this regard. The former wrestler and officer of the Zairian Central Bank, Papa Onyemba (67), narrated how the neighbours of his Johrei center categorically opposed EMM’s messianic clean(s)ing campaigns. Expressing his surprise about, indeed his disregard for, the reluctance of people to accept their flower gifts, Onyemba explained that: One day when we were cleaning over here on our avenue, our neighbours told us ‘you shouldn’t clean in front of my place anymore!’ Hehe [soft laughter]. ‘You must not [!] send any person anymore to clean in front of my house! You clean at your own place, over here, but that’s it! We are accustomed to living inside our own, ah, according to our possibilities [selon nos moyens].’ So what people say is that, when we [Messianiques] are cleaning, if we are cleaning in front of their compound, [they say that] we come to steal their fortune [nous prenons leur chance]. Now, here I would ask the question: ‘You keep your fortune in your trash bins, in your rubbish? Is that where you keep your hope and good fortune? I truly think that if there were any fortune [on your side] at all, you should keep it where it’s clean rather than where it’s dirty, no?’ (Onyemba, Lemba, July 2011).

In Onyemba’s messianic perspective, ‘dirty’ soil, no matter where, as much in the private as in the public domain, needs cleaning interventions and care to be ‘purified’ and for the evil attached to it to be fended off beyond reach. Onyemba’s neighbours, however, oppose these ‘cleaning’ interventions, accusing EMM of occult spiritual manoeuvring so as to steal their fortune (Fr. chance, Li. lupemba). Similar to the findings about messianic flowers in Chapter 3, the misunderstanding between Onyemba and his neighbour’s perspectives points to conflicting semiotic ideologies about what EMM’s clean(s)ing is and does, with the neighbour suspecting that the intended ‘cleanliness’ is, from a spiritual point of view, not that clean or benevolent after all. While such a refusal based on spiritual grounds seems at first sight motivated by a categorical refusal of any of EMM’s activities, which, in the case of the Onyembas, are couched in perceived economic inequality between them and their neighbours, it should not be forgotten that ‘rubbish’ as a bone of contention in the urban sphere has a history in Central Africa. Already in the first half of the twentieth century, rubbish was a truly problematic matter for colonial urban administration, in that it could be used by subaltern urban populations as a ‘matter of

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refusal’. Phyllis Martin (1995) describes how in Kinshasa’s neighbouring city of Brazzaville, by 1920 the city had been spatialised on the basis of a strict racial segregationist model, with the town for the whites on the one side, and the townships of Bacongo and Poto-Poto on the other side of the city. Such an urbanised expression of the ‘purity and danger’ principle as applied to racial difference did (and to some extent still does) exist in Kinshasa as well. About the colonial efforts at rubbish removal in the 1920s and 1930s, which were a forceful exportation of one regime of purity (and danger), Martin writes: African priorities … clashed with those of the municipal authorities over rubbish disposal. Since the early days of Poto-Poto and Bacongo, the administration had tried to impose its version of cleanliness and neatness on the African population. Here was an issue par excellence, through which prevailing European notions of Africans as dirty and undisciplined could be worked out. While householders kept their yards swept clean, they resisted demands for corvée labour to clean the streets of Poto-Poto and Bacongo in their free time. … The Mayor’s frustration is revealed in his report that ‘refusal by workers to help clean the roads and squares in their villages’ was ‘solely due to laziness’. Due to lack of co-operation, ‘rubbish accumulates in an unsightly manner’ (Martin 1995: 60).

How can one make somebody apply a foreign regime of purity if a person is, on the basis of his/her skin (colour), considered categorically impure to the extent that he/she was spatially quarantined in the first place? In colonial times the mainstream interpretation on the part of the colonisers was that Africans’ reluctance to ‘clean up’ their neighbourhood was due to ‘laziness’. Osumaka Likaka (1997) has shown how in the context of cotton cultivators in colonial Congo what was perceived as ‘laziness’ has rather to be seen as an infrapolitics of resistance in the context of forced labour. In Onyemba’s view, his neighbours lack insight, rather than being lazy, but the pattern of producing difference through moral or intellectual, i.e. normative, disqualification is very similar. Already in colonial times, rubbish and the particular regime of urban cleanliness that comes with it was the sensational matter with which authority and agency were generated and contested. It is here that refuse and refusal seem etymologically connected. The disregard and seemingly vigorous neglect many Kinois continue to cultivate vis-à-vis the soil of their city, and public space more generally, reflects how strongly this visceral memory of colonial state-people relations persists.18 At the same time, the responsible state and municipal authorities themselves seem imbued by inaction and refusal, with particularly devastating effects on the city’s road infrastructure since the

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infamous sachet culture was complemented, towards the end of the 2000s, by the even more devastating accumulation of plastic bottles. Some of the newly renovated roads literally washed away, and neighbourhoods transformed temporarily into lakes, with human porters and pirogues replacing cars and motorbikes, as tropical rainfalls can no longer evacuate because ditches, sewage pipes and entire ravines are congested with plastic bottles, fostering an exponential increase in the speed of erosion. Kinois encounter the postcolonial paradox of (not!) having to care about waste in public with the mental coping mechanisms of cynicism. Rubbish itself is thus at least symbolically brushed away, with a stroke of mockery, as the well-known joke about Kin-la-poubelle masterfully shows. In the local popular imagination the city’s very soil has become a classic theme of laughter and self-ridicule. From the early 1960s onwards Kinshasa had come to be known across the African continent and beyond as Kin-la-belle, the archetypal place of cleanliness and joy. Taking up this theme, the Kinois themselves, over the years, started commenting on the critical situation of their city’s public space by turning Kin-la-belle into Kin-la-poubelle (Kinshasa the rubbish bin). The simultaneity of attachment and detachment, of identification with and alienation from the urban soil revealed in this joke holds some potential for analogy with the logic of laughter, which can simultaneously reveal and conceal, suggest inclusion yet threaten to be a laughter of exclusion at the same time (cf. Bergson 1959 [1900]). It is transposed here onto the presence of rubbish in the city: while laughter expresses and reveals the presence of a public secret (Taussig 1999), a socially

Illustration 4.2 Bosoku Ekunde, L’inondation (2009). Author’s collection.

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shared feeling about the implicit reality of something being wrong, it simultaneously indicates that the very content of what is tacitly shared is meant to remain inexplicit and veiled behind the curtain of complicit mockery. The logic of public secrecy can be habitually found in Kinshasa’s popular paintings, where a critique of Congo’s authorities and their failure is disguised as a humorous ballet of bodies ‘enjoying’ the strains they have to endure (see Illustration 4.2).19 The Kin-la-poubelle joke similarly reveals what everybody seems to know: that there is a problem with the public administration and the management of public space. Yet everybody also knows this is an issue that it is useless to discuss, because a solution is not readily at hand. In a way, Kinshasa’s rubbish is the city’s own laughter, a dirty smile indeed, driven by anger and despondency. As an expression of ‘fake’, or pretended, alienation, it creates sufficient distance and detachment from the root causes of the problem, be they historical or contemporary, to conjure a protective shield of indifference, which is vital for self-respect to survive and carry on.

Beyond Mockery The metonymical conflation of material and moral space, i.e. of cleanliness with virtue and of dirt with sin, is as much a Japanese as it is a Congolese commonplace. My close friend Papa Jack found a picturesque way to explain this thought: flies are attracted to meat only if it is rotten and sends out the stench of death; in other words, one is only prone to attack by evil if one’s own moral conscience is itself in a state of impurity. A clean environment thus corresponds to a peaceful inner landscape of good conscience. This explains why cleaning the environment can purify one’s own conscience, or karma, as well as that of the dead, as Messianiques explain. If we apply the Japanese concept of the ‘ancestor’ as not gender- or lineage-based (cf. Chapter 8), it becomes clear that cleaning the entire public sphere is meant to uplift everyone’s state of happiness and virtue. By adapting their clean(s)ing activities to the existing spiritual geography of the city, this endeavour is upscaled to target the well-being of the city and, by extension, of the Congolese nation (cf. Lambertz 2016a). There is not just one pertaining/overarching model of cleanliness, not one single regime of what dirt is, which persists in Kinshasa. Intentionally or not, Kinshasa’s city life is patrolled by a multitude of moralising agencies, including medical actors, development experts, priests, pastors and other spiritual experts such as EMM and TMAJ’s

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responsables, but also everyone else considered a carrier of authority and opinion. Given the multiplicity of these agents and the visceral memory of a paternalising colonial rule their efforts sometimes invoke, the postcolonial city is a laboratory for the generation, reproduction, tradition and (trans)formation of imported and locally developed understandings, or semiotic ideologies, of purity and danger. In view of this, EMM and TMAJ’s situation of being exoticised and stigmatised minorities in Kinshasa’s widely Christianised religious landscape makes it difficult for their ritualised sensual regime of cleanliness to achieve a wider popular grounding in the everyday. However, EMM and TMAJ are not the only movements in Kinshasa’s religious landscape to spiritually interfere in the seemingly secular domain of public cleanliness by practising salongo. The Congolese church Liloba ya Nzambe (the Word of God), which was founded in 1995 by prophet Khonde Mpolo Dominique and is among Congo’s bigger churches, is known for its salongo cleaning activities across the country. While Liloba’s leaders claim that the laborious cleansing as active prayer was revealed to their prophet Khonde in a vision, EMM’s responsables unanimously consider the efforts of this church to be the happy result of their own salongo activities, which as a messianic model caused its emulation by others. Also India has a tradition of ritualised cleansing labour. Here, public service work (Sanskrit: seva) took on institutionalised forms most prominently in the Ramakrishna movement, founded by Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), as well as in a variety of other movements such as Baden Powell’s Boy Scout movement, which is known for public service work in Europe and Africa as well.20 As well as Sikhism, the Sathya Sai Baba movement studied by Smriti Srinivas (2008: 142–145) likewise advocates seva (public service) as a ritual prescription based on the idea that care for others is essentially a cure for the self. For Indian devotees who are geographically mobile, such as Indian expatriates whom Srinivas followed in Kenya, she argues, ‘participating in [Sai Baba’s] service activities in another location becomes the ground for acquiring local citizenship.’ According to Srinivas, this process leads to the construction of a ‘bio-civic ethics’: ‘a sensory moral praxis that establishes a meaningful and transformative relationship between the body-self and civic space – a sphere of embodied citizenship’ (145). More than mere intellectual and bodily gymnastics, EMM’s salongo cleaning activities in both the private and public spheres, have a tuning effect on their practitioners’ attitudes to the urban territories in which they live. EMM thus promotes a sensory territorial attachment – one may indeed call it attouchment so as to capture the conflation of a

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Illustration 4.3 Transmitting Johrei in public during a salongo cleaning session, Kinshasa, June 2011. Photo by the author.

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sensory-material and a social sense of belonging (cf. Lambertz 2016a, 2016b) – which corresponds to Srinivas’ idea of ‘embodied citizenship’, even if Messianiques do not live ‘in another location’ away from their home. The practice of salongo encourages territorial inscription beyond the private, domestic sphere. It aims to generate an umbilical bond with one’s neighbourhood and the wider public territory of the city and the nation, including its very history and past. The accompanying messianic optimism about the civic abilities and real possibilities of Kinois and Congolese at large is decisively anti-utopian in Messianiques’ selfunderstanding, which goes against both the self-mocking logic of the Kin-la-poubelle joke and the lack of efficient action by the state and its respective authorities. Thus, EMM’s ardent labourers, men and women, old and young alike, see their clean(s)ing efforts as a powerful voice against persistent Afro- and Congo-pessimism, which is so widespread among Kinois at large, even if, as we have seen with the Kin-la-poubelle joke, this pessimism can also be a technique for safeguarding one’s personal self-respect.

Notes   1. Valentin Wakudinga, ‘Eglise Messianique Mondiale: Une évangélisation exemplaire par les œuvres’, in L’Observateur, 23 September 2013, my translation.   2. The new religion Agonshu, for instance, practises ritual cleaning work referred to as shugyô (requested religious training or austerities), which includes public cleaning activities such as in parks (cf. Reader 1995: 233). Like EMM, Agonshu uses these practices to attract members. Likewise, members of Tenrikyô, one of Japan’s oldest new religions, are constantly involved in meticulous cleaning of their ritual spaces, ‘not because it is a job that has to be done, but because it is an action of religious practice and social service’ (Reader 1995: 234). Another movement is Ittoen, known for its cleaning of public lavatories and toilets (cf. Kondo 1987).   3. See e.g. http://www.radiookapi.net/​actualite/​2010/​08/​02/​kinshasa-un-­nou veau-cimetiere-a-nsele, accessed 24 March 2017.   4. See e.g. Filip De Boeck’s movie Cemetery State (2010) about a team of gravediggers living on the city’s Kintambo cemetery.   5. Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991 [1974]) laid important foundations for the so-called ‘spatial turn’. See also Döring and Thielmann 2008, Warf and Arias 2009.   6. As regards African religious movements, most research has dealt with the transformations in people’s social spaces of belonging, triggered by perceived migration, displacement, diaspora and exile, either of followers or their movements. E.g. Adogame 2003, Adogame and Spickard 2010,

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Demart 2008, Mossière 2010, Blanes and Sarro 2009, van Dijck 1997, 2001. Some works have looked at the symbolic ramifications of spatial reinscription through the production of spatialised teleologies of hope and destination, mostly generating a spiritual geography of the world that accords with religious values and convictions. E.g. Eade and Garbin 2007, Garbin 2009, Jacka 2005, Mélice 1999, Robbins 2006.   7. Similarly, in his investigation of the Perils of Belonging, Peter Geschiere (2009) suggests that we pay careful attention, in the study of ‘rituals of belonging’ in Africa and Europe, to the question of ‘whether different aesthetics and styles, in Birgit Meyer’s sense – that is, different ways of invoking key referents like “soil” and “body” – can help to explain the variable impact of appeals to autochthony as an ultimate form of belonging’ (38).   8. Every week a different unit spends an entire day journeying to and fro, and working on EMM’s field-garden near mount Mangengenge. Given the distance that has to be covered by foot this activity called bilanga was often compared to a pélerinage (Fr. pilgrimage), which indicates the ritualised nature of the task. Agriculture naturelle, as EMM’s ‘nature farming’ is locally called, despises the use of chemical fertilisers, which are considered ‘toxic’. Just like the clean(s)ing work of salongo, this ritual labour has an important spiritual dimension, as the touching of earth is considered to be a means to liberate, purify and uplift personal and national ancestral spirits (see Lambertz 2016b).   9. Salongo was introduced in Zaire as a civic obligation by former president Mobutu. Still today, early Saturday mornings before 10 a.m. are reserved for public cleaning, and shopkeepers are often fined if caught selling during these hours. For the concept of salongo, see B. White 2005: 82; Pype 2009b: 103; Van Reybroeck 2012: 508. 10. ‘More often than not’, writes Ian Reader, ‘in contemporary temples at least, [Zen Buddhism] involves some form of cleaning of the temple grounds and environment, such as sweeping the tatami floors of the halls of worship, meticulously dusting the Buddhist altars, washing out the toilets and scrubbing and polishing the wooden corridors, cleaning up the graveyard and sweeping up leaves’ (Reader 1995: 231). 11. For Burton and his work, see Maxwell 2008, 2011. Murray Last (2011) has observed that in rural Hausaland in Northern Nigeria rubbish heaps were maintained outside the house to bind unwanted spirits, who are thus prevented from entering the house. This leads him to suggest that ‘in towns, rubbish is put into the street specifically to move spirits outside the house where rubbish otherwise might accumulate. If rubbish is wholly removed from the streets, where do spirits go?​The fear is that they go into the houses, and cause much more trouble – so that messy streets, in this view, are good, not bad, for public health’ (Last 2011: 224). I warmly thank Roman Loimaier for pointing me to this publication. 12. On our compound the sweeping would usually be done by ‘ancien combattant’ Kabangu, who, despite his age (in 2013 he was 88), remained faithful to the values of duty and discipline, which he picked up during his life in the infantry of Mobutu’s national army of Zaire.

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13. To a certain extent this seems comparable to the domestic sweeping in Japan: according to Reader, ‘housewives sweeping outside their houses are not, unlike the members of new religious groups … taking part in explicit religious actions. They are performing actions that have an identifiably ritualised (and, I would add, implicitly religious) content whose meaning and nature clearly transcends the simple act of cleaning’ (1995: 228, bracket by Ian Reader). 14. See for instance Andreas Spaeth, ‘Chaos am Himmel über Afrika’, in Die Zeit, 26 January 1996, or http://fr.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Catastrophe_​de_​ Kinshasa, accessed 3 July 2013. 15. MacGaffey, for instance, writes about persons who died in an industrial accident, who were spiritually abducted to Europe by the whites (1986: 109). Elsewhere, he writes: ‘witches become “ghosts”, not “ancestors,” and are condemned to anonymous wanderings in the trackless and infertile grasslands that lie between the forests and the cultivated valleys’ (MacGaffey 1986: 73, see also Jacobson-Widding 1979: 103–110). 16. In June 2013 I observed a poster inside the police major’s office announcing the official celebration of the tenth anniversary of Poste de Point Chaud. 17. Several scholars have noted that, because of the obsession with the devil and his army of demons, the Pentecostal sphere also encourages a spatialised imagination of spiritual warfare in the city (e.g. Kalu 2008: 218–219, Pype 2012: 27–62). 18. Nancy Rose Hunt uses the concept of ‘visceral memories’ to indicate those memories ‘rooted in bodies and places, which carry terrifying resonances of symbolic power [that] seem to bespeak a time not of ‘the BaTambatamba [Arab rulers in eastern Congo] alone, but of the colonial regime [of the Congo Free State] that was built on its foundations.’ (Hunt 1999: 49) 19. On humour as a coping mechanism, see also Mbembe 1992 and for Kinshasa see De Boeck 2007. 20. Watts (2005) attributes the historical origins of the activities surrounding the notion of seva to a variety of factors: developments around the idea of serving the guru or God in the context of colonialism in India in the nineteenth century, Vivekananda’s reactions to famine and disaster, as well as ‘global developments in the domains of organized philanthropy and civics’ (Watts 2005: 13).

I5 Experiencing Faith Crisis, Miracles and Spiritual Healing

Maman Nicole’s ‘Experience of Faith’ From a TMAJ Sunday Service, Kinshasa, June 2013 Nicole: Bonjour Messianiques. Everybody: Bonjour. Nicole: My name is Nicole, I am responsible for the TMAJ centre in Kenge. The account we will hear today is the story of our brother Jean, who had been suffering from a mental disorder [Li. problème ya mutu: problem of the head] for three years. He had sought help from a nganga, he had gone to various churches, but without relief. When he came over here to Kinshasa, he sought help from numerous people, but in vain, so he returned to Kenge, where a lot of churches had started operating. Given there was no solution to his sickness they eventually decided to keep him at home. … Our brother professor Inongo went to see their family … and informed us that it was necessary for us all to go and pray for this new brother Jean. … Upon arrival at their home, we greeted their mother and their sister … Jean noticed us and said: ‘No! I will not speak, you will wait for me to speak, I had an accident, oh yes, an accident, oh, on Kimwenza, ah, do you know Avenue Kimwenza? Ooo Werra [son] was working there, with one of Koffi’s musicians.’ After he had started speaking like this I told the others we shouldn’t lose any time. … We could see that Meishu Sama would be able to do something here. … Then Alfred also arrived … so we were now three to transmit Johrei to Mr Jean. … At a certain moment Jean stopped speaking and sat in peace. ‘It’s over’ we told his younger sister, ‘but you should come with him to our church, because the Johrei he will receive within the church room will be different from the kind he gets here. … Inside the light will be stronger.’ ‘No problem’, his sister had said. Soon, some of her former church brothers arrived from the church of Branham, where she had been praying before. … They asked her ‘Ah, sister, what have you become?’ And she had responded: ‘I was with you

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guys, but for a long time I did not see any solution to my brother’s problem. So now please let me go to the place I want to.’ ‘Aah, you entered an église ya magie [magic church].’ ‘Oh really? But if this is magic I will for sure kill only my own family, and not yours, no?’, she had replied. … Then we learned that, at night, Jean would stand by the tree in the middle of their compound, and that he still refused to come. But his humeur [mood] had apparently changed. … We decided to do a cleaning session in their house. We did the prayer and all that, we cleaned all the rooms, we placed flowers and we started transmitting Johrei. I noticed how inside myself something was telling me: ‘You should give Johrei to the tree out there where Jean stands at night, and also to the backside of this house.’ I went out … and started transmitting Johrei to the tree, from all sides. I held my hand up in the air all around the tree. Then I turned to the back of the house and transmitted Johrei over there, until I felt it was enough. Once back inside the house, Papa Inongo was informing them: ‘Maman, if you see that you have a singa [a chain charm], a molangi [flask-charm] or any other protection somebody gave you at some place where you entered, it is really important that you get it out [of the house] because the things we are doing here are not just for fun [Li. eza aventure te], it is God’s work, and God designed his work with no such other things! The mama then informed us: ‘In fact, yes papa, in our house there are indeed certain things. My child, the second last had brought them and left them with us. We had called our noko [maternal uncle] to come and remove them. He should have come himself, because in Bandundu [province] the noko is the chief of the family. But our noko had refused … because in his church they refuse to deal with such things. So the stuff is still there, really.’ Then it was I who spoke: ‘Maman, we will take these things away, we will remove them, [don’t worry].’ And the maman had replied: ‘Please do!” Then all of a sudden Jean, the one with his ‘head in all directions’, sat down and said: ‘Me too, I have something to tell you.’ We were all taken aback, including his own mother: ‘You know, when I was young and looking for women, I went to see a nganga, and I took some poussière [dust] from him which I started putting onto the things I would give to ladies so they would have to fall in love with me.’ All of us started laughing aloud. I looked at him and said: ‘Our brother’s thoughts have come back! So, and where did you place it?’ ‘Ah, I buried it in the corner of my room over there, in the earth. You cannot see it anymore, it has vanished now, all by itself.’ His mother was laughing and thanking God: ‘If my child’s intelligence has returned, then it is thanks to this Johrei!’ On the same day, after we had done the cleaning of their house and left, the maman had sat down and started washing plates. Suddenly, as she told us later, she had seen something strange: a dry little thing, an insect, moving all by itself from the tree towards her feet. The insect had flown off and she had screamed: ‘Ah, this is the thing that is weeping here all

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night in our house! Either it does this in here, or it weeps over there on top of the tree.’ [It must be due to this that] every time our brother Jean [who is mentally ill] hears it he has to get outside and approach it. While their mother was asleep, his little sister would then come and wake her up to say ‘Hear this, maman, you will see yet again brother Jean will open the door to go and stand by the tree over there, at the place where he would start talking rubbish until morning.’ Their maman had explained to me: ‘[You cannot imagine] how much this thing has disturbed us here!’ Then she had killed the thing [the insect] together with the sister. After they had killed it, the sister had come straight to me and I had told her: ‘[Good!] If you see any other strange things like that: [kill it and] thank the Lord!’ When the bed was prepared that night, their mother discovered a cockroach in the toilet, a really huge one, too big for her to chase away with a brush. It was impossible to kill it like that, she told us. When she realised she could not kill it with the brush, somebody told her ‘Take a hammer and crash it onto the cockroach’s head! The thing that disturbs your child so much over here behind the house, it is this cockroach!’ Their mother then took a hammer and smashed the head of the huge cockroach. In the morning, after waking up she said: ‘Ah, this prayer they have come to do over here, it truly is a real prayer! How come that I can see it all now like this?’ That’s what our sister Lidya told us when she arrived for the prayer session [at TMAJ] the next morning. I told her [again] to thank Papa Nzambe [father God], because we don’t hang out with bandoki [witches], and neither are we bamamans mbikudi [diviner women], but that it is God with his love who is showing us all the things that are happening in our houses. And this is how, since this very day, our sister had taken her decision: ‘Given our brother was healed here, I will keep helping God over here in this church of yours’. Today Jean is one of our brothers, and those friends who had fled him, they have started coming back to him, and his intelligence has fully returned. As a sign of proof, the wall of their house that was already breaking, he awoke one morning and took the wall down to start repairing it without anyone asking him to do so. [Applause] And then his brother came over here to let us know, yesterday in fact, that ‘Really I am full of joy that God has saved my brother. He had started to make me really sad, it was extremely difficult, emotionally, because to see your brother go crazy like this, it’s painful!’ Just like Jean’s mother and his sister, … two more of their brothers have found the joy of our church. And it was the same with yet two more of their family members. One will get back home perhaps in June or July only to see the healing of their brother through Johrei. One of them I can see here among us right now. When we were there as we were before, we really had mòto [fire], but these days what we are experiencing [how we are being treated] has become like in the Nigerian movies, because in Kenge they really call us

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magicians. [But most] churches over there, they operate by offering only minor solutions [to people’s problems], for a little while. [Yet, even if we are more powerful than them], there is really nothing behind all this! We only know God and nothing else! Merci. [Applause]

Maman Nicole’s testimony elucidates the efficacy of Johrei as a spiritual healing technique, in this case against people who have become liboma (developed a psychic disorder, Fr: fou), which is commonly considered to be the result of an abuse of magic (kosimba fétiches: touching fetishes), in which the power of the magical charm has turned itself back against the person who commissioned it. Often pastors take on the task of delivering such individuals from their diabolic ‘spell’. In Nicole’s account, the maternal uncle of the family (Li. noko) refused to address this issue, no doubt under the influence of the born-again ideology of ‘breaking with the past’ (Meyer 1998). While Christians accuse Jean’s sister of having entered an église ya magie, Nicole makes it clear that TMAJ’s activities are really just as opposed to African traditional magic as Pentecostalism. In this sense, Messianiques like Nicole consider Johrei as the more efficient alternative to Christian efforts of deliverance. With this claim of superiority in terms of ameliorative efficacy EMM and TMAJ inscribe themselves into the long-standing history of religious movements in Central Africa, whose goal it has for a very long time been to offer healing by overcoming evil in the context of the fortune-misfortune complex, usually by supplanting an existing movement whose healing efficacy has lost its fervour and appeal (De Craemer, Fox and Vansina 1976).1 This chapter deals with the Johrei healing technique or ‘prayer in action’, as Messianiques call it, and its pragmatic efficacy in times of personal crisis. It explores the local (re-)production and articulation of the Johrei healing technique and its relevance to local conceptual frameworks and semiotic ideologies related to origins of evil and the restoration of health. As in the case of Jean and his family, it is often as a result of ‘miraculous’ healing in terms of physical, social and/or economic recovery that conversion occurs. In turn, Nicole’s account indicates how, similar to the Holy Spirit among born-again Christians, Johrei’s efficacy manifests itself on the body and is rhetorically fashioned and celebrated in moments of public testimony referred to by Messianiques as ‘experiences of faith’.

Johrei in practice Johrei has been repeatedly described by responsables as ‘the backbone of the messianic faith’ (la colonne vertébrale de la foi messianique). The

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deployment of the ‘faith’ concept points to the way in which EMM and TMAJ see themselves as actors in the same field of action as the numerous Pentecostal churches and other movements based on spiritual healing. The slogan indicates the significance of Johrei not only as EMM/ TMAJ’s central activity, but also as the anchor assuring their followership, i.e. a stable inflow of sympathisers. Often newcomers become members after they encounter a ‘miracle’ induced by the ‘prayer in action’ (Fr. prière en action) of Johrei. From a quantitative point of view, it is clear that, if compared to Pentecostal deliverance and prayer healing practices, Johrei and Sukyô Mahikari’s Okyome remain a minority phenomenon in Kinshasa. Nevertheless, they complement the picture of medical pluralism in a region with a long-standing tradition of ‘spiritual’ or ‘faith healing’.2 In line with the Japanese etymology of jôrei – usually written as johrei – EMM and TMAJ’s responsables in Kinshasa explain its meaning as ‘purification of the soul’. Most Messianiques, however, use the concept to refer directly to the ‘divine light’ (Fr. lumière divine, Li. mwinda ya Nzambe) that flows during this channelling ritual. Two people sit opposite each other, face to face, with the giver emitting the light from his raised hand and the other receiving it at a distance of about thirty centimetres. Touch is thus suggested, but contact does not actually occur. Giving Johrei (Li. kopesa Johrei, Fr. donner le Johrei) or transmitting it (Fr./ Li. transmettre) is restricted to ‘initiated’ members, who are connected to the deceased ‘messiah’ Mokichi Okada (and through him to their ancestors and the universal God). This connection works through an amulet received at initiation called Ohikari. The meaning of hikari (Jap. light) is known to the followers. While the receiver sits on a smaller plastic stool, the giver sits on a plastic chair.3 After entering the prayer hall and ritually bowing, clapping and praying in front of the altar, the receiving participant sits down on a stool facing the altar, in front of a potential giver. A Johrei session is opened with a short bow towards one another with eyes closed and hands folded, which is understood to be a formal style of greeting in Japan. After five to ten minutes, the giver folds his hands to interrupt the flow and invites the receiver to turn around. Now the light is streamed onto his/her back for the same amount of time. A rapid touch on the receiver’s shoulder indicates that a final minute of transmission will now be performed to the front again, before the giver closes the session by folding his hands ‘Japanese style’, offering a rewarding handshake, and pronouncing ‘Grace à Dieu, Meishu Sama’ (Grace to God, Meishu Sama). A single session of the ritual may last up to twenty-five minutes, although this depends on the availability of time. As those who come

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to receive Johrei in the different units of the city often outnumber those who are entitled to dispense it, the duration is often reduced to a total of ten to fifteen minutes, after which the receiving person is asked to liberate his stool for another receiver. On Wednesdays and Sundays, and after any bigger gathering, the mobile plastic chairs of a Johrei centre are rearranged into double rows of chairs and stools facing each other. This is done to precede a Marche de Johrei (Johrei walk), which can be seen as a chain-transmission of divine light for many participants simultaneously. Every seven to ten minutes the responsable of the unit claps her/his hands to indicate that all receivers are to shift stools. Hence the idea of a Marche de Johrei as a ‘walk’, during which the receivers move from one giver to the next over the course of 90 to 120 minutes. This practice indicates the individualising difference of the giver, as Johrei is considered to vary in strength, depending on who transmits it. As with any practice ruled by ritual prescription, Johrei is meant to ‘work’ only if the ‘correct’ way of carrying it out is respected. Dissenting opinions are therefore linked to the generation of authority and it is not surprising that, after a schism, a seceding faction introduces a change in terms of its own ‘correct(ed)’ way of practising. Thus, while both EMM and TMAJ’s responsables consider Johrei as a ‘prayer in action’ in which ‘divine light’ is transmitted, changes in practice have arisen since TMAJ broke away.4 In EMM’s case, the light is thought to envelop the receiver’s entire body in a cloud of light regardless of where the transmitting hand is held. TMAJ, on the other hand, has resorted ‘back’ to the way in which MOA – the movement from which EMM’s pioneers had seceded (cf. Chapter 1) – practises TPO (Traitement Purificatoire Okada). Here the intensity of the streaming light is strongest close to where the emitting palm is suspended, which means that the streaming hand wanders up and down the receiver’s body. At times, the giver also stands behind the receiver to transmit Johrei to his head, which is in line with MOA’s system of attaining the different ‘chakra points’ of the body. This also resembles the way in which Okyome is done in the local Dojo of Sukyô Mahikari.5 In Kinshasa, the responsables of any of these Japanese religious movements ardently claim the historic originality of their own practice, which usually also involves actively ignoring the other respective movements. It is historically beyond a doubt, however, that all three versions – Johrei, TPO and Okyome – are variations of the miteshiro otoritsugi ritual, which was at the heart of the older Japanese new religion Ômôtô (cf. Chapter 1). As Birgit Staemmler has shown, the latter is itself an adaptation of chinkon kishin, a meditative technique focusing on the healing power of thought (cf. Staemmler 2009: 239–274,

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2011: 175). As in Japan, there is also no limit in Kinshasa to the duration or the number of times to give or receive Johrei per day. ‘The more the better’ is the rule. Ministers are entitled to transmit Johrei collectif, which is done during services on Wednesdays, Sundays, and sometimes in evening services (in Japan it is done every morning, ibid.). Both in Japan and Congo it is also possible to administer Johrei to oneself if another person is not present. Also, in both settings it is a given that in urgent cases more than one person can administer Johrei simultaneously to the same receiver (ibid.).

Clouds of Crisis The primary reasons that motivate people to come to EMM or TMAJ can be summarised as ‘this-worldly benefits’ and include health, social harmony and prosperity. Next to the seekers who often join out of hopeful curiosity, people who visit a Johrei centre for the first time are mostly in a phase of intense crisis and despair, owing to physical disease, social mayhem or financial turbulence in their lives. Various units of TMAJ, EMM and also MOA resemble, at times, emergency health care centres, providing hope and the possibility of taking action against the urgency and despair caused by misfortune and the fear of concrete personal disappearance.6 EMM’s Claude’s problems of financial loss and intense illness were eventually solved thanks to the miraculous power of Johrei. Claude had been a municipal clerk in a village near the Angolan border in Kasai province and become a successful diamond trader in the 1990s (cf. De Boeck 1998). One day, he was trapped in a hold-up and his entire diamond stock was stolen. Soon after, he fell sick with a severe disease (whose name he does not know) and lost so much weight that many people thought he would die at any moment. According to him, if he went to sit on one of Kinshasa’s terraces, other customers would abandon the place for fear of him dying on the spot. Claude’s younger brother had been living in Luanda, Angola for quite some time and was a member of EMM there. He had come to visit Kinshasa and taken Claude to one of the local EMM branches. Given that all the medications Claude had been taking had not been of any help, he finally overcame his initial inhibitions and followed his brother, hoping for relief. After his brother had gone back to Luanda, Claude followed his advice and returned to the Johrei centre on Ave. Lufuluabo. He also stopped taking the drugs the doctors had prescribed, as a result. At first, he admitted, he did not think this would be of any benefit, but he

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hoped it would at least make him win his brother’s trust and encourage him to send more money from Angola. This is how he described his first Johrei experience: Five days after [my brother] had left I returned to Ave. Lufuluabo. As soon as they had started transmitting Johrei to me, my first Johrei in fact, I began to feel a kind of heat in my body. With the second Johrei, I started sweating. I felt the taste of medicine in my mouth. It was really bitter! I said to myself, ‘Aaah what is it I am feeling here?’ After the third Johrei, I left to find drinking water, but I couldn’t find any. All I found was a ‘bistro’ where they sold cold beer. So I ordered a bottle of beer. I felt how my mouth turned normal again, but, as I had been sweating, the sweat smelled of medicine. I said to myself: ‘Ah, but what is this? This is not normal, really!’ I went home. The next morning I woke up and asked myself: ‘Should I really go back to this place?’ But I had slept very well, and I thought ‘Perhaps it’s the beer that I had’, but I could easily get up, like that. [So there was improvement] (Claude, Lemba, June 2013).

The sensory intensity of heat, sweating, fever and trembling are frequently used in accounts that authenticate Johrei’s energetic efficacy. Claude’s account shows to what extent Messianiques perceive Johrei as a relevant alternative to drug-based médecine moderne, which they systematically criticise. As discussed in Chapter 1, EMM and TMAJ’s aetiology euphemises any sort of misfortune, and physical disease in particular, as a smallscale moment of millennial transformation, announcing subsequent liberation and change. Many have explained sweating and heat as natural signs of ‘purification’, showing that the ‘light’ of Johrei is actively ‘burning’ the causes of the disease. But Johrei also engenders moral/ spiritual purification: according to one of EMM’s responsables, it has happened several times that individuals who have come to receive Johrei have started crying under the impact of the ‘divine light’: ‘They were becoming aware of all the things they had done’, she explained. This had led to spontaneous private confessions from girls, who had remorse for having been led astray by the easy money of kindumba (prostitution), or other youngsters whose deeds were indecent in the eyes of this responsable. Personal crisis often implies the simultaneous occurrence of social disharmony (usually family strife), financial and professional convolution and physical disease.7 It is well known from Central Africa (and beyond) that all three facets of (mis-)fortune may find simultaneous expression in the human body (Li. nzoto). The categories of ‘social’, ‘financial and professional’ and ‘physical’ are thus mutually referential facets of one’s overall state, or continuum of (mis-)fortune, which

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Messianiques explain as niveau spirituel (spiritual level) or karma. It is in the body that obstruction by way of blocage (i.e. witchcraft), as well as subsequent ‘deliverance’ materialise.8 Thus, also in African Pentecostalism, the body is the critical juncture, the site in and on which the spiritual battle between God and the Devil is fought.9 EMM’s aetiology assumes that one’s spiritual level or karma is responsible for fortune and misfortune, which results from one’s individual and ancestral degree of spiritual and physical purity. Affliction is caused by so-called clouds (Fr./Li. nuages) of dust-like impurities (Li. mbindo, Fr. impuretés), which envelop or ‘block’ the spiritual and physical body. As has been discussed in Chapter 1, the double conception of things (including the human body) having a material and a spiritual body, is well known from descriptions of Central African cosmologies.10 The materiality of these clouds fits with African conceptions of personhood. Kwasi Wiredu, for instance, generalises that ‘the elements of the African inventory of human personality are conceived as material, save only that they are supposed to be exempt from the ordinary laws of optics and dynamics’ (cf. Wiredu 2005). Impurities that envelop the spiritual body are seen as resulting from one’s own or one’s ancestors’ ‘sins’ (Li. masumu, Fr. péchés), while those clouding the physical body result from ‘toxins’ (Li./Fr. toxines). The latter have entered the body either through ‘impure’ food grown with chemical fertilisers, or through the intake of medical drugs. Ancestors are part of the body because they are held to reside in the blood (Li. makila, Fr. sang), which is explained by reference to the ‘scientific’ discovery of DNA. But body and mind are not imagined as ontologically different: the local secretary of MOA explained that illness has mostly spiritual origins. What causes illness is ‘the toxins which come from evil thoughts [mauvaises pensées] and evil speech [mauvaises paroles] of others, especially those of the people in one’s vicinity, and also from all the things one consumes’ (Limete, March 2012). The co-responsibility of ancestors is what encourages Messianiques like Régine (41), who frequents a Pentecostal church along with TMAJ, to explain Johrei as a form of deliverance. Indeed, both Johrei and Pentecostal deliverance are psychogenealogical interventions. Unlike PCCs, however, which often consider ancestors demonic (cf. Chapter 8), EMM and TMAJ frame ancestral influence as part of one’s genealogical karma, which one can improve by reconciling with and uplifting the ancestors through Johrei. Referring to her defunct father, EMM’s Jeanne (27) explained that, ‘Johrei, it’s as if I give food to somebody I don’t see’ (Gombe, July 2010).

