4. The regime of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the assassinated father of the incumbent, was the image’s “legs of iron”;
5. The transitional government led by the incumbent Joseph Kabila was the image’s “feet partly of iron and partly of clay”;
6. The regime that was about to unfold in the wake of the presidential elections will be Jean-Pierre Bemba’s upcoming regime of “stone” (the French word “pierre” (stone) having been extracted from Bemba’s first name and conflated with the biblical “stone” which, according to verse 34, was set to shatter the image’s legs: “As you [Nebuchadnezzar] looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it smote the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces[.]” The Congolese prophet, however, doesn’t stop there. Contradicting himself, he then equates the stone, which he had previously conflated with the person of Bemba, with the Congo, “the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth” (35).
Congolese street and television preachers have a built-in disclaimer in their prophetic dithyrambs. The television prophet who made these predictions about a month prior to the runoff elections couched his disclaimer as follows: if you choose the incumbent despite these dire warnings, everything he does will be doomed to fail as he is already doomed by the Good Book. The incumbent did win at long last (with 58%), but to some Congolese who voted for Jean-Pierre Bemba, who obtained 42% in the runoff elections, the new democratically-elected president’s administration is doomed by God Almighty as he might have stolen the elections through black magic or by a devilish conspiracy with the international community that claimed the elections fair and square!
Not to be outdone in the religious realm, the incumbent’s camp circulated its own prophecy, which even found its way on the official website of Congo’s President, authored by his official editorialist, Marcel Nzazi Mabidi, who had furbished his pen under Mobutu with his magic realist lyrical praises to the Zairian dictator.
There’s a national “Jesus Christ” in the Congo: Simon Kimbangu (1887-1951); and a “New Jerusalem,” the city of N’Kamba, in the Bas-Congo Province, Kimbangu’s birthplace.
Prophet Simon Kimbangu, a catechist, had turned into a political and religious leader in the early 1920s, a change that made him the enemy of the colonial state number one. He was swiftly deported into another province where he died in internal exile under Belgian rule in 1951. Unlike Daniel, Kimbangu didn’t write prophecies but he’s alleged to have left a “word-of-mouth” corpus of prophecies that his family and his followers have used to set up one of the most successful money-making churches in Central Africa, spanning multiple countries, complete with radio and television stations in Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville, as well as schools and one university. And still unlike Daniel, Kimbangu is today a messiah, God’s “Special Envoy” as the Kimbaguists call him in the full name of their church, the ECSK---“Eglise du Christ au Congo par l’Envoyé Spécial de Dieu Simon Kimbangu” (the Church of Christ in the Congo by God’s Special Envoy Simon Kimbangu).
Here’s Kimbangu’s prophecy, as captured by Marcel Nzazi Mabidi:
“Congo will one day be independent. For 40 years the country will go through chaos and will experience daunting difficulties and sufferings of every kind. Then good fortune will come. The country will first be led by a sheep (Joseph Kasavubu, the first president). That man will be a native of the province where I was born.
The country will then be led by a wild beast (Mobutu) who will come to cast aside the sheep. During the rule of the wild beast marked by terror, the country will be ransacked. Money will be lacking in the country. Even banks will be empty.
Then a man will come, a meteor, a native of the province where I will die (Laurent-Désiré Kabila). His rule will be very short. His main role will be to chase the wild beast from power.
Then someone will come, a young wise man (Joseph Kabila). It’s him that will save this country and bring to the people true independence.”
To really understand that this country has lost its marbles, we have to turn back to Isaiah 18, which now passes as the foundational text of the Congolese “imagined community.”
Even the most seemingly rational Congolese read in Chapter 18 of the Book of Isaiah the prophecy that confirms their narrative as the Lord’s chosen ones, beside the people of modern-day Israel, especially the first verse of this chapter that has the prophet relaying God’s message intimating to a nation “which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia” to
“Go, you swift messengers,
to a nation, tall and smooth,
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