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Illustration 5.1 Johrei given jointly to a woman suffering from high blood pressure, Mokali, Kimbanseke. Photo by the author.

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Albert (23), a young sympathisant of EMM, and later of TMAJ, who suffered from the so-called mbasu disease, explained that: some come because they have the problem [Li. mpasi] of finding a job, others don’t have a place to sleep, they must come over here and do work for Meishu Sama [Li. asalela Meishu Sama musala] in order to find some means to pay the rent, others have a mpasi [disease, difficulty] like mine here, I come with it for it to stop [Li. naye na yango po esila], and from this mpasi onwards I will stay Messianique forever. So people have really a lot of difficulties. They come [like me] with the mpasi of the mbasu like this, or with illnesses [maladies] like typhoid, fever that doesn’t stop, whatever illness you have (Albert, Lingwala, June 2011).

Spiritual Diseases Albert was born in a village near Mbuji Mayi in the province of Kasai Oriental. Already in his early childhood, his father had trained him in folkloric dancing of the Luba ethnic group. One day, he remembers, the Luba-based music orchestra Bayouda du Congo (the Jews of Congo) was passing by his village and this is how he was discovered. ‘They have trained me, I’ve been working very hard, I was very good, and so they’ve taken me with them’ (ibid.). He became one of their front dancers and started touring with the Bayouda across the whole of DRC. Then, all of a sudden, his foot swelled up, the skin erupted and water started running out. The skin receded and a major sore developed, which grew bigger until it covered the entire leg. This skin disease, commonly referred to as mbasu and known to emit a gruesome odour, is one of the ugliest manifestations of a spiritual attack (Li. kindoki, Fr. sorcellerie).11 In biomedical terms, mbasu is Buruli ulcer (Mycobacterium ulcerans disease), but nobody in Kinshasa seems to know this terminology.12 Albert knew on the spot that this was the visible expression of an invisible attack, and he did not doubt its origins: it was his rival from the Bayouda orchestra who had effectively ‘blocked’ him from moving forward in his career as a professional dancer. It is common knowledge in Kinshasa that the city’s artistic milieu is strongly engaged in fétichisme of all sorts, as Bob White (2004b) has amply discussed.13 It is said that one can ‘buy’ the mbasu disease in a little flask on Kinshasa’s central market for very little money (200 FC). The liquid or powder is said to be strategically placed by the evildoer somewhere in the victim’s vicinity, so that his/her foot or other parts of the body may come into contact with it.14 Opinions differ concerning whether the mbasu may only attack the person for whom it is intended or

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also other passing pedestrians. Although random witchcraft seems surprising, there are historical precedents: the Jesuit missionary Van Wing reports that among the Bakongo, so-called matiti ma nkisi (harmful charm grass) would be distributed on crossroads as a sort of aerial of a nkisi complex. If somebody passed by, touching it without knowing about it, no matter how healthy, he/she would contract a disease (Van Wing 1959 [1938]: 377). It is safe, however, to state that among spiritualists in Kinshasa the mbasu, as any other form of witchcraft, is said to work only if the putative victim has a moral or a spiritual debt (Fr./Li. dette (spirituelle), Li. nyongo), i.e. if he/she has committed an injustice or offence that occasioned an attacker to reach him/her. In case of moral impeccability, no evil thought, speech or substance can attain you. Thomas from Soka Gakkai International (SGI) employed the following example: If for example, you and I, we have some business together, and I cheat you, then you will tell me: ‘So you have cheated me, ah I will show you my friend, I will bewitch you and I will send you an evil fate [mauvais sort]’, and it works! But if I have done nothing, if there is no problem, if you have a clean heart, it can never work! (Thomas, Limete, April 2012).

Despite the mainstream opinion that mbasu is ‘what evil spirits can do’, as an EMM missionary put it when inspecting Albert’s leg in my presence, there are individuals like EMM’s Maman Anto who question such explanations. While she stressed in an interview that ‘beyond any doubt, witchcraft [sorcellerie] exists, Meishu Sama says it, that witchcraft exists!’, concerning the mbasu she was more sceptical: ‘Me, in any case, I don’t believe in all these stories’. For her, mbasu, just like la gâle (scabies or maladie ya mpese, the cockroach disease) is the result of a problème de saleté (a problem of dirt, a lack of cleanliness). Western medicine is considered useless against diseases of spiritual origin such as the mbasu. Albert explained that he visited numerous medical doctors and took all possible antibiotics to cure his sore leg, without success. In cases of such spiritual diseases, only traditional medicine can help. Here the spiritual movements of TMAJ, EMM and MOA, with their healing technique of Johrei and TPO, respond to an important need in the urban landscape of necessities. Albert has been receiving Johrei for three years for about two to three hours per day. In January 2013 his sore leg was finally healed, and the open wound was closed. When I returned to Kinshasa in March 2013, I did not find him among the usual receivers of Johrei on Ave. Lufuluabo. At first, the local responsables told me he had gone back to Mbuji Mayi, but I rapidly understood that as soon as his mbasu had healed he had

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altered his initial intention to be initiated and abandoned the church instead. Two ministers confirmed my inkling. As part of a more general pattern, whether due to social pressure or other personal reasons, many hesitate to become stable members of spiritual movements, despite their conviction that it has produced beneficial effects in their lives. The Indian representative of the spritual movement Brahma Kumaris (locally called Raja Yoga), soeur Kunzu Ben,15 summed it up from her perspective: The Congolese, I know them. They come and join us because they think they will get money, a good job and success. After a few months, when this does not happen, they leave. But also when it does happen, they leave. Then new ones come (Kunzu Ben, Gombe, March 2013).

Other diseases named and described by Johrei practitioners are less obviously linked to somebody’s spiritual problems than the mbasu. They include rheumatism in knees and other ligaments; back pains, which seem, at times, to be hernia-induced (as indicated by numbness in the leg); infertility; uterine cists; tuberculosis; and one of Kinshasa’s most frequently heard of hassles, haemorrhoids. Given that many diseases come and go undiagnosed, however, it is difficult to complete this list. In Albert’s case, Johrei led to full recovery, causing him to start a normal life again.16 Among the incurable and therefore spiritual diseases is also sickle-cell anaemia, which is locally referred to as anémie SS or drépanocytose. Because of sicklers’ immunity to malaria, this hereditary disease is proportionally endemic to areas where malaria is common: unlike sicklers with sickle-cell trait and actual symptoms, those who are merely carriers17 do not actively suffer from the syndrome and therefore are often unaware that they are passing the disease on to their children, who, unlike non-sickle-cell children, cannot die of malaria. Known to be a genetic problem, i.e. one of the blood (Li. makila) and therefore linked to the ancestors, sicklers are frequent visitors to Kinshasa’s Johrei centres. In an annex behind an internationally funded biomedical clinic specialising in the treatment of sickle-cell anaemia in the neighbourhood of Yolo,18 the Mokichi Okada Association (MOA, cf. Chapter 1) has set up a centre for Thérapie Japonaise: TPO (Thérapie Purificatoire Okada), Agriculture naturelle and Art floral, as one can read on the welcoming board. In 2014, the results of a scientific study into the efficacy of the OPT ‘biofield’ treatment of sickle-cell anaemia was published,19 which was carried out with the authorisation of the Congolese Ministry for Scientific Research. A second study is currently on its way to official approval, looking at the effectiveness of OPT in curing the effects of HIV-Aids.

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Antoine (37) is from Kinshasa but lives in Pretoria. I met him at EMM’s headquarters in Kinshasa in 2010, when he was on a home visit after fourteen years in South Africa. Antoine says of himself: ‘In my teenage years I went to some Pentecostal churches, but they didn’t appeal to me, no, it’s not my kind of thing, praying to God with all that noise, the shouting, I’m not that kind of person. I like to see a ritual and it must be quiet, yes, that’s where I can easily pray.’ He not only frequented EMM, both in Pretoria and Kinshasa, but also considers himself a member of AMORC and the Ordre Souverain Du Temple Initiatique (OSTI). ‘I’m a spiritual person, I like to know more about spirituality, I like to discover’, he explained (Antoine, Gombe, July 2010). But more than his intellectual interest, it was his physical condition as a sickler that gave him an interest in spiritual healing options. Upon our first meeting, he explained: it’s a disease where people have intense pain in their limbs, or in the back. It’s about the blood, and it’s a genetic disease. People actually die from it. If the case is very bad the pain is extreme and the person can die. But since I’ve been receiving Johrei all this started to dissipate until it disappeared completely. So, I’m not having it anymore. I had also some wounds that were opening by themselves. … I had gone to the hospital, I even had private surgery done. But it would not help. But with Johrei all these wounds disappeared. You know, when you have sickle-cell [anaemia], the red blood cells are in the form of C, and when they block [a vessel] it hurts … and sometimes it caused wounds to appear. At times these wounds explode, that’s when it’s worst! Water runs out and there is no medicine that can cure it here … (Antoine, Gombe, July 2010).

Johrei, for him, ‘became a lifestyle. I really like to go, especially to give Johrei to people, those who are sick, wherever they are. I can see the change happening in them. It’s really a great experience!’ (ibid.). However, in the long run Johrei could not cure Antoine’s condition and this caused him to be disappointed. Two years after our initial meeting, he shared with me that he ‘had gone through a very difficult period’ lately, and that he had ‘nearly died’. Somewhat to his own surprise, in a moment of an extreme crisis linked to his disease he had ‘simply prayed to God for help without using any of the rituals I know, and God answered my prayer!’ From that moment onwards he was ‘convinced that I do not need all this knowledge anymore, it was just a way God wanted me to go so as to learn about certain things. I can live a better life now, one that everyday people live, fearing God and [simply] going to church every Sunday.’ This is what had brought him ‘back to Jesus’ and to abandon ‘mysticism’. The cause for his disappointment was obviously the failure of Johrei and other non-Christian rituals to

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cure his crisis. Rather than questioning their veracity or efficacy, however, his explanation points to the register of additional, secret knowledge, which was inaccessible to him, in line with the theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957): concerning EMM, he explained, ‘I wanted to go further but I understood that I cannot evolve if I am not part of the clergy. That is how it works over there: you must go your way to become a minister of Sekai Kyûseikyô to be able to read certain books that contain more knowledge, but which are reserved to the committed people only.’20 Antoine’s case indicates that Johrei, but also ritual techniques offered by other spiritual movements, not only engender bliss and miracles, but also disappointment and distress, causing spiritualists to move on in the meandering web of spiritual healing options.

Miracles and Medicine Trust in the power of miracles depends on a discursive, but interestingly also ‘scientific’ reinvigorisation of the miracle promise. La médecine moderne and Kinshasa’s miracle industry, which includes Johrei healing, cultivate an ambivalent relationship with each other. In so-called expériences de foi (faith expriences), as Messianiques call their practice of testifying the miraculous power of Johrei in public, medical doctors, nurses and la médecine occidentale are often discredited in terms of therapeutic efficacy. The real and only efficacious treatment is in the hands of Meishu Sama, just like charismatic Christians with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Medical professionals even appear at times as incompetent. On the other hand, médecine moderne is systematically construed as the ultimate and only authority that can properly attest to the veracity of a miracle through scientific diagnosis. Here, critique and necessity of modern scientific methods go hand in hand, which indicates a ludic, pragmatic and also opportunistic attitude to epistemological pluralism. Understanding the emic value of miraculous healing such as that induced by Johrei presupposes taking into account the dire state of Western medicine in contemporary Kinshasa. A short visit to the dispensaries of cités such as Kingabwa or Kingasani provides suggestive evidence. In certain areas that lack a sewerage such as Kingabwa, but also in commune de Kinshasa not far from the glossy ville of Gombe, hygiene conditions even on private compounds have become partly unspeakable. This material context is important so as not to culturalise the treatment of the mbasu and other diseases by ‘spiritual medicine’ too hastily as the result of putative blind ‘belief’ in witchcraft and

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evil spirits. At the same time, it explains that a quiet and clean surrounding, as provided by spiritual movements and churches alike, can indeed count as viable alternatives to Western medicine, whose success requires a standard of disinfection, which is often not a given even in so-called ‘medical centres’. This inefficacy of biomedicine also partly accounts for many Messianiques’ attitude to medical drugs. Considering that the latter are often perceived as having a limited effect, which is due to a variety of reasons (poor medical information, insufficient salubrity and undisciplined administration of drugs, etc.), Mokichi Okada’s critical position vis-à-vis medical drugs developed in the 1930s to 1940s still inspires EMM and TMAJ’s responsables today. Okada suffered from an eye disease and tuberculosis that had been diagnosed as incurable by a ‘medical doctor’. When he eventually recovered, he attributed his survival to his refusal to follow the diet prescribed by the hospital. Hence EMM’s critical attitude to Western medicine and an emphasis on a healthy organic diet instead. Okada concluded that medicine was poison causing sickness rather than healing and at the same time a weakening of man’s natural remedial powers. Despite all medical developments of the last seventy years this position is decisively repeated by Messianiques in Kinshasa today. Minister Didier, for instance, like Papa Germain and Minister Ntumba, is proud of not taking pills for more than fifteen years. EMM’s Jacques also does not give any medication to his children, though he respects his wife’s dissenting opinion to at least give them anti-malaria tablets.21

Experiences of Faith Differing from Pentecostal churches, EMM and TMAJ do not encourage public confession on stage. There is, rather, comparative discretion in terms of people’s privacy. The latter is mostly shared only with a responsable. Everyone is encouraged, however, to share the beneficial outcomes of their ‘faith’ with the church community in witness accounts, which are referred to as expériences de foi (faith experiences). This is in line with EMM’s terminology used in Brazil (Port. experiência de fé) and seems to be a more general feature that has been appropriated from globalising Pentecostalism.22 While in Pentecostal churches such accounts illustrate and prove the power of the Holy Spirit, in EMM and TMAJ it is the spiritual power and efficacy of the ‘energy’ or ‘divine light’ of Johrei that is systematically reiterated, and thus empirically authenticated through these

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miracle narratives. The rhetoric performances are staged by individual followers during services and repeated or carried on in random conversations. They form an ongoing collective repertoire of empirical proof about the fact that Johrei actually works and indeed produces miracles. Responsables systematically encourage their followers to share these miracles, ranging from spectacular events of divine intervention where Meishu Sama’s spirit interferes like a deus ex machina to protect Messianiques from accidents, to events in followers’ lives such as receiving the possibility to travel or a solution to property conflicts. Accounts of restored health after severe illness are systematically recurrent. ‘Faith’ is thus understood in these ‘experiences of faith’ to be a pragmatic principle that ‘works’ (cf. Kirsch 2004). A content-related analysis of twenty randomly recorded faith experiences between 2010 and 2013 reveals the following findings: all accounts start with a self-presentation of the person’s name and how he/she got to know EMM or TMAJ. Persons who have been suffering systematically state that they have consulted all sorts of churches and medical centres in the past, and have tried all sorts of medication, without success. Medicinal personnel are often presented as being surprised by the healing miracle, before they have ‘confirmed’ the divine intervention. The occurrence of dreams in which ancestors appear is systematic. Healing also occurs in dreams, or money rewards are announced, such as: ‘One week ago, in a dream, they revealed my salary for the cleaning of the cemetery we did last week’ (Ntumba Kabangu, June 2011).23 Healing is announced with regard to sterility, which means that marriages and family harmony are saved, but also tuberculosis, haemorrhoids and mental disease due to nkisi abuse, as in Jean’s above-mentioned case. Also family conflicts are resolved, as well as job and money problems, travelling, the passing of the examens d’état (state-organised final high school exams), and the paying back of debts, which is often linked to family reconciliation. Healing power usually stems from Johrei, prayers and flowers. Expériences de foi usually close with thanks to Meishu Sama for saving someone. At the end there is nearly always a statement such as ‘this is what made me join EMM and become a member’, which presents conversion as a rupture in one’s life, clearly a pattern that resembles the testimony culture of born-again churches (cf. Marshall 2009: 152–156). Expériences de foi are usually staged successively by one, two or three individual followers in a rhetoric performance in front of the wider church/temple audience. With their sometimes skilled rhetorical talent, responsables also rephrase and re-present the experiences of absent followers from as far as Angola, Mozambique, Zambia or

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even Brazil. Most ‘experiences’ originate from Kinshasa, however, and other Johrei centers in DRC such as Mbanza Ngungu, Mbuji Mayi or Kananga. EMM and TMAJ’s secretaries have started collecting and transcribing ‘faith experiences’ from Kinshasa so as to circulate them back to Angola and beyond. Other spiritual movements, many of which also rely on witnessing accounts, stream filmed faith ­experiences online.24 In the context of Pentecostalism’s increased public presence, Kinshasa’s urbanites are accustomed to perceiving and interpreting the things that happen to and around them as tied up with the spiritual (lack of) favour related to their ‘church’. Meanwhile, intellectual training by Congo’s official education system, including primary and secondary schools as well as the nation’s diploma-driven universities, appears increasingly removed from the everyday realities lived by the population. Churches, which have come to constitute the school classroom in terms of teachings that are relevant to ­people’s everyday worries, have become like a massive popular tabloid think tank of the oral genre, whose truth production is determined by the epistemological principles of the miraculous and the magical. It is here that the vast majority, including many if not most of the city’s university students, learn to connect, interpret and confront the phenomena and processes they encounter in their city, their country and themselves. Against the background of the above-mentioned importance of personal crisis, and probably different from a Western New Age public, it is not surprising that my interest in somebody’s sensations, ‘inner’ feelings or emotional states was often perceived as strange and inappropriate. Frequently, the interlocutors spontaneously digressed by pointing to the (hoped-for) pragmatic effects of Johrei in one or another circumstance of their lives: Today group interview during marche de Johrei at the unit of Mpasa-Maba in an unfinished, quiet and roofless construction in the sandy outskirts of Kinshasa. I ask whether one could feel Johrei and what feelings it arouses. As predicted, it was Papa Germain who, as the responsible head of the unit, claimed the right to answer. Great answer: how you notice Johrei is through the results it produces, mainly health. Totally in line with what Richards (1991) writes about SKK in Thailand. But Johrei also produces dreams, in which either ancestors speak to you or which are premonitory (field notes, 16 September 2013).

While each and every follower has his/her own particular interests, sensitivities, quests and necessities, it is fair to say that those who do not practise Johrei because of an acute personal crisis, do so out of prevention and for the continuous changement and development of their

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situation. This reflects the pragmatism Kinois urbanites have come to adopt as an indispensable attitude in their lives. In Japan, but also increasingly in urban Africa, the quest for ameliorative efficacy encourages a New Age-like individualisation of religious practice and affiliation, and at the same time a tendency of schismatic multiplication. Ian Reader summarises that in Japan there is ‘an increasing fragmentation of religious structures and an emergent individualization in which people “pick and mix” a variety of practices together in a form of personalized religion, but without specific adherence or affiliation’ (Reader 2005: 440, see also Koepping 1994). A tendency to multiply insights and experiences is on the increase in Africa too, while the affiliation to an existing movement and community remains, even if only temporary, an important preoccupation.

Notes   1. See also the general conclusion, where I interpret this in light of John Janzen’s concept of ‘tradition of renewal’ (1977).   2. See e.g. Tonda 2002, Devisch 1993, Van Wolputte et al. 2002, Persyn and Ladrière 2004. Other medical actors of ‘Asian’ origin include the Hôpital Sino-Congolais in Limete (11ème rue, côté résidentiel), which offers acupuncture, mainly for rheumatism, which is carried out by Congolese personnel who are trained by their Chinese employers. Similarly, the big Hôpital des Chinois, as it is called by Kinois, on the crossroad of Boulevard Lumumba (1ère rue, direction FUNA), is well known for a variety of Chinese medical techniques.   3. Despite a minor difference in the required age of the giver – in Japan the giver has to be at least fourteen, while in Kinshasa even the youngest of children can transmit Johrei – the way in which the practice is done seems quasi-identical to how it is performed by followers of Sekai Kyûseikyô in Japan (cf. Staemmler 2011: 175–177).   4. Before the schism in November 2012, all of TMAJ’s future responsables were at EMM.   5. In Japan, Staemmler (2011: 175) has observed that major differences between Johrei and Mahikari’s Okyome ‘lie in duration and recommended frequency, and in the absence of formal prayers, direct physical contact and the possibility of spirit possession in Johrei’ (cf. Staemmler 2009: 272f.).   6. ‘Personal disappearance’ can refer both to an eruption of or a critical stress on one’s public personality and social role, as well as its more ultimate form, death.   7. In Hippocratic medicine, krisis is the marginal turning point in the course of a disease, determining whether the health status of an afflicted person will either ameliorate and lead to recovery or deteriorate and lead to death.   8. See for instance Janzen 2005, Devisch 1993, De Boeck 1991a.

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  9. The label of ‘alternative’ medicine, which offers a holistic approach to health and healing and is often associated with New Age healing in the West, is, historically speaking, therefore not appropriate in Kinshasa. 10. Other Japanese new religions such as Tenrikyô also teach that ‘although the mind in origin is clean and pure, it becomes clouded because of spiritual dust (hokori), which settles on the mind as a result of bad deeds and thoughts. This spiritual dust gradually builds up and clouds the mind, and as this happens all manner of problems may arise, such as illness. Becoming ill is a sign that the mind has been allowed to become cloudy and needs cleaning’ (Reader 1995: 234). The notion of the ‘clouded mind’ originates in older Buddhist teachings and finds prominent expression in Jainism, where a particular stress is put on the physical materiality of the accumulated impurities. Thanks to Stefan Binder for this precious hint. 11. The skin itself may be viewed as the interface between the visible and the invisible faces of the person, between the outside and the inside, the objective and subjective faces of the person, or between personne morale and moi, as Marcel Mauss (1938) put it. Devisch (1998: 151) writes that among the Yaka, ‘the skin has a function as intermediary, as go-between, of transitionality’. It is thus no surprise that it is in and on the skin that the indexical role of the body intensifies, indicating emotional and social disharmony and strife. 12. The WHO guide for Buruli ulcer informs us that ‘it is the third commonest mycobacterial disease, after tuberculosis and leprosy’ (WHO 2012: 1). The manner in which this infectious disease takes hold remains so far unknown. The most effective treatment consists of a combination of specific antibiotics for eight weeks. 13. One of Congo’s most notorious singers, Pepe Kalle (1951–1998), was also known to have suffered from the mbasu on one of his legs. Still today this is remembered by many as the result of a sacrifice he had to make in return for his fétiche-based fame. Those who know that Pepe Kalle was a prominent member of Sukyô Mahikari blame his disease on this affiliation. 14. Next to the mbasu, the most notorious diseases ‘cast onto someone for a particular reason’ (Li. maladies ya kobwakela), are ‘bird’s disease’ (maladie ya ndeke) i.e. epilepsy, and ‘cockroach disease’ (maladie ya mpese), another skin disease that results in itching and spots on the skin, which was explained to me also as la gâle (scabies). 15. Ben is Gujarati for ‘sister’ and is the title used for the committed professionals of the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University. All sisters wear plain white sarees and are reputed to follow a vow of chastity. This clearly adds to the general mystery that surrounds the Raja Yoga movement. 16. Also in biomedical terms Buruli ulcers are known to eventually heal. 17. I.e. those who have only inherited one abnormal copy of the haemoglobin gene, from only one of their parents, and therefore only carry the gene and do not suffer from the disease themselves. 18. The Centre de Médecine Mixte et d’Anémie SS (C.M.M.A.S.S.), locally known as Hôpital Mabanga, was built in 2012 with donations from the private sector in the neighbourhood of Mabanga (Yolo-Sud, commune de Kalamu).

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Cf. http://www.energy-assistance.org/​fr/​Bulletin/​newsletter_​51, accessed 3 March 2017, and http://www.santetropicale.com/​rdc/​actus.asp?​id=​14568, accessed 3 March 2017. 19. Cf. Minga, Koto, Egboki and Suzuki 2014. The findings of the study indicate that ‘repeated administration of biofield therapy is considered effective for individuals with SCD who have various symptoms, although the care given by the practitioners may have had some influence on the clinical outcomes.’ See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​pubmed/​24445353?​dopt=​ Abstract, accessed 3 March 2017. 20. His resignation from the Rosicrucian order (AMORC) was motivated by a disappointment regarding this organisation’s mail order system, which, according to him, was ‘in a total mess’. Continuing to frequent the Ordre Souverain du Temple Initiatique (OSTI) in Pretoria had become ‘too difficult from the fact that I didn’t have transport to go and attend the lectures. I was just reading at home’, which was not enough to understand the complexities of the ‘Jewish mysticism’ (Kabbalah) they advocate. 21. The idea that medical drugs are poisonous is not new in Central Africa (cf. N.R. Hunt 1999; L. White 2000). It should be stressed that, unlike EMM and TMAJ, MOA practises its Traitement Purificatoire Okada much rather in unison with biomedicine (see Chapter 1). 22. Katrien Pype (2011a: 297) sees public confessions and private ‘soul-­healing’ sessions with an individual pastor as performances that construct the person. On-stage performances especially are more than just narration, and have the effect of producing public self-knowledge and personal awareness. Although they do not appear as public confessions, EMM and TMAJ’s expériences de foi are also rhetoric self-presentations and performative instances that construct the person, as is the case for any conversion narrative, witnessing accounts or public intervention in general. This individualises dealing with evil, which is encouraged by the fact that the movements’ aetiology aims to consider evil and karma an individual rather than a social matter. 23. EMM’s core values of cleansing/​cleanliness and ancestor worship cumulates in collective tidying-up of cemeteries (cf. Chapter 4). 24. See for instance EMM’s website http://www.johreiafrica.com/​, accessed 21 December 2014. Among Messianiques in Kinshasa this has so far remained an unexplored technology of proselytization, mostly because of missing translations into French, Lingala or other Congolese languages, as well as insufficient internet connection speeds and access.

I6 (In) Touch without Contact Johrei and the Aura of the Self

Before I was really choleric and difficult to bear. But now I’m tolerant. … That’s what spirituality is all about. If your spirituality evolves, your mentality also develops. It’s like Yoga: ce sont des disciplines qui aident à controller son moi [they are disciplines that help to control one’s self]. In EMM we have added a physical force to it, but it’s the attitude that will end up changing. —Barbara, Ngaba, March 2012

This chapter is concerned with Johrei’s ‘problem of presence’, as Engelke (2007) has called the paradox of having to make something present (as in the case of his research into the Holy Spirit), the material absence of which is an inherent precondition of its existence.1 Johrei’s light, or ‘physical force’ as Barbara calls it, is ‘invisible’ as well, and thus it similarly requires to be rendered present. This works by stimulating the senses with a variety of things, which touch and engage the human sensorium, both during the transmission of Johrei and, as a result of it, in dreams. By drawing on the concept of the iconic chain, I try to show how Messianiques sensorially ‘clothe’ themselves in the atmosphere, or indeed in the ‘light’ of their things, ranging from the Goshintai calligraphy to the Ohikari amulet, the practitioner’s body and his/her hand. Like Barbara, they eventually start embodying, or incarnating, and thus remediating this atmosphere as part of their individual selves, which thus become part and parcel of the iconic chain. The focus on religious materiality does not restrict our analysis to the level of sensory experience and the body. Local intellectual elaborations about how these material things within the iconic chain of Johrei, and thus the healing process as such, actually work, are part and parcel of this process of ‘making present’. Thus, on the one hand, the correct and sophisticated manipulation of things implies a manoeuvring in the

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realms of style, atmosphere and the senses, while on the other hand it implies the mobilisation of intellectual frameworks, which explain the ways in which these things make Johrei work. Similarly, the study of personhood has stressed the importance of, on the one hand, the more subjective, interior level of lived experience, of the world of the senses and the body, of emotions and intuition, and on the other hand, the more objective and objectifying levels of concepts and cosmology.2 Hence the didactical subdivision of the chapter, which should not make us forget, however, that both the sensory and the conceptual dimensions of personhood are really fundamentally intertwined. The argument pursued is that, in the long run, Messianiques’ senses are tuned and conditioned by EMM’s aesthetic atmosphere, which is amplified by opposition to the wider religious landscape. This results in the fostering of a private and intimately felt difference, or alterity, of the practising self, which grows into being part of the iconic chain. Or, in line with emic ways of putting it: when practising Johrei, practitioners imbue or ‘charge’ their so-called ‘aura’ with aesthetic difference, which is considered to be a protection. Johrei and its iconic chain, in this sense, is a technique of the self, or as Barbara put it: a ‘discipline that helps to control one’s self’.

The Sensory Self: Johrei’s Iconic Chain Aesthetic Difference Even though some practise it at home and, in rare cases, also on the street in front of a Johrei unit, Johrei is considered ‘stronger’, i.e. more effective, if it is executed inside the ‘church’ or ‘temple’ building. The model of a decent Johrei center is based on Japanese-style minimalism, which can be reminiscent of the seductive and sharp proportions of many corporate designs. Inside the buildings there is an absence of colour symbolism, which is a marked aesthetic difference when compared to Pentecostal churches, where blue and red curtains, hung at intervals, are regularly used. The predominant use of white in both EMM and TMAJ’s centres – tiles and plastic chairs are white, just as all painted walls and ceilings – provides the perfect contrast to the dark suits of the officiants (Fr./Li. those who guide the ceremony) during services, whose ritualised bows and minimalist moves give the irresistible impression that they are drawing and performing calligraphy with their bodies.

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Illustration 6.1 EMM’s ‘altar’. The Goshintai calligraphy and Meishu Sama’s portrait. Photo by the author.

But the interiors of all centres are far from finished, because of frequent problèmes de moyens (problems of means, i.e. money). Only the two headquarters (of EMM and TMAJ respectively), as well as EMM’s Johrei centres of Lemba and Mokali, really stand out in terms of aesthetic difference, with their white walls, tiled floors, ordered plastic chairs, fresh flowers outside and inside, systematic sweeping and cleanliness, toilets with water, etc. Smaller centres are either located in a member’s living room that has been vacated and transformed for the purpose of the ‘church’, or in a provisory, unfinished construction project which resembles the countless, still unfinished, born-again churches, whose improvised character expresses the style of la débrouillardise (from Fr. se débrouiller, the art of getting by), as Kinois call improvising to make ends meet. While EMM and TMAJ’s ‘buildings’ follow the axis mundi logic, their local orientation does not have to be aligned with any auspicious directionality, as is the case for mosques and Catholic churches. Yet similarities with these traditions exist in relation to the specific arrangement of paraphernalia inside of the prayer rooms: the prayer halls of the different units are ‘consecrated’ with a holy calligraphy and a portrait photograph of Meishu Sama.

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Illustration 6.2 Two seekers transmitting Johrei in TMAJ’s unit of Petrocongo, Masina Sans-Fil. Photo by the author.

Written Light The calligraphy is referred to as Goshintai, which is a term everybody knows. It is a vertical sequence of ‘Chinese letters’ (Fr. lettres Chinoises), as the Japanese ideograms were described to me on several occasions. Both the founder’s portrait picture and the Goshintai are neatly framed and suspended side by side on one of the centre’s four interior walls, where they constitute the visual focal points of the ‘altar’. The altar itself includes a half-shelf, half-table structure, where ancestral offerings are placed during services. EMM’s minister Joseph explained the Goshintai to me as follows: It contains five ideograms; five letters, which signify ‘true God of the great Light’. According to oriental custom [Fr. coutume orientale], the calligraphy is a vehicle for a message and a force [la calligraphie véhicule un message et une force] … Peter: Is the light the same as that transmitted during Johrei? … Joseph: A person [if in the same room as a Goshintai] does indeed receive Johrei [from the calligraphy], but it is not channelled. It is like, when receiving the sunrays in the open: they spread out. But when one takes this thing, what is it called, a magnifying glass [Fr. loupe], this very glass, if one places it here the sunrays will be concentrated, and it burns. It is in the same way, if you are in a [place] where there is a Goshintai, you will

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receive light, but if somebody raises his hand [to give Johrei], the rays will be concentrated and channelled [Fr. canalisé].

Joseph is one of the chief instructors during EMM, and later TMAJ’s, teaching sessions. He presents the initiated member’s hand as a ‘magnifying glass’ with an obvious mechanical and instrumental understanding of the invisible processes that govern the world. The role of scripture here is, of course, important. As I gathered from several Messianiques’ rather unspectacular descriptions of the Goshintai, this Japanese ideogram means precisely what it does, which makes it a powerful example of iconicity, a visual mantra, where the signified and the signifier stand in a relationship not only of similarity but, more than that, of identity (see general introduction). The same applies for the Ohikari amulet, a small iron pendant described as médaillon sacré (sacred medal), which members receive upon initiation. Wearing it (Li. kolata Ohikari) entitles one to transform one’s status from being a receiver of Johrei to somebody who can give it. Members explain that inside the small circular metal pendant there is a ‘little piece of paper’ with the Japanese ideogram for light (Jap. hikari, Fr. lumière, Li. muinda). EMM and TMAJ’s Ohikari amulets cannot be opened, however, without breaking the glue of the seal (see Illustrations 6.3–6.5). To understand both EMM and TMAJ’s aesthetic appeal, and its potential to scare people, it is helpful to look at how the working of things is explained: one may think that it is the invisible entity of the meaning of the sign that, like a spirit, ‘loads’ the sign, as if filling a container. This would make the sign a materialisation of a thought, a meaning, which is initially detached and has the capacity to act through it. However, in Joseph’s understanding, it is not the ‘meaning’ of the sign that accounts for its power. For him Goshintai’s power is dependent on two other criteria, which constitute the origin of the object: the moment of its conception, and its aesthetic texture and size, or style. In July 2010 I asked him while he was transmitting Johrei to me what it was that made an Ohikari a real Ohikari and why I could not simply try to fabricate one for myself. Joseph’s response was striking: How will you fabricate it yourself? [If this would work, then] everyone could have done it, no? How would that work? Because the person who has made the Ohikari has done so upon divine order. By writing, the great light has passed through his arm towards the palm of the hand, towards the paintbrush, towards the pen, and this has charged [Fr. chargé], automatically, the paper. And the person who wears this now emits [Fr. dégager] this very light. So one cannot make it oneself, this is very difficult, it will have no effect (Joseph, Gombe, July 2010).

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Every Messianique, even if she/he is not or not yet the proud owner of an Ohikari, knows very well that the piece of paper inside it was written by Meishu Sama himself during his lifetime in Japan. It is one of the first things one learns when approaching the movements. This emphasis makes the semiotic/semiological question of the relationship between the sign and its signified secondary: what makes the thing powerful is the origin of its production, in particular who made and touched it rather than what it encodes or represents. According to this logic, the Ohikari is a relic, or an icon, rather than a symbol. Comparable instances where the thing, even if written, is seen as an icon of its maker, include the autographs fans collect from their favourite football, cricket or music star, and the souvenirs and art posters one buys at the place of their original, just like Catholic sacred water with healing powers, or the prasad, as Hindus call the edible substance blessed by the deity’s idol upon darshan in a Hindu temple. The underlying logic is what Frazer called ‘contagious magic’, where ‘things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed’ (Frazer 1922: 11). Pype (2012: 159) critically engages with Benjamin’s thesis of the art object losing its aura if mass-produced. With regard to the massbroadcast Pentecostal melodrama, she stresses that ‘the Holy (as well as the Satanic) can be transmitted via mass-mediated programs’. Quoting Gell’s article on ‘technologies of enchantment’ (1992), she argues that Kinshasa’s spectators are well aware that ‘it is the way an art object’, in her case the melodrama, ‘is construed as having come into the world [that] is the source of the power such objects have over us – their becoming rather than their being’ (Gell 1992: 46, quoted in Pype 2012: 159). In this way, it is the source of inspiration and artistic knowledge that is responsible for the moral quality of a movie’s aura. The Ohikari is not very different. Both the Ohikari and the melodrama gather their (positive or negative) intention from their fabricants, who ‘charge’ it, as Joseph explains. Later in the same conversation, he explained that this principle may basically apply to everything: ‘A vehicle, which is driven or moves, [for instance], always has the spirit of its fabricant’ (Joseph, Gombe, June 2010). According to him, this explains why some cars give greater protection than others during accidents, a logic which is commonly also held to apply to houses, which host the spirits of their owners. In the case of a house, especially if it has been constructed with ‘ill-gotten money’ (gained through fétiche and sacrifice), it is said to host the spirits of the victims that have been sacrificed for it. Thus the house is iconically tied to its builder

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and his/her respective level of morality. Things tend to protract the moral quality of their inceptor. The power of both the Goshintai and the Ohikari also depends on their respective size and style. This points to the written thing’s atmospheric effect rather than to its meaning, which supports Meyer’s (2010a) request that social scientists ought to become more sensitive to ‘styles of binding’ and ‘aesthetics of persuasion’ rather than sticking to meaning-based approaches: ‘the emergence and sustenance of social formations depends on styles that form and bind subjects not only through cognitive imaginations, but also through moulding the senses and building bodies’ (2009a: 22). Important in this regard ‘is the question of how the aesthetics and styles that particular new media forms imply clash or can be made to merge with established religious aesthetic styles’ (Meyer 2009a: 14). That EMM and TMAJ’s aesthetic style clashes with established styles in Kinshasa and even marks a strong aesthetic difference is demonstrated by Papa Claude’s account of his first entry into EMM’s prayer hall. He was simply horrified at the sight of the Goshintai calligraphy: I look at the Goshintai of Lufuluabo [Johrei centre] and say to myself: ‘Ah but this is unbelievable! This kid here [his younger brother, who brought him there] is into magie! Even the money that I had asked him for was an occasion for him to sacrifice me! This kid, he has money, where does this money come from? And my disease, now I get it, it must be this kid who was sacrificing me! (Claude, Lemba, June 2011).

One glance at the Goshintai upon entering the hall was enough for Claude to be convinced he was being subjected to sacrifice and magie. His sensation, produced by the Goshintai, was intuitively one of uncanny danger. Other Messianiques, but also random visitors, have described their first encounter with EMM and the Goshintai in similar ways. It should be noted that it is the same feeling of initial repulsion and fear, caused by uncanny aesthetic difference, which later became what attracted Claude. In terms of the terminology developed in Chapter 2, the aesthetic perception of a secret being unheimlich and therefore illegitimate flipped into one that is heimlich and legitimate, now suggesting trust rather than treason. The diabolical and the divine appear as two sides of the same coin of aesthetic difference. Johrei’s miraculous superpower cannot be dissociated from the sensory experience induced by the places where it is practised and the things that constitute it. The presence of the Goshintai lends the buildings’ interior a special ‘aura’, as Messianiques themselves explain it, which newcomers in particular perceive as aesthetic difference. The Goshintai’s size, position and ritualistic

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presentation alone clouds the spectator with awe. The hermetic and secretive character of the cryptic writing only contributes to the aesthetic riddle it offers to the senses at large. Reading Light Iconic or ‘atmospheric’ uses of written text or scripture, beyond its literary utility, are not foreign to Africa’s past and present. In his work on Luba Christians around the missionary W.F.P. Burton, David Maxwell (2016: 379) reminds us that among the Luba ‘the Bible also had a talismanic quality. Missionary photographs of bonfire meetings for the purpose of destroying charms reassigned as polluted substances show converts holding the scriptures aloft to ward off evil spirits that might jump from the fire.’ In a way, the use of Japanese writing in the Goshintai and the Ohikari is reminiscent of situations of first contact between Africans and written texts, especially the Bible, which was introduced by European missionaries (cf. Behrend 2003, 2010). For the Lower Congo region, Janzen and MacGaffey (1974: 12–13) remind us that ‘the Book was seen as a kind of n’kisi, a sacred medicine, akin to other bundles and statues invested with sacred powers’ (12),3 as is also known from sacred books in Europe such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, for instance (Brown 2003: 70). EMM and TMAJ’s approach to reading suggests a utility that exceeds the transmission of information. Part of the ritual prescriptions is the reading of the founder’s teachings. Not everyone observes this requirement as an exercise for personal intellectual development. The aesthetic act of making eyes meet letters is in itself presented as having a beneficial effect: Johrei through Printed Words You may wonder what I mean when you look at this title. Once you read the article you will come to understand my meaning, which is that people who read my writings receive Johrei through their eyes. Let me explain the reason for this. You must fully know the fact that the consciousness of a writer reflects on the reader through written words. That is, the spiritual vibration of a writer reaches and influences the spiritual being of a reader. All my writings are inspirations from God, so the spiritual being of the reader is purified through the vibration of the written word. By saying this I do not mean that rigid writings alone are good. Written words should be full of interest. Otherwise, the readers would not be drawn to reading them through, so they would be of no use at all. Needless to say, interest is of the essence. Writings should be so full of continuous, enthralling magnetism that readers could not put them down … November 26, 1952 (Okada 1999: 325–326).

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Although not using the language of ‘talismanic power’, ‘sacred medicine’ or expressions like ‘invested with sacred power’, as anthropologists have done for a long time, the idea is that written words carry the potential to channel the charisma intended by their author. This makes reading, if the text is of divine inspiration – as Okada suggests of his own written teachings – an aesthetic practice and a charismatic experience of divine unison. Implicitly, Okada is a commentator on certain semiotic ideologies at work in Kinshasa today. One day André, a close friend of mine, stayed over at my place because we had been having an engaging discussion the entire evening and it was too late for him to take a taxi. When entering my room his eyes fell on the thick, green ‘Bible’ of the Grail Movement entitled Dans la Lumière de la Vérité (In the Light of Truth) by the mythical author Abd-Rushin. When I picked the book up from the table and handed it to him, André reacted with anxious and categorical refusal. Reading one line of this ‘occult literature’ may have been enough to be ensnared by the ruses of the Devil, he explained to me later. Like in the case of the Goshintai, it is less the meaning of the written words contained within the book than the inherent intention(s) it is presumed to be ‘charged’ with, i.e. the origins of its production. In addition, suspicion is not aroused by meaning but by the book’s aesthetic style and ‘atmosphere’, as I have described for the Goshintai. Reading is not pure reflexive business with thoughts but a sensual, aesthetic friction with a book and its letters. Many have explained how their first contact with a book said to be of ‘occult’ nature was a moment of fear and being touched. It should be noted that, both in Lingala and French, somebody who is thought to have taken on the ‘bad thoughts’ or opinions of somebody else is said to be intoxiqué (akomi intoxiqué: he has been intoxicated). In this way, mental and material processes are metonymically conflated, which is similar to Meishu Sama’s theory of sins causing toxins in the body. In his monograph on Spirits and Letters, Thomas Kirsch argues that many analytical dichotomies in the social sciences, especially Max Weber’s opposition between charisma and its routinisation and rationalisation, have obstructed the analytical sighting of the important empirical reality that there is often a ‘co-occurrence of charisma and writing’ (Kirsch 2008: 10). There is a de facto co-dependency and an ongoing interaction between ‘charisma/spirit/orality’ and ‘institution/ letter/literacy’, to the extent that these very dichotomies must themselves be questioned. Kirsch’s impressive scrutiny of literature on prophetic movements from across sub-Saharan Africa, supported by his own fieldwork in the Spirit Apostolic Church in Zambia, reveals that

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spirits do not necessarily go out of the window when letters enter the room. On the contrary, if looked at as embedded in their social practice and context, letters may very well correspond with and contribute to the presence of charisma. That written letters may channel ‘sacred’ or demonic powers – as André was convinced –strongly supports this point, and as the abovementioned passage shows, it is what Okada has also theorised. It is this semiotic ideology that explains why the reading of EMM and TMAJ’s teachings is seen as a required and beneficial religious practice. Okada’s language of ‘vibrations’ and ‘enthralling magnetism’, most probably a legacy of the influence of mesmerism on the New Thought movement, which had aroused his curiosity in Japan, offers an alternative to the idea of ‘power’, ‘force’ and ‘spirits’ to indicate the charisma or the emotive effects that written texts can also have.4 The primordial role of the author and the origin of the text’s production are, as for the Ohikari discussed in the next section, also a central quality. It is the author who ‘charges the paper’ (as Joseph would say) with either a divine intentionality, which Okada calls Johrei, or with its diabolic opposite, as André believed in relation to the Bible of the Grail Movement. Wearing Light Similar to his explanation about the hand of a person who transmits Johrei being a magnifying glass, Joseph recurred to another technological metaphor to explain the Ohikari: I have always given an example, which is a little striking, a little concrete. Take the case of a radio station, a transmitter [émetteur]. I, over here, have a radio receiver [Fr. poste récepteur]. You, imagine you have your own, and he over there has a big one. The transmitter sends a signal [émission], and all of us, we capture it. My receiver may have two ranges of frequency, or nine, and I can capture [the signal]. [Thus] we receive the same phonie5 in the same way, although the volume differs. … This is the Ohikari. The divine energy which my radio receives, it’s the divine world, it is God. My own Ohikari, it’s a receiver, it captures energy to enable me to channel it. The volume differs, i.e. the intensity of the energy channelled and radiated differs from one person to another. The transmitter is the divine world, so it’s God, [while] the receiver [poste récepteur], it’s my Ohikari (Joseph, June 2010).

A member of Kinshasa’s Dojon of Sukyô Mahikari, whose initiates wear a similar pendant called Omitama,6 explained that ‘it is like electricity: God is the Inga Dam7 and the sacred medal is like an electrical

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cabinet [cabine électrique] connected to it.’ For Messianiques the Ohikari has the technological quality of mediating divine energy, which enables its owner to save (Li. kobikisa, Fr. sauver) others. Wearing and possessing an Ohikari indicates per se that one is favoured by a divine blessing, as it reflects that one has had the ‘grace’ to afford the initiation fee of 50 USD (in 2010) and 100 USD (since 2012), respectively.8 Somebody’s Ohikari falling on the ground, or somebody forgetting to put it on is seen as an ancestor expressing a warning about one’s current life situation: utter care is required. Usually in such circumstances a member consults a responsable in order to receive ‘orientations’, which often leads to a donation (Fr. offrande, Li. mabonza) and a number of Johreis to receive. If the Ohikari falls on the ground the warning is more severe than when one forgets to put it on. In this case it has to be reconsecrated by a minister in exchange for a donation. While the Ohikari thus indicates if there is a major threat in one’s life, EMM and TMAJ’s authorities deny practising any form of divination. It is not problematic to remove the medal from underneath one’s blouse or shirt to show it to other people (just as touching it is no problem),9 but it is important to always ‘wear’ (Li. kolata: to wear, Fr. porter) it, ‘even when making love’. The Ohikari should only be removed during showers. There, a nail on the bathroom wall is supposed to be reserved for hanging it. This way of storing the Ohikari appears to be a low-profile version of Mahikari and also MOA’s habit of storing the ‘sacred object’ in a specially reserved little box. The most urgent ancestral warning, usually regarding one’s life being at stake, occurs if the Ohikari falls into the toilet or actually ‘disappears’ (Fr. perdre, Li. kobungisa) through loss or theft. In this case, only ‘reinitiation’ (entailing another payment of 50/100 USD for a new Ohikari) can solve the problem and restore security to the person.10 When I returned to Kinshasa in 2012, my friend Christian was no longer wearing his Ohikari. After initial hesitation he confided in me that it had fallen into the toilet while he was washing. As a result, he had drastically reduced the frequency of his visits to EMM’s headquarters. Not only did he lack the money for a reinitiation or any major offering, but admitting the loss of his Ohikari would be humiliating and embarrassing, depending on who asked him about it.11 It would openly reveal his overall state of misfortune, or bad karma as Messianiques call it. The auspicious and indeed capricious behaviour of the Ohikari makes it similar to a tool for divination. Joseph explained that Ohikari were ‘like a dashboard [Fr. tableau de bord] in a car, indicating whether the tank is full [plein], or whether it is not full [pas full]’ (Joseph, Gombe, June 2010),

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Illustration 6.3 (left) MOA’s amulet. Photo by the author. Illustration 6.4 (bottom right) EMM’s Ohikari with the Izunome sign in its centre. Photo by the author. Illustration 6.5 (top right) The Hikari sign. Encapsulated inside the Ohikari is a miniature calligraphy of the letter sign for ‘light’. Photo by the author.

reflecting one’s karma or la permission des ancêtres (ancestors’ permission), as Christian would often say himself to refer to his (mostly dire) financial situation. The appropriation of Johrei healing in contemporary Africa has to be understood in light of the historical appropriations of electricity. Heike Behrend notes that, when first introduced, ‘electricity was identified and connected with the already existing concepts of power and force used for healing and harming … [It] confirmed and reinforced more than it questioned the local discourse on power’ (2010: 15). However, while Behrend was concerned with situations of first contact with electrical power, today the local discourse on power is replete with concepts from electronics and communication technology. In a reunion with EMM’s missionaries in 2010, responsable Freddy explained to his followers that the human soul is like a SIM card: it happens to be

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blocked and has to be properly unlocked in order to be able to communicate and flow again. This unlocking is what EMM is all about, he explained. Amulets as devices of protection have a long history in Africa.12 Stories circulate about the miraculous powers of the Ohikari. In one story from Brazil, the Ohikari was capable of warding off a bullet by making it hit the precise spot where the Ohikari was located on its wearer’s chest. Gérard (32) who was an EMM missionary but left the movement because of internal rivalries, continues to wear the Ohikari despite the fact that he became a responsable of the AMORC movement. However, a number of responsables deny that the Ohikari is an instrument of protection. Apart from transmitting Johrei, it has no effect whatsoever on one’s everyday life, they say. Alain, for instance, stressed that ‘it has never protected me and I do not wear it for security at all. I always remember what they told me on the day I came to wear this medal, and that they said it is neither mystique nor a protection, but a simple instrument de travail [working tool], not more than that’ (Alain, Mbinza, September 2013). The denial of it being a protection is motivated by the awareness that such explicit materiality may be suspected of magie, which seekers skilfully use to single themselves out (cf. Chapter 2). Internally, the way in which the Ohikari should be explained, whether as a protection or merely a ‘working tool’, contributes to social rivalry and differentiation within the movement. Ministers wear la grande lumière (the great light), or Daikomio in Japanese, which is a similar-looking amulet of a larger size that entitles the wearer to transmit Johrei collectif to the entire community. In 2010 there was only one Congolese minister carrying Daikomio in Kinshasa. In 2013, after the schism, their number had risen to eight (three from EMM and five from TMAJ). Onyemba, a spiritualist veteran who had already joined MOA in 1989, told me he did not care much about ranks and hierarchies. Yet, later on I learned from him that ‘if I were still at MOA today, I should have la grande lumière. … The friends who have stayed there, they all carry the Daikomio now. Me too, I deserve to wear the Daikomio’ (Onyemba, Lemba, June 2011). All in all, the Ohikari’s presence on the carrier’s chest makes him/her perpetually ‘in touch’ with his/her own personal difference, as opposed to those who do not carry one. This closely resembles what Georg Simmel (1992 [1907]: 416) wrote about jewellery (Schmuck), with which one can ‘bejewel oneself with secrecy’ (sich mit einem Geheimnis schmükken). Jewellery increases the Ausstrahlung (aura) of a human being, he writes, which in Kinshasa is taken literally:

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One may speak of human radioactivity. Every individual is surrounded by a larger or smaller sphere of significance, which radiates from him, and in which anyone who has dealings with him is immersed. … The rays of the jewellery, the sensory attention it provokes, create such an expansion of the personality and an intensification of its sphere, that it is bigger, so to speak, when it is ‘bejewelled’.13

Dreams and Photographs A range of movements from all sorts of origins today popularise treaty-like teachings on the role and significance of dreams. Dreams as spiritual technologies are clearly no longer only a feature of African Christianity (cf. Hastings 1994: 586). Among the adepts of Eckankar, dreams are most important in guiding the spiritual quest of a true Eckiste, who always has a dream diary next to his bed in which to note all sorts of oneiric activity. For Jean-Paul, the Eckiste whom I befriended in my neighbourhood, Eckankar’s emphasis on dreams is the key to his nostalgia about the ‘spirituality of our ancestors’, as he put it, which he considers to a large part irretrievably lost. In Bantu Africa and beyond, the intimate zone of the dream space has for a long time been a preferred hang-out for the living and the dead to encounter each other. Like television in the African context, dreams have long been spaces of revelation, confirmation and serious commentary on lived reality.14 Especially during the night following initiation, Johrei is well known and even expected to provoke dreams in which one usually meets one or several of one’s ancestors. In the face of questions and expectations from initiated members, a new initiate will have difficulties returning to a Johrei center without having dreamed this first night. Dreams (Li. ndoto, Fr. rêve, songe) are frequently also referred to as messages (Li./ Fr. message). For Marie-Jeanne, who had joined her brother at EMM and was looking for a way out of the recent bankruptcy of her transport business, a single session of Johrei had caused an overwhelming dream experience: she had seen her beloved but deceased father, who in the dream had handed her a ‘large sum of money’. Without hesitating she took this as a premonitory sign that her business was close to being rescued. Guided by a responsable, Marie-Jeanne interpreted her father’s generosity as a direct response, a counter-gift, to her generous offering of divine light to him (Marie-Jeanne, Gombe, July 2010). Similarly, Maman Lusamba once received an ancestral recipe in a dream, which had long been forgotten among the people of her ethnic group in Kinshasa. The next day she got up and went straight to prepare it for her family, as she proudly announced. She described the

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meal as succulent (Lusamba, Kinshasa, July 2013). Examples like these are abundant and contact with an ancestor in a dream is systematically framed and interpreted by EMM’s responsables as a highly positive and rewarding experience for the spiritual gift of Johrei. This bears remarkable similarities to the Jamaa movement, which was founded by Placide Tempels in the 1940s among the newly urbanised populations of the industrialised mining areas of colonial Katanga (De Craemer 1977: 85, Fabian 1971: 180). As in Jamaa, much of EMM and TMAJ’s local pastoral care is organised around the interpretation of dreams. Unlike Jamaa, however, there is no proper method of interpretation. Joseph explains how he developed his own ability to interpret dreams – or his ‘gift’ as he calls it – when he was living with his grandmother in a Luba village: ‘My grandmother often told me a lot of things. She told me: if you sleep, if you see something [in your dreams], be careful, this is not good. Later, when I tried to get deeper into the matter, I understood that she was right’ (Joseph, Gombe, July 2010). Bénédicte Meiers (2013) stresses the importance of the dream as an ‘institution of interiority’ among Pentecostals of the Congolese Combat Spirituel church (201–203). As if it were a small-scale possession in private, the dream account allows one to express what can usually not be said: ‘It is through the dream that adepts can publicly express their desires and exorcise their demons’ (Meiers 2013: 202). In the experience of Messianiques, dreams and the encounters with ancestors that they offer are directly related to the practice of Johrei. One may see a link of intermediality between the two: the dream is the confirmation that Johrei has reached into the practitioner’s private sociality, his/her intimate interior and emotional constitution. During so-called orientation sessions, he/she shares these with a responsable in private, leading ideally to a strengthening of his/her self-control. The Master’s Photogenic Presence In line with local prophetic tradition, the instigator of a movement – in this case Meishu Sama – matters crucially to all followers. A photograph is used as a presencing technique, whose spiritual efficacy is accompanied by theoretical explanation. In both EMM and TMAJ’s prayer units, the photograph is attached to the wall on the right-hand side of the Goshintai. Everyone entering will first walk up to the Goshintai, bow, bow to Meishu Sama’s picture, bow again to the Goshintai, then clap three times, say the Amatsu Norito prayer (see Chapter 7), clap again three times and bow again.

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When I visited EMM’s unit of Mbanza Ngungu in Lower Congo, I was accompanied by Frank, a friend and motorcycle taxi driver from Kinshasa, who is also an assistant pastor in a branch of the Pentecostal church of William Branham (Message du Temps de la Fin). His surprise was intense when he saw the photograph. Frank’s subsequent condemnation was caused less by the presence of the photograph itself, however, than by the bowing down in front of it. Such a corpothetic attitude (Pinney 2004) indicated and confirmed to him that this was idolâtrie, he said. Meishu Sama’s photograph is also put up in the homesteads of members, who receive it on the day of their initiation. Importantly, the picture should be placed higher than one’s head so that one is looking up to the master when bowing down and praying in front of him. In her article on Jesus pictures in Ghana, Birgit Meyer (2010c) summarises the contradictory attitude many Pentecostals have towards pictures. Under the dogmatic pressure to deny that pictures may have any iconic quality, some of her informants stressed that calendars with Jesus pictures, for instance, were mere aides-mémoire. This point was opposed and contradicted by other practices, observable in movies, which indicated that it is very much possible that ‘there is a spirit in that image’. Messianiques are very outspoken about Meishu Sama’s spirit in the picture. Used as a substitute for the Goshintai in smaller foyers de lumière where fewer than ten followers gather, the picture, like a Goshintai, is said to radiate the ‘aura’ of the founder and thus protect the room. It is used as a protection, not only at home, but also in wallets (cf. Illustration 0.1). TMAJ’s booklet La main de Meishu Sama (The Hand of Meishu Sama), which is a translation from a Brazilian Portuguese original, explains how Meishu Sama’s hand, though ‘merely’ a photograph, has produced ‘graces’ in people’s lives.15 It is also possible to reverse the direction and transmit Johrei to a photograph so as to reach a distant person. This closely resembles the photo magic described by Heike Behrend (2003), who has explored the usage of ‘photographs Africans produced for Africans’ for healing and harming (129).16 Behrend de-exoticises this matter by pointing out that identical practices of photo magic have been in use in Europe, too. The case of EMM and TMAJ is an invitation to widen the Africa-Europe binary of cultural synchronicities to a world focus. Photo magic, here, appears to be a rather ‘global’ phenomenon, which is well known locally for originating in Japan and reaching Africa via Brazil. While the contemplation of Meishu Sama’s picture may indeed be seen as a ‘sacred gaze’ (Morgan 2005) performed with a particular

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‘corpothetic’ attitude, the real ‘picture’ in relation to which ‘corpothetics’ has always been crucial, is of course the ‘coeval’ and cospatial human Johrei partner. Touch without Contact Messianiques in Kinshasa know that, like in Japan, Johrei ‘work[s] also if the receiving person is not aware, or at work doing something else, or doesn’t know about Johrei at all’ (Staemmler 2011: 177). Some members of EMM said that conversation is also allowed, as long as it touches on issues related to the church and its mission, be they personal problems or matters of doctrine. TMAJ, however, refutes this categorically, stressing that the necessity of silence and concentration are preconditions for successful Johrei transmission. These differences in semiotic ideology are yet another one of the grounds on which TMAJ based its criticism of EMM’s ‘improper’ way of doing Johrei. Many stressed the importance of concentration during Johrei, ‘the best prayer [being] the one from the bottom of your heart’ as TMAJ’s Fiston put it. What matters most, he said, are the necessary attitude (Li./Fr. sentiment) of sincere love (Fr. amour, Li. bolingo) and altruism (Li./Fr. altruisme). Without this attitude, Johrei does not work, he explained. ‘It’s a great moment of concentration. Even if we did it over here [next to the noisy street traffic], we will forget the noise. One must not speak. The disturbing noise [Fr. bruit], in fact, it’s not the others but it’s you! One should remain concentrated even if it’s a [simple] practice, it’s an entire prayer’ (Fiston, Mbinza, September 2013). But as is observable in practice, there is no unanimity concerning the necessity of concentration, nor is the shutting of the eyes systematically encouraged. Non-accustomed neophytes in particular tend to peep or openly look at one another, sometimes displaying a sense of curiosity about the close-up physiognomy, the bodily composition or, in case of the receiver, the lines in the palm of the giver’s hand. Some givers suspend their hand threateningly close in front of the receiver’s face and body, sometimes to the extent that one gets the impression that the olfactive senses start reacting. But given the unusual nature of this voiceless, interpersonal, bodily ‘face-to-face’ confrontation, the peeping and gazing at each other is an understandable reflex. It is inevitable to go beyond the understanding of the eye as merely a visual organ and rather understand it in an intersensorial conflation with the haptic whole of the body. In his article on the haptic effects of screens, Jojada Verrips (2002) investigates the relationship between humans and screens, these material carriers of putatively ‘other’, more

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virtual, worlds. Verrips agrees with scholars who question the rigid ‘Cartesian mind-body split and ocular-centrism’, claiming that ‘a better understanding of [the] impact [of screens] can … be reached if we perceive our relation with screens not in terms of a subject “object” relation, but of a subject “subject” [or body to “body”] relationship’ (22). ‘Looking at screens in itself is not merely a visual but above all a tactile process, a process in which our total body is involved and not only our eyes, let alone our mind’ (26). The moment of Johrei transmission suggests an equivalent conflation of the visual and the haptic senses, making the body and its skin a larger ‘corporeal eye’, and the gaze a truly ‘haptic’ experience.17 Two ‘disarmed’ bodies immobilised on plastic chairs, deprived of their vocal ‘ammunition’ to produce themselves, are ritually installed to perceive each other through their two larger ‘corporeal eyes’. The haptic screen here is the other ‘person’ with his/her fleshy fabric, while the film being screened is one of physical interpersonal difference, sensed, perceived and contemplated through the ‘corporeal eye’.18 In Kinshasa the gaze is an important semiotic instance with which to ‘play the status game’, i.e. to display and negotiate an interpersonal status relationship between obedience and superiority. Depending on one’s background and upbringing, who is allowed to look into whose eyes is subject to status and regulation. During conversations, being hesitant with one’s direct gaze is thus not seen as cowardice but as a sensitive display of respect. Similarly, if not granted by one’s social position or age, looking into the eyes of a superior may be perceived as a blunt lack of respect. Although this rule has evaporated among many of Kinshasa’s youngsters, it is still observable that father-son or teacher-pupil relationships, for instance, continue to be governed and publicly displayed through this semiotic ideology concerning the gaze. Contrasting with these status rules, Johrei ‘merely’ requires an initiated carrier of the Ohikari who is entitled to transmit, regardless of age, gender, class or status. It thus happens that a younger boy in a T-shirt channels Johrei to an older man wearing a suit, for example, which is at first sight a rather unusual scene in status-conscious Congo. The same principle of equality applies to gender, although it is rare for women to stay at a Johrei centre for several hours. Thus, unlike darshan in a Hindu temple, in EMM/TMAJ the ‘touch without contact’ is not sought from a worshipped and superior divinity, but from an egalitarian human Other. Yet the giving hand is always above, and one of the participants necessarily carries an Ohikari.19 This difference in status between the giver and the receiver has to be taken into account, because for many,

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spending a hundred dollars for initiation is an investment that is more than they can afford. However, this difference is far from the oftencriticised distance of the Pentecostal pastor. The Sensory Self If we follow Csordas’ (2004) argument about the experience of alterity as the phenomenological kernel of religion, in EMM and TMAJ’s case this alterity is inherent in the aesthetic ensemble of the iconic chain. During Johrei, the most prominent alterity mediating, ‘giving’ or ‘transmitting’ any sensation, is not a divine spirit or a remote guru, but the silent other person sitting opposite, who gives or receives the channelled energy. Sensorial friction is generated with and through this respective other with whom one is in touch without contact. This results from the intersensorial conflation of silence with the ‘corporeal gaze’ and the ‘haptic’ personal screen of the other’s body, which is kept in a sitting position of ritualistic allure. Given the prominence of the immediate mediator, as well as the controllability of the Johrei energy, what matters during Johrei is much more the Johrei partner opposite and oneself than any remote, capricious or evanescent spiritual agency. The experience of Johrei is of a horizontal energy, which makes me suggest that what others call ‘the sacred’ is here what happens between self and Other. This closely resembles one of the stages in the mbwoolu healing cult among the Yaka ethnic group studied by Renaat Devisch (1998), which has also been practised among Yaka urbanites in Kinshasa. One of the stages in the mbwoolu healing ritual involves the seclusion of the patient in a separated space where he/she finds himself/herself with a number of carved ritual figurines. For several days, the patient performs unction on a daily basis with red earth of his own and the figurine’s body. What Devisch describes for the performance of this unction act closely resembles the experiential register triggered by Johrei. In a way, the ointment used by the mbwoolu patient and the ‘invisible light’ used by Johrei practitioners are homologous, with the respective Johrei partner being comparable to the mbwoolu figurines. Devisch writes: The unction in a play of mirrors between the patient’s own body and the figurines performs a transitional function. The unction affirms the boundary or the bodily envelope as a source of comfort and as a mirror. By the daily unction of his entire body, the patient stimulates his body tone and the sentiment of being intact and cohesive. … the unction awakens tactile receptivity, adaptive permeability, or a predisposition to stimulation. It articulates the skin-self (‘le moi-peau,’ as coined by Anzieu 1974) as a

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faculty of regeneration [and] confidence … The skin has a function as intermediary, as go-between, of transitionality. … (151) Through the interaction with a series of identificatory cult figurines, the patient develops his identity as a unity of social and individual skins. Thus, what arises in the figurines arises also in the patient, that is, a relationship to the body as a source of comfort, confidence, reciprocity, and social distinction. This relational boundary offers to the hatching self the possibility of an ulterior evolution. The play of identification and differentiation leads to a number of delegations, transfers, and in- or excorporations. … (152) In his interaction at once tactile and corporeal, as well as verbal and visual, with these cult figurines, the patient explores a multiplicity of human figures and specular modes of identification. (155)

This closely resembles the procedure of a marche de Johrei (Johrei walk), when Johrei partners are exchanged at regular intervals, for everyone to get a similar level of ‘divine light’ energy, the intensity of which depends on the spiritual level of the giver. Although here the ‘verbal’ dimension is muted to the benefit of the other senses, Johrei must be seen as an equally identificatory mirroring process. Both the Other and the self are simultaneously ‘rubbed’ into existence through sensory friction, which makes Johrei a silent though powerful moment of individuation, a ritualised ‘screening’ of one’s intimate human similarities and differences. Its practice generates a sense of difference vis-à-vis both the Other and one’s self, the experience of which is one of intimate alterity (Csordas 2004: 167), and which makes one realise that Je est un autre, as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud phrased it.20

The Conceptual Self: Negotiating Personhood In May 2012, I encountered a sociology professor (56) at EMM’s Johrei center on Avenue Lufuluabo. In a lengthy conversation, he explained to me that he was going through the toughest crisis of his life and was more than excited to get to know the ‘very accessible, yet so profound teachings they have here at this church’ (Mukamba, May 2012). For him, the idea of questioning himself and his own behaviour as the origin of his crisis seemed like a true revelation. Clearly, how and what people think about themselves and their experiences influences the subjective side of personhood. Next to Johrei as a technique of the self focusing on the body and sensory experience and tuning, EMM’s school of thought also generates the self by advocating a particular way of conceiving of evil and one’s personal responsibility towards it. This more conceptual dimension of personhood will be developed now.

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Ndoki se yo moko: The Self as the Origin of Evil Ah ah moninga éé (3x) To tambola malembe ô na mokili Tambola malembe na mokili ô  mama (2x) Ah muana é, Mesushama éé Bakoko na mokili muana baloba:  tambola malembe na mokili ô  mama Okeyi mbangu obeti libaku éé  muana olobi ndoki Ndoki se yo moko.

Ah my friend (3x) We should walk slowly in this  world We should be careful in this  world, oh mama (2x) Ah child, ah Meishu Sama The ancestors, if alive, they would tell the child: walk slowly in this  world, oh mama If you walk too fast you will  stumble, child, and you will accuse a witch for it But the witch is you, it is yourself! —Guimaranz Mvevo 21

As Helen Hardacre (1984) has argued, Japanese new religions systematically promote a ‘world view of the self’. This resonates with what Paul Heelas (1996) has described as the celebration of the self being a general pattern of the New Age movement. Among spiritualists in Kinshasa the role of the responsible self is articulated mainly against the common aetiology of the numerous Churches of Awakening, which often locate the origins of evil outside of the self. The local president of Soka Gakkai International formulates it strikingly when explaining the core values of his movements: Over here [at SGI], [the focus is on] the individual, because we know that the individual develops [s’élève] all by himself/herself, and that he/she can transform his surroundings. This is contrary to what they say in other movements, especially the Eglises de Réveil [Churches of Awakening], where the human is inherently evil, a sinner, so he cannot do anything by himself. [Over there], divine, spiritual or supernatural forces have to intervene. Over here in Daochin Buddhism, it is the exact opposite: here we say that we ourselves have all potentialities … Through the recitation of the Nam Myoho Renge Kyo22 we will awaken these capacities, and we will elevate our own state of life. What we want is that everybody rises up, and when everybody has risen, we will have reached the ultimate goal of our movement: world peace (Bululu, Lingwala, April 2012).

The self as the basic building block of a society is a long-standing value of Buddhist and Confucian ethics. This can be seen in the Confucian concept of ‘peace’, which posits inner harmony of the individual self as a precondition for social harmony and peace at large, and which contrasts with more ‘Western’ ideas of peace as the absence of violence (cf. Galtung 2001). EMM’s minister Joseph frames it thus: ‘To transform

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the world, Meishu Sama says: one has to transform the individual. We cannot change the whole world if the individual does not change’ (Joseph, Gombe, August 2010). In explaining and defending this value, criticism of Christianity, in particular of Pentecostalism, is systematic and addresses the ways in which people are made to lose their own libre arbitre.23 Some of the criticism is reminiscent of that against the Belgian Catholic-colonial church-state nexus, combined with strong Marxist overtones: ‘They [the Christians] have made people rely on Nzambe pesa ngai [God give me] to make them dependent’ (Jérôme, Gombe, May 2010). But more regular is the critique of Christianity’s tendency to locate any origin of evil in agencies other than the responsible self. EMM and TMAJ’s aetiology differs strongly in this regard in that it presents each problem that occurs in one’s life as a necessary ‘purification’, a small-scale millennial moment that leads to a betterment of one’s condition. The focus is less on the origin of a problem than on what to do to get out of it. This makes divination or prophecy redundant. EMM’s Joseph is very outspoken in this regard: The doctor can do that. But we are not used to doing this. There are churches, yes, who say this, but we, we will not say babuakeli ye [they cast a curse on him/her]. No, we will simply understand a mishap as a manifestation of the ancestors, as it is called, so the impurities, the toxins, these are masumu, sins, you know. And that’s where we stop. We will give you orientations. With the light that you’ll receive, the sins are slowly but gradually eliminated, and [this is how] change will occur (Joseph, Kinshasa, March 2012).

The purposeful presence of evil in the world as a way to purge humans of the sins and toxins contrasts with the explanation of misfortune through demonic attacks. Adopting this alternative aetiology has consequences: Régine (41) explained to me how the prophecy of a pastor at the Congolese Pentecostal church Assemblée Chrétienne de Kinshasa (ACK) had revealed to her that God had provided her with a ‘star that shines’ (une étoile qui brille), i.e. a bright and shining destiny, but that somebody in her family was trying to obstruct her fortune. She was in constant fear of possible demonic attacks and would not dare sleep alone. Panic would arise if there was a mouse or a cockroach in her room at night. But now, thanks to Johrei, she says, I am calm. I am not scared anymore like before. And if something happens [a problem occurs], it is only the spiritual debts that I am paying spiritually. It will pass. Things do not occur randomly [Il n’y a pas de hasard] … And about all that was evil, then I was telling myself these are the projects of Satan. But now I see it rather as a good start, so I can

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[eventually] develop. With Johrei I feel protected, I feel at ease [à l’aise] (Régine, Yolo, May 2013).

The absence of prophecy, divination or any other form of identifying external causes of evil also has important social consequences: EMM and TMAJ’s healing process appears fully individualised and contrasts bluntly with the crucial importance of social consensus, which has long been the basis of therapy management in Central Africa (Janzen 1987). Private counselling is only with a responsable, and confessions are made strictly in private, unlike in many Pentecostal churches. Pype (2011a) argues that the process of ‘confession cum-deliverance’ generates Christian individuals, who confess evil deeds on stage so as to be delivered. Thus ancestral ties and possession are undone within the therapeutic church community, which simultaneously restitutes the dividuality of the person, i.e. its entanglement with her/his novel urban ‘family’ of the church.24 This is not the case in spiritual movements, where guilt is carried as a personal karmic burden. The moral reflexivity and self-responsibility thus incited is not a totally foreign feature. It attaches itself to existing local patterns of moral responsibility, in which any form of misfortune attributable to an invisible attack is understood to be occasioned by an act of provocation by the victim him/herself.25 No evil can strike you if you have not offered a moral failure that opens the gateway for any evildoer to access your group, or, as my local father Jean-Jack (45) put it strikingly: ‘Flies are attracted to meat only if it smells.’ In EMM and TMAJ, this individualising principle is emphasised: everyone yields what he/she has sown. The extent to which this is a programmatic theme is shown by the above-mentioned song, which stresses in its refrain that ndoki se yo moko (the witch is you yourself).26 Yet, where does the self start? And where does it end? And to what extent are ancestors Others or part of the self? Indeed, despite the role explicitly ascribed to the libre arbitre of the self, ancestors prominently determine one’s karma through their own spiritual level, which they express by virtue of protection or the withdrawal thereof. The apparent contradiction between self and ancestors is formally resolved by emphasising that the ancestors are always within and part of the self, because they are located in the blood (Fr. sang, Li. makila), which is justified by reference to the DNA. One’s feelings, reactions and decisions are therefore always also those of one’s ancestors: ‘I am my ancestors, my karma and myself’ (field notes, personal thought, 29 May 2013). 27 However, the precise role of ancestors and their relation with the free will of the self has been a major reason for disagreement. TMAJ’s

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leadership systematically evokes this issue to account for their secession from EMM. EMM’s key prayer to the ancestors, called Pratique ya Sonen (cf. Chapter 8), contains a passage which the seceding responsables did not agree with. The passage reads mpasi na ngai elembo ya bakoko oyo (my ills are but a sign of my ancestors). To the secessionists this meant delegating the origin of misfortune to the ancestors only, liberating the self from any personal responsibility of one’s ills. As a sign of their refusal of this position, TMAJ have scrapped the Pratique ya Sonen prayer altogether, which they tend to rather mock now as irrelevant. Yet, already in 2010 this debate was underway. During a teaching session in 2010, for instance, stress was put on the fact that chacun peut se choisir (everyone can choose himself/herself), stressing that the self is stronger than the ancestors in one’s blood. The diverging positions on this matter gradually came to coincide with the rivalling fronts that eventually led to schism. It is therefore questionable whether these ideological, or dogmatic, differences would have evolved as sharply as they did had there not been the deeper rivalry among EMM’s responsables for leadership and personal importance in the first place. Although this is a matter of interpretation, my view is that it is Marx’s ‘material’ Basis which has caused and determined the ideological Überbau to diverge into two clear-cut positions. But although I think that opinion results from power, and not vice versa, we know that it is always both. The Strengthened Person By purging a person’s material and spiritual bodies from their clouds of sins and toxins, Johrei is imagined to generate a so-called ‘aura’ around the person’s body. Mokichi Okada’s micro-treaty of social psychology entitled ‘aura and radiation’ (cf. Okada 1999 [1984]: 305–307 and EMM 2013) summarises this idea: If someone does a good deed to somebody, the sentiment [Fr. sentiment] of recognition [Fr. reconnaissance] stemming from this person produces a light which will be transmitted by means of the spiritual link [Fr. lien spirituel] [between these people]. This process increases the width and the intensity of the aura of the benefactor. But if somebody generates negative feelings such as vengeance, hatred, jealousy, etc., because of these negative thoughts and actions, one creates negative vibrations, which reflect themselves on the spiritual body. This causes an increase of impurities in the evildoer. Thus, you can understand that one should do good and make others happy, and that one should never incite in others feelings such as vengeance, hatred, jealousy etc. … The accumulation of [such] negative thoughts … in others causes a darkening and a destruction of

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[one’s] aura, which, in the end, provokes [one’s] ruin (reading by Papa Jacques, Mokali, June 2013).

The concept of ‘aura’ is tempting in that it invites us to interpret it, in accordance with Benjamin’s (1977 [1935]) understanding, as the unique quality of an original artwork, which gets lost as soon as it is mechanically reproduced. Would it be didactically apt to consider Johrei a technique to enhance somebody’s personal ‘originality’? The person as a work of art that is ‘originalised’ and lifted out of his/her apparent state of urban mass-anonymity? The sensory generation of embodied selfexperience, which, as I have argued, results from the practice of Johrei’s iconic chain, may be seen precisely as such a process of ‘originalisation’, or ‘individuation’. To consider Johrei as a ‘technique of the self’ is helpful in this regard, because Foucault (1983) developed this concept to express the production of subjects with a personalised moral authority, and thus an agency of power, who can determine and govern their lives as ‘original’ authors in their own right. In the end, is it not really the power to decide where one’s self starts and where it ends, i.e. who decides over who one is and what one does, is it not this personal ‘originality’, aura, or authority, that the Christian nguya ya Nzambe (God’s power), older ideas of ‘life force’ and spiritual power (nguya ya bomoyi), and also Johrei’s ‘divine light’ are all about?28 Despite their synthesising value, such generalising translations risk to overstretch emic understandings. Messianiques think less in abstract terms about a strong ‘self’, but present ‘aura’ rather as an invisible shield of physical energy and force. Alexandra (26), the wife of an EMM missionary, explained to me that ‘concerning witchcraft [Li. kindoki], when the demons who can come and attack you, at night for example, from their vibrations, if you are weak, they can immediately force you. … They can also kill you while you are asleep if you are not strong’ (Alexandra, Ngiri-Ngiri, June 2011). A more elaborate explanation was provided by Papa Vincent, whom I interviewed in a Lebanese hamburger restaurant in Gombe:29 Vincent: If you practise meditation you are strengthening your protection. It is a spiritual process. It is not visible, it’s subtle, but one lives experiences. If you are in front of a magician, or if you are in front of a witch [sorcier], he/she cannot stay with you, he cannot live with you … Even if it is your brother, he will try by all means to avoid you, to distance himself … One day I arrived, I wanted to take a taxi that had stopped. Of course, you know how people enter a taxi over here: the taxi stops, one person enters on one side [and so on]. There was a lady who entered, then I approached, and the third person also entered. But the woman could not bear it. She told the driver: ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop! I cannot continue,

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please let me out’, and she really got out. [Pause] She said: ‘I cannot bear the atmosphere’ … Peter: Is this the aura? Vincent: Voilà! That’s the aura, the aura is your protection! Peter: So it’s like a Johrei one has around oneself? Vincent: Voilà, but it’s invisible. Only the one who has reached the third eye can, the one who has the third eye opened, can see it. There, then, he/ she [the witch] is already reduced to silence and he cannot say anything to you (Vincent, Gombe, June 2011).

There is an obvious ambivalence, if not a paradox at work: on the one hand, as an optimistic theodicy EMM/TMAJ’s aetiological grid provides a real answer to the question of evil, presenting it as a natural purging of sins and toxins, which accumulate as a result of one’s own (and one’s ancestors’) moral failure and unhealthy food. This has truly tranquilising effects and appears to generate trust in oneself and one’s surroundings, because the cause of misfortune is effectively steered away from the group towards one’s own individual karma. On the other hand, Johrei is utilised as a means to increase one’s aura and ‘shield the self’ against external attacks, whose existence is thus de facto confirmed. In view of this, it appears that Kinois (re-)produce Johrei to confirm the very logic which its underlying aetiological framework is actually meant to criticise and replace.30 One’s ‘aura’, understood in Okada’s sense as an envelope of invisible light that increases thanks to Johrei, iconises the presence of personal difference. This is to be understood as the outer, socialised side of the self-experience developed during Johrei thanks to the follower’s repetitive ‘exposure’ to the atmospheric difference of the iconic chain. In other words: Johrei increases one’s feeling (of being) different. This personal difference is materially imagined as an aura of light, which one may call, with Benjamin, one’s own personal ‘originality’. In a densely populated city, difference protects, and this is precisely what EMM and TMAJ offer. By practising Johrei, followers gradually acquire the atmosphere of the iconic chain at large. They become little Goshintais themselves. Eventually, the change, which was expected to come from outside, occurs as an inherent feature of oneself. One may thus say that the presencing of energy equals the presencing of self. If we were to add the concept of the ‘sacred’ to the discussion, Johrei makes of the self a sacred entity, producing what Csordas (1994) has called the ‘sacred self’. In contrast to the problem of the Friday Apostolics studied by Matthew Engelke (2007), EMM or TMAJ’s Messianiques take delight in displaying the materiality of their Japanese ‘religion’, which can be

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seen as a materialist counterculture and critique of Pentecostalism with its evanescent and capricious Holy Spirit. While it often produces discomfort in newcomers, it generates pride and distinction among more long-standing members.31 The core problematic of Engelke’s study is the theological debate about the (il-)legitimacy of materialising the sacred and its material representations. These theological concerns do not figure among the internal preoccupations of movements such as EMM and TMAJ. Among many Messianiques, one may rather diagnose a provocative pride about the irrelevance of such theological debates, materiality being simply and necessarily part and parcel of an effective ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’ practice, as African tradition has long known. Well aware that by joining or visiting EMM or TMAJ, one frequents Christianity’s Other, many celebrate their exodus from the coercive political correctness of Christianity’s community of sinners by being interested in those who are presented as the ‘worshippers’ of things. Many Messianiques have been disappointed by their pastor or have felt that Christianity was too dogmatic for them. Chercheurs appeared to enjoy finally being entitled to participate in the basic truth about the powerful nature of an object like the Goshintai, considered to be ‘more basic’ and also ‘simpler’ than Christianity, which was often described as trop compliqué (too complicated). Those who call themselves ‘seekers’ demonstrate a curiosity and satisfaction about the explicit usage of religious things and their workings. It is mainly these that they have been looking for and enjoy manipulating and explaining. It appears that the ‘Protestant’ phobia of things religious generates a minority counterculture of curiosity. This fosters a knowledgeable technological expert community, whose ‘initiated’ members know well that they know more than others, which they enjoy. The stigmatised minority situation has important consequences for the aesthetic experience of the iconic chain: Claude’s above-mentioned account of his first sighting of the Goshintai exemplifies this. The same feeling of initial repulsion and fear is what explains the place’s attire and attraction for those who have come to experience the miraculous powers of Johrei in their lives. Clearly, the diabolical and the sacred are two sides of the same coin of aesthetic difference at large. Through Johrei, surrounding aesthetic difference becomes personal difference (expressed as ‘aura’). In this sense, the stigmatised minority situation is a catalyst for personal difference, which is ritually embodied through Johrei.

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Notes   1. The Friday Masowe Apostles studied by Engelke are radically opposed to any form of religious materiality, including even the Holy Book of the Bible.   2. Jackson and Karp (1990: 22) stress the ‘importance of understanding personhood not just in semantic or conceptual terms but in terms of bodily and affective life’. Lambek and Strathern (1998: 7) apply an interrelated perspective to concepts and experience. They suggest ‘that we examine how cultural concepts impact on bodily experiences and practices and likewise how our embodied condition affects cultural concepts and social practices’. The study of personhood, a classical theme of anthropological scholarship in Africa and beyond (cf. Fortes 1987, Mauss 1938), has recently received increased attention under the impact of Pentecostalism and the construction of the born-again Christian subject in urban Africa (e.g. Meyer 1999, Marshall 2009, Pype 2011a).   3. It should not be forgotten that such iconic use of scripture is a common habit in Sufism and Hinduism. In India, for instance, students on university campuses openly wear so-called Taviz charms, containing written messages, around their arms to materialise a wish from their mother or somebody else. Many other examples could surely be found.   4. Indeed, Okada’s alternative language of ‘vibrations’ and ‘magnetism’ can be seen as an invitation to rethink the older ethnographic vocabulary of ‘talismanic power’ or ‘invested with sacred powers’. It points to an understanding of religion as a practice of mediation, while culturalising differences may thus be undone for the benefit of being closer to emic sensitivities. Opponents of such a measure will object, however, that the emic terms are rather those of ‘force’ and ‘power’ than of ‘vibrations’ and ‘magnetism’.   5. Before the advent of the mobile phone, the phonie served to communicate at a distance with the help of a radio transmitter and a long antenna.   6. Other movements that involve wearing amulets include so-called knightly orders (Fr. ordres équestres) such as the Knights Templar, which also seems to exist in Kinshasa, as two interlocutors told me.   7. The hydroelectric Inga dam, not far from the city of Matadi in the Lower Congo, was probably Mobutu’s most famous white elephant project. Every Congolese knows it from its representation on the 100 francs congolais bill.   8. These are the costs for initiation at EMM. TMAJ, since its outset in November 2012, has offered initiation for 100 USD.   9. This is different in Sukyô Mahikari where the Omitama must not be shown to others and therefore remains hidden underneath one’s clothes. A skilled eye will see the chain, however. 10. It may be important to consider that in India, for instance, the auspiciousness of capricious jewellery is part and parcel of popular gemmology, a quality also attributable to the wedding ring in Europe. 11. Although this version of the ‘fallen’ Ohikari and the embarrassment it would entail is by far the most credible version, I could never find out

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whether there were not also other factors contributing to Christian’s withdrawal. Due to his public personality as one of Kinshasa’s popular painters – who are in any case suspected of being ‘magicians’ – he may have come under too much suspicion from his colleagues. 12. Marianne Ferme (2001), for instance, writes about amulets in Sierra Leone that ‘the amulet mimics its function: it is a container that protects the medicines inside. Just as the amulet should protect the wearer.’ The Ohikari reflects the same architecture. It is also known that charms from elsewhere have been considered stronger than those of autochthonous making for a very long time (De Craemer 1977: 94). 13. The original passage goes: ‘Man kann von einer Radioaktivität des Menschen sprechen, um jeden liegt gleichsam eine größere oder kleinere Sphäre von ihm ausstrahlender Bedeutung, in die jeder andere, der mit ihm zu tun hat, eintaucht ... Die Strahlen des Schmucks, die sinnliche Aufmerksamkeit, die er erregt, schaffen der Persönlichkeit eine solche Erweiterung oder auch ein Intensiverwerden ihrer Sphäre, die ist sozusagen mehr, wenn sie geschmückt ist’ (Simmel 1992 [1907]: 416, italics in the original). 14. Dreams are not seen as abstractions in a sphere of fictitious detachment. The emically relevant question is not so much whether dreams are real or fictitious, but how strong one’s momentous connection is to the invisible realm, i.e. where one is located between waking and sleep, the visible and the invisible, the body and its reflections. 15. The same is said about the possibility of online Johrei, where a clip can be played on loop showing Meishu Sama himself transmitting Johrei ‘live’. Cf. https://www.youtube.com/​watch?​v=​8Oj8tgYIQB8, accessed 23 January 2014. However, given that internet speed remains very low in Kinshasa, this medium appears not to be familiar to Messianiques. 16. A striking example invoked by Behrend is the case of Mary Akatsa, who had founded a Pentecostal Christian church in Western Kenya in the 1980s. To heal a child she resorted to hitting a photo with the Bible in order to activate it. Behrend writes that this ‘directed God’s power toward and healed the child. Persons and things – Mary Akatsa as healer, the book, the picture, and finally the child as addressee – were connected with one another in a media chain by the power of God’ (137). EMM and TMAJ’s ‘photo magic’, if we want to call it this, also depends on a ‘media chain’, or Johrei’s transmedial iconic chain, as I argue below, involving the Ohikari, the body and hand of the giver, and the photograph alike. 17. Verrips (2002: 40) points out that he borrowed the designation of ‘corporeal eye’ from Malcom Turvey (1998), ‘Jean Eppstein’s Cinema of Immanence: The Rehabilitation of the Corporeal Eye’, in: October 83, p. 25–50. 18. The conflation of sight and touch during Johrei is strikingly comparable to the darshan ritual, which lies at the heart of worship in Hinduism. Based on a ‘mutuality of seeing and being seen’ (Pinney 2004: 9), the concept of darshan denotes the ‘reciprocating gaze’ or interfixation between the divine statue in a Hindu temple and the visiting believer who comes to ‘experience’ darshan (cf. Eck 1985, Pinney 2004, see also Rajagopal 2004).

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19. During an initiation session in August 2012, minister Joseph explained: ‘A person who wears the Ohikari is a factory of miracles. Every member wearing the Ohikari is a factory of miracles. He is an entire church. Meishu Sama said it like this: if a person wears the Ohikari he has a power, which is superior or equal to that of the founder of all religions.’ 20. Thanks to Joel Glasman for pointing out to me that this phrase goes back to Rimbaud. 21. The song appears to be an appropriation of Vadio Mambenga’s hit ‘Tambola Malembe’. It was composed by EMM’s Angolan minister Guimaranz Mvevo, who grew up in DRC. I warmly thank the headquarters of EMM DRC in Kinshasa for allowing me to publish the song. 22. SGI is known for the loop-chanting of this mantra in the tradition of Japanese Nichiren Buddhism. 23. The philosophical concept of the libre arbitre (free will) is common currency among EMM/​TMAJ’s responsables. It probably stems from the Catholic university training several older Messianiques have gone through. 24. That this is particularly so in the case of ‘confessions’ is understandable because here the person sheds his/​her moral personality to assume a new one that is authorised by the witnessing church community. Pype (2011a) shows that in this regard the Pentecostal healing cult is not different from more long-standing patterns of healing studied by Corin (1998) and Devisch (1998), who have studied the Mongo-based zebola and Yaka-based mbwoolu cults, respectively. In both cases the person is simultaneously singled out and tied back into the social group. In EMM and TMAJ’s case, witness accounts are also performances that construct the person. However, they merely aim to attest to Johrei’s miraculous power and do not encourage the person to break with former social ties or to become part of a new social group. The coercive pressure to restore the dividuality of the person as a part of the community is clearly less intense. 25. De Boeck (1991b: 165–166) points to the importance of provocation among the Aluund: ‘It is precisely by analysing the internal dynamics of the conflict in terms of the “provocation” [chiteel], and by pointing out and thus locating the source from which the conflict originated, that the diagnostic judgement of the oracle proves its worth.’ See also the discussion of the origins of the mbasu disease in Chapter 5. 26. It is in this sense that Papa Jacques from EMM’s unit in Mokali once explained to me that ‘if you have an accident for example, if you are walking on the street and a car passes and hits you, it is not the driver you should blame, but you should ask yourself: how can this happen to me right now, what have I done for this to happen?​’ (Jacques, Mokali, April 2012). 27. For Karma and ancestor worship in Japanese new religions see Kisala 2004. For a comparative study see Obeyesekere 2002. 28. For ‘life force’, see also Pype (2011a: 285, 2012). 29. Vincent is the oldest and most experienced ‘spiritualist’ I have met during my fieldwork. Aged 67 and trained in steel plant technology in Italy in the 1970s, Vincent was a long-time member of MOA before becoming a

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Buddhist with Soka Gakkai International (SGI). He eventually turned to Raja Yoga with the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University, where he found his favourite spiritual practice: meditation. 30. This contradiction is maintained even by the most skilled of the movements’ teachers. In June 2011, for instance, in a teaching session dedicated to the theme of flowers, teacher Jérôme explained that the flower, like Johrei, was efficient at purifying places of their maleficent external agencies, but then got entangled in a long exposé ridiculing the city’s pastors for propagating the idea that evildoers are always others and not oneself. 31. EMM and TMAJ do not really have a ‘problem of presence’ as the Friday Masowe Apostles do. Their excessive use of material religious mediation causes rather a ‘problem of absence’, one may say, in the wider urban Pentecostalising landscape. For outsiders, EMM and TMAJ’s religious paraphernalia produce at times an overload of (supposedly diabolic) spiritual presence, which cautions newcomers, in particular, that a bit less materiality could at times be socially convenient.

I7 Vibrating Words Performative Silence and the Power of Words

If the pinnacle of learning is simplicity, the pinnacle of eloquence is silence. —Joseph, Ngaba, May 2013

Of Regeneration and Respectability This chapter discusses EMM/TMAJ’s ‘Japanese’ prayer practices, where a ‘sense of extraordinary presence’ (Meyer 2012) is generated by means of vocal sound production. The ‘Japanese’ prayers are not treated in isolation: through a theoretical reflection on loudness and silence, they are inserted into, and contrasted with, their surrounding religious landscape, which has come to be sonically dominated by the amplitude of the abounding churches of born-again Christianity. Among the findings are that religious sounds must be understood in the context of local habits of hearing and inclinations towards the aural. I argue that an aesthetic grasp of EMM/TMAJ’s prayers, which focuses on prayer as a sonic/atmospheric phenomenon rather than an act of ideational communication with God, also contributes to our understanding of the movements’ categorical condemnation. As I have discussed in Chapter 2, aesthetics of authority are closely linked to the performance of sensual secrecy, i.e. of the suggested presence of hidden or unrevealed knowledge, experiences, techniques or capabilities that are inaccessible to outsiders. If culturally accepted, these constitute important aesthetic boundaries, which keep people from questioning the ‘mighty’ by ascribing them invisible, at times magical, capacities that are performed and/or signified through aesthetic paraphernalia. The silence of the human mouth, the ‘non-speech act’ known as Schweigen in German or tacitude in French, appears to be a universal

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constituent of such aesthetics of authority, at least if we follow Elias Canetti’s elaboration of the connection between Schweigen and secrecy – ‘All that is social is woven by speech, in silence though it freezes’ (Canetti 2011: 349, my translation). He interprets this antisocial silence as tactics of the powerful, and writes: ‘part of what constitutes power is an unequal distribution of the ability to see through. The one who is powerful can see, but he will not allow himself to be seen by others. He has to be the most silent of all. No one should know his moods and intentions’ (Canetti 2011: 346, my translation). This comment on the privileged ability of some to see or know what remains invisible and inaudible to others, applies to African chiefs, diviners, prophets and witches, and is also applicable for the sound register.1 As Filip Peek (1994) reminds us in his article on the forgotten importance of Africa’s sounds and acoustic worlds, ‘other-worldly presence’, or ‘charisma’, embodied by these very personae of power, is ‘always signalled by acoustic difference.’ The divine king or chief, who does not speak but performs his other-worldly difference by relying on spokespersons and translators, is a classic example.2 Also Mary NooterRoberts (2001: 256) has argued that sound produces the circumstances necessary for the sustained presence of spirits.3 Yet, silence not only indicates authority, respectability and superiority. It can also signal inferiority and weakness. The missionary ethnographer Jacques Van Wing, for instance, points to the reflexes of visual and acoustic absenting when confronted with the unquestioned superpower of lightning (known to be sorcery’s most devastating weapon): ‘When a thunderstorm approaches, the indigenes extinguish all fires, they remove everything that is red from their houses and then hide in silence to prevent nzazi [Kikongo: lightning] from noticing their presence’ (Van Wing 1959 [1938]: 347). These examples indicate that silence can perform both superiority and inferiority, which makes the silence of the mouth as ambivalent as laughter. Analogous to Henri Bergson’s (1959 [1900]) distinction between inclusive and exclusive laughter, silence can also be either inclusive or exclusive.4 It can offer a protective hiding place for those who need security and feel temporarily weak or incapable to speak. This is what I call the silence of regeneration. On the other hand, silence, like laughter and eloquent speech, can be exclusive if used to perform one’s superiority, one’s not-having-to-speak because of a putative, often status-based or socially acknowledged authority. This is what will be termed silence of respectability. Thus, although inclusion and exclusion, weakness and strength, are clear-cut opposites, the performance of silence can render their difference ambiguous.5

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But silence is also the opposite of loudness, which makes it a relative phenomenon that depends on its sonic context: an intimate conversation in a nightclub can be conducted at very high amplitude; however, in the moment of a power cut (as also happens in Kinshasa), a sudden control and moderation of vocal energy is required to maintain the same level of intimacy. I therefore use the concept of relative silence to emphasise the necessity of evaluating acoustic phenomena, including prayer, within their respective sonic surroundings. This chapter, dedicated to vocal practices of prayer, intends neither to analyse the ideas expressed or kept silent during prayers, nor whether this ideational content is seen as relevant or not. Rather, it will investigate the effects of human sounds and silences from the vantage point of their materiality, asking what it means to pray aloud, to speak aggressively within the specific context of a city like Kinshasa, while others value controlling their mouth, producing nearly mute or monotonous chanting. In light of EMM and TMAJ’s condemnation as movements of ‘occultists’ or ‘magicians’, the chapter proceeds to ask whether their practices are really so different from the other prayer practices surrounding them. Within the context of the dominating Pentecostal sound waves, there are individuals who feel attracted to alternative religious sound experiences, which introduce differently powerful ways to produce an aural touch. Instead of using the force of verbal authority and vocal violence, with which the ‘in-the-name-of-Jesus’ mantra is practised by born-again pastors, a minority of the innovating spectrum of, more often than not, young Kinois searches for more exquisite, outstanding, perhaps more difficult and unusual prayer techniques, mostly with an exotic appeal. Alternative religious sounds and the aural atmospheres several spiritual movements generate: Soka Gakkai International (SGI) is known for the rapid ritualised loop-chanting of the Nam Myoho Renge Kyo mantra; the neo-Hindu ‘religion of sound and light’ Eckankar is known for its collective singing of the holy sound ‘Hu’; several new religious movements such as Brahma Kumaris (three minutes of silence, three times a day, referred to as ‘traffic control’) and the International Association of Ching Hai cultivate silence in a purer form by focusing on inward meditation and mentally repeated mantras. Shintô prayers are sung in Japanese by adepts of the branches historically connected to Sekai Kyûseikyô including EMM and TMAJ. Other aural atmospheres are created by European-Western classical music in ritualistic contexts, as proffered by the distinctive Grail Movement, whose ‘sealed’ adherents are particularly keen on Wagner.

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Il faut que ça frappe! Fractions of a Soundscape In the neighbourhood of Kingabwa, as soon as the sunset starts and the first mosquitoes appear, another upcoming night is announced by the churches’ soundcheck: staccato-like Jé-su, Ssson!, Sssson!, Yesu! Aléluja! are flung into the freshly turned-on microphone systems.6 Thirty minutes later our compound is flooded with prayer sounds from the four different Eglises de Réveil surrounding us. Loud and repetitive individual prayer slogans gradually turn into glossolalia behind the thick sonic layer provided by the pastor’s model performance on the microphone. There are sermons, shouting, clapping, orchestral bands and energetic pastoral preaching. Our compound is a sonic battleground now for four different armies of acoustic warfare against evil. All attack the neighbourhood with mortars of organ, song and amplified voice, distorted machine-gun microphones ecstatically shooting in the air, allowing only brief moments of ceasefire when the chief pastor utters a powerful Shhhhhhhh, which orders the sonic orgasms to cease and let the neighbourhood breathe – for a short while. The sonic avalanches of awakening easily surmount the walls of our compound. Having grown up near the Belgian forest, it took me some time to adapt to what had, at first, struck me as utterly cacophonic. The oldest church on our road is the local branch of ACK (Assemblée Chrétienne de Kinshasa), whose prayers I can single out thanks to the Hammond-like sound of its organ, usually playing an endless loop of the 1-4-5-4 chords to accompany its church rumba. Next door is the church of my friend, apôtre Boris, who organises an evening service three times a week, with a hired sound system and the vociferous help of his three pastor sons. While Bertrand, another pastor, runs a church called Montagne de Sion on the little road behind the house (see below), three compounds further down the road at the front is the Eglise du Triomphe Eternel, a local church that was founded in 2010. As there is still no wall around this church, whose pastor deemed it more important to invest in a powerful sound system, their prayer is openly observable as adherents often walk around gesticulating and praying aloud, as is well-known among born-again Christians in Kinshasa. In 2014 there were about fifty members, and their pastor has proudly made it to a Toyota Space Wagon imported from Japan, with the steering wheel on the left (Li. volet ya London). The congregation has etched its own distinct sound on my memory, as their amplified prayers sometimes began as early as six o’clock in the morning with the typical overdrive and distortion through full bass and no treble. Particularly thrilling are the services for children, which start at nine

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o’clock on Sunday mornings, when each of the six- to ten-year-olds is trained in the privilege of ‘singing’ solo into a fully turned-on microphone system. Regardless of the musical quality or emotive effect of such sonic performances, which for myself remain rather troubling memories, most Kinois living in the cités actually accept and often also defend these practices as part of their Christian existence. Though some would often use my questions and my presence to complain about the inactivity of their government to do anything against the ongoing makelele (Li. for noise, as well as cicada), de facto most actually comply with, support and defend the presence of these sounds. This is in line with many pastors, who in their sermons outright diabolise critical minds who oppose their pastoral sonic presence. Brian Larkin describes how the inhabitants of Jos in Nigeria have developed ‘techniques of inattention’ so as to cope with the ‘endemic, repetitive nature of religious conflict’. ‘Techniques of inattention’ designate ‘the ability not to hear the messages that carom around the urban landscape’ (2014: 1007). In Kinshasa, it is less interreligious tensions such as those between Muslims and Christians in Northern Nigeria that require ‘techniques of inattention’. It is rather the rivalry between church and bar sounds, which are in sonic competition, fostering aural overstimulation and, as a result, a certain amount of inattention. Indeed, as Kinois often joke themselves, it is difficult to find a street that does not host at least one or two churches. But it seems to be even more difficult to find one without a nganda (shelter), as a bar or terrace is called. Ngandas often have their own powerful sound systems, as portable and mobile as the plastic chairs and tables. In 2007 the governor of Kinshasa issued a decree against tappage nocturne (nocturnal sound ‘beating’), directed against the religious sounds of night vigils, prayers and deliverance rituals, but also against the worldly sounds of bars and nightclubs. The mayor of Matete (one of Kinshasa’s twenty-four communes) has even been in a ‘war’ against sound pollution in his commune.7 Yet, the decibel intensity does barely seem to decrease over time, which Kinois explain by pointing to a relationship of reciprocity between pastors and politicians. In 2010, when I joined painter Ekunde to a newly opened bar with the picturesque name Masuba ya Lion (lion’s piss), which he had decorated with beautiful erotic dance and nightlife scenes, the owner asked me if I could organise some loudspeakers from Europe. When I asked him about the kind of speakers he was looking for, he responded that this did not matter. Il faut que ça frappe! (it has to punch [they have to be powerful!]) was all he said. As probably elsewhere in urban Africa,

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loudness is enjoyed by many in Kinshasa if it touches the body with a punch in the guts.8 When the loudspeakers do not beat, people start ‘beating their hands’ (Li. kobeta maboko, i.e. to clap or drum with their hands). This is the case for churches whose sound system is missing or not operational due to power cuts or a broken or missing generator. Here, praying voices are usually sustained by the drumless rhythms of collective clapping. This is particularly prominent during night services when the clapping cuts through and permeates the silence of the dark at long distances. The acoustic pattern of dancing and singing at night or in the daytime is a long-standing feature of religious movements in Central Africa, which De Craemer, Fox and Vansina (1976: 473) interpret as a strategy to attract others. But such clapping, ardently performed in a quick and unifying rhythm, particularly at night, was at times explained to me as acoustic ‘bullets’ (Li. masas, sg. lisas). This echoes the singing, clapping or shouting in the equatorial forest, where people walking to their fields in the early morning hours emit vocal signals and clap to warn and chase away animals and prevent them from being surprised.9 Everyone who has visited Kinshasa and spent a night outside the Gombe city centre knows the nightly sound of clapping hands. Montagne de Sion, right behind my room in our hardly finished house construction, is run by pastor Bertrand. He grew up in the neighbourhood and I distinctly remember him because he once tried to make me fall while prophesying to me in front of his congregation. Bertrand is a charming man with a Mercedes 190, which is narrow enough to enter our street even during the day when it is occupied by a second-hand clothes market. He has the usual elegant boss attitude of a self-made pastor, but his most striking feature is his voice. Although I do not know all the pastors who frequent the churches of our neighbourhood personally, a common feature of those I grew familiar with was their chronically sore and broken voices. This is clearly the result of intense and dedicated prayer, sermon and deliverance. The vibes in Bertrand’s church range from ardent and serious shouting to an atmosphere resembling a football stadium: Au nom dööö, his voice rises into treble, and the crowd of young, mostly female followers, release their excitement in an overwhelmingly collective answer: Jéésüüüü! As already indicated, pastors’ voices are ideally powerfully amplified by a sound system, and supported by a religious music band, which steps in and takes over as soon as the pastor and his voice need a break. Bertrand also extensively relies on the acoustic support of a band and amplification system. The latter is particularly helpful in rendering

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sonorous spiritual shots by Bertrand blowing air with his lips into the microphone right at the moment before people fall. The model of a Pentecostal church construction in Kinshasa’s cités involves the erection of walls around the prayer room, to be finished as soon as possible once a church has been founded.10 This can be seen as a response to growing security concerns,11 while it incorporates the ideal of a stable and rooted, ‘built’ and territorially inscribed ‘church’ community, which visually and physically secludes itself vis-à-vis the gaze and bodies of putative intruders. This clearly fosters the feeling of community. At the same time, in a somewhat dialectical countermove, the very same churches’ personnel often seek to ‘overcome’ the walls of this visual separation and spatial limitation by sonically flooding their neighbourhood. Consider, for instance, what I observed in the neighbourhood of Yolo-Sud: A young pastor with a dark suit and a yellow tie installs a big loudspeaker on the outer wall of the small church, which now literally stands above the heads of those who pass by on the street. He attaches the cable and turns it outwards in the direction of the street, clearly so as to reach out to a maximum of collateral listeners for the upcoming service (field notes, Yolo, June 2013).

This model of walled urbanity is apparently mocked, attacked, or at least ludically appropriated: the walls are simply ‘shouted down’ by the powerful distortions of religious sermons and sound waves. Although somewhat by coercion, the free-floating sounds, like animals in divagation, assure the urban citizens’ sonic cohesion and keep up the feeling of being in a village-like, boundary-less community. Another impressive source of nightly noise is the matanga funeral rites. Anyone who has participated in or witnessed such a gathering, from far or close, knows about the impressive sound level that pervades the night space and persists until the early morning hours. This is done to sonically accompany, support and partly substitute the physical presence of friends and families who usually stay overnight on plastic chairs or on the floor at the house of the defunct.12 Kinshasa’s nights are also filled with the impressive loud crowing of roosters, whose signals echo the emission of sound messages by the lokole drums of the equatorial forest. It seems that in tropical latitudes, these animals, who usually sleep higher up in trees, are always awake, and awaken their neighbourhoods as early as 3.30 a.m. or earlier. My initial suspicion that it was the Pentecostalisation of the nocturnal urban public sphere – I rarely sleep without earplugs – that had caused the roosters to change their clock, has thus proved a forgone

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conclusion. Strikingly different compared to before, however, is that the night and daytime soundscape of work and industry in Kingabwa has gradually given way, since the 1990s, to one that is dominated by distorted microphone sermons, ecstatic prayer sounds and the buzz of fervent church rumba. While it is impossible to sufficiently summarise Kinshasa’s soundscape with its intense traffic, the sound codes of taxi-buses, shoe-­ shiners, bana vernis (nail polishers) and street vendors, it appears that the urban soundscape has been intensifying its aural stimuli over the last twenty years, mainly because of the born-again appropriation of sound amplification. The overall aural culture has been transformed to the point that the personnel of Catholic seminaries, which are known as the harbours of silence and interiority, have come to doubt their newcomers: ‘This generation does not know silence anymore’, said the rector of the Grand Seminary of Mayidi in Lower Congo, for instance (interview, Mayidi, April 2013).

Silent Sound Sites: Sonic Heterotopia One morning in 2013, having jostled myself through the crowds and traffic around the central market on Avenue Kasa-Vubu, I reach TMAJ’s prayer centre on a sandy street next to Ecole Saint Pierre. From the corner of the street a loudspeaker emits rumba beats in my direction, as I enter the opening in the iron door to the compound. Six people are sitting behind the open windows and transmitting Johrei to each other, in silence. As I go to greet minister Ntumba, he informs me that he and Joseph are about to leave for the ritual cleansing of Maman Régine’s newly rented house in the neighbourhood of Yolo-Sud. Régine is in her early forties and has a degree in accounting. She works as an accountant for the national air traffic agency (RVA, Régie des Voies Aériennes), has two children, and lives alone with them and her sister in a rented house. Her polygamous husband abandoned her for his first wife, she explained. Régine joined TMAJ looking for solutions to her financial difficulties, which she encountered after two fake landlords had fooled her with fake guarantee deposits. Like many women in Kinshasa, Régine is also looking for a husband. As a woman with a job, she would like to find somebody who wants more than just to share her bed and salary, clearly not the easiest thing to do. Ntumba and Joseph, whom I had preceded, finally arrive at her place, both carrying a bouquet of hand-picked flowers for a number of Ikebana arrangements for the different rooms. After a rapid guided

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tour, we all sit down around the small table and both ministers start arranging little Ikebanas. We begin the ritual in the first room, Régine’s bedroom. All of us follow Ntumba as he bows down three times. Standing upright with closed eyes, we synchronically clap three times and the minister’s voice emerges from the prevailing silence, pronouncing the opening line of the Amatsu Norito prayer: Takaamahara ni kami tsumari massu. A deep breath is taken to tune in conjointly: Kamurogui Kamuromi no mikoto mochite, sumemi oyakamu Izanagi no Mikoto … . The entire prayer lasts for three and a half minutes, and pronouncing it correctly requires knowing the text by heart, breathing at the right moments and pronouncing the long and short Japanese vowels as perfectly as possible (all of which Régine and I are still struggling with, so we use the prayer sheet as support, peeping through our half-closed eyes at the sheet in our hands). There is a break towards the end of the Amatsu Norito when everyone stays quiet and voicelessly enunciates (though often with visible lip movements) his/her own private wishes. During the daily prayer services held at the movements’ various centres, where all prayers are regularly spoken, this break causes a long-ritualised silence. The Messianiques then stand with their heads bowed down and their eyes closed, moving their lips, but without sound. Then the leading voice of the minister goes on with another Japanese sentence. The group then follows until the end of the Amatsu Norito prayer is reached. The responsable who is leading the prayer session, in our case minister Ntumba, goes on with the first line of the second prayer, entitled Zengen Sanji. While the Amatsu Norito is known among Messianiques to be a very old prayer of the Japanese tradition, Zengen Sanji is said to have been written by Meishu Sama himself under divine inspiration. It contains a number of Buddhist elements such as the divinity Miroku Omikami. The third prayer then performed is Cantique de Réveil (song of awakening), which originates from Brazil and was locally translated into French, just as the Christian Notre Père (Our Father), which Mokichi Okada himself ordered to be included in the liturgy. In Régine’s bedroom, we also added the last of TMAJ’s additions: the Chant du Ciel en Chiffres (heavenly song in numbers) is usually only sung individually by members at their homes. This Japanese mantra is based on numerology and was explained to me as being highly effective for financial prosperity. After twenty minutes, the last syllable is pronounced in Régine’s bedroom, and a sort of relief can be sensed after this session of vociferous labour. But only for a brief moment, as we go on to repeat the procedure in the childrens’ bedroom, then in the third bedroom of

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the house. After an hour and a half of hard praying, our shirts are stained with sweat, and we happily agree to the beer Régine has organised. I learn that the house was occupied beforehand by the wife of the landlord, and that she had died from the consequences of a long-standing conflict they had had because of his decision to take a second wife. But when the landlord eventually wanted to return to her and to their house, the ills had already affected her health, leading to her death. When I visited Régine again the next morning, she expressed that the ritual cleansing of her new home had immensely pacified her. She had never slept so well in this house as on the night after the purification through prayers. This also had to do with the appeased spirit of the lady who had lived there before, she explained. Régine really likes the fact that TMAJ’s prayers do not chase away spirits as evil and haunting, or as demons, as she has seen so often in a variety of Churches of Awakening. The sounds we had uttered the day before had pacified and uplifted unhappy spirits, she said, in order to reconcile with them. The most frequently practised prayer is the Amatsu Norito, which most members know by heart, including children. It is performed regularly upon every entrance to the church (EMM) or temple (TMAJ) as part of the well-prescribed sequence of ritual actions that ‘open’ contact with God. Before entering, every member or sympatisant first writes his name down in the book on a table. He/she is then supposed to kosala prière (do the prayer), in order to walk straight through the alley towards the ‘altar’ and perform a sequence of gestures and sounds upon arrival: bowing (one bow to the Goshintai, one to Meishu Sama’s photograph and a third bow once again to the Goshintai), clapping (three times, as is known from Shintô temples in Japan) and praying silently the Amatsu Norito but while moving his/her lips. The latter is interrupted by the silent seconds in which only lips move to speak one’s wishes in silence. When the prayer is finished, three claps follow (once) as well as three bows. Only now, after the individual has turned around towards the community practising Johrei, does he/she greet them with ‘Bonjour Messianiques’, to which everyone practising Johrei in the room replies ‘Bonjour’. If a chair is free to receive Johrei, the transmission starts immediately, otherwise one usually sits down and waits patiently in silence for one’s turn, receiving the light of the Goshintai. During Sunday and Wednesday services, the entire panoply of prayers described above is prayed collectively. But here substantive dissent arose when the schism between EMM and TMAJ occurred. In a move to apply the liturgy, TMAJ added not only the numerological Chant du Ciel, but also a set of Japanese mantras for daily private use

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at home, one for each day, which are referred to as psaumes (psalms) or poèmes (poems). According to rumours among followers of TMAJ, EMM’s Angolan leadership had hidden these prayers to conceal the real power of their Japanese religion. All of TMAJ’s prayers are printed in a new booklet entitled Livre des prières et poèmes, which every adept receives for free and which contains explanations and a guide to pronunciation. TMAJ’s responsables also contended that EMM’s ways of praying were too similar to born-again prayer, by invoking the ancestors’ power like the Holy Spirit, especially in the prayer of Pratique ya Sonen, which undermines the capital importance of individual responsibility and free will, as discussed in Chapter 8. Secondly, TMAJ’s leaders were dissatisfied with the way in which prayers were pronounced and Johrei was practised in EMM. This accusation is grounded in minister Ntumba and Papa Grégoire’s (one of TMAJ’s long-standing members) pilgrimage journey to Japan, where both saw and heard the way in which the prayers were done in the ‘original’ way. EMM would be praying too rapidly without emphasising the importance of perfect pronunciation. To improve pronunciation, an MP3 stereo system was bought for TMAJ’s prayer hall, on which Japanese mantras are regularly played, intoned by a voice of Japanese origin. This constitutes a model of pronunciation, which the followers can imitate when praying by themselves. The correction, or purification, of ritual chanting itself, also echoes the emphasis placed on the ritualistic use of mantras in India. In order to be effective, the ‘constituent sounds must be recited properly with correct pronunciation and in accordance with fixed and strict rules regarding pace, rhythm, and intonation’ (Burchett 2008: 814).13 Both branches stress the importance of praying aloud and maintain that the key functional purpose of their prayers’ sounds lies in their ability to cleanse the ‘spiritual atmospheres’ through pleasing and uplifting their ancestral spirits.14

‘But God Understands’ Vibrating Words from Japan When asked about the meaning of the Japanese prayers, Messianiques usually answer: ‘The translation, you can find it in the book, I have it at home’, despite no printed translation actually being available. No one, not even the higher responsables of the movements, is capable of

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explaining nor is anyone interested in studying or reflecting upon the semantic content of their Japanese prayers. One day while I was spending time at TMAJ’s prayer site, a teenage boy arrived at the centre. After a conversation with him, minister Ntumba took him to the altar to show him how to perform the prayer, with the bowing down, the clapping and the intonation of the Amatsu Norito. When I returned the next morning, the boy was sitting outside, on his own, with a prayer sheet, on which all the important prayers were printed. He was exercising the pronunciation of the Amatsu Norito. Softly, he recited each syllable separately, pronouncing i as a, however, which informed me that he was not so good at reading. He told me that he was going to learn the entire Japanese prayer by heart in one week. From inside the temple, soft classical music and Japanese mantras reached our ears, hinting that some model intonations were available. When I asked him if he understood the meaning of the prayer, he said ‘No, but God understands’. This resembled what a young member of Sukyô Mahikari had answered to my question of why one would not simply produce translations in French or in Lingala: ‘It’s like a telephone number to God. If you mess it up, you will not reach your destination.’ As such, the Amatsu Norito is clearly a ‘human communication with divine and spiritual entities’ (Gill 2005: 7372), which is the classical definition of ‘prayer’, even if its content is without meaning to those who pronounce it. I understood that a translation would transform this dialled number, which thus forces people to learn the verses by heart as if it were an esoteric formula. This is not only similar to Koranic recitation in Islam, but also Sanskrit shlokas for Brahmanic instruction of the Vedas, as well as Pali texts for Buddhists. In all these traditions, semantic content in a language is often not understood by those who learn material by heart and ‘tongue’ or chant it. The explanation repeated and taught by EMM/TMAJ’s responsables corresponds to the boys’ own understanding: speech, and every word, in fact, has a particular vibration, carrying on the spiritual vibration (or intention) of the person who has invented the prayer. The old Japanese Amatsu Norito prayers of the Shintô tradition would be composed of the most ideal sonic arrangement of syllables, so as to vibrate in the most powerfully positive way. This high-quality vibration assures an easy and rapid contact with God, a hotline of love of the utmost intensity. Translating it would not diminish its semantic content, but a translation would alter the prayer’s sound vibrations, and this is what matters as the prayer’s most crucial element.15 This sensitivity and obviously reflexive awareness of the importance of the prayer’s sonic texture expresses an iconic understanding of

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ritual language and words, in which the words’ sound is what they are intended to transmit. The degree of love encapsulated in the prayer is not coded in a linguistic text, but situated in the vibrations caused by the voice uttering it and its syllables, to the extent that semantics are entirely irrelevant. The same holds true for Eckankar’s holy sound of ‘Hu’ or the Hindu/Buddhist ‘Om’.16 EMM and TMAJ have a theory to explain these ‘physics of the word’, which can be seen as a Japanese proto-version of John Austin’s speech act theory (1962). The two Japanese concepts of Kototama and Guen Rei, as well as certain explicit teachings by Meishu Sama himself sum up the matter. Also Messianiques, who were not responsables, knew these teachings in detail, using them in their explanations. According to the glossary of TMAJ’s thirty-seven-page-long booklet Teachings for Everyday Reading, translated from Brazilian Portuguese, Kototama is: A Japanese vocabulary, composed out of koto = speech and tama = spirit, which indicates the force, or energy of speech. Every time a sound is emitted, it vibrates either positively or negatively, influencing in a decisive way the creation of the spiritual atmosphere. In this way, the world of Good and the world of Evil, of happiness and of sadness, of the right way and of error, all depend on the Kototama pronounced by the human being.17

While TMAJ’s responsables draw their teachings from Meishu Sama’s writings, they also receive a cours d’encadrement (supporting lesson) from the Brazilian headquarters, which have been gradually translated into French. The document titled Cours d’Encadrement: Le pouvoir du Guen Rei (‘Guiding Lesson: The Power of Guen Rei’) by TMAJ’s Brazilian instigator Reverend Dorgival combines a number of striking passages: Guen-rei is a Japanese word composed of Guen, meaning speech, and rei, spirit. Therefore it means the spirit of speech, whose power exerts an enormous influence on prayers in general, because the sounds emit vibrations, which decisively determine the creation of a positive or negative spiritual attitude. It is because of this that the prayers Amatsu Norito and Zengen Sanji, highly pure in their sonority, have an extraordinary effect on diseases and other human sufferings. It is the same [principle], which is at work in the usage of mantras in oriental prayers: the sonic emissions have the power to purify the environment and, as a result, purity reigns.

The teaching continues with an explanation of Okada’s theory of ­seventy-five natural sounds that constitute the universe. It incites adepts to ‘express only good things that have a pure vibration’ and that one has ‘to always be highly attentive to the way in which ideas and

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impressions are transmitted. A good dialogue resonates positively with one’s soul. Conversations with a negative tenet could produce only pleasure to the secondary spirit’ (i.e. the Devil). Only a good Guen-rei should be practised, which increases the light of one’s soul and diminishes the spiritual clouds that make people hate themselves and fall prey to evil. In this way, when one recites the Zengen Sanji prayer, the spirit of speech, which is highly perfect, beautiful and powerful, a purification of the environment surrounding the prayer is produced. … In this way, spiritual clouds will diminish and suffering will be considerably removed.18

The aforementioned glossary also has an entry entitled Amatsu Norito, which reads: Amatsu Norito: or the prayer of Heaven. It is composed of a combination of sounds that generates energy with the power to purify space by enabling the connection between Heaven and Earth, God and mankind.19

The Power of Words and Transcultural Reassurance That such a conception of sound is not unknown in Africa is suggested in Philip Peek’s (1994) review article on the significance of sound in ritual throughout the sub-Saharan continent. Emphasising the hearing faculties of a diviner or ritual specialist who can be blind but never deaf, he stresses that ‘ritual acts must first establish grounds for dialogue: human and other-worldly beings must both hear and reply to each other. Ritual sound (voice, song, music) serves to sacralise space, being, and, above all, time in this world, in order to permit such dialogue. Not only do most rituals begin with sound, but the first evidence of spiritual attendance is usually auditory.’ In another passage commenting on an Isoko festival in Nigeria, he stresses the protecting force of prayer which equals the cleansing function of the Japanese prayers: ‘Sacred sound also served to protect the people during ceremonies just as do the medicines placed at critical points in the village and worn by performers and ritual specialists. … A ritual period or a sacred presence must be signalled sonically, just as physical space is marked off visually’ (Peek 1994: 481). It follows that despite EMM and TMAJ’s exotic appeal, their sonic cleansing by means of spoken prayers can be inserted into a historical pattern of sound cleansing and protection that is far from exotic or new. As Marleen de Witte (2008a) has already shown in her study of conflicts around sound production between neotraditionalists and Pentecostalists in Accra, nor does Pentecostal sound practice divert from this conception: ‘While the relationship between spiritual power

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and space or territory is … very different in charismatic-Pentecostalism and traditional religion, the emphasis on spiritual touch and the central role of sound for getting in touch with spirit power is remarkably similar’ (701). Moreover, EMM/TMAJ’s vibration theory equals the well-known and popular theory of the ‘power of words’. The extent to which the latter is a commonplace in Kinshasa, which is reflected and thought about by people regardless of social status and belonging, was indicated to me on the night preceding 22 June 2013. It was around three o’clock when I was awoken by a loud monologue, shouted out into the nocturnal darkness by somebody on the little street right behind the wall of my room. His speech was obviously meant to reach the entire neighbourhood. The man’s son was severely sick and in a critical state, as I learned later: … I stand up to you in the name of Jesus! You don’t have any power in my life! You are no masters over my life. You are no masters over my family. In the name of Jesus! Your witchcraft is nothing, you will fail, one doesn’t curse anyone just like that. The family you put your hands onto is not your family. You will die! You have touched a place one does not touch. You will die like caterpillars. In my own name, the one who knows [unclear] of all this here, if he/she is here, whether from my own family’s side, whether from the side of my father, or from his mother’s side, from our brothers’ and sisters’ side, from our friends’ or the neighbourhood’s side, you will die! [Loud clapping now] [Unclear] will go down, he will die in those abodes [mboka] of yours, [I clap] my hands like the name of Jesus. I am ‘verbally attacking’ [kosaka] you in the name of Jesus. Jesus made this world with words. Me too, I am attacking you with words. As you are used to cursing [people] at night with slippers, with which you fly like aeroplanes, I am attacking you with the power of the Holy Spirit! As I am alerting you here, you be careful, I will start calling you by your names! Careful, careful! You entered places one does not enter! You entered places one does not enter! …

This passage of kosaka speech, directed at those evil entities who were attacking his suffering son, demonstrates the father’s reflexive awareness about the power of the words he is using. For him, the curse that witches had cast on his son had been issued by way of speech (Li. koloka or kolakela mabe, to curse), just as he is now replying by way of speech, supported by ‘the name of Jesus’, who, as he puts it, also created the world through speech. The use of clapping to acoustically support key passages is indicative of how sound is meant to be sensually felt by its invisible addressees. While the passage exemplifies the longevity of cultural speech and hearing patterns that have been Christianised in the meantime,20 it is a good example to illustrate the extent to which the

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power of words (Li: nguya ya liloba) is more than a tacit cultural assumption, but is indeed a popular theory, truly a form of street wisdom in contemporary Kinshasa and probably beyond. Its awareness conditions people’s linguistic (and hence social) behaviour. The power of words was mostly explained to me as a ‘typically African’ feature and was referred to with a sense of pride about cultural specificity and heritage. This ‘African’ feature – which relates in part also to the mechanics of witchcraft – is backed by the Bible and theologically advocated by the Pentecostal emphasis on the importance of the spoken word.21 Another example of the power of words in practice is kobelela (literally to shout, to cry, especially when in fear).22 Witches are known to silence their victims by stealing their voices (Janzen and MacGaffey 1974: 46, MacGaffey 2000: 33–34). Hence the well-known proverb Soki omoni ndoki belela ya avant mungongo nayo ekokima yo (if you see a witch, shout aloud before your voice abandons you). Kobelela means exactly this: to shout aloud reactively in order to call for help in moments of spiritual attack or threat. In a ‘mantric city’ made of an ‘architecture of words’, as De Boeck (2004a: 259) describes the incomparable importance of the creativity of the spoken word in Kinois’ everyday, depriving someone of his/her ability to speak means stealing his/her chief instrument of existential friction, of self and world production, which is indeed similar to murder. However, when talking to people about the power of words, the example commonly referred to is the power reserved for members of one’s family to curse somebody (Fr. maudire, Li. koloka or kolakela mabe). The mechanism according to which evil words about a close one can have devastating effects is common knowledge even among younger generations, just like its opposite, to pronounce a blessing (Fr. bénir: to bless, Li. kopambola or kolakela malamu). The latter automatically entails positive effects. When digging deeper into the exact mechanics of these interpersonal physics, uncertainty and sometimes confusion arises, especially when it comes to the question of whether the spoken and voiceful utterance is necessary for a curse to be active. This closely resembles the question of whether prayers ‘work’ only if they are intoned or also when spoken merely in thought. Somewhat critical of the many Pentecostal churches, Alain, the journalist and follower of TMAJ, compared the principle of prayer explicitly to cursing when he explained that: one is not obliged to shout or speak very loudly when one prays. Even by speaking softly one will reach the same result. I pray for instance very softly, so that no one around me can hear, but not inwardly. … I have learned that witches also act by means of the word, like cursing in fact.

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If you say that I did something bad to you and tell me that wherever I go that same evil thing will happen to me, that’s it, that’s koloka. The witch uses speech to act and the Christian or anyone who prays can also only act through speech. But if you don’t speak at all and everything is silent, you don’t do anything. It is necessary that the words are uttered. If they are not, they will not have any effect on me. That is what I suppose. So given this similarity between cursing or blessing and prayer, one has to speak (Alain, Mbinza, September 2013).

Later, Alain went even further when he told me that ‘you may or may not have heard the curse or blessing, because he can pronounce it far away from you, even alone in his room. It will reach you!’ The activating principle here is the utterance of sound, regardless of whether it is perceived by the ears at which it is aimed or not. It should be stressed that another of Okada’s theories, the one on ‘radiation and aura’,23 as was read out and explained once in June 2013, fits directly with Fu-Kiau’s (2001 [1980]) theory of sound waves and cursing in Kongo spirituality. The same principle was explained to me by other Kinois, many of whom have nothing to do with spiritual movements whatsoever. It is reminiscent of Stoller’s (1984) insight into Songhay hearing culture where sound, once uttered and born into the world, obtains an autonomous life of its own, physically affecting the psyche of others, but being detached from its initial author, or in a way, carrying his/her intentions on in time and space. These conceptions of linking language and action match and conjugate well with the semiotic ideology theorised and thus authorised by EMM and TMAJ’s teachings. This offers individuals like Alain a basis on which to generate intellectual knowledge and positive cultural reassurance about his African origins. Clearly, in the pluri- or post-ethnic social texture of the postcolonial city, a plurality of linguistic/semiotic ideologies work side by side. In line with the openness of the sorcellerie concept (Li. kindoki), which Peter Geschiere (2013: 7) thinks is partly the reason for its versatile applicability and tenacity in urban Africa today, there is no unanimous consensus on whether a curse has to be spoken or not. Some contend that a voiced utterance of speech is unnecessary for witchcraft to be active, while others stress the necessity of vocal sound for a curse to be effective. Generalising statements are not possible in this pluralised urban space. Performative Word Power The practice of verbally attacking invisible forces has been exacerbated by Pentecostal spiritual warfare in the city. The older pattern of the

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power of words is here backed by a theology of the spoken word. In délivrance sessions, individuals diagnosed as being possessed by demons are delivered from their demonic possessors by means of violent verbal attack, supported with the gesticulation of a directing arm and hand, as well as the laying on of hands. The words uttered are persistent repetitions of the imperatives Bima! and Sors! (Li. and Fr. for Get out!) intended for the demons. Also Móto! and Feu! are to implore divine spiritual fire to descend and attack the demon. Under the influence of Nigerian born-again churches such as Winner’s Chapel and others, the English fire has more recently become fashionable. Another well-known expression repeated in these ‘prayers of authority’ is Na nkombo na Yesu! or Au nom de Jésus! (Li. and Fr. for In the name of Jesus!), with which the speech acts are handed into the agency of Christ, as already Simon Kimbangu would do in the early 1920s (Janzen 1977: 107; Vellut 2005: 55). This mantra is supposed to be a most powerful speech act against demonic possession, turning all successful deliverances into miracles authored by God himself. When asked about the impressive level of verbal energy and the decibels produced during these deliverance sessions – it is frequent that participants generally have a sore voice afterwards – Christian activists repeatedly explained that ‘theoretically’ the deliverance would work just as well if a prayer were silently produced, because it was chiefly God’s will that was acting and not the human voice. But why then do it so loud and so energetically? From an exorcist operating in the realm of the Catholic Church, I learned that, in practice, it is important to be loud: For a person who is cursed [envoûté], for instance, where I feel that the person is inhabited by an evil spirit, or by several evil spirits, I speak a prayer aloud, with an open, loud voice [Fr. à haute voix], and sometimes I shout, I order Satan to leave the person, because the human being himself/herself [Fr. l’être humain en soi] has a power [puissance]. He/ she embodies a power. … The voice here is like an authority (Eugène, Mongafula, June 2013).

The question of whether this power is of human origin, or whether, because uttered ‘in the name of Jesus’, it becomes ‘inspired’ and divine in nature, can easily become a confusing stake for intellectual argumentation among the thousands of amateur theologians who abound in the argumentative playground of Kinshasa. From a praxeological perspective, nothing seems to withstand the observable/audible evidence that it is the illocutionary force of the human voice, indeed a religious medium here, which ‘shouts the demons away’ (in the double sense of the German rein-schreien).

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What matters in a spiritual cleansing ritual of the Christian spectrum is not so much the ideational sophistication of what is being said, in which language or meaning, but the quantity of vocal matter, the physical energy it transmits, its intensity to touch the demon/spirit (i.e. the authoritative texture of the voice). This was also supported by the explanation given by EMM’s Maman Anto, who explained that spirits have to feel the prayers one utters. Delivering pastors also usually prepare themselves over a certain number of days by fasting, abstaining from sex and other delights. In this regard, their deliverance rituals are not much different from the healing procedures performed by contemporary nganga healers.24 The words pronounced ‘in the name of Jesus’ do not ‘mean’ Jesus, they ‘do’ Jesus. This qualifies the vocal sound of deliverance and exorcist rituals as iconic. While EMM and TMAJ aim to voice in their prayers a maximum amount of positive vibrations (i.e. of ‘love’, Li: bolingo) to uplift and reconcile with the unhappy spirits they want to console, the delivering pastors consider possessing spirits as evil and pronounce words violently so as to shout the demons away. Vocal healing, or sonic remediation, is also done with the help of mobile phones, as I learned separately from both a gynaecologist and an exorcist, who have respectively witnessed and caused the solution to birth complications, by means of a mobile phone placed on the belly of a pregnant woman. By mediating the exorcist’s voice, the mobile phone can transfer his vocal authority. It is in this process of remediation at a distance that the authority of the prophet/pastor is generated. In the case of the mobile phone, the distance is both spatial and acoustic. It should be stressed that in both the prophet/pastor’s case and in the case of the mobile phone, it is the act of remediation which simultaneously produces the distance it remediates, and vice versa. An iconic use of language can also be observed in the ways in which pastors and other ardent Christians manipulate the medium of the Holy Bible. An intermedial connection between the spoken and the written is strikingly illustrated by Kinshasa’s popular painter Bosoku Ekunde’s ‘beatingly loud’ painting entitled Le pasteur (cf. Illustration 7.1): in a scene of deliverance between a team of male pastors with their assistants and two female bandimi (Li. for believers, followers, adepts) from their church Lisungi du monde (Help of the World), the Bible is not used as a container of meaning but as a material object of power.25 The words it contains do not seem to matter to the pastors, whose eyes have other things to contemplate. In the semiotic ideology at work here, the spiritual power of the book lies in its materiality rather than in the meaning of the sentences and ideas it carries, although both reinforce

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Illustration 7.1 Bosoku Ekunde, Le Pasteur (2010), Birgit Meyer private collection.

each other. The same applies to the pastors’ loud voices, which are signalled through bodily effort and open mouths, so as to seemingly penetrate their patients with vibrations. The Bible and the pastors’ voices are shown here in analogous intermediality, and painter Ekunde guides our attention to the power, which seems to emanate from them. Clearly, rather than merely containing a powerful message, it is the materiality of these media themselves, which carries and ‘does’ spiritual power. The Bible and the pastor’s voice do not stand for the power of God. By embodying this very power, they are icons of divine presence and intervention. One evening I was sitting in my room with a bottle of beer listening to one of the new hits of Kinshasa’s new religious music star Mike Kalambay. Frank, my close friend and active member of the Branhamist Pentecostal church, passed by to say hello. He candidly commented that what I was doing was ‘useless’: by drinking beer while listening to Christian music I was compromising the beneficial effects of the music. The principle of sacred sound being able to spiritually purge the surrounding spiritual space of negativities is the same, however.26 Just like EMM/TMAJ’s Japanese prayers, Christian sound does not stand for, but actually does spiritual power.27

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Sonic Iconoclasm The usage of sound to counteract perceived spiritual evil can also be experienced in EMM’s unit in the neighbourhood of Lemba. Here it is increasingly frequent that, while the Amatsu Norito and others of EMM’s mantras are intonated, neighbours throw stones onto the corrugated iron roof, causing a very loud and shocking ‘bang’, similar to when a mango falls on the roof. This is sometimes followed by the shouting of words such as Diabolu! Basatana! (devils, satanists). Maman Anto, the unit’s responsable, then reacts by inciting her community to sing the mantras more ardently, sometimes inviting them to repeat the Amatsu Norito several times, so as to increase the centre’s ‘aura’ of spiritual protection. While the throwing of stones qualifies as sonic iconoclasm, where somebody attempts to destroy the mantra’s sound image, similar acts occur when the centre’s flowers are destroyed or the centre’s wall painting is defaced. As I experienced once, neighbours also burned plastic trash in front of the house exactly at the moment of a strong upcoming wind, the stinking smoke of which was thus blown straight into the prayer room, where people started coughing. I was unable to check the intentionality of this act, given it is common in the rainy season that rubbish is burned when the air starts moving before a thunderstorm. The responsables of the centre perceived it, however, as an intended provocation. The fact that Messianiques do not sonically oppose Pentecostal ways of praying should not obscure the fact that during teaching sessions the Pentecostal way of addressing God is frequently parodied and ridiculed by the teaching personnel. ‘Shouting at God’, or a prayer that disturbs any third person not concerned, is explained as an inherently diabolical act.

Producing Acoustic Difference What makes Messianiques’ prayers powerful, in their own understanding, is not the fact that one does or does not understand their meaning, but rather that they create an acoustic difference. Japanese is a handy resource to do this. The act of pronouncing words in Japanese by Kinois empties the language of any relationship to meaning and makes it, for the praying individual, a purely iconic experience of acoustic difference. This is very similar to the Catholics’ usage of Latin (from before the Second Vatican Council), ‘Ancient Hebrew’ performed by the Friday

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Masowe Apostles studied by Engelke (2007), Arab recitations by nonArabic-speaking Muslims, Christian Orthodox prayers in Greek (who apparently were successful in Katanga/Shaba in the 1970s),28 and of course also Pentecostal glossolalia. Simon Kimbangu also spoke a ‘celestial language’ (MacGaffey 1983: 69). All these are powerful linguistic tools to produce acoustic difference. In Kinshasa, where an increasing portion of the population does not understand French or English, sermons in these or other Western languages can also be seen as similar techniques for producing acoustic difference, which indicates spiritual presence tout court. This interpretation differs from older ways of seeing language that is not ‘understandable’ as irrational magic or incantations.29 EMM and TMAJ’s responsables would not go so far as to claim that Japanese is by itself a sacred or spirit language, as is known to be the case for Sukyô Mahikari (Cornille 1999: 237–238). But that a sound element belonging to the ‘transnational’ undoubtedly receives transcendental qualities such as being a direct hotline to God, supports Robbins’ (2009b) argument that ‘the trans- in transnational is the transin transcendental’, making it, in a way, a performable hotline to the other world. In the city’s rather noisy urban environment, EMM and TMAJ produce acoustic difference not only through their non-amplified and very controlled collective chanting of the Amatsu Norito and other Japanese prayers, but also through silence per se, which, especially for TMAJ, is a requirement during Johrei. In the case of born-again churches, however, loudness is used to create acoustic difference, which, in addition, is distorted, both through over-amplification as well as the grain in the pastor’s sore and shouting voice. The latter might be seen as a technique to dehumanise the human voice in order to make it sound more similar to the voice of spirits, as Peek (1994: 481) proposes for instruments to which a tensely vibrating metal element is often added so as to provoke a ‘sore’ vibration to the sound. This is known in drums, but also thumb pianos (mbira and sanza), and the distortion of voice by a mirliton, etc.30 Paradoxically, the pastor’s voice becomes the least understandable at the moment when it is the most audible, i.e. when amplified and therefore distorted to the utmost. The message seems more distant or removed at the very moment when the medium that carries it, the sound of the amplified voice, is brought closest to the human ear.

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Performative Silence from Regeneration to Respectability As we have seen, silence is fundamentally ambivalent. On the one hand, it can be a protective hiding place for those who need security and feel temporarily weak, thus offering a space of regeneration. When sharing my interest in silence with TMAJ’s Alain, I explained to him what I meant by regenerative silence, i.e. a silence of regeneration in which one could concentrate and gather strength. His response was affirmative: ‘The power comes indeed from this silence. There is a concentration, which allows you to orient your thoughts in a way to be able to plan a certain number of things in the organisation of your life, and this leads you straight to certain rather visible results’ (Alain, Mbinza, September 2013). On the other hand, silence can also perform one’s personal respectability, one’s not having to speak because of a perceived superiority. André once told me that a chief would never deny knowing something about sorcellerie. During his early study years at a Catholic seminary, one of André’s elder ‘brothers’ there had approached him and asked which gri-gri he was using in order to be so intelligent. André was shocked and had started crying in the face of this accusation, frightened and not knowing how to react. In retrospect, he told me that he regretted having reacted in this way. Had he known before what silence could have done, as in the chief’s case, he would have smiled and said nothing: ‘The guy would have been even more afraid of me’, he said (André, Mongafula, May 2013). This points at silence and the control of the mouth (including laughter) as a long-standing pattern of local aesthetics of authority.31 Much indicates that in Mobutu’s Zaire, it was the class of the postcolonial neobourgeoisie, whose new Zairian patrons had started occupying the leadership positions of the country’s economy after Mobutu had ‘Zairianised’ most foreign companies in 1971. Although in-depth research is still lacking, it is known that courses were offered at the Universities of Lubumbashi and Kinshasa for the new elite to be trained in leadership behaviour and how to appear as a proper patron. Next to ostentatious consumption and manners of respectability more generally, this was linked to techniques of the body such as a selective attitude regarding who deserved a handshake or rather a fatherly top-down shoulder touch. More important, it seems, were techniques of the mouth such as a particular kind of masculine laughter known as le rire gras (fat laughter) and, of course, a meticulous economy of selective speech.32 Though weakness and strength, regeneration and respectability, are clear-cut opposites, the performance of silence can render their

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Illustration 7.2 Mantra chanting in Mangengenge. Praying the Amatsu Norito ‘prayer’ before labouring at EMM’s organic farming site. Photo by the author.

difference ambiguous. Not being able or allowed to speak, on the one hand, and not feeling the need to speak up because one’s status entitles one to remain silent, are two subjective sides of the same coin of objective (in-)audibility. Within Kinshasa’s hustle and bustle, EMM’s prayer units are silent sound sites, they are sonic heterotopic islands. The silence offered and practised here is a silence of regeneration (or of recreation, as suggested by the French récréation, meaning a ‘break’). The eloquence of silence has been a salvaging resource to EMM’s Alain, who has had explosive tensions with his maternal aunt in the house where he lived with his pregnant wife. From his own perspective, his aunt would be speaking negatively to and about him and his wife on a daily basis, as soon as he returned from work. His reaction had always been to engage with her openly in verbal arguments and discussions, as they are well captured by the Lingala verb kosuana (literally ‘to bite each other’, but rather meaning to argue verbally) or the French se chamailler. Thanks to Johrei and the control of the mouth he learned at EMM, he explained, one day he returned home and understood that by being so responsive he had only been feeding the arguments. From now on he was silent and no longer engaged when his aunt commenced speaking aggressively. He felt protected from

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her words by the ‘aura’ Johrei had procured around him, and which was audible in the silence he now kept. Gradually, he explained, he felt increasingly more secure and superior to his aunt’s behaviour of mediocrity. Similar examples include Barbara’s account, who said she was choleric but managed to master herself thanks to Johrei and other EMM practices. Examples of such silence of self-mastery, and hence of respectability, can also be found among members of other spiritual movements. Papa Pascal (60), for instance, had been the manager of Zaire’s national boxing team. Before becoming a yogi with the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University, he was an angry man, he says. He would drink a lot and was verbally aggressive. But thanks to the meditation techniques he learned, he had now become the quietest and most composed man he knows (according to him). The same is true for Adolphe (24) from the International Association of the Supreme Master Ching Hai, where mantras are spoken silently, inwardly, during the meditation exercises. In his view, the appropriation of his movement’s silence has enabled him to develop a certain respect in his family, who for a long time had considered him weak and reactionary. During Johrei the sonic architecture of the silent sound site of the Johrei center is thus transposed onto, or into the body of the individual who becomes a mobile silent sound site, a microcosmic bonsai of his church. While inside the Johrei center, the silence was one of regeneration; as soon as the Messianique returns to his/her social vicinity in the context of Kinshasa’s noise and talkativeness, the same silence becomes a silence of respectability. Thus, the same silence of regeneration, seen in its sonic ‘thingliness’, is taken home by some and carried as a power object on their bodies. This is similar to miraculous handkerchiefs distributed by Pentecostal pastors, a Kimbanguist prayer card or a Catholic rosary or bottle of blessed water. A more suitable comparison even is the Ikebana flower, which requires effort, discipline and concentration.

Conclusion Despite Pentecostalism’s ‘tension with whatever existed before its arrival’, as Robbins (2009a: 161) summarises the literature on Pentecostal personal, cultural and eschatological attitudes towards the past from the perspective of their teachings, it is clear that from a praxeological perspective, no practice can eject itself out of the urging flow of its local historicity (Kalu 2008: 180–181). Thus, in many of Kinshasa’s religious rituals, verbal practices appear to reproduce a long-standing semiotic ideology based on the conception that words and sounds have power.

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The argumentation of this chapter has been led by two axes of analysis: the first, which compares the ways in which sound acts, documents a similarity between EMM/TMAJ and Pentecostal churches in Kinshasa; the second contrasts the relative silence of EMM and TMAJ with the considerable amplitude applied by Pentecostal charismatic churches. Concerning the first axis of analysis, for all movements, sound acts may be called iconic. Like the bullets of nocturnal clapping hands, Christian prayer sounds and music cleanse space and fill the (nocturnal) emptiness with Christian acoustic presence. Just as in the case of EMM/TMAJ’s Amatsu Norito, it also cleanses people’s bodies. The only difference being qualitative in that Pentecostalists chase away possessing demons with an intonation (or ‘vibration’) that ‘demons’ are imagined not to like, whereas EMM and TMAJ’s Japanese prayers cleanse rooms by uplifting ‘unhappy spirits’, thus offering their practitioners an aura of protection through a vibration of love and positivity. Whether words of prayer can be sonically projected only loudly, or also silently or mentally, is subject to popular discussion, but no one doubts that speech acts, in any case. There is a remarkable degree of consciousness, often also theoretical and reflexive, about the principle of ‘the power of words’, which is justified by reference to the Bible for some, or Japanese spiritual knowledge for others, but which clearly originates from popular/indigenous spirituality. The big difference between the two tendencies compared lies in the way in which spiritual presence, that is the force of the words themselves, is generated: in Pentecostal-inspired churches, it is the pastor who serves as megaphone of the Holy Spirit, by inserting his own bodily force into his words, force which he sanctifies by pronouncing the ‘in-the-name-of-Jesus’ mantra, and which, owing to his own physical efforts, is seen as an aesthetics of sincerity and of revelation. In the so-called spiritual movements such as TMAJ and EMM, another mechanism of spiritual generation is at work. Here, it is one of sensual suggestion and seduction, proposing to the senses an aesthetics of secrecy. The latter is emphasised by the pronunciation of words, which are semantically inaccessible. By stressing that ‘audibility and inaudibility are manifestations of the tension between distance and proximity’ (2007: 186) Matthew Engelke makes us ponder upon Kinshasa’s religious landscape, where some movements speak up loudly, whereas others, a minority indeed, cultivate concentration and control their vocal output. For some this silence has an alienating effect. For others, more at ease, it is a convenient

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harbour of recreation and regeneration, a temporal island on which to breathe and to gather strength. The vocal control exercised when chanting the Japanese mantras emphasises technique and skill, which turns the prayers into oral Ikebanas, i.e. a practice based on care, exercise, self-control and discipline, while offering the rewarding possibility to train and champion oneself. The driving telos of self-achievement and transformation is not absent in the visions of several messianic seekers, who envision attaining verbal control as a true means of generating power. In June 2010, EMM’s Joseph shared with me that: me personally, I have placed myself under a discipline: I try to make an effort to think before I speak. … Why this discipline? Because I need, I wish that I managed to develop the power of speech [le pouvoir de la parole]. To acquire this power, one has to start by controlling one’s speech, because you can already acquire it, but if you don’t control it, you can kill (Joseph, Gombe, July 2010).

It is the ambiguity of silence described in the introduction, its potential to perform both weakness and strength, which allows to link it to the term mystique. In a city driven by amplification, both the cleansing vibrations of pastoral word power and the sonic intensity of Kinshasa’s cultural industry (music being Congo’s only transformed export product), the intensity of sound seems increasingly perceived as an existential security belt, whereas silence is condemned to be concealing.

Notes  1. Canetti’s vocabulary fits remarkably well with Central African conceptions: The above-mentioned erstarren (freezing) fits with the blocking effects of witchcraft, while the idea of sich anspinnen, or ‘weaving’, reminds us of Devisch’s Weaving the Threads of Life (1993), suggesting that life is like a web, as De Boeck (1998) and Ferme (2001) also discuss. For a discussion of Canetti with regard to silence, public secrecy and power, see Taussig 1999.  2. Cf. Peek 1994: 477–478, see also Nooter (1993) on the silence of the Luba king.  3. The importance of acoustic difference in generating spiritual presence is ‘of course’ not unique to Africa. It is commonplace among various religious traditions, including ‘even’ ultra-orthodox Calvinism, as Jojada Verrips (2013) shows in his article on the Dutch preacher and church founder Jacobus den Hartog (1892–1963).  4. Thanks to Jojada Verrips for pointing me to the connection between silence and laughter, both of which bear the Janus face of ambivalence. The latter

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is exemplified by people who laugh about their own jokes in public: some listeners feel charmed and touched, others feel mocked and ridiculed. The outcome depends on the status relations at work at the moment of the performance.  5. Hence also the widespread intuitive strategy, often observable among adolescents, to conceal personal insecurity by hiding behind a mask, while simultaneously performing, through the very same mask of silence, a demonstration of ‘cool’ strength and superiority. Not being able or allowed to speak, on the one hand, and not needing to speak because of one’s status-based superiority, are two sides of the same coin of (in-)audibility. Metaphorically speaking, the double-edged sword of silence carries both the cutting blades of life and death.  6. The following paragraphs are based on my personal observations from the neighbourhood of Kingabwa, where I lived during most of my fieldwork. The aim is to collect a number of sonic snippets that, although subjective, may offer insight into Kinshasa’s soundscape.  7. See http://www.digitalcongo.net/​article/​64762, accessed 23 December 2014.  8. Not surprisingly, the Lingala term koyoka conflates the dimensions of abstract, meaning-based ‘understanding’ and the materiality of touch and sensual perception. It can mean ‘to understand’, ‘to hear’ or ‘to listen’, but also ‘to feel’ and ‘to perceive’ as one can feel the wind. This same is true for the Shona verb kunzwa (to hear, but also to taste and to smell) (Engelke 2007: 203). The German term spüren (to sense) approximates koyoka. In German it points to the dimension of prophetic or investigative intuition, however, which in Central Africa would be expressed as ‘seeing’ (Li. komona) rather than ‘sensing’.  9. Many thanks to Lys Alcynda-Stevens for this connection. 10. This is different from those belonging to the bigger AICs, such as the Kimbanguists or the Bapostolo of John Maranke, who are used to praying in the open. 11. The construction of walls around compounds is known as bunkerisation in Kinshasa and occurred especially in the 1980s, see De Boeck 2004a: 227. 12. In August 2013 I was forced to return to Belgium for my grandmother’s funeral. Here, the acoustic reaction to death was rather different: At the gravesite and in my grandfather’s house, nearly all cards of condolence and flower girdles carried the slogan ‘In stiller Anteilnahme’ (with silent condolence) or ‘In stiller Trauer’ (in silent mourning). Does this indicate that in this part of Europe, Stille (silence) has been just as much the compulsory sonic paradigm connected to death, as loudness is in Kinshasa?​ 13. The claims made in favour of the correct form of ‘praying’, the importance of the appropriate medium, i.e. the role of the voice, the body and their relation to the attitude of the chanter, echo rivalling semiotic ideologies used in the historic conflict between Protestants and Catholics, or the more contemporary example of tensions between the Islamic da’wa reformists and Sufism more generally in Nigeria, Mali, Pakistan and elsewhere. 14. For the concept of ‘spiritual atmosphere’, see Chapter 3.

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15. It would undo its original aura, one may say with Walter Benjamin. 16. ‘Om’ is also part and parcel of the liturgy of the weekly service of AMORC. This explains why a Kinois member, who had previously been a responsable of EMM, explained it to me as a secret word from France, where AMORC’s headquarters are located. 17. ‘Kototama’, in TMAJ’s Enseignements Destinés à la Lecture Quotidienne, French translation by Clément Kabamba, Kinshasa 2013, p. 33 (my translation). 18. Rev. Dorgival, Cours d’Encadrement: Le pouvoir du Guen Rei, French translation by Clément Kabamba, Kinshasa 2013, my translation. 19. ‘Amatsu Norito’, in ibid., p. 33, my translation. 20. In style and content the passage is nearly identical with what the missionary ethnographer Van Wing (1959: 352–355) documented as a formule d’incantation in the chapter on magic in his classic work Études Bakongo. Would he have called and classified this thus, had the name of Jesus already figured there in the 1930s when he was researching and writing?​ 21. Simon Coleman (1996, 2006) has analysed the Pentecostal focus on the spoken word in relation to prosperity gospel. He summarises that ‘inspired words are … seen as literally creative, so that the believer must be careful to speak positively at all times.’ He summarises that ‘key to this assumption is the doctrine, based in part on Romans 10:8, that whatever is spoken by faith can address and have an influence on all situations. So-called positive “confession” is therefore not an admission of sin (as in Roman Catholic confession to a priest) but rather a statement that lays claim to divine beneficence, giving prosperity to the person but also equipping them to be more effective in converting others to the faith’ (Coleman 2006: 499). See also Pype 2011a: 301–303. 22. For other examples see the work on Kàsàlà (Luba praise poetry) by Jean Semaranza Kabuta (2015). 23. See the section on ‘The Strengthened Person’ in Chapter 6. 24. Interview with a Songye nganga, Mangengenge, September 2014. 25. For non-literal uses of the Bible, see also Behrend 2010: 188, and Janzen and MacGaffey 1974: 12–13. It should be stressed that such an understanding of the Bible is of course not unanimous in Africa. Kirsch (2008: 139), for instance, has found that among rural Pentecostals in Zambia, the Bible as material object does not carry any agency. 26. See also Pype 2012: 301–302. For similarities in Accra, see De Witte 2008a: 771. 27. It should be stressed that vocal meaning and matter are never thought of as separate, which reminds us of the didactic and artificial nature of this distinction. 28. Thanks to Achille Mutombo for this precious information, personal communication, Lemba Salongo, May 2013. 29. The latter perspective arises if researchers postulate the modernist linguistic ideology as universal, in which words are essentially carriers of meaning (cf. Bauman and Briggs 2003, Keane 2007). This is contrary to the insight that ‘human literal intelligibility is not the decisive factor to understand the logic of mantras’ (Tambiah 1968: 177–178).

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30. Erlmann (2004: 10–11) reminds us of Sutton’s (1996) ‘pioneering study of the soundscape of Indonesia … in which he argues that inferior or malfunctioning Western sound technology does not automatically lead to a deterioration of “Third World” musical practices. Rather, over-modulation and distortion may be a premeditated effect meant to reinforce traditional aesthetic norms.’ 31. Long before the advent of Catholic convents and missionary movements, silence and the self-discipline of mouth control were an important theme in Central Africa’s oral tradition. Luc De Heusch (1972) recounts how, in the myth of the foundation of the Luba kingdom a ‘stranger from the East’ named Mbidi Kiluwa arrived at the court of the former king Nkongolo to marry the latter’s two sisters. Mbidi’s son Kalala Ilunga would later eventually found the Luba kingdom. Mbidi, when arriving at Nkongolo’s court, refuses to speak. De Heusch reports that he never laughed and had filed teeth, ‘a mutilation that becomes apparent only when a person laughs’ (22). He interprets this as indicative of the value of sophisticated control of the mouthly orifice. While the stranger uses his (own mouth) with the utmost discretion ‘Nkongolo’s mother and Nkongolo himself are characterised by intemperate opening of the mouth. It would seem that excessive opening (forbidden for reasons of good manners and convenience) is a deadly danger’ (23–24). Mbidi introduces a number of prohibitions at the new court, which mainly affect the mouth (22): he instructs his son Kalala Ilunga, the future founder of the Luba kingdom, that ‘the royal cuisine requires discretion and silence’ (23), and that food should be consumed behind the house, eating being an act of the mouth not conducive to the sight of others. In De Heusch’s structuralist reading, ‘in this dialectic, opening connotes the abandon of nature and of death, [whereas] closure connotes the refinement of civilization. “Closed” conduct is the guarantee of the sacred power of bulopwe (i.e. divine kingship). Further, closure relates directly to fecundity and fertility’ (24). According to De Heusch, ‘Luba symbolic thought is wary of every kind of hole, including the vagina if it is not modified, like the mouth, by a cultural operation’ (1972: 24–25). While much debate can be had about the historical accuracy of such accounts and their interpretation it is difficult to disagree with De Heusch’s main argument about social change, ‘the substance of the myth [being] concerned with the introduction of a supposedly superior civilization to a truly primitive and long enduring social universe’ (26). Would EMM and TMAJ’s mouth control that extends to a discipline of the entire body, be in analogy with Mbidi Kiluwa’s criticism of the untamed Nkongolo a criticism of an existing (Pentecostal?​) culture of the open mouth?​ 32. Interview with Professor Tshungu Bamesa, UNIKIN, April 2014.

I8 Imported Tradition ‘Ancestor Worship’ as Reverse Orientalism

Ce qu’il faut réellement retenir, c’est que les morts sont réellement morts lorsque leurs membres de famille se souviennent d’eux. What really must be borne in mind is that the dead are really dead when members of their family remember them. —Radio Télévision National Congolaise (RTNC), evening news, 1 August 20101

This statement ended the news broadcast on DR Congo’s RTNC state channel on the evening of 1 August 2010, after a short report on small groups of smartly dressed people walking around one of Kinshasa’s cemeteries, where they had come to visit the graves of their deceased relatives on the public holiday of ‘Parents’ Day’. It was Mobutu who had declared 1 August Journée des Parents, with the morning reserved for the dead and the afternoon for living elders. This may be linked to the ideological influence of Afrocentrism and African theology, which aimed to attune the continent’s nationalisms to fit the (invented) standard of ‘African’ cultural heritage. Also the explicit inclusion of ancestors in the Catholic liturgy of the rite zaïrois,2 or Birago Diop’s widely celebrated poem Les morts ne sont pas morts, show that Africa’s culture of ancestrality was proudly part of these programmatic endeavours. Yet, by stressing that les morts sont réellement morts, the newsreader obviously diametrically opposed the famous title of Diop’s poem. Has Afrocentric cultural pride become subject to popular questioning? The fact that visiting cemeteries is depicted on the news of a state channel indeed draws attention to the exceptionality of the practice: the statement sounds like a disclaimer intended for those who are likely to misunderstand. Its purpose is to remind the audience that ‘remembering’ (se souvenir) per se is innocent and different from ‘getting in touch’ with the dead and their spiritual powers. At least since the celebration

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of the ‘deathlessness’ of the dead in Diop’s poem, the latter is a practice known to have a long history in Africa. As a disclaimer, the statement fends off potential suspicions that viewers might have about this state-approved practice of commemoration as really being a ‘traditional’ practice of ancestor veneration or worship, which born-again Christians demonise. But the statement also translates the general uncertainty with regard to the condition of death (li. liwa) and the dead more generally: if the true ‘deathness’ of the dead were ‘out of the question’, i.e. if their inability to affect the living were a unanimously assumed and accepted commonplace, no doubt the journalist would not have felt the urge to add his moralising reminder. It illustrates how the ultimate and most discomforting of issues, death and the condition of the dead, is a subject of popular interest and debate that has indeed become omnipresent to the extent of becoming banal in the city of Kinshasa, as De Boeck has argued.3 McCall (1995) critically discusses how research on ancestors in Africa had reached a theoretical cul-de-sac. Initially driven by structuralfunctionalist interests, mainly promoted by Goody (1962), Fortes (1945, 1978) and Kopytoff (1971), scholars later became aware of the historical dynamics of change in lineage relations, calling structural-­functionalist approaches into question and drawing attention to practice-based research (Kopytoff 1987). Today, research on ancestors seems to be ­confronted with still newer challenges. As our case study indicates, it is not only lineage relations, but also the modes of worshipping, of conceiving and conceptualising ritual gift and sacrifice, as well as the meaning and role of the ‘ancestor’ concept per se, that are subject to transformations. Moreover, EMM and TMAJ demonstrate that a practice such as le culte des ancêtres, as Messianiques call it, performs cultural belonging in the pluralist religious landscape of the contemporary African city. This is done by recovering a putatively ‘African’ tradition from a remote and unknown elsewhere: Japan. Transcultural issues were of little consideration to structural-functionalist scholars concerned with ancestors in a time when ‘Africa’ still denoted an unquestionable ontological entity. Today, however, one can no longer overlook how ‘Africans’ do ‘Africa’ with increasing reference(s) to, and a self-reflected positedness within, a wider transnational world of direct or indirect interconnections and cross-cultural interdependences. It is in the context of the ‘crumbling of the patriarchal gerontocratic order, that has always been so typical for the “enduring time” of tradition and ancestrality’ (De Boeck 2004a: 189) that EMM/TMAJ attempt to ‘save’ both the demonised dead and the forgotten ‘African’ legacy.

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This chapter is therefore as much about ancestors and their significance in the everyday as about the institution of ancestor worship itself. Both aspects have to be understood with their own respective local historicity. The first part introduces the multiplicity of eschatological models available in Kinshasa, where Pentecostals tend to diabolise, i.e. to ‘quarantine’, ancestors. Part two presents EMM and TMAJ’s ancestor worship with a focus on the materiality of envelopes and money. It will become apparent that the ‘ancestor’ concept used by Messianiques refers to a renewed version of the ‘ancestor’ idea from Japan. In light of this, part three discusses EMM and TMAJ’s ‘ancestor worship’ as reverse orientalism.

Eschatological Pluralism and the Pentecostal Quarantine Kinshasa’s presentist temporality,4 its unsteadiness and utter unpositedness in time, is fertile ground for any project that produces eschatological narratives aiming to insert the present into a bigger cosmic scheme. At the same time, and paradoxically so, the sheer multiplicity of such eschatological models contributes to the very unpositedness of the present. Whether postmillennial, such as the Kimbanguist model, where the souls of the deceased can be sure to be well cared-for in the already accomplished ‘New Jerusalem’ of the village of Nkamba in Bas-Congo province,5 or the Catholic model of far-removed heaven and hell, where souls will wander off after being judged; or the millennial fervour of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Watchtower), who have been preaching the end of the world and the instauration of a timeless paradise for more than a hundred years on the African continent;6 or the Pentecostal premillennial fervour for the ongoing immediate return of Christ, who will resuscitate the dead and provide them with a new body for eternal bliss during a thousand years in this world (De Boeck 2005); or the ‘traditionalising’ model in favour of the production of ancestors, based on a radical denial of any non-autochthonous version of afterlife, as proffered by Congo’s Eglises des Noires of the Ngunza tradition after Kimbangu: when it comes to deeper convictions about whether spirits of the dead can or cannot influence the living, uncertainties and doubts persist. Where the spirit of the deceased remains, for instance, and what exactly it is capable of doing in its ‘post-visible’ condition, is a general subject of debate. Some maintain that the spirit remains in the tomb and awaits the future advent of Christ there. Others, after initial hesitation, come up

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with accounts of a remote paradise or purgatory. Yet others emphasise the danger of wandering spirits who come to haunt the living in order to cure their unhappy situation of invisibility by possessing and parasitising the bliss of others. There are indeed many flavours and colours in which ‘the dead’ are encountered and continue to be sustained. As De Boeck has already stressed, the subject of the dead is far from dead after all. Eschatological afterlife models appear to serve an intellectual playfulness (Droogers 1999) and the production of symbolic capital by means of truth claims, rather than the purpose of consolation vis-à-vis the ultimate problem of death and its living brother: fear. Kinshasa’s multiple eschatologies, as they appear in the journalist’s statement, can also be seen as competing semiotic ideologies about the things of death, such as pictures, photographs, portraits, houses, places, names, body parts, birthmarks, names, soil, belongings, or, as in the case of the opening statement, the cemetery, as well as the past per se, and the spaces in which it took place. By pointing to the fact that ‘remembrance’ can be practised independently of the putative impacts of ancestors’ powers, the journalist points at a variety of semiotic ideologies that may govern the relationship between past and present. Either it ‘acts’ through ancestral spirits, or it is ‘merely remembered’ from the vantage point of a detached present. Outside of spiritualist circles, it is mainly older people who remember that the ‘African’ way of doing death was once an unproblematic part of life. Younger Kinois are increasingly lacking in knowledge about the issues of death and afterlife as they were conceived in the times of their forefathers. When asked about such issues, many take pride in elaborating on ‘how it really was’, but one can sense the general uncertainty. Especially with regard to who is or will become an ancestor, no consistent opinion transpires. What ancestors can or cannot do, where they are and whether they can actively punish and possess somebody, is generally unclear. It is in this atmosphere of cultural insecurity that EMM and TMAJ’s version of ‘ancestor worship’, with all its things, timings, techniques and procedures, offers yet another way to produce a feeling of cultural stability and belonging.7 This happens by offering participation in a larger, transnational programme that offers ways in which to lead one’s life, i.e. to feel, think and decide about it, and wraps the undertaking in the promise of prosperity. As is well known from scholarship on Pentecostalism in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, the Pentecostal success is linked to its promise to liberate the individual subject from gerontocratic tutelage and obligations to the family, in particular from ancestral ties.8 Given that the

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production of ancestors is a keystone for the stability and reproduction of a particular social order, as Fortes (1945) and Goody (1962) have shown, it is not surprising that attempts to break the communitarian social order precisely attack the institution of ancestrality. However, as Meyer (1998, 1999) has influentially argued, the Pentecostal discourse to ‘make a complete break with the past’ is contradictory in that conscious attempts to absent something make it necessarily present,9 or, as Engelke (2010: 177) puts it: the discursive programme to break with the past is ‘a paradoxical demand of remembering to forget’. The result is therefore not an absenting or an oblivion of ancestral spirits and their existence, but a more or less intentional diabolisation, which concretely takes the form of psychogenealogical counselling and obsessing over the identification of sinful curses of the past (Meiers 2013). These spoil the collective karma of one’s family, as Messianiques would call it. The result is a generalised discourse of diabolisation with regard to ‘traditional’ culture as a whole.10 Devisch (1993: 6) summarises this shift when he states that the ancestor, ‘instead of being a source of filiation and identity, [has come to be] perceived as persecutor, preventing the descendants’ inscription into the (time-)space of the other’, which is understood to be a new world of prosperity and material bliss. This hostile attitude towards the communal past also temporalises the present, which in turn is inscribed onto a fictional and deterministic linearity of ‘development’. This is what the Pentecostal premillennial fervour is all about. It is indeed another repetition, a feedback from the old colonial and missionary ‘library’, in which the ‘inventions’ and ‘ideas’ about Africa as archaic and backward were assembled to produce a place that was obsolete and urgently in need of being ‘reborn’ into a radically different and new reality.11 The concept of the Pentecostal quarantine is helpful to conceptualise the paradox of wanting to ‘break with the past’ while, in the very act of doing so, in fact cultivating it: something that has been quarantined can only be kept away by a conscious and continuous effort to do so, requiring energy and labour, and paradoxically indeed, attention. Within its state of quarantine, the past and its agents, the ancestor’s spirits, frequently escape to present themselves in people’s memories or haunt them by possessing them as demons. By being locked away, these spirits are cultivated and grow, constantly threatening to escape again, to overgrow and haunt the present, similar indeed to Hannah Arendt’s (1985: 213) understanding that the crimes of the past ‘hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation’. In line with Kopytoff’s alternative thesis of ‘ancestors as elders’, the Lingala word bakoko (Sg. koko) is commonly used to indicate one’s

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grandparents (and their siblings), while it simultaneously refers to respectable elders more generally, both alive and dead. Often the concept connotes the wisdom of the elderly in connection with their knowledge of the customs of the past. The more generic meaning of bakoko to indicate one’s elders, dead or alive, while connoting the respectability of African heritage, is altered when the French concept of ancêtre comes into play, a concept seemingly more related to the condition of death than to that of age, although this is difficult to generalise because of the widely varying levels of proficiency in French.12 But bakoko also has other meanings: koko also stands for birthmark, which is supposed to be a sign one inherits from a deceased forefather, sometimes as a mark of reincarnation. Also, in the evening hours, when sitting at one of the countless plastic tables of the city’s terraces, young men pass by the table fronts carrying cardboard boxes on their heads, full of wooden twigs, roots and nuts, shouting out bokoko, bokoko (literally ‘ancestrality’, or ‘heritage’) to advertise that they are selling these powerful ancestral snacks, whose taste or medicinal efficacy are known to be discoveries of the past. Most common are the kimbiolongo root, a welcome aphrodisiac, cola nuts and mondongo (cardamom seeds).

Japanese Ancestor Worship in Kinshasa Lifting by Gifting: Prayers, Names and Envelopes As we have seen in Chapter 7, speech is a most powerful medium to ‘get in touch’ with spiritual entities, be they the Holy Spirit or one’s ancestors. Several older people recounted to me how, as young boys, they were initiated into talking to the ancestors while handing offerings to them in the huts next to the house of the family or village chief. Pierre Petit (1996: 356–357) has documented how the Luba king addresses his ancestors in case of difficulties: You, ancestors, who have engendered the father who has engendered myself, you who have been the first ones to exert the sacred authority which you have transmitted to my father and which today I possess; please respond to my request for the situation to improve.

EMM and TMAJ’s ‘ancestor worship’ follows a similar pattern. In contrast to Pentecostal free speech, and rather in line with Catholic prayers, EMM uses a preformulated arrangement of sentences in Lingala, i.e. the ‘prayer’ called pratique ya Sonen, which can be seen as a secured direct

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hotline to the ancestral world. The Japanese concept of Sonen (deep thinking) is understood to concern the ‘spiritual vibration of the mind’ and determines whether your thoughts are positive or negative (EMM 2013: 2). I witnessed how the Sonen text was circulated and photocopied among newcomers, clearly with the aim of having the right text for the best ameliorative efficacy. Most Messianiques know this prayer by heart. The English translation (by the author) of the locally practised Lingala version reads as follows: PRATIQUE YA SONEN All of us, together, we are practising SONEN [deep thought], in order to transfer the mpasi of our ancestors and of their descendants over to the messiah and saviour Meishu Sama. 1. I accept that Meishu Sama is the messiah whom the world has been awaiting for so long. I adhere to the fact that the difficulties that I have are messages from my ancestors. 2. You, ancestors, who are within [responsible for] my own pains, I am handing over your pains to the messiah and saviour Meishu Sama, so all of you may be purified, saved and resurrected by him. 3. Meishu Sama, messiah and saviour of the world, I beg you to lift up all the pains of my ancestors, so all of them may be purified, saved and resurrected by you. I place my entire hope on you, master. 4. Dear ancestors you, who have been purified, saved and resurrected by Meishu Sama, I beg you, all of us together we can really gather one hundred thousand followers by December 2010; one by one each one of us will raise one person per month. This is our deal and I place my entire hope on you. All of us, together, we practise SONEN to display the joy, luck and gratitude of our ancestors and their descendants to our messiah and saviour Meishu Sama. 1. Meishu Sama, messiah and saviour of the world, please accept all the joy and gratitude of the ancestors that manifest inside me. I have no words to express all my gratitude. 2. I am grateful to our Lord, in the name of Meishu Sama and as his instrument, together with my ancestors and many other people. All of us together, we practise SONEN to let our ancestors and their descendants know our convictions and faith. 1. I carry a divine spark and our messiah Meishu Sama within me. Along with many other people I am the representative of God in this world. 2. I am the sum of all my ancestors and the representative of all of them. I want all of them to manifest themselves through my thoughts and feelings/desires, so I can lift them up to Meishu Sama. 3. Together with them I want to serve God’s work as the instrument of Meishu Sama. 4. I am grateful to God and Meishu Sama for all [the things] I can do today, together with my ancestors.

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All of us together we practise SONEN so as to do good to others; we ask Meishu Sama to show himself within ourselves, each one will give the offering of thankfulness. 1. I accept that paradise is within myself, [and] I also accept that Our Lord and Messiah Meishu Sama, as well as the ancestors, find themselves within this [location of] paradise. 2. Messiah Meishu Sama, please forgive me, do to me as if I was your servant, and your plan to give joy to others, and to do good even if little, this will show itself in me.

Several have used this ‘prayer’ to receive a favour from somebody else. One adolescent girl resorted to praying Pratique ya Sonen in order to influence the ancestors of a friend with whom she had fallen in love. Later on, after they had indeed become closer, she had told him about it, which caused the young relationship to break apart. Now she regretted having told him about her super prayer. I personally witnessed a similar attempt at mental manipulation. In June 2011, I joined a team of EMM missionaries on a clean(s)ing mission to a member’s house in the neighbourhood of Mikondo. As transportation costs are usually difficult to cover, and Mikondo is quite far out of the city, I offered the passenger seat on my motorbike to one of the members. Maman Ortie (39) was glad to get a lift and we got through the traffic fairly easily. Once we had reached Pascal, however, a policeman stopped us and straightaway pulled the key from the ignition and confiscated it. I was prepared for this to happen because I had forgotten the second helmet, and thus found myself in a rather uncomfortable situation for the subsequent discussion. The bike was pushed over to one side, and the capitaine of the post appeared and urged me to enter into negotiation. I explained that I was on a house-cleaning mission with my church, etc., and that I was helping somebody out by giving her a lift. The officer was listening, though gesticulating that we should enter the office container to discuss the matter inside. I knew this would not be the best thing to do, as being blocked on a chair in front of him and his colleagues would reduce my bargaining capacity. During all this time, Ortie was standing next to me, silently and visibly concentrated, to the extent that I started wondering, ‘Why doesn’t she help me with the talking here, at least a bit?’ After settling the matter with 10 USD the capitaine and I agreed that we were friends now and I knew I had yet another new protector on yet another crossroad. Ortie was still not saying a word. When we finally left and arrived at our destination, I finally asked her why she had been so quiet. Her answer struck me, as she had been silent only to my ears: ‘I have been doing

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Illustration 8.1 Salt, rice and water (in Japanese pots), as well as fish, fruit, money, bread and names as offerings to the ancestors. Photo by the author.

pratique ya Sonen all that time to his ancestors’, she said, ‘and it worked, because you only had to pay ten dollars’. The catalogue of offerings is yet another matter through which TMAJ has justified its secession from EMM, whose minimalist Japanese-style offerings of water, salt and rice13 it has enhanced by an extensive list of local edibles. These are installed one after the other in front of the Goshintai: first the set of little Japanese pots with rice, salt and water, followed by an impressive fish from the Congo River (mbisi ya mayi), which is prepared for the offering by tying its head and tail together with a string and stuffing a salad leaf into its mouth, then placed on a bed of salad with tomato slices around it. This is followed by a big basket of fruit, a bundle of pondou (cassava leaves), a pain carré (square bread), a tray of aubergines and a green cabbage, two baskets with envelopes and/or ancestor lists (see below), and at the end, a basket full of sweets, biscuits and lollipops.14 But money is also given to the ancestors, which at first sight resembles the emphasis on money in Pentecostal churches. Maman Anto summarised: ‘Give thirty per cent of your salary to God and you will see how your life will change for the better’. She said this on the basis that, anyway, ‘all money belongs to God’.15

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The Catholic and Kimbanguist pattern of donating money as alms is widely referred to as mabonza in Kinshasa. This is also a renowned feature of Pentecostalism, where the pastor’s flashy car reflects the bliss of glamour in which his bandimi (followers) participate by following him.16 To outsiders the mabonza donations sometimes seem to be due to coercive social pressure, often criticised and ridiculed by Kinois themselves. The thirty per cent requested by Mama Anto similarly appears slightly over the top to an outsider, and while such a sentence might easily arouse many critical Kinois to compare EMM/TMAJ with greedy exploitative (false) pastors, Messianiques themselves perceive obvious differences in relation to Pentecostalism: Alain repeatedly explained to me how for him, EMM’s explanation of the mabonza gift had been a true revelation to him. He had hitherto never seen it this way: here one’s very personal ancestors are receiving the money, and are thus reintegrated into a cycle of reciprocity. As Alain learned from EMM’s teachers, the readiness to give away money was also in large part responsible for the development of the West. Why otherwise would the ‘Western countries’ offer so much money to developing nations? I learned from several Messianiques that they had already gifted a month’s salary at least once. Referred to as effort majeur, this is usually done in a calculated way for a particular wish to come true or a special problem to be solved. In a teaching session in August 2010, one missionary informed the congregation that mbongo eza temps (money is time). He explained that the necessary time for praying and transmitting Johrei to be effective could be considerably shortened by offering money to one’s ancestors. This, once again, indicates the mechanical or technical imagination of an input-output calculation, which makes prayer indeed very similar to labour. In Pentecostal churches, the amount of money one offers is often publicly displayed. This is done ostentatiously and with the help of a microphone through which the pastor announces to the church community (and the neighbourhood) that somebody should come forward with an amount of twenty dollars (or more, or less, depending on the social standing of the church), followed by those who give ten dollars, then five, then 3,000 francs congolais (FC), 2,000 FC, 1,000 FC and so on until the level of a few hundred Congolese francs is reached. Thanks to the envelope technology in EMM and TMAJ, money is given anonymously, which makes it possible even to offer nothing.17 All one can see is that somebody places an envelope in the slot of a rectangular wooden box.18 In Kinshasa, upon entering the ritual space, an envelope can be chosen from three different piles: offrande des ancêtres (gift for the ancestors),

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offrande de construction (gift for construction) or offrande de gratitude (gift of gratitude). Envelopes are placed in the box either as the result of encouragement during a session of personal orientation,19 or when the missionary invites or indeed instructs the follower to make a pecuniary offer (Li.: kopesa mabonza, Fr.: donner l’offrande). For the mabonza during services, EMM’s liturgy has reserved a moment in which the entire congregation gets up and queues in front of the wooden box to place their envelope.20 Several times during evening prayers, teaching sessions and Wednesday and Sunday services, EMM’s responsables had to remind the congregation that empty envelopes were not a gift conducive to enticing the ancestors, even if the intention was good. When the incitation to give money is uttered, responsables stress, however, that even a very little amount can have decisive effects. In the end all depends on the true attitude of gratitude (often used in French, or in Li. botondi) one has, no matter how much ‘ancestral permission’, i.e. money, there is. Yet, and not surprisingly, it is the lack of la permission des ancêtres which deters many from intensifying their frequency of visits to the church/ temple. Money for mabonza was explained to me as la face matérielle de la gratitude, the ‘material side of gratitude’, i.e. its thingification, materialisation or embodiment. Gratitude vis-à-vis others, including the dead, is one of EMM/TMAJ’s core Buddhist teachings. It implies an ideal of selfpositioning and self-awareness and can therefore be seen as a mental attempt to repair reciprocity. It is through preaching and turning away from the utter ‘materialism’ presented as a result of colonialism and cultural contact with the West, that a harmonious life in respect and gratitude will be possible. ‘The ancestors do not ask for any random sum of money to be offered to them, but for the [honest] feeling [of gratitude] with which I present to them my prayers’ (Jérôme, Kinshasa, July 2012). Or, in minister Jacques’ terms: Meishu Sama says that spirits need vibration. Everything has a spiritual side. Even foufou, our food, has a spiritual side, and even money. The ancestors also need money, but what kind of money do they want? Not the paper, but the spiritual side of money (Jacques, Mokali, July 2012).21

Similar to what has been said about books (cf. Chapter 6), money is more than just paper with signs on it. Its invisible side may have a powerful quality in itself, which is often understood to relate to the moral quality of the work that has produced or, in the best case, earned it. Money lying on the floor, which has putatively been lost by someone, is often left there and not picked up for fear of it being a bait of contagion placed by a magician or a nganga. As I learned from two ngangas

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on the outskirts of Kinshasa, whom I visited with two older members of TMAJ, placing money as bait at strategic spots is a long-standing technique to catch a soul. Money can obviously mediate more than just monetary value. Alain once told me: It is something I have discovered at the messianic church, which advises me that money, the origins of which you are not all too sure about, should be given to the church. Even money you’ve collected [Fr. ramassé], one should not just consume it, but always keep a little part to give to the Church. This protects you against any evil spirit, which can arrive and can be the source of your misfortune (Alain, Mbinza, September 2013).

This is also known from Pentecostal churches whose (fake) pastors are sometimes criticised for taking away people’s putatively ‘ill-gotten’ jewellery and inciting people to gift any suspicious money, as is depicted in painter Ekunde’s Le Pasteur (see Illustration 7.1). It is also well known to Kinois that individuals who have made money in dubious ways, i.e. by recurring to sacrifice, or by ‘touching magic’ (Li. kosimba fétiche, Fr. toucher au fétiche) for it, often deliberately do not redistribute this money in order to ‘protect’ their kin (who accordingly find out about the quality of the money in question). Clearly, the semiotic ideology governing the social manipulation of banknotes conditions the ways in which people relate to one another. It is here that authority is negotiated and generated on the micro-social level, which in turn keeps the semiotic ideology alive. One day in 2010, Alain followed the instructions he received from an Angolan minister at EMM to be open and outspoken about the practices of and his affiliation with EMM. So he decided to inform his family in an elaborate reunion. The result had severe consequences for his family life, because he saw himself all of a sudden excluded from the circle of familial reciprocity and deprived of the possibility of lending or borrowing any money with any of his brothers. While beforehand, as the father of his nuclear family, he was used to managing the finances for his wife and his two children by exchanging money with his brother, this role was now taken over by his wife, because his brother no longer wanted to exchange money directly with him, for fear of being infected by his magie as the source of his income. On a wider level of analysis, this informs us about the extent to which capitalism, i.e. the role of money as a technology that renders the process through which it was gained invisible, is met with suspicion. To sum up, my point here is that the logic of offering money to the Pentecostal God or, in EMM/TMAJ’s case, to the ancestors, by

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transferring one’s ‘gratitude’ through the medium of money, follows the same pattern, or happens within the same semiotic ideology, as the transfer of money-mediated bewitchment through sorcery or magie. A money gift can obviously restore, but can also poison a tie of reciprocity.22 This is much more in line with the logic of sacrifice and the transference, or transfiguration, of spiritual energy, than with the idea of alms and charity as practised in the Catholic Church, or of the Japanese idea of hôshi as private individual service for one’s ancestors. Clearly, a number of ritual gift traditions encounter one another here. Of Names and Numbers: Saving by Inscribing Every Wednesday morning and every first Sunday of the month EMM celebrates a special service for the ‘elevation of the ancestors’ souls’ (culte d’élévation des âmes des ancêtres). Followers are requested to bring so-called ancestor lists (Fr. listes/formulaires des ancêtres, Li. mikanda/­ formulaires ya bakoko) on which they have inscribed the names of as many ‘ancestors’ as possible (usually not more than forty or forty-five because the pre-edited forms do not have more lines). For each ancestor, some information about the degré de parenté (degree of relatedness of the ‘kinship’ tie) is requested, and at the end of each list the total number of inscribed ancestors is indicated. Upon entering the prayer ground, the lists are deposited in a pile with the receptionist, who also puts the follower’s name in a book and calculates the total number of inscribed ancestors collected on that day. Like the money gifts and food offerings, the lists are ritually enshrined during the service (Fr. mettre à l’autel, Li. kotia na autel). The total number of ancestors enshrined on the day of worship is announced at the end of the service, before the tray with the lists is devoutly carried out of the room. After the service, one of the missionaries burns the sheets, because ‘what remains is only matter, only paper, it is no longer of any use’, as I learned from a missionary carrying out the task. In Japan, the practice of enshrining and thus ‘saving’ one’s ancestors by means of their name is a common Buddhist feature. Though the Lingala verb kobikisa (to save) means ‘rescuing’ rather than ‘recording’, I use the term here deliberately because of its polysemic ambiguity in English. Ancestors are saved from oblivion by being mentally evoked and archived in writing, for a little while at least, in such lists. At the same time, they are spiritually rescued. At the end of a morning service on a Wednesday in June 2012, at EMM’s Mokali unit in the Kimbanseke commune, a total of 2,083 collected ancestor names was announced.23 A variety of French, Lingala

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and sometimes Tshiluba concepts is used to indicate the respective kinship relation. The lists allow us to discuss three important points related to EMM/ TMAJ’s ancestor worship: firstly, the underlying cultural significance of the name; secondly, who is seen as an ancestor and what ramifications this has on the putative subjectivity of the list’s author; and thirdly, what this means for the production of time in Kinshasa today. As I learned from several Messianiques, and as a number of lists confirm, some have followed EMM’s guidelines to make the effort and find out the names of their great-grandfathers and great-­ grandmothers for both their paternal and maternal lineages. They do this by asking their parents or kin in order to be able to list as many ancestral souls as possible. An example is a list that mentions fourteen arrière-grands-pères (great-grandfathers) and eight arrière-grands-mères (great-grandmothers). Often the offering of money and the enshrining of ancestor lists go hand in hand: Régine did not conduct any special inquiry to find out the names of people she did not know, except for the sisters of her mother, who died before she was born. For the rest, I know the name of my father, of his father, of my mother and her parents. For the others, often we had funerals at our home, and also three [colleagues] of our office have died, so I put them [on the list]. … I have also put my friends from the institute who have already died, and then the presidents of the republic. The paper is at home now, but as soon as I find [some money for] an offrande [donation], I will pray and, the next day I will deposit this. This is how God saves these souls, these ancestors (Régine, Yolo, June 2013).

The importance of quantity and numbers resonates with the logic of wealth in people (Guyer 1995) and is encouraged by EMM’s messianic doctrine of constructing paradise on earth by ‘saving’ as many ancestral souls as possible. It is proposed that the more souls are ‘saved’, the more stability and elevation is enabled in the here and now. Many repeat a standard set of names on a weekly basis, including their grandparents’ and Mobutu’s name, for instance. Many keep a model sheet in their homes, which are mnemonic devices, indeed archives, of the names of those they do not remember by heart. That many forms are handwritten is not surprising in Kinshasa. For several of the lists analysed, the form was neatly drawn and prepared from scratch, proving meticulous dedication to this bureaucratic task, which reflects an urge for ritual purity. The opposite is also true, however: one author from the sample analysed had simply photocopied his pre-filled model and completed it

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with some names. This suggests that there are clearly also a few who just want to get the job done. Another author has filled two lines with the names of his deceased children, which are qualified as muana nanga (my child). But he is not the only one commemorating his departed children. Other lists carry entries such as mon fils ainé (my oldest son), mon bébé, ma fille (my daughter) or mon garçon (my boy) with an unquestionable commemorative leaning. The lists thus directly reflect Congo’s alarming level of child mortality. That a name is more than an abstract symbol, code or representation but has the performative and iconic ability to embody or re-present whom it belongs to can perhaps be most clearly grasped if one imagines putting down on a list the name of one’s departed child. As elsewhere in Africa, the name is known to be a sonic icon, a mantra, which makes a person’s spirit portable, comparable to a picture or a statue. Like the portrait of a departed person at a matanga funeral, which is carried around and danced with during parts of the mourning sequence, the name obtains iconic quality as soon as it is materialised, and sensationalised, in speech or writing. The connection between the name and its proprietor is one of similarity, if not of identity, making it powerfully iconic.24 The weekly filling in of EMM/TMAJ’s ancestors on forms by individual Messianiques can thus be compared to a commemorative ‘dipping’ and ‘throwing’ of deceased close ones. These two concepts refer to the public shouting of names by so-called atalakus (criers, attractors of attention), who are an important constituent of a Congolese music orchestra. Names are ‘thrown’ (Li. kobuaka) both during concerts and on records (cf. B. White 2004a, Tsambu 2013). While the atalaku’s role is to attract and socially weave the music and the band into the wider audience by means of names as iconic contact points, Messianiques do the same within their own self-selected community of spirit kin. In both cases, this has an obvious laudatory purpose to entice sponsors and protectors, living ones in the case of the atalakus, and dead ones in the case of Messianiques. The iconic nature of the name also explains the prominence of other name-based practices such as the taking on or distribution of (nick) names, which in Kinshasa are often inspired by Western football or music stars, but also the institution of the ndoyi (namesake). The namesake phenomenon is significant and respected in Kinshasa, and can be seen as an appellative birthmark. Just like ancestors, birthmarks are also called koko in Lingala. People who carry the same name inevitably have a homologous connection and therefore something in common. The name is their spiritual connection point. In Kinshasa’s Pentecostal

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circles it is common for departed namesakes, especially if they qualify as bakoko, to easily possess a descendant. Régine explained to me what is known as a malédiction de nom (cursing by name): There is what is called malédiction de nom [name cursing]. It is very different from where you [Peter] come from. [In] our culture, [imagine that] I am born, [and] they give me your name. [But] while you were alive, what you did, or perhaps you were a molaso [lit. a rubber strip, meaning a whore], so at the time you my homo(nym) [namesake], you were perhaps a ndumba [free woman], or you were perhaps a witch, or a féticheur; all this will now recoil on me because I am carrying your name. So, now you have to pray, to receive a lot of Johrei, so these manifestations will not be able to reach me. That’s more or less it. That’s what one calls les liens de nom [the ties of name]. But in the Eglises de Réveil [born-again churches], they tie the spirits of the name: ‘Oh you, name spirit, it is you who is cursing here. I am chasing you, je te chasses’, and all this.

The name acts like a channel here. Interestingly, Régine had started her statement with a strong occidentalising tinge, portraying her own ‘culture’ as radically different from ‘where you [Peter] come from’. While I am convinced that the name is more than a detached representation for Europeans or in the ‘West’ too, where magical matters have grown and been pushed out of the acceptable discourse, this shows how, under the impact of religious movements and the semiotic ideologies they advocate, cultural differences are also produced and discursively cultivated in places like Kinshasa. Who is an Ancestor: New Wine in Old Vessels? The large number of concepts used to refer to one’s ‘kin’ reflects how social models are thought of and spoken about today.25 The most obvious and striking finding suggested by our sample of fifty-five ancestor lists, with a total of 2,083 ancestral spirits thus ‘saved’, is undoubtedly the overwhelming presence of ‘ancestors’ who are not older than, or who are at least of the same generation as the lists’ authors. Moreover, an impressive number of extra-kin ‘ancestors’ appear on the lists, such as friends, neighbours, neighbours’ children, etc. One list, for instance, specifies the neighbourhood concerned, such as ‘voisine q/12 Kutu’, referring to a neighbour of ‘quartier 12’ in the locality of N’Djili, ‘Kutu’ being the name of the vicinity.26 One male individual has excelled in compiling a total of 313 ‘ancestors’ on four separate sheets. In this case, the handwriting is everything but tidy, and the list of names appears to result from a brainstorming of dead individuals, which, however, appears in nearly alphabetical order.

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This author has not indicated any degré de parenté, which explains the high number of ‘unspecified’ ancestors in the table. The following names are striking: Senghor, Kongolo, Kisolokele, Kongolo Mobutu, Bemba Jeanot, Kasavubu, Kimbangu, etc., all of whom are important figures in Africa and Congo’s recent history. Also other authors have included world-famous heroes: one list holds, next to seventeen grand-pères and five grand-mères, also several other dead family members. Then follow the names of Beethoven (who in total appears twice, as frequently as Lumumba, Léo Laurant, Catholic Pope Jean-Paul II, the founder of the Latter-Day Saints Joseph Smith, as well as William Branham, who is the charismatic founder of the US-originated Pentecostal church well known in Kinshasa as Tabernacle du Temps de la Fin. The inclusion of non-family members is, at first sight, surprising since the structural-functionalist credo on ancestor worship in Africa, established by Fortes and Goody, contends that it is a rule that ancestors are at least members of one’s lineage. The inclusion of non-kin members and arbitrary historic personalities departs even from Kopytoff’s finding (1971) about the equivocality of ancestors and elders. However, from a ‘Japanese’ point of view, the arbitrary inclusion of departed non-kin members is much less surprising. Here, a transformation of the notion of ancestor has been witnessed since the Meiji restoration in 1868, and in accelerated fashion since the end of the Second World War. Morioka (1984) has summarised research on ancestors and their worship in Japan by pointing to the gradual collapse of the longstanding pattern of social organisation around the Japanese tradition of a large-scale family household (Jap. ie). He writes: The notion of a continuation of ie over generations has almost totally evaporated (204). In the context of urbanization and intense industrialization in the first half of the 20th century, followed by the devastating consequences of the Second World War, Japan’s notion of ancestrality has undergone a change from a unilineal view which includes distant ancestors beyond even indirect experiences, to say nothing of direct personal contact, to a concept which limits ancestors to close kin within the range of direct experience, but extends bilaterally; and as such a change from an obligatory concept which should include all the dead on one’s descent line regardless of personal preference, to an optional one which limits ancestors to the deceased close kin whose memories are cherished by offspring (206).

In Japan, the ie-pattern gradually transformed into a social structure based rather on the model of the urban nuclear family. However, unlike the PCC rhetoric of rupture and the tendency to quarantine the

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ancestors, Japan has witnessed a transformative adaptation of their ‘ancestor’ concept, which implies that the institution of ancestor worship has remained alive. The unilineal ‘male’ concept of the ancestor turned bilateral, and the remembering individual was transformed from being subjected to custom and lineage obligations into the subject of his/her own moral authority, who chooses himself/herself those he/ she wishes to remember.27 Our sample from ancestors enshrined during EMM’s Wednesday service in Kinshasa reveals the same tendency to replace one’s de jure social ties, based on blood and lineage, with those which de facto make up one’s social self in the volatile and capricious environment of the city. This arbitrary way of conceiving of ‘ancestors’, which remains the persistently and proudly utilised emic term, appears to correspond very well with the sensitivities and needs of Kinois today. This newer form of ancestor worship appears much more personalised than collective. Smith (1974: 183) maintains that, instead of structuring power in a society based on the ie household, the ancestors have now come to ‘release the psychological tensions [of the living] through affectionate reminiscence of the dead and consolation of their spirits.’ Morioka (1977: 207) sees this as ‘a shift from an obligatory ancestor of an ie to an optional ancestor of an individual, and [thus a] “privatization” of the function of ancestor worship may be in progress.’ This directly applies to our case. Japan’s new religions, in particular of the Reiyûkai movement and its offshoot sects, have been crucial for this transformation of the ‘ancestor’ concept. Komoto (1991) points out, in line with Hardacre (1984), that Reiyûkai had introduced ancestor rites to laypersons. These had hitherto been reserved mainly for Buddhist priests in temples and in private homes in exchange for considerable pecuniary tribute. Reiyûkai and its offshoots were also the first to conceive of ancestors bilaterally (Shimazono 2004: 74), and can therefore be seen as the chief catalysts of the ‘democratisation’ of ancestor worship in Japan (see also Clarke 1999b: 203–210). In the African tradition, where the ancestral rite had been reserved for the living elder of a lineage, the same democratising endeavour can thus be attested for Messianiques in Kinshasa. On the conceptual level, an important aspect should be highlighted: while Smith, in hindsight, calls for abandonment of the ‘ancestor’ concept as an analytical term and for a distinction between former ‘ancestor worship’ (Jap. sosen sûhai) and the newer form of ‘consolation of spirits of the dead’ (sosen kuyô), Morioka (1984: 201) prefers to distinguish between ‘classical ancestor worship’ and ‘modified ancestor

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worship’. Although these academic nuances matter little to Kinois, they may help us to grasp better the importance Messianiques attach to calling their practice a culte des ancêtres, so as to symbolically attach themselves and thus reinforce their ‘African’ heritage. While many African Independent/Initiated Churches have been diagnosed to (re-) produce older values and ritual prescripts in a novel, Christianised format, the case studied here seems to place us in front of ‘new wine in old vessels’. Along with the transformations of the Japanese ‘ancestor’ concept, the historical depth of one’s lineage, so important for the legitimacy of the living head of a Japanese ie household, is shallowed down to those deceased whom one has personally known. Our sample of 2,083 ancestors collected on a Wednesday in Kinshasa shows a similar result. The 2,083 ancestors listed belonged respectively to the following generations (patrilineal and matrilineal ancestors considered together): in the lists, the grandparents’ generation is most prominently present (26.2 per cent), which reflects the meaning of koko as mainly applying to a defunct grandparent. The parents’ (20.1 per cent) and authors’ own (14.0 per cent) generations are similarly strong. Most striking is that more children (4.2 per cent) are remembered than members of the great-grandparents’ (2.1 per cent) generation and those of the ‘ethnic or customary’ (1.1 per cent) category together. This not only closely resembles Smith’s (1974) findings for Japan. It also confirms Jewsiewicki and White’s (2005) interpretation that Kinshasa finds itself in a chiefly ‘presentist’ regime of historicity, which, rather than being the result of ‘crisis’, keeps to older patterns of commemoration and time production in Africa (cf. Mbiti 1974: 32–35) and surely also in other parts of the world.28 The quasi-absence of ancestors who died a long time ago and are remembered as founding fathers of one’s lineage corresponds with Katrien Pype’s finding (2012: 58–59) that old ancestral forces are generally absent as causes of illness and affliction in the theatrical productions of Kinshasa’s Pentecostal melodrama. This contrasts with Ghanaian and Nigerian movies, where it is mostly such old ancestral forces that are responsible for affliction. In Kinshasa, spiritual problems appear to be caused by the living or the recently dead rather than the long-standing clan divinities. No doubt, this also has to be seen in light of intergenerational tensions and the transformation of the gerontocratic order among the living inhabitants of the city at large, as it reflects on the shifting of witchcraft accusations from the old towards the young.29 Indeed Congo’s urban situation appears to be different from that of West Africa, where family divinities remain important references for

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temporal anchorage (Meyer 1999). Thoughts about the reasons for this have to take into consideration Congo’s deeply transformative politicoreligious history and the strong implantation of Catholicism since the fifteenth century and under Belgian colonialism, but also Kinshasa’s spatial situation of geographical eccentricity. The latter is exacerbated by a difficult and partly absent transport infrastructure (cf. Pourtier 2009), preventing many Kinois from keeping in touch with the soil of their ancestral village. This not only fosters the rural-urban divide, perhaps more than in other urban contexts such as Lomé, Cotonou or Accra. It also encourages Pentecostal tendencies to ‘break with the past’, which is also a serious reason for not having to keep in touch with this remote and inaccessible ancestral land. But there is yet another, more symbolic, dimension of EMM/TMAJ’s ancestor worship we have yet to clarify: why is it that Messianiques are seemingly so proud of their practice of ‘ancestor worship’ within Kinshasa’s pluralistic religious landscape?

Reverse Orientalism Bakambwe banangibwe Yekelele, yekelele, yekelekele  bakambwe yo, Yoyoyo  bankambwe yo, yekelekele  bakambwe banangibwe

Beloved Ancestors Oh, oh, oh dear ancestors, Oh, dear ancestors, oh, beloved  ancestors

Mutshikondo tshiakale, bavua bela  nshima Bashebeya nzolo, bwakunu vuluka Kadi lelu wa’ndaya, tuvuabanu  pua moyo Nutubui kidila lelo, bankambua banangibwe

In earlier times we would  immolate and prepare a meal  for you, a chicken to remember  you But today, we have forgotten you Therefore we beg you to be  merciful, our beloved ancestors

Yekelele… (Chorus)

Oh, oh, oh dear ancestors…  (Chorus)

Aku kunudi baya, kanuena  bajimina Nudi bonso mu njila, wa  disukudibwe Bwa panwa sukudibwe, nenu  tokeshibwe Bwa panwa sukudibwe, nushala  kabidi

Over there where you have gone,  you are not lost You are merely on the road of  purification Once purified, you will be free Once purified, you will want to  stay on over there

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Yekelele… (Chorus)

Oh, oh, oh dear ancestors…  (Chorus)

Bana betu wayaya, nansha My dear brothers, even if you are  munukadi bafue  already dead Tshidi tshifua mmibidi (sic), kî What really dies is only the body,  anyima yenu to  but your souls remain alive Lwayi bonso tusangoluka,  forever  tusangoluka nenu Please come all and enjoy, rejoice Lwayi bonso tutshionkomoka,  with us  bwa dinanga dia mufuki Please come all to join us in  happiness, for the love of our Lord Yekelele… (Chorus)

Oh, oh, oh dear ancestors…  (Chorus)

Miroku Omikami, bonso ne  Meishu Sama Nuita buja banu benesha, buaku  disha anyima

Miroku Omikami, all of us with  Meishu Sama Please accept this blessing, to  nourish our souls

Yekelele… (Chorus) Oh, oh, oh dear ancestors…  (Chorus)30

Most songs composed and performed by EMM and TMAJ’s little unit choirs are in Lingala and contain only elements of Tshiluba, Kikongo, French and sporadic Portuguese. The song Bakambwe banangibwe is an exception because it is entirely in Tshiluba and can be seen as an embrace or celebration of Congo’s pluralistic ethnic heritage. The wish to celebrate the variety of Congo’s languages is common to other spiritual movements as well. Eckankar, for instance, has a little choir performing songs mostly in Kikongo. Celebrating Congo’s diverse ethnic heritage is intended as cosmopolitanism and should not be confused with a divisive understanding of ethnicity, although this is a matter of interpretation.31 The interdependence of the ancestors’ and the living’s well-being is long-standing both in Africa32 and in Japan.33 Booth Jr., for instance, recorded in the 1970s for the Luba: ‘Those who are ancestor spirits normally take a benevolent interest in their descendants, warning of dangers and giving help in trouble; but if their desires are left ­unfulfilled they too can be vindictive and destructive, bringing illness and even death’ (1977: 45). He also quotes his father, the missionary Newell S. Booth who worked among the Bene Nsamba in Northern Katanga:

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To the Bene Nsamba religion is a means of getting what they want. In groups the people ask the spirits for victory in conflict, for rain, for fertility in land and animals, for salvation from diseases and wild beasts, for successful hunting and fishing, for the right choices in communal life as to building sites, succession of rulers, etc. As individuals they seek boons from the spirits in deliverance from all sorts of ills and for success with every imaginable kind of venture (Booth 1936, quoted in Booth Jr. 1977: 34).

What has come to count as religion on the one hand, a concept nonexistent in Bantu languages, and prosperity, on the other hand, is not so different after all. This also indicates that the idea of ‘occult economies’, as Comaroff and Comaroff (1999, 2001) have called it, is not as new in Central Africa as the recent globalisation of prosperity-focused religiosity around the world appears to suggest. EMM and TMAJ’s ancestor worship thus feeds into a long-standing local history and appears, for many, to (re-)produce a long-standing cultural pattern. As part of TMAJ’s open information policy, in June 2013 a series of booklets (Li. mbuku, Fr. livres) were issued. One was called Nos Ancêtres, nos Racines: Les Liens Spirituels (Our Ancestors, Our Roots: The Spiritual Ties).34 Essentially a compilation of teachings by Meishu Sama, parts of it were also copied from Brazilian documents provided by the Angolan intermediary, but reorganised to fit a question and answer style and rounded up with an introduction, comments and a two-page summary. The latter is entitled Les Ancêtres, nos Racines, and was composed in Kinshasa. After ascertaining that there really is an inseparable connection between the living and the souls of their ancestors, it notes: How can one get a better destiny in life? Is there not a secret art to modifying our destiny? Or, is there not an efficacious secret art that everyone can practise? Meishu Sama has taught us a method through which everyone can improve his/her destiny. So, what is this method? It is definitely very simple. And it is not something one could call a ‘secret art’. It is enough to 1. Accumulate virtue, and 2. Practise culte des ancêtres with enormous love, while praying for the elevation of their souls. … It is essential to understand the spiritual and to celebrate ancestor worship correctly. … In this world, there are people who proceed from success to success, without much effort, whereas others, despite all efforts, stagnate in bad luck. Why this difference? … If the ancestors are in an unhappy state of existence in the spiritual world, we cannot have real happiness in this world … (TMAJ 2013a: 1–2, my emphasis).

As the Bankambwe banangibwe song indicates, the Pentecostal discourse of demonisation is criticised, for example in EMM/TMAJ’s teaching sessions (enseignements). During one such teaching session, EMM

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missionary Ntumba questioned the paradoxical ‘break with the past’ attitude of the Combat Spirituel church, one of the biggest Congolese Pentecostal denominations founded and headed by the Olangi couple (Ndaya 2008, Meiers 2013): ‘Have you already been to the Church of Mama Olangi?’ he asked rhetorically; ‘they say over there that when you suffer it is because of the ancestors. They too recognise that the suffering of descendants is caused by the ancestors, but they preach that one has to cut the ties’ (Jérôme, Kinshasa, July 2010). These blood ties, or ‘spiritual cords’, as Okada calls them in his writings, are referred to in Kinshasa as baliens ya molimo or baliens spirituels (spiritual ties) to indicate the family ties that reside in the blood (makila). Okada insists that ‘the spiritual cords between nonrelatives can be cut or broken, but those between blood relations cannot be severed’ (Okada 1999 [1984]: 56). Blood is the ultimate ancestral medium within our bodies, equal to DNA and the theory of genetics. TMAJ’s Régine applies this stance with regard to what she has found out from her affiliation with Assemblée Chrétienne de Kinshasa (ACK), another well known and widespread Congolese Pentecostal church, which she frequents along with TMAJ: At the Messianiques we pray, but the difference is that at ACK we chase demons: ‘I am chasing you … ! Get out! Leave!’ [She imitates the pastor] But at the Messianiques we do not chase away demons, we are not binding them [referring to the binding of evil spirits, kolier milimo mabe]. We simply pray to the God of our ancestors. Those demons, they are ancestors, no? Over there, where they are, they are suffering, no? What they are looking for is a way to get out, no? Now, if you start binding them, if you chase them, their suffering will return onto you, no? But if you pray to God to forgive them, to save them, that the light of Meishu Sama may enlighten them, and if they get out then of their difficulties and find peace and healing [guérison], they will think of you as well and say ‘No, Peter he has been suffering from [inaudible] problems, may God be helpful to him’ (Régine, Yolo, June 2013).

There is a great awareness among EMM and TMAJ’s followers about the fact that their stance with regard to the dead is far from accepted. Alain put it this way: ‘in today’s common conception people think that once you make a prayer for the dead you become mystique and it is here that there is a misunderstanding between those who practise (the messianic faith) and those who ignore it’ (Alain, Mbinza, September 2013). Or, in the terms of TMAJ’s Jérôme, who mocks Christians by imitating their accusations: ‘But these people, [the Christians say about us], this is not a prayer! This is pure superstition, these witches! One does not make a prayer for the dead!’ (Jérôme, Kinshasa, June 2011).

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The historical ‘tradition’, to which supporters of TMAJ/EMM’s culte des ancêtres relate, implies that spirits of the dead have a performative power. According to this tacit semiotic ideology, the dead are meant to persecute (Fortes 1987: 78) or follow (Booth 1977: 37, Theuws 1962: 183–184) the living, both positively and negatively. They can send illness to signal their wish to be adopted as a protecting spirit on the family compound.35 It is with a view to deproblematising this relationship and restoring the reciprocity, and hence a move to free the ancestors from the Pentecostal quarantine, that EMM and TMAJ’s efforts must be seen. For those who feel attracted to EMM/TMAJ, it is precisely the conviction that disregarding the dead causes misfortune which is pertinent. For them, revaluing the role of the dead and addressing the issue by ‘unbreaking with the past’ offers an intellectual, but moreover, an emotional, or one may say, a psychogenealogical comfort in a context in which uncertainty and danger are continuously around. This logic is also applied to the level of the nation and general well-being on the national level. In 2010, an Angolan minister of EMM, who was on constant visit from the headquarters in Luanda, would frequently stress that, in comparison with Angola, Congo had considerable problems with its ancestors. Both the dead of the past more generally, but also former presidents and politicians, were suffering from a general disdain. This criticism of memory politics in Congo reflects the conviction that current misfortune, on the grassroots level but also on that of the Congolese nation, is the direct result of a disregard and ill-treatment of ancestors. EMM, and even more so TMAJ, are indeed ‘playing the ethnic card’ in the sense both as tactics and as a playful provocation. Ethnic here refers to the construction and performance of an (invented) cultural tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1996), or heritage, by manipulating resources of identification that are symbolically connected to an African past. The aim is not to single out and celebrate one or another particular ethnic group present in DRC, but to construe and celebrate one’s ‘African’ cultural identity by embracing, and not breaking with, the past. This includes practising local vernacular languages, such as Tshiluba in the Bankambwe song, and the performance of the historic ritual of ‘ancestor worship’ with a nostalgic appeal, including the use of paraphernalia (protective amulets, vocal addresses, etc.), which is part of a wider demonstratively unproblematic attitude towards instrumental religious materiality. Several Messianiques would also ludically pour the first drops of their beer onto the ground as ‘libation’ to the ancestors. This celebration of being ‘African’ has to be read against the

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burgeoning presence of fundamentalising Christianity and the hegemonic endeavours of the Pentecostal quarantine, which Messianiques perceive as opposed to their ‘African’ heritage. EMM’s teacher Jérôme once summed it up strikingly: I identify with Meishu Sama’s teachings as an African because from my birth onwards people have always told me that the dead are not dead (enseignement, Jérôme, Kinshasa, July 2010).

What has generally been called ‘ancestor worship’ has long been a classical theme in the anthropological study of ‘Africa’. Before its rehabilitation by the ideological polish of Afrocentrism, the putative ‘celebration’ of the presence of the dead had no doubt contributed to forging the imagination of ‘Africa’ as a place of ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’ ‘culture’, based on the precept that ancestor worship was the most basic and original form of religion (Hardacre 2005: 320). Feeley-Harnik (2005: 17) reminds us that ‘in the nineteenth century, Africa was stereotyped as the location of cults of the dead, also called ancestor worship’. The concept of ‘ancestor worship’ has supported, and continues to support, the programmatic tendency to deny Africa coevalness, as one may say with Johannes Fabian (1983), urging it into an archaic and unchanging past. This suited the missionary project, which in Congo, as elsewhere, had soon started to diabolise the ‘backward traditionalism’ of ‘African religion’, conceptually lumping together phenomena that were otherwise emically rather disparate.36 A number of structuralfunctionalist studies were necessary to show that, rather than an apotheosis of death, ancestors were very instrumental in the social order and the organisation of the society of the living.37 The concept of ‘worship’ is closely related to the notions of ‘idolatry’ and ‘fetishism’, which have been irreplaceably stuck onto the idea of ‘Africa’ itself, ever since the first contact made by the Portuguese (MacGaffey 1994). It is therefore not surprising that criticism has arisen over time. When describing how Simon Kimbangu’s followers saw their leader as a lineage ancestor, MacGaffey wrote already in 1969 that ‘the ancestors are no other than human beings who have been translated to another place; [therefore] expressions such as “ancestor worship” tend to misrepresent Congolese reality’ (146). This anticipates the elaborate criticism developed by Kopytoff (1971), whose linguistic analysis of Bantu concepts depicting elders revealed that ancestors were nothing but the posthumous prolongation of the idea of elders whose existence was necessary to validate the moral, social and political order, i.e. one’s place in the social and ontological order of the cosmos and society.38 Kopytoff suggests that the analytical concepts of ‘ancestor’ (as opposed

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to a living elder) and of worship are, in fact, inadequate results of a Western inclination to conceive of anything related, in one way or the other, to death as inextricably ‘religious’. Pentecostalism’s most important asset is no doubt the Holy Spirit as a spiritual entity, which is spiritually and geographically detached from the ancestral world. While in movements such as the Mpeve ya Longo (churches of the spirit of the other world), studied by Devisch (1996), the Holy Spirit was still considered to be in ‘latent equation with the [lineage] ancestor’ (Devisch 1996: 582, note 3), many contemporary Pentecostal churches in Kinshasa openly demonise ancestral ties per se precisely on the grounds of this equation (Pype 2012: 58, Meiers 2013). This would prevent the individual from being born again as an autonomous Christian subject. Although historically connected to the ideas of life-giving ancestral power, the Holy Spirit is fashioned as a spirit radically different from any other pre-existing spiritual entity.39 In view of this, EMM and TMAJ’s explicit practice of a culte des ancêtres40 in the midst of pulsating Kinshasa cannot be understood as anything but a provocation and an attempt to seek distance from, and look for alternatives to, the Pentecostal politics of time. The deliberate and somewhat proud use of the culte concept emphasises this. Differing from the English cult concept, which resembles worship by denoting a ‘system of veneration and devotion directed towards a particular figure or object’,41 culte in French is mostly used to refer to the temporal unit of a religious service and is frequently used also by Christians. The way in which Messianiques use it, however, creates ambivalence: in culte des ancêtres, both the English and the French meanings apply. We may ask what encourages Messianiques to depict their ‘prayer’ for the dead precisely as a culte des ancêtres. The concept of reverse orientalism was developed by Faure (1995) to describe efforts of the Kyoto School and the New Kyoto School in Japan to counter the orientalising essentialisations of (Zen) Buddhism and Eastern philosophy by Western scholars. The aim was to turn their external depictions into an asset of Japan’s own uniqueness. According to Borup (2004), the constitution of Zen Buddhism in Japan cannot be understood without taking into account the cultural pride it enabled. Using Edward Said’s canonical conceptualisation of ‘orientalism’ (1979), the concept of reverse orientalism refers to how ‘the oriental’, which is the object of orientalising clichés, may strategically make use of the same clichés and cultural materials used to sustain the project of orientalism to its own advantage. In other words, the same stereotypes and depictions on which orientalist accounts rest are converted into assets of cultural pride and a means of staging own’s own uniqueness.

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EMM and TMAJ’s explicit use of the culte concept strategically recycles the French worship concept, as it was used in the ‘colonial library’ of classical anthropology and missionary knowledge production, and feeds it back into contemporary religious popular culture. Seemingly inspired by Japan’s unique cultural history, EMM/TMAJ’s reverse orientalism is indeed an attempt at symbolic retaliation against the perceived subjugation to Christian missionary rule ever since the missions started. This tendency also exists among followers of other spiritual movements. Concerning the law of karma and reincarnation, Jean-Paul, a proud member of Eckankar, explained: Our ancestors knew very well the law of karma and of reincarnation. My two children, say, my two first sons, they were twins, and both died when very young. After a while my grandmother had told my wife: ‘they had come to pay their debts’. Back then I wasn’t very much into the teachings of Eckankar, I didn’t know what this grandmother really wanted to say. These children had just been born, and then they left, like that, what kind of a debt would they have been able to contract, towards whom? Later on, I understood that our ancestors actually knew that these were souls who had been here about an incarnation’s lifetime before, and they had come to be reborn. This is how it is. Our ancestors knew [a lot of things], but there has been a major disruption somewhere, by the Catholic fathers. … Our ancestors knew all this! But they have been disturbed by colonisation. When the colonists arrived, they erased everything. … It was the missionaries, the priests.42

Jean-Pierre (re-)produces Eckankar’s spiritual wisdom as a reaction to the ‘orientalising’ denigration of African spirituality by Catholic missionaries, which follows the same pattern of reverse orientalism as EMM and TMAJ’s ancestor worship. While one should not be blinded by long-standing clichés portraying Africa as essentially preoccupied with the dead, it should be noted that many Congolese who have attended university usually know the name of Tempels and of his book Bantu Philosophy (1956 [1945]). As already mentioned, there has been substantial feedback from colonial and missionary anthropology and its culturalising discourse into the populations that once were the ‘objects’ of these studies. Therefore it is difficult to estimate whether such culturalising knowledge, about death and the ancestors for instance, reflects people’s true convictions, on the one hand, or whether it is rather performed to generate one’s own ‘African’ or ‘Bantu’ heritage as a cultural resource of identification within the pluralistic landscape of the city. No ‘authochtonising’ project today excludes the globalising scale of reflexive feedback, which EMM

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and TMAJ exemplify so well, in that they enlighten their African followers on how to handle and (re-)produce their own heritage with imported strategies, tactics and theories from afar. Perhaps the challenge of contemporary anthropology lies precisely in the globalising mobility of those materials that enable such cross-reflexive cultural productions of urban subjectivity.

Notes   1. Field notes IV, p. 51.   2. Next to dancing and drumming during the church service, the Zairian rite evokes ancestors as part of the praying community and offers the celebrant the opportunity to wear a gown with patches of leopard skin, similar to a traditional chief. It has been criticised for being too bold in its use of African folklore (Sundkler and Steed 2000: 1023, Elochukwu Uzukwu 1982).   3. See De Boeck 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2008.   4. Based on Hartog’s (2004) Régimes d’Historicités, Jewsiewicki and B. White argue that Kinshasa’s population lives more largely in a presentist historicity, as opposed to ones directed to the past or future (Jewsiewicki and B. White 2005).   5. See Mélice 1999, Garbin 2009, MacGaffey 1969.   6. Fields 1985, Jones 1999.   7. For the concept of cultural security, see Friedman and Randeria 2004.   8. See e.g. Meyer 1999, Kalu 2008, Asamoah-Gyadu 2004, Marshall 2009, Pype 2012, Meiers 2013.   9. Pype refers to a ‘denial of the past’ (2008, Chapter 8) while van Dijk thinks of it as ‘cultural de-mnemonization’ (2000: 14). 10. See Hackett 2003, Meyer 1999. 11. Cf. Mudimbe 1988, 1990. 12. Who counts as an ancêtre is a topic subject to general uncertainty. Whether all family members or only some, or all who have died, become ancêtres or not, is no longer cultural common sense (see also Anderson 1993, Pype 2012: 58), which is an important thing to bear in mind when assessing EMM/​TMAJ’s culte des ancêtres. 13. During the opening scenes of the services, these are devoutly carried into the prayer room, one after the other, on silver-coloured trays, and placed or ‘enshrined’ in front of the Goshintai (Li. kotia na autel). Every item that is enshrined in front of the Goshintai is sanctified beforehand in the room adjoining the prayer room, hidden from the gazes of the bandimi. This works with the help of three sparks that have to be produced by hitting two firestones, referred to as kiripi and with Japanese inscriptions, against each other. Some members know that something has been done to the things placed in front of the altar, but the practice seems to be proudly concealed as a privilege to the higher officials.

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14. In EMM, only once a year, on 1 November, which is the ‘annual day of the ancestors’, more ‘local’ offerings are given, such as a big fish, foufou and other local cooking ingredients. 15. For local conceptions of money, see De Boeck 1998: 785. 16. See on this issue Hasu 2006. 17. It should be stressed that some Pentecostal churches also use the envelope technique (cf. Meiers 2013). 18. This anonymity, stressing the individuality of the donation, is about the only link that exists with the Buddhist concept of hôshi (Japanese for ‘service’), which is unknown to Congolese members and indicates the divergence that exists between the Buddhist and the African traditions of offering. Hôshi is explained in Japan as ‘literally giving something to someone superior or divine, be it material or immaterial. It is to be given secretly, willingly, gratefully and gladly without expecting reward, which, however, will come manifold … Examples for hôshi are donations of money to the church, telling people about the divine plan, counselling, and working towards the upkeep of the three sacred sites’ (Staemmler 2011: 172). 19. EMM’s responsables are aware of the importance of individual follow-up and some keep a book with records. Matsuoka (2007) argues that EMM’s success in Brazil is largely due to a systematic pastoral care of individual adherents, whom the Catholic Church had discarded as a consequence of the collectivist focus of Liberation Theology. 20. After the collection, EMM’s donation box is taken to the minister’s rooms at the back of the church. Here the envelopes are taken out and piled up on a tray, which is then ritually carried back into the prayer hall where it is placed and enshrined next to the other offerings, in front of the Goshintai. 21. The delegation of one’s wisdom to Meishu Sama is comparable to the Christian way of constantly referring to the Bible to authorise one’s knowledge. Since the Bible has become such a paradigmatic reference in Kinshasa, even EMM and TMAJ’s responsables frequently refer to it. The sentence: ‘Even in the Bible it is written that …’ is also frequent among Messianiques. 22. Also here one man’s meat is another man’s poison: the fear of ill-gotten money may be a welcome dividing line for those who do not wish to share or deal with others who suspect them. Others, like Alain, are struggling with the curse and blessing that their affiliation to TMAJ or EMM simultaneously generates. The ambivalence of the gift that may restore yet poison a relationship is also visible in a rumour that circulated in Kinshasa in 2009, according to which West African traders, as soon as somebody accepts to shake their hand, i.e. enters into a relationship of trust with them, spiritually steals the other person’s penis. For the wider geographical occurrence of this rumour, see Bonhomme 2009. 23. After the service I joined the missionary who was going to burn the lists and, with the consent of the unit’s responsable, I took photographs of all fifty-five lists that had been enshrined that morning. I was not granted permission to reproduce one of the lists by one of the movement’s Superiors, because ‘ancestors are spirits, whose names should not be exposed to the

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eyes of everyone. That’s why we often burn the forms straight after the service’. 24. Alverson (2008: 3) summarises this point by writing that ‘while on the one hand, names denote and implicate how a person is embedded in a socio-cosmic totality … speaking personal names in certain linguistic and cultural contexts can also bring about what seems fantastic in the West; that is, “action at a distance” (somewhat in the way Westerners popularly imagine the forces of gravity or electromagnetic radiation). So, over time certain of one’s names become not only metonyms, which index, catalogue, and chronicle one’s career, family, or house, they can also become material pathways connecting one with, or severing one from, people, nature, or trans-mundane (“super-human”) entities. Contrary to ideas advanced in Western thought, in Africa the relation between the name, the named, and the rest of language and creation is not merely semiotic (“symbolic” and “arbitrary”), but also performative and material.’ 25. One author avoids any possible doubt by specifying in a detailed manner ‘papa abota ngai’ (the father who made me be born) or ‘Mwana ya maman kulutu’ (the child of my mother’s elder sister). He is also the only one to openly state ‘nayebi te’ (I don’t know) in the kinship column. 26. ‘Voisin q/​4 commercial’ and ‘papa q3 kibunda’ follow the same logic. 27. It was mainly the anthropologist Robert Smith (1974) who in the 1960s undertook a major census of ancestral tablets in Japanese home shrines (Jap. butsudan), following the research question ‘Who are the ancestors?​’ To the surprise of the scholarly community, Japanese home shrines included a variety of social relations, which were entirely unrelated to the old lineagebased obligations. Roughly seventy-five per cent of the tablets analysed ‘were not those of lineal ascendants but commemorated young children, collaterals, and others outside the descent line, even including strangers’ (ibid.: 183). 28. The remaining categories are grandchildren (0.4 per cent), friends and neighbours (10.5 per cent), national past (0.7 per cent), diverse (0.6 per cent) and not specified (19.2 per cent). 29. Cf. De Boeck and Honwana 2005, De Boeck 2004a, 2004b, see also B. White 2005: 68. 30. Thanks to TMAJ DRC in Kinshasa for allowing me to publish this song, which was composed by a member of TMAJ in Kinshasa. 31. Other songs are Meishu Sama na bakoko na biso boyamba mabonza oyo (Meishu Sama and our ancestors, please welcome our offerings) and Paladiso oyo (this paradise). Though many songs directly refer to elements of the ‘allochtonous’ messianic doctrine, as the Japanese notion of God or ‘Miroku Omikami’ indicates, it is possible and also probable that melodies and rhythms of older musical and religious traditions from the region are being recycled. 32. The idea that a neglect of the dead causes misfortune is not new. MacGaffey (1983: 67) quotes a certain Mertens who wrote that ‘the dead show their discontent because they are neglected by the living’. The underlying conception is the fundamental importance of the dead for the living. Booth (1977)

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writes for the Luba of Katanga: ‘Although death is a negative phenomenon, in some ways the dead have more power and influence than the living’ (42). He stresses that ‘the essential point is that one cannot understand the living apart from the dead’ (44). 33. In Japan, this conception became especially popular as part of the more thorough transformation of ancestor worship by the new religions of Tenrikyô, EMM’s mother organisation Ômôtô, and in particular Reiyûkai and its offshoots (Yamaori 1986: 52). Morioka (1984: 211) summarises that these religions ‘expound that the anguish and agony one suffers are caused by dead ancestors unable to arrive at a blissful state and hence in distress’. 34. TMAJ’s separation from EMM was, among other reasons, explained as a reaction to the restricted access to written information granted by EMM, resulting in allegations of secrecy and elitism against them. As a result, TMAJ produced a number of booklets of twenty to thirty pages, which were distributed freely to followers. 35. Petit (1996: 355) reminds us that ‘the Luba lastly attribute the power of procreation to the spirits: every pregnancy supposes the intervention of a spirit, which “follows” the pregnant woman and protects the child to be born. He (the spirit) will be the ngudi in Tshiluba, i.e. the namesake or the godfather of this child’. Petit also mentions that female diviners and pregnant women were ‘followed’ by a spirit (356), as also discussed by Theuws (1960: 124–125). The importance of ancestors for fertility was explained to me once as an ‘ontogenetic’ principle, which fundamentally enables human existence. Thanks to Peter Crossman for pointing me to this concept and the fact that in the general African perception, the ancestors (forebears) are at work (literally -sebenzi in siZulu) during the process of conception, i.e. without them existence is not possible. 36. The Jesuit missionary Van Wing had already criticised the fact that ‘between the religion of ancestors, on the one hand, and the actual practice of nkisi, on the other hand, there are a great many acts and gestures which the indigenous person does not qualify with any generic vocabulary related to cursing [Kikongo: loka]. The European, however, driven by generalisation and classification, gives it labels such as magico-profane, magico-religious, superstitious etc.’ (1959 [1938]: 346, my translation). 37. Especially by Fortes 1945, 1965, 1987 1987 and Goody 1962. The Tallensi studied by Meyer Fortes clearly distinguish between a dead person and an ancestor. The latter is viewed to have spent a life of moral impeccability in order to be made an ancestor, whereas unmarried or childless people, orphans, suicides, the poor, criminals and former slaves would never be able to become one, because ancestrality also meant the continuity of lineage, i.e. fertility tout court. 38. In Kopytoff’s case the Suku of south-western Congo (Kinshasa), but he stresses that his ‘description conforms to the generalized pattern of African ancestor cults and is congruent with Fortes’s analysis’ (Kopytoff 1971: 129). 39. Despite the multidisciplinary interest in the subject of ancestors, scholarly attention to subsequent historical developments, in particular within African Independent Churches and Pentecostal Charismatic Churches,

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remains limited to Anderson’s (1993) article on ancestors in religious movements in South Africa. This quantitative survey reveals a welcoming and even encouraging attitude towards ancestors among South Africa’s Zionist churches, whereas the picture gets more ambivalent and assorted when it comes to Pentecostalising movements. 40. This is the shortened form of Prière pour l’élévation des âmes des ancêtres (Li. losambo ya lobiko ya milimo ya bakoko, prayer for the elevation of the ancestors’ souls). 41. New Oxford American Dictionary, 2008. 42. Jean-Pierre went on to explain: ‘But I think you must be aware of the wellknown speech by King Leopold II upon the arrival of the missionaries. I think you must know this speech, in which the king gives them instructions about the model to be followed regarding the spiritual teachings. You [the white people] have really disturbed everything over here’ (Jean-Pierre, Kingabwa, April 2013). Leopold II’s speech is indeed widely known in DRC and can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/​watch?​v=​uVRFBTgWq-A (accessed 24 March 2017). What is unfortunately less known to Congolese today is that the speech is in fact a fake that was constructed by Mobutu’s propaganda machine, which in the early 1980s sought to discredit the Catholic Church (Albert-Henri Buisine, personal communication, Kisangani, October 2015).

I Conclusion In Japan, rapid transformations and contrasting ways of social life and organisation were brokered and managed by the countless new religions, their engagement with the popular spheres of society and their eclectic and variegated reshuffling of foreign and pre-existing cultural materials. Transnationally engaged Japanese new religions such as Sekai Kyûseikyô (including EMM and TMAJ) travel, or indeed ‘globalise’ themselves, with more than just a set stock of cultural décor and ritual paraphernalia. Implicitly, as an unrecognised and unknown stowaway, this deeper historical experience is on board as well. To Messianiques in Kinshasa, the Japanese way of transforming one’s own cultural legacy and adapting it so as to embrace, support and encourage the novel conditions of urbanity, appears to be a promising and soothing alternative to the Pentecostal rhetoric of rupture that largely quarantines the past. On the one hand, this is attractive because it allows the production of one’s ‘own’ tradition with a smile of superiority and difference. By presenting their ‘ancestor worship’ as an asset of their local identification as ‘African’, Messianiques unknowingly (re-)produce what scholars of Japan have termed strategic ‘reverse orientalism’. While in Japan, the experience of orientalism led to the construction of the invented tradition of Zen Buddhism as an icon of Japaneseness, Messianiques’ practice of ‘ancestor worship’ in Congo aims at strengthening their identification as ‘Africans’ in the face of Pentecostalism’s rhetoric of breaking with the past. Given that anthropological literature on ‘African traditions’ is hardly available to ordinary Kinois, the teachings that spiritual movements dispense fill in a void by providing expertise regarding the workings of spirituality and guidelines for personal experience by embracing ancestral wisdom as something up to date. What appears to be of ‘Japanese’ origin, successful in ‘Brazil’, and thus enables Messianiques in Kinshasa to conceive of themselves as part of a wider, cosmopolitan world, is locally (re-)produced as a school about one’s own indigenous spiritual heritage.

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De Boeck (2004a: 189) has shown how Kinshasa’s history and urban condition has led to a ‘crisis of kinship models and principles of seniority’. Programmatically, EMM and TMAJ’s imported tradition of ancestor worship can be seen as an intended counter-move, as an attempt to remediate and restore this situation. The idea of restoring an institution such as ‘ancestor worship’ appears indeed, at first view, to be truly conservative.1 In practice, however, spiritual movements empower the individual. Not only is the giver’s hand during Johrei ‘above’ the receiver’s. When it comes to ancestor worship it is the living author of an ancestor list who not only freely chooses his/her ancestors regardless of kinship or age rules. It is he/she, who actively saves his/her (quarantined) forefathers, and not vice versa. Together with the Japanese notion of transferring one’s merits to one’s ancestors in order to heal and uplift them, this has empowering consequences for the practising subject. The confrontation of individual subjectivity vs. group values advocated by gerontocratic tutelage is also what Howard Wimberley discussed in 1969 for young Japanese members of the new religion Seichô-no-Ie. Concerning the tension between collective tutelage on the one hand, and autonomous individuality on the other hand, he argues that Seichô-no-Ie’s rituals provide ways in which youngsters can reconcile their individual subjectivities with a morality based on family values from which they do not have to break. The same can be said for EMM and TMAJ’s followers in Kinshasa.2 Thus, if during Johrei the person’s authority, or ‘aura’, is ritually strengthened during the imported tradition of ‘ancestor worship’, the self is in the centre of one’s respective community of ancestors. Despite a conservative moral discourse that promotes a seemingly nostalgic ideal of ancestral kin-based communalism, EMM and TMAJ’s practices de facto individualise the person and his/her sense of authority. This is amplified by the situation of being in a stigmatised minority. This study has examined how a small group of Congolese urbanites practise ‘spirituality from Japan’ in the densely populated city of Kinshasa. They do this in the quest for health, prosperity and ways to craft and edify themselves, their authority and the urban worlds around them. The quest for fortune goes hand in hand with a quest for aesthetic difference, which, in association with things and atmospheres, is tuned into the body so as to craft and edify one’s personal presence, self-confidence, authority and force. The study has lent a voice to people who are critical of their society and consider themselves as being in the vanguard of necessary change. In the case of Messianiques, it appears that the ‘Protestant’ phobia of things religious generates a minority counterculture of curiosity,

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encouraging a knowledgeable expert community of spiritualists, whose ‘initiated’ members know very well that they know more than others. It should be stressed that there is a remarkable degree of consciousness, often also theoretical and reflexive awareness, about the workings of the spiritual technologies offered by spiritual movements. In light of persistent crisis, many Kinois have themselves grown wary and curious, wanting to know how things ‘really’ work. The aesthetic difference offered by spiritual movements is thus couched in an elaborate knowledge culture (Li. mayele) about the spiritual workings of the world. They offer an intellectual space for discussing, defending and arguing about the respective truths, at times with a truly academic fervour. In this way, spiritual activity provides a ‘schooled’ lens through which to interpret the world, while offering the space to generate an opinion and a voice. The ‘Japaneseness’ of the practice matters in this regard, as many actually celebrate their exodus from the coercive political correctness of Pentecostal Christianity’s community of sinners (Robbins 2004), without losing a symbolic tie with the wider world. The first chapter traced the historical trajectories of the Sekai Kyûseikyô movement (Church of World Messianity or EMM) by discussing its origins in pre-world war Japan and its expansion to Brazil and other parts of the world since the 1950s. In 1991 Brazilian missionaries transplanted the movement to lusophone Africa. This picture of a globalising religious movement has alerted us to the fact that, as the EMM and TMAJ branches indicate, South-South transnationalism is operational beyond the field of Pentecostalism, and ‘global Pentecostalism’ is only one among several globalising religious trends. Moreover, the spiritual movements present in Kinshasa today are anything but the result of external missionary intrusion. On the contrary, all key actors are local agents who resort to the outside world (Li. pòtò) as a sphere of transnational charisma. Transnational institutional connectivity, I argue, explains why, against the assumption of ‘globalisation’ as diffusion, Japanese spiritual movements in Kinshasa must be seen as fully local initiatives by Congolese actors. Here, they have also been since the 1970s part and parcel of Central Africa’s historical pattern of schism and renewal, as the local schism between EMM and TMAJ of 2012 also demonstrates. Transnational connectivity is here not a ‘centrifugal’ force, but a ‘centripetal’ one.3 It does not ‘deterritorialise’ people from their locality, but rather provides resources to stage and anchor themselves even more firmly within their long-standing local social, geographical and symbolic spaces. In his discussion of the importance in Ghana of foreign spirits from India, Wuaku (2013: 14) comments on Meyer’s analysis of Indian spirits

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coming to possess people among the Ewe in Southern Ghana. ‘The acquisition of Indian Spirits and new dzo’, Meyer writes, differs from Mami Water possession, in that people actually ask for these new spirits rather than being overwhelmed by them. Nevertheless these spirits are also perceived as external forces enabling their owner to do certain things, which he is unable to do by himself. Moreover these new spirits share with Mami Water the fact that they are foreign and that they link their owners with global culture. … [Especially to young men], the new spirits provide access to the modern and the global world, showing once again that modernity and spirits go hand in hand (Meyer 1999: 210–211, quoted in Wuaku 2013: 14–15).

Wuaku adds to this ‘centrifugal’ interpretation of globalising cultural forces with an important point. He emphasises the importance of: indigenous understandings of spiritual power that link people’s ability to deal effectively with local sources of harm and hardship [by acquiring] external or foreign spirits … Because the cause of mishap is often located in close relatives and friends, in indigenous Ghanaian religious thinking there is a sense that spiritual remedies such as curative powers and protective symbols must come from external or foreign sources and hence be unfamiliar to the perpetrators of supernatural harm (Wuaku 2013: 14-15).

While for some Messianiques in Kinshasa, Meyer’s interpretation may surely apply, Wuaku’s ‘centripetal’ interpretation of deterritorialised spiritual forces is highly compelling. The vast of Messianiques majority seek contact with the foreign spiritual energy of Johrei to serve local needs rather than out of a wish to participate in modernity or global culture. The chapters of this book provide evidence for this by offering insight into a multitude of putatively ‘Japanese’ practices that are locally (re-)produced and validated. As a result, the identification of religious movements by way of their putative cultural origin is no longer a valid option. The movements of EMM and TMAJ that this study has mostly been concerned with are really Congolese movements, not despite but rather because of their putatively coming from ‘Japan’, which in itself is a locally crafted symbolic space. This defies perspectives of cultural homogenisation, as it shows that it is precisely because of EMM’s emphasis on its ‘Japaneseness’ that it can become a local resource of religious expression and creativity. This entails cultural change and transformation, mainly by encouraging the practice of a locally recognised aesthetic difference, i.e. of Messianiques’ sensuous, or embodied knowledge of being different within their relational, immediate context. For Messianiques and Kinois at large ‘Japan’ is thus less a symbolic reference to an ideational model of historical and

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economic development than a feeling, a mood or a sensuous inclination towards the embodiment of difference, expertise and sophistication within the city of Kinshasa. Dense population, economic and political instability and the longstanding overall hardship that the vast majority of Kinois have had to endure over the last three decades have eradicated the material resources to produce and stabilise social difference and stratification, generating a magmatic popular class that perpetually invents and reinvents new ways to draw boundaries and delineate potential differences. It is through friction with the things and matters presented in the various chapters, such as flowers, prayers, ancestors and the healing practice of Johrei that movements like EMM and TMAJ offer one way to perform such boundary work by allowing practitioners to embody and carry home an overall aesthetic difference. Over time they become themselves microcosmic bonsais of the aesthetic difference practised in their movements. As aesthetic formations (Meyer 2009a), spiritual movements are thus schools of aesthetic difference. By virtue of practising Johrei and its silence, as well as the chanting of Japanese mantras, the senses are schooled and one’s behaviour moulded and styled (Chapter 7). It is in the everyday performance of the silence of respectability, and at times a more generally proud or arrogant behaviour, that spiritualists may induce respect in others, but also the fear that fuels infrapolitical suspicion. This repeats, or indeed renews, an older pattern of suspicion as political currency, as discussed in Chapter 2. As performative Gegenstände, things constitute sensory points of reference and tools for interaction, sensory friction and confrontation. As this happens in a social context in which the usage of religious things is systematically condemned and stigmatised, the intensity of the sensory friction and thus the role of these things as aesthetic boundaries is amplified. Unlike Bourdieu’s (1976) theory of distinction through mainly an economy of symbolic capital, aesthetic difference is locally experienced and also phrased in a language of force (Li. nguya: force, or nguya ya Nzambe: God’s power/force) or ‘aura’: during Johrei one’s spirit, or indeed one’s ‘Johrei’ itself is strengthened (Johrei na ye eza makasi!: his Johrei is really powerful!), which is tantamount to the process of healing. Although more subtly and discreetly sensational than the charismatic fervour of Pentecostal Christianity, the experience of Johrei as the manifestation of Meishu Sama’s spirit is locally seen as comparable with that of the Holy Spirit, which also resonates with the Kikongo concept of mpeve (spirit). Johrei is thus (re-)produced in continuity with existing local notions of spiritual force and the possibility of embodying them.

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Indeed, like the Holy Spirit, Johrei and the charisma of the transnational it comes with (cf. Chapter 1) also resemble the ‘higher God’ of another, more powerful world. One may wonder whether history is repeating itself: what has been called the ‘Pentecostal revolution’ (Marshall 2009) and hailed as generating new and ‘modern’ subjectivities in Africa’s urban environments, appears to be straightforwardly in line with what Horton (1971, 1975a, 1975b) described in his theory of first-contact conversion as a shift from lesser spirits to a higher Christian God. This shift was analogous, Horton claimed, to the shift of people’s livelihoods from the microcosmic village level governed by territorial lesser spirits to the macrocosm of an industrialising urban working class, seduced and driven by ideals of mobility and detachment. The focus on a non-Christian minority movement has offered insights into the cultural dynamics of mimetic cross-fertilisation in an increasingly diversified religious landscape. By looking at that which is putatively ‘different’, epistemological and cultural constants and variables have appeared, enabling us to view the mainstream of (increasingly Pentecostal) urban religiosity in Kinshasa ‘laterally’, or ‘from the side’, in the perhaps fresh, non-Christian light of a superdenominational movement. Emically perceived differences, but also continuities with other local religious traditions, including Pentecostalism, have appeared. Rather than focusing on different religious traditions in terms of their discourse or ‘belief system’, the aesthetic approach has allowed us to identify innovations and continuities on the level of sensory perception without losing track of the generation and negotiation of authority as related to things and the validity of their use. The sociological pattern of schism and renewal (Chapter 1), the use of flowers as plants endowed with spiritual capacities (Chapter 3), the attitude towards soil and rubbish (Chapter 4), the aetiological logic of Johrei healing and the concordant generation of miracles (Chapter 5), its dependency on atmospheric and aesthetic difference that puts the person in a particular perspective (Chapter 6), but also the mantric quality of prayer and words, whose intentions vibrate in addition to, or indeed as, their meaning (Chapter 7), all these matters suggest that, beyond the exotic appeal of a ‘Japanese’ religion, Messianiques are (re-) producing, protracting and indeed renewing older patterns of religious activity and the semiotic ideologies they come with. Most explicitly this happens in the elaborate practice of ‘ancestor worship’ (Chapter 8), which we have interpreted as ‘reverse orientalism’. These continuities point to the presence of a broader religious culture beyond the fragmentary pluralism of denominational affiliation, which indicates important local historical continuities.

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At the same time this study has also elucidated how difficult it is in a context like Kinshasa to dissociate the categories of ‘medicine’, ‘religion’ and ‘education’. The truly cross- or transfunctional role of religious movements in Kinois’ everyday life, as locations of healing, prayer and instruction, questions the applicability of Luhmannian functional differentiation as a universally applicable analytical method. Despite its attraction for students of ‘religion and globalisation’ (e.g. Beyer 1994), such an approach tends to produce globalisation rather than analyse it. Thus a diffusionist perspective on EMM and TMAJ as ‘new religious movements’ that globalise Japanese religion around the world would have prevented our insight that Messianiques’ are in fact active agents of local historical continuity. Pre-world war Japan and contemporary Congo are interesting entities for diachronic comparison: not only were both spaces marked by rapid urbanisation and ensuing social change. The accommodative openness to ideational eclecticism discussed in Chapter 1, as well as Japan and Africa’s ‘shamanic’ heritage, as appears in a number of EMM’s spiritual teachings, offer a number of transcultural ‘repertoires of resonance’ (Wuaku 2013: 6). This provides local Congolese actors with important cultural resources to rehabilitate the constructive side of their indigenous ‘African’ spirituality, which in Messianiques’ understanding has been under the threat of demonisation by Christianity ever since the early missions. Unlike the politics of time in many of Kinshasa’s Pentecostal churches, where radical breach and rebirth is often preached with millennialist fervour, EMM and TMAJ favour a more reconciliatory politics of memory that rehabilitates the importance of ancestors and their African past. However, unlike neotraditional movements, Messianiques simultaneously stress the superiority of their own practice and expertise over both Christian and traditional African spiritual crafts, which Johrei is able to neutralise and overpower (cf. Maman Nicole’s faith experience in Chapter 5). While such an attitude could be seen as the ordinary side effect of missionary arrogance in a religious field of competitors, in a historical perspective it actually (re-)produces a long-standing pattern of the eradication of evil through religious renewal in the larger Central Africa region (De Craemer, Fox and Vansina 1976, Janzen 1977). John Janzen (1977) has diagnosed a dialectic of ‘iconoclastic’ (i.e. which destruct religious images) and ‘iconorthostic’ (i.e. which create religious images) tendencies in the history of Bakongo people, which are constitutive of a ‘tradition of renewal’. In the case of the Kongo ngunza (prophets) like Simon Kimbangu or Simon Mpadi, renewal was ‘exhibited though a sloughing-off of material sacrament; [in cults,

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however,] renewal is concerned with recharging symbols and the creation of the material sacrament (nkisi): the iconorthostic process’ (87). The simultaneous presence of both destructive and creative tendencies, as is reflected in PCCs on the one hand, and the materially creative spiritual movements on the other hand, exemplifies how in the urban situation both rupture and renovation, breach and remaking, are today at work simultaneously. The complex layering and ongoing supplanting of movements with others, their things and their ‘arguments of images’ (Fernandez 1986, see also Vellut 1999) is today no longer just about ritual efficacy and ameliorative intensity or force (De Craemer, Fox and Vansina 1976). A key dividing line adding to the complexity, and indeed ‘policing’ the room for innovation, is the more general underlying moral uncertainty of the urban situation as it expresses itself in perpetual suspicion and accusations of Christian pastors to be ‘false’ or of non-Christian movements to be ‘occult’. In addition, the process of renewing local repertoires of values, symbols and their aesthetic anchorage in things and the body, occurs today with an increasing amount of available cultural resources that ‘flow’ and ‘float’ between places as distant as Brazil, South Korea, India, Congo and Japan (cf. Appadurai 1996). Thus, not despite but rather because of their exotic appearance within their local cultural landscape, Congolese spiritual movements like EMM and TMAJ, but also Soka Gakkai or Eckankar, for instance, set forth this old tradition of renewal. The foreignness of a ‘Japanese’ religious organisation from abroad is not an impediment, but rather an encouraging factor in this logic. In the ongoing refashioning of this Central African tradition of renewal, ‘Japanese’ religion thus also provides a powerful resource for agency and innovation.

Notes 1. As Helen Hardacre attests, also in Japan, the performance of heritage through the ‘reverence of one’s ancestors in the new religions and in Japanese society in general is closely linked to social and political conservatism and to traditionalist preference for the social mores of the past’ (Hardacre 2005: 324). 2. As discussed in Chapter 1, Seichô-no-Ie shares a lot of similarities with SKK. Both are thoroughly influenced by the New Thought movement, both belong to the four most important Japanese new religions present in Brazil and both were founded in the same period in Japan. 3. The centrifugal-centripetal dichotomy arose in a conversation with Thomas Hendriks, whom I warmly thank.

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Illustration 9.1 Messianique with flowers from his garden on his way to an Ikebana workshop, Kinshasa, June 2011.

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Index

I Index aesthetic approach, 2, 23–27, 28, 262 aesthetic boundaries, 24–25, 195, 261 aesthetic difference, 11, 14, 21–22, 24, 28, 32, 53, 165–167, 170, 190, 258–259, 260–262 aesthetic formations (B. Meyer), 24, 126, 261 African Independent Churches (AICs), 9, 10, 16, 39, 222n10, 243, 255–256n39 African traditional religion, 3, 50, 120, 209 Afrikania. See neotraditional movements Agonshu. See under Japanese new religions Aladura movement, 10 Amatsu Norito. See under prayer amulet in EMM/TMAJ/MOA (see Ohikari and Daikomio) in Sukyô Mahikari (see Omitama) ancestors, 3, 59, 106, 129, 132, 137, 151, 159, 160, 174, 177, 186, 205, 225–256, 263. See also spirits ancestors worship, 19, 28, 163n23, 193n27, 225, 227, 228, 230–231, 238 241–244, 246, 249–251, 255n33, 257–258, 262 national ancestors, 37, 141n8, 241 Angola, 7, 8, 35–37, 53, 60–61, 149–150, 159, 160 Appadurai, Arjun, 18, 264 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 40, 65n6 architecture of words (F. De Boeck), 9, 22, 210 Asia, 3, 10–12, 14, 17, 18, 40, 161n2 Assemblée Chrétienne de Kinshasa (ACK), 5, 185, 198, 247 Assembly of God (Assemblée de Dieu), 5, 14, 80 atmosphere, 1, 24–25, 59, 60, 103–104, 107, 111, 112, 121, 164, 165, 172, 189, 197, 200, 205, 207, 228, 258, 262. See also spiritual atmosphere; Böhme, Gernot

aura, 79, 89, 92n9, 164–165, 170, 176, 179, 187, 190, 215, 219–220 Mokichi Okada’s concept, 187–189, 211 Walter Benjamin’s concept, 169, 188, 223n15 Austin, John, 25, 74, 207 Bahá’i Faith (Foi Baha’i), 14–15 Bayouda du Congo, 153 beauty, 39n20, 95, 99, 101–105, 107–109, 11, 115, 118, 120, 122n2, 122n15, 123n30, 124 Behrend, Heike electrical cosmology, 109, 116, 175 photo magic, 179, 192n16 Bekaert, Stefan, 47–48 belief, 11, 23, 73, 78, 82, 157, 262 Benjamin, Walter, 169, 188–189. See also aura Bergson, Henri, 196 Bible, 23, 67n20, 71, 108, 123n18, 171, 172–173, 191n1, 192n16, 210, 213–214, 220, 223n25, 253n21 Black Atlantic (P. Gilroy), 19 blood (makila), 81, 83, 87, 155, 156, 186, 187, 242, 247 Böhme, Gernot, 25, 104 book, 12, 13, 42, 67n22, 70–73, 85, 87, 157, 171, 172, 191n1,192n16, 205, 213, 236, 246 Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University, 7, 14, 15, 28, 155, 162n15, 194n29, 197, 194n29, 219 Branham Tabernacle, 5, 144, 179, 214, 241 Branham, William M. See Branham Tabernacle Brazil, 7, 8, 18–19, 35–37, 52, 62, 101, 109, 158, 159, 253n19, 257, 259, 264, 264n2 Buddhism, 13, 34n28, 38, 60, 66n12, 125, 126, 128, 141n10, 162n10, 184, 194n9, 203, 206, 207, 235, 237, 250–251, 253n13 Bundu dia Kongo, 6 Byrne, Rhonda, 46, 66n15, 66n16

292 • Index

Catholic Church, 2, 5, 34n28, 53, 54, 69–70, 98, 112, 113–114, 166, 169, 185, 193n23, 202, 212, 215, 217, 219, 222n13, 223n21, 224n31, 226, 227, 231, 234, 237, 244, 253n19, 256n42. See also missionaries: Christian centripetal globalisation, 53, 64, 259–260, 264n3 China, 8, 9, 11, 12–13, 18, 101, 121n2, 161n2, 167 Chinkon Kishin (healing ritual). See Johrei: origins of Christian Science, 14, 66n14 Church of John Maranke (Bapostolo), 6, 222n10 Clarke, Peter, 29, 38, 39–40, 43, 54, 67n24, 67n26 Cohen, Abner, 89 Comaroff, Jean and John, 5, 80, 246 Combat Spirituel (Church of Maman Olangi), 5, 178, 247 common sense groupism (R. Brubaker), 19 conceptual interface (A. Bajpai), 76–77, 92n6 Conrad, Joseph, 37 crisis, 3–4, 41, 82, 84, 91, 146, 149–151, 156–157, 160, 161n7, 183, 243, 258, 259 cultic milieu (C. Campbell), 8 Daikokokuten (statue), 15, 59–61, 64 Daikomio (amulet), 176 De Boeck, Filip, 22, 79–80, 110, 193n25, 210, 226, 228, 258 De Heusch, Luc 224n31 deliverance: rituals of, 146–147, 151, 186, 199, 200, 212–213, 246, 247 Démon du fleuve, 13–14 demonisation discourse, 57, 70, 75, 77, 88, 90, 91, 105, 229, 247, 263. See also Hackett, Rosalind denominational nationalism, 16, 23 devil, 72, 75, 77–78, 80, 84, 106, 129, 142n17, 151, 172, 208, 212, 215 Devisch, Renaat, 162n11, 182, 221n1, 229, 250 Diop, Birago, 225–226 Douglas, Mary, 133 dreams, 25, 38, 159, 160, 164, 177–178, 192n14 Eckankar, 11, 14, 63, 89, 177, 197, 207, 251 economy of constipation (F. De Boeck), 80, 82, 92n11 Église Chrétienne Union du Saint Esprit (ECUSE), 6 Église des Noirs, 6, 112, 228 Ekunde, Christian Bosoku, 136, 199, 213–214, 236

electrical cosmology (H. Behrend). See Behrend, Heike Elílí/Elilingi (shadow, double, reflection), 47–48 embodied citizenship (S. Srinivas), 138, 140 Engelke, Matthew, 23–24, 164, 189, 190, 191n1, 216, 220, 229 faith experience, 114, 144, 157, 158–159, 163n22 Ferme, Marianne, 78–79, 81, 182n12 Fernandes, Francisco Jesus, 36–37, 53, 65n3 flowers, 64, 95–123, 129, 134 Congo ya sika (water hyacinth), 115, 123n23 fleurs de lumière (flowers of light), 102, 109 Ikebana, 10, 27, 52, 96, 101–103, 107–108, 117, 119, 128, 202, 203, 219, 221, 265 Sangetsu (Ikebana school), 102–103, 112, 114, 122n16 fortune. See (mis-)fortune fortune–misfortune complex (De Creaemer, Fox and Vansina), 48, 146. See also (mis-)fortune Frazer, James George, 169 Freemasonry, 10, 28, 63, 75, 93n22 Freud, Siegmund, 86 Geenen, Kristien, 115, 123n23 Gell, Alfred, 117, 169 Geschiere, Peter, 76, 82–86, 93n17, 141n7, 211 Ghana, 11, 17, 18, 109, 110, 120, 179, 243–244, 259–260 glossolalia, 198, 216 Goody, Jack, 98, 99, 115, 121n1, 229, 241 Goshintai (calligraphy), 25, 59, 64, 96, 164, 167–171, 179, 253n13 Grail Movement (Message du Graal), 10, 13–14, 28, 63, 89, 99, 119, 172, 173, 197 gratitude, 117, 231, 235, 237 Guarapiranga (Brazil), 35, 52 Guen Rei. See power of words: Japanese theory of Guru Siyag’s Siddha Yoga, 14–15, 33n16 Hackett, Rosalind, 11, 14–17 Hanegraaff, Wouter, 76–77 Harrism, 39 healing. See spiritual healing Heart of Darkness. See Conrad, Joseph hidden power of the Whites (H. Turner), 10, 12, 47, 117 Hinduism, 7, 11, 17, 18, 91, 169, 181, 192n18, 197, 207 Holy Spirit, 4, 23, 59, 75, 146, 157, 164, 190, 205, 220, 230, 250, 261

Index • 293

Horton, Robin, 65n6, 262 house, 49, 82–86, 93n13, 100, 104–107, 108, 111, 113–117, 118, 120, 121, 129, 134–135, 141n11, 42n13, 143–146, 169, 202–204. See also Ie (Japanese largescale family household) Hunt, Nancy Rose, 88, 142n18 icon/iconic, 24–25, 213, 168, 206, 239 iconic chain, 25, 164–165, 182, 188–189, 190, 192n16 Ie (Japanese large-scale family household), 141–143 Igreja Messiânica Mundial de Africa, 35, 53, 58, 101 Igreja Messiânica Mundial do Brazil, 55, 101 Ikebana. See under flowers India, 3, 7, 9, 10–12, 17, 18, 20, 32n11, 32n12, 33n16, 33n19, 43, 46, 57, 91, 92n6, 138, 142n20, 155, 191n3, 191n10, 205, 259–260, 264 initiation, 7, 29–30, 56, 74, 76, 84, 147, 169, 174, 177, 179, 182, 191n8 intimacy, 82–86, 93n19, 197 Isichei, Elizabeth, 9–10 Izunome branch of Sekai Kyûseikyô, 55, 58 theory and symbol of, 43–44, 175 Jamaa movement, 178 Janzen, John, 116, 161n1, 171, 263–264 Japan, 1, 7, 8, 9, 11–12, 17, 18, 19–21, 33n17, 35, 37–56, 59, 62, 65n7, 67, 23, 67n24, 68n32, 68n33, 98, 101–102, 109, 119, 120, 122n14, 122n15, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 140n2, 142n13, 147, 149, 161, 169, 173, 193n27, 203, 204, 205, 206, 226, 227, 237, 241–151, 253n18, 254n27, 255n33, 257, 259, 264 Japanese new religions Agonshu, 140n2 Ittoen, 140n2 Mokichi Okada Association International (MOA) (see Mokichi Okada Association International (MOA)) Ômôtô, 38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 55, 56, 66n14, 67n28, 255n33 Perfect Liberty Kyodan, 52 Reiyûkai, 242, 255n33 Seichô-no-le 38, 46, 52, 66n14, 67n20, 258, 264n2 Sekai Kyûseikyô (see under Sekai Kyûseikyô) Soka Gakkai International (SGI) (see Soka Gakkai International) Sukyô Mahikari (see Sukô Mahikari) Tenrikyô, 140n2, 162n10, 255n33

Jehovah’s Witnesses, 43, 112, 117, 227 Johrei, 7, 34n28, 41, 47, 55, 57, 59, 96, 103, 114, 128, 129, 139, 144–163, 180–182, 205, 262, 263 Johrei collectif, 149, 176 Marche de Johrei, 148, 160, 183 origins of, 41, 55, 67n28, 148–149 Kabila, Laurent Désiré, 3–4, 7, 132 Kalle, Pepe, 162n13 Kalongo Mbikayi, 94n24 karma, 48, 137, 151, 163n22, 174, 175, 186, 189, 193n27, 229, 251 Kasai, 7, 19, 56, 57, 62, 93n15, 149, 153 Keane, Webb, 23–24, 25–26 Kimbangu, Simon, 16, 43, 52, 216, 228, 241, 249, 263 Kimbanguism, 2, 5–6, 10, 16, 39, 42, 222n10, 227, 234 Kimpa Vita, 15, 16, 65n2 Kirsch, Thomas, 117, 123n25, 172, 223n25 Kitawala movement, 39 Knights Templar, 191n6 Kototama. See under power of words: Japanese theory of Kyôchu Sama. See Okada, Yôichi Larkin, Brian, 199 Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), 5, 241 Leal Pinheiro, Claudio Cristiano, 122n11 Lefebvre, Henri, 125, 140n5 light, 42–43, 105, 111, 122n18, 164, 168, 183, 189, 208 Likaka, Osumaka, 135 Lower Congo (today Kongo Central), 6, 9, 28, 31, 32n6, 39, 65n2, 116, 129, 133 Lumumba, Patrice Eméry, 35–37, 241 MacGaffey, Wyatt, 9, 39, 76, 79, 87, 88, 90, 105–106, 116, 121, 142n15, 249, 255n32m magic (desciptive), 12, 57, 91n1 magic (normative). See magie magician/magicien, 10, 11, 12, 72, 74, 80, 81, 84–89, 90, 100, 112 – 113, 114, 120, 146, 188, 192n11, 197, 236. See also occultist/occultiste magie, 10, 70, 71, 74–75, 78, 88, 91n1, 97, 105, 112, 113, 146, 170, 176, 237 Mahidika Ngimby, Nimy, 94n24 Mami Wata, 32–33n12, 80, 118–119, 123n29, 123n30, 260 Mangengenge, holy mountain of, 127, 141n8, 218 Mao Zedong, 12 Marche Chrétienne (16 February 1992), 1 Martin, Phyllis, 135 Matata Ponyo, Augustin, 86–88, 89, 91

294 • Index

Matsuoka, Hideaki, 19, 53, 253n19 mbasu (Buruli ulcer), 153–154 Mbuji Mayi, 34n29, 57, 62, 153–154, 160 mbwoolu healing cult, 182, 193n24 media, 4, 13, 15, 43, 75, 92n9, 97, 109, 169, 170, 178, 192n16, 243 medical drugs, 117, 149–150, 158, 163n21 medicine, modern, 42, 150, 154, 156, 157–158, 163n21, 263 Meishu Sama (Lord of light), 2, 30, 41, 43, 48, 51, 58, 59, 61, 70, 107, 113, 125, 128, 143, 147, 153, 154, 157, 159, 166, 169, 172, 178, 178, 184, 185, 192n15, 193n19, 203, 204, 207, 231–232, 235, 245, 246, 247, 249, 253n21, 254n31, 261. See also Okada, Mokichi life of, 41–44 (see also Okada, Mokichi) portrait photograph of, 25, 41, 44, 107, 128, 166, 178–179 Message du Temps de la Fin. See Branham Tabernacle Meyer, Birgit, 24, 76, 97, 110, 141n7, 170, 179, 229, 259–260 millennial capitalism (J. and J. Comaroff), 80, 91 millennialism, 3, 38, 44, 80, 91, 122n15, 150, 185, 227, 229, 263 miracle, 4, 7, 8, 42, 75, 113, 146, 147, 157–158, 159, 193n19, 212 missionaries, Christian, 3, 9, 10, 12, 28, 42, 70, 77, 90, 99, 116, 117, 129, 154, 171, 196, 223n20, 224n31, 229, 246, 249, 251, 252, 255n36, 256n42 (mis-)fortune, 3, 7, 46, 48–50, 57, 62, 64, 71, 74, 81, 85, 104, 105, 116, 134, 146, 149, 150, 151, 174, 178, 179, 185, 186, 236, 238, 255n32, 258 Miteshiro otoritsugi (healing ritual). See Johrei: origins of Mobutu Sese Seko, 1, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 36, 57, 80, 87–89, 94n24, 96, 109, 119, 128, 132, 141n9, 141n12, 191n7, 217, 225, 238, 256n42 Mokichi Okada Association International (MOA), 11, 14–15, 55–58, 59, 60, 63, 67n24, 68n33, 94n24, 99, 104, 119, 148, 149, 151, 154, 155, 163n21, 174–175, 176, 193n29 money, 60–61, 78, 79–80, 63, 83–84, 93n14, 109, 150, 153, 155, 159, 166, 174, 177, 227, 253n13 as gift (mabonza), 234–238, 153n18 (see also sacrifice) dirty/impure money (mbongo mabe), 73, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 93n15, 105, 107, 169, 170, 153n22,

monstre de Brazzaville. See Démon du fleuve motorbikes, 4, 28, 33n23, 84, 93n15, 136, 232 Mozambique, 37, 159 Mpadi, Simon, 263 Mpeve ya Longo movement, 250 Mulele, Pierre 33n13 name, iconic power of, 64n4, 209, 212, 213, 220, 223n20, 237–240, 254n24, 255n35 nature farming (Li. bilanga, Fr. agriculture naturelle), 31, 103, 141n8 ndoyi (namesake), 240 neotraditional movements in Brazil, 52–53, 54 in Ghana (Afrikania), 3, 120 New Age, 8, 43, 44, 66n14, 109, 160, 161, 162n9, 184 New Thought, 38, 45–46, 66n14, 67n20, 173, 264n2 nganga, 10, 84, 87, 90, 91, 93n17, 100, 116, 123n26, 143, 144, 213, 223, 236 Nigeria, 2, 5, 10, 14, 33n18, 33n23, 75, 99, 109, 141n11, 145, 199, 208, 212, 222n13, 243 nkisi, 84, 90, 96, 105, 106, 114–117, 154, 255n36, 264 Nooter–Roberts, Mary, 88, 91–92n2, 196 nostalgia, 3, 177 Nzambe Malamu church, 5 Nzete Ekauka movement, 66n10 occult economies (J. and J. Comaroff), 5, 22, 92n14, 246 occult sciences (sciences occultes), 6, 70, 71, 74, 76–78, 84 occult/occultism in contemporary Kinshasa, 66n18, 72, 73, 74, 77, 81, 83, 88, 97, 264 nineteenth century, 10, 77 Ôhashi, Ryôsuke, 101 Ohikari (amulet), 25, 29, 64, 147, 164, 168–169, 169, 170, 171, 173–177, 192n12, 192n16, 193n19 Okada Purificatory Treatment/Traitement Purificatoire Okada (OPT/TOP), 55, 57, 58, 148, 155 Okada, Mokichi, 2, 29, 41–44, 45–52, 59, 65n9, 67n22, 68n32, 70, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 122n12, 130, 147, 148, 155, 158, 172, 173, 187, 189, 191, 103, 207, 211, 247. See also Meishu Sama Okada, Yôichi, 44, 68n33 Okada, Yoshikazu, 54, 55 Okada, Yoshiko, 44, 51 Okyome, 55, 147, 148, 161n5

Index • 295

Omitama (amulet), 173, 191n9 Ômôtô. See under Japanese new religions: Ômôtô Ordre Souverain du Temple Initiatique (OSTI), 156, 163n20 Oyedepo, David, 5 paradox of autonomy (M. Ferme), 78–79, 80, 82 pastor, 5, 8, 14, 66n11, 79–80, 90, 117, 137, 146, 163n22, 179, 182, 185, 190, 194, 30, 197, 198–202, 213–214, 216, 219, 220, 234, 236, 247, 264 Peek, Philip, 196, 208, 216 Peirce, Charles S., 24, 34n27 Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCCs), 2, 6, 7, 814, 15, 23, 29, 26, 36, 39, 54, 79, 80, 81, 99, 106, 109, 117, 119, 123n18, 142n17, 156, 158, 160, 165, 169, 178, 179, 182, 185, 190, 191n2, 194n31, 197, 208, 209, 210, 211, 214, 215, 216, 219, 223n21, 223n25, 224n31, 331, 234, 236, 237, 240, 241, 243, 244, 249, 250, 253n17, 256n39, 257, 259, 261, 262 and ancestral spirits, 227, 229–230, 242, 247, 248 and demonisation, 57, 70, 75, 77, 88, 90, 91, 105, 229, 247, 263 and the person, 163n22, 186, 193n24 pastors (see pastor) prayer and healing in, 4, 5, 146, 147, 151, 186, 198–202, 212, 220, 193n24 pentecostal quarantine, 227, 229, 230, 242, 248, 249, 257, 258 Perfect Liberty Kyodan. See under Japanese new religions personhood, 21–22, 165, 183–190, 191n2 Petit, Pierre, 230–231, 255n35 power mystique (A. Cohen), 89 power of words African theory of, 208–210, 212, 220 (see also prayer) Japanese theory of, 207–208 power, African conceptions of, 85, 87–88, 221n1 prayer, 4, 7, 46, 64, 195–224, 234, 247–248, 250 Amatsu Norito, 131, 178, 203– 204, 206–208, 215–216, 218, 220 Our Father, 7, 50, 203 pratique ya sonen, 59, 187, 205, 231–232, 233 Zengen Sanji, 203, 207–208 Prima Curia, 11 Protestant mainline Church 2, 5, 10, 62, 126

psychic disorder (liboma), 144–146 Pype, Katrien 20, 31, 42, 122n18, 169, 186, 193n19 radio trottoir, 12–13, 36, 80. See also rumour. Ranger, Terence, 17, 76, 92n4 (re-)production, concept of, 18–19 Reader, Ian 127, 131, 132, 141n10, 142n13, 161 Reiyûkai. See under Japanese new religions religious renewal, 2, 3, 5, 36, 54, 61, 259, 262–264 reverse orientalism (B. Faure), 250–252, 257, 262 ritual cleansing. See also salongo in India (Sanskr. seva), 138, 142n20 in Japan (Jap. hôshi), 237, 253n13 Robbins, Joel, 33n17, 216, 219 Robertson, Roland, 39–40 Rosicrucianism (AMORC), 10, 11, 12, 63, 75, 119, 156, 163n20, 176, 223n16 rubbish, 107, 109, 124–142 rumour, 10, 13–14, 47, 81, 84, 100, 119, 205, 254n22 sacrifice, 6, 71, 74, 78, 81, 83, 85, 87, 93n14, 93n17, 105, 107, 113, 119, 162n13, 169, 170, 226, 236, 237 salongo EMM’s ritual cleaning action, 109, 124–142 origin of the concept 128, 141n9 Salvation Army, 43,44 Sangetsu (Ikebana school). See under flowers Sape (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes), 20, 21 schism, 2, 5, 27, 30, 36, 37, 54–61, 62, 64, 68n39, 148, 161, 176, 186–187, 204, 259, 262 science, 19–20, 57, 75, 76–77, 89. See also occult sciences Scott, James C., 90 scripture, 167–177 secret society, 6, 11, 46–47, 73, 74, 75, 88, 90, 91, 97, 110, 119 secret/secrecy, 7, 9–12, 14, 29, 46, 176, 195–196, 220, 221n1, 255n34 and flowers, 110, 116, 109, 110, 119–120 as il-/legitimate resource of power, 73, 78, 85–89, 91, 94n25 Seichô-no-Ie. See under Japanese new religions Sekai Kyûseikyô, 2, 14, 37–40, 41–45, 46, 53–56, 57, 66n14, 67n23, 68n32, 102, 157, 161n3, 197, 257

296 • Index

semiotic ideology (W. Keane), 25–26, 104, 105, 111, 112, 125, 134, 172, 173, 180, 213, 211, 219, 222n13, 228, 236, 240, 248, 262 sensational forms (B. Meyer), 97, 102, 103, 109, 114, 120 Shintô/Shintoism, 9, 29, 38–40, 56, 60, 197, 204, 206 sickle-cell anaemia (anémie SS, drépanocytose), 155–156 silence, 180, 195–197, 216, 217, 219 Simmel, Georg, 85, 119, 176 Soka Gakkai International (SGI), 7, 14, 28, 40, 52, 154, 184, 194n29, 197, 264 sonen (deep thought). See under prayer: pratique ya sonen South Africa, 18, 106, 156, 256n39 South Korea, 2, 264 South-South transnationalism, 7, 54, 259 spirits, 13, 38, 47, 70, 99, 104, 118, 173, 196, 212, 213, 216, 228, 235, 242, 243, 246, 259–260, 262 ancestral, 74, 141n8, 205, 229, 230, 240, 248, 255 (see also ancestors) evil/unhappy, 71–72, 83–84, 93, 105–107, 111, 113, 116, 123n25, 124, 129, 130–132, 141n11, 154, 158, 169, 171, 204, 220, 247 spiritual atmosphere, 103–104, 107, 111–112, 121, 205, 207 spiritual healing, 100, 142–163 in EMM/TMAJ (see Johrei) in MOA (see Okada Purificatory Treatment) in Sukyô Mahikari (see Okyome) spiritual movements, 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 14–17 19, 22, 27, 28, 33n17, 45, 47, 50, 58, 62, 63, 64, 69, 73, 75, 77, 84, 86, 99, 119, 154, 154, 155, 157, 158, 186, 197, 211, 219, 220, 245, 251, 257–259, 261 spiritual technology, 21, 118, 177, 259 Staemmler, Birigt, 55, 148, 161n5 Sukuinushisama. See Okada, Yoshikazu Sukyô Mahikari, 11, 14, 20, 54, 56, 63, 89, 94n24, 119, 128, 147, 148, 163n13, 173, 174, 191n9, 206, 216 Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association, 14–15, 197, 219

suspicion as infrapolitical resource, 71–91, 261, 264 of flowers, 100, 108, 109, 110, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121 of witchcraft/occultism, 22, 27, 45–46, 50, 172, 192n11, 210–211, 226, 237, 240 Tata Gonda, 6 technique of the self (M. Foucault), 165, 183, 188 Tempels, Placide, 178, 251 Temple Messianique Art de Johrei (TMAJ), 2, 33, 11, 14, 58, 59, 61, 109 Tenrikyô. See under Japanese new religions things, 1, 3, 7, 8, 20, 21–27, 31, 36, 64, 71, 73, 78, 86, 89, 91, 104, 129, 131, 144, 151, 164–165, 168–170, 190, 192n16, 213, 228, 253n13, 258–259, 261–262, 264 tradition of renewal (J. Janzen), 161n1, 263–263 ultra religion, 29, 58 unheimlich (S. Freud), 86, 88–89, 170 Unification Church of Reverend Moon (Moonies), 14–15, 28, 40, 112 university, 8, 64, 75, 77, 81, 89, 160, 251 Van Wing, Jacques, 154, 196, 223n20, 255n36 Verrips, Jojada, 180–181, 192n17, 221n3 Watanabe, Tetsuo, 35, 55, 68n33 wealth in people, 79, 92n9, 238 Wimberley, Howard, 258 Winner’s Chapel, 5, 212 witchcraft. See suspicion Witte, Marleen de, 208 world religions, 16, 33n17 Wuaku, Albert Kafui, 11, 14–15, 17, 18, 259–260 Yoka Choc (music orchestra), 20 yukon, 47–49 Zaiko Langa Langa, 20 Zaire, 1, 7, 56–57, 60, 63, 79, 80, 88–89, 94n24, 96, 119, 134, 141n9, 217, 219, 225, 252n2. See also Mobutu Sese Seko Zambia, 123n25, 159, 172, 223n25