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KINSHASA, DRC — For half a century, one of the most influential religious and liberation movements in modern African history has operated in relative global obscurity, even as it grew to count millions of followers across the continent and beyond. Its founder, Simon Kimbangu, spent 30 years behind bars, dying in exile after Belgian colonial rulers labeled his work a threat to their rule. Today, as the Democratic Republic of Congo grapples with its worst territorial crisis since independence in 1960, Kimbangu’s legacy of nonviolent, homegrown Black liberation is being reclaimed as a guiding light for the nation.

Kimbangu, a former lay Baptist catechist, launched his ministry in 1921, when what is now the DRC was the personal colony of Belgium’s ruling monarchy, its rubber, timber, and mineral resources plundered to rebuild Europe after World War I. Rejecting colonial representations of God as a white European figure, Kimbangu framed the divine through the traditional Kikongo deity Nzambi, positioning himself as God’s earthly envoy and the Black embodiment of the Holy Spirit. His message of self-determination and spiritual liberation drew tens of thousands of oppressed Congolese plantation workers, who flocked to his base in the small village of Nkamba, southwest of Kinshasa, seeking healing and hope.

Alarmed by the movement’s rapid growth, colonial authorities arrested Kimbangu after just five months of public ministry, charging him with inciting insurrection. Though sentenced to death, Belgium’s King Albert I commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and Kimbangu was exiled more than 1,600 kilometers to what is now Lubumbashi in the country’s southeast. He died in prison in 1951 at the age of 64, never having tasted freedom after his arrest. Today, only a handful of official photos exist, showing a bald, stern-faced prisoner in plain, austere prison garb.

Against all odds, the movement Kimbangu founded survived and thrived. Officially named the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth Through the Prophet Simon Kimbangu, it is now estimated to have between 6 and 17 million members, most based in the DRC, with congregations as far afield as Belgium. Nkamba, the small village where Kimbangu began his work, is now recognized as the church’s spiritual seat, dubbed the “New Jerusalem” by believers, who make regular pilgrimages there to honor their founder. In 2023, the Congolese government officially designated April 6 a national public holiday, Kimbangu Day, to celebrate his lifelong struggle for African self-consciousness and liberation. Many Congolese now draw parallels between Kimbangu and Nelson Mandela, noting both endured decades of imprisonment for fighting oppression, even as Kimbangu remains largely unknown outside Central Africa.

Distinct from both traditional Christianity and imported African religious movements, the Kimbanguist Church has retained its core founding principles of independence, nonviolence, and equity. It prohibits polygamy, a practice widely accepted in many Congolese communities, prioritizes peaceful conflict resolution, and invests heavily in local schools and community social programs. Unlike many older Christian denominations in the region, it also elevates women to positions of senior leadership, a practice rooted in the critical role Kimbangu’s wife Marie Muilu played in keeping the movement alive during her husband’s three decades of imprisonment. “Women are ministering in the church. They have a key role to play because the church is so thankful for what the wife of Simon Kimbangu did when her husband was in prison,” explained André Kibangudi, a senior church elder. “We should have more female leadership.”

Today, as Congo confronts a devastating armed rebellion in its eastern provinces, Kimbangu’s legacy has taken on new urgency. Since January 2025, the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group has seized control of Goma, the largest city in North Kivu, and occupied much of the mineral-rich province, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians and stoking fears of national fragmentation. President Félix Tshisekedi, who has positioned his administration as a champion of Congolese sovereignty, has courted the Kimbanguist movement, and his prime minister, Judith Suminwa, is a member of the church, a reflection of the group’s massive political influence and voter base. Tshisekedi has recently offered U.S. companies unprecedented access to eastern Congo’s untapped mineral reserves, estimated to be worth more than $24 trillion, in exchange for American support to counter the M23 rebellion. The move has drawn fierce criticism from activists and opposition figures, who warn it risks eroding Congolose sovereignty and intensify great power competition for resources in the region, where Chinese firms already dominate mineral extraction.

For Congolese analysts and religious leaders, the current crisis demands a return to Kimbangu’s core values of self-sacrifice and commitment to collective liberation. “The first challenge for African leaders, or Congolese leaders, is that they are not free,” said Bwatshia Kambayi, a prominent Congolese historian and former higher education minister who has drawn parallels between the struggles of Mandela and Kimbangu. “African leaders, they do not realize that they have a slavery mindset. We are independent, but we are not free.” Kambayi argues that today’s Congolese political elite, many of whom prioritize personal wealth over public good, have fallen far short of Kimbangu’s example: “The elite running Congo are poor men who want to live as rich people. This is not the fight of Simon Kimbangu. None of them has reached the level of fighting for people’s freedom, for people’s liberty.”

Kimbanguist pastors across the country echo that sentiment, framing the movement’s nonviolent, community-centered ethos as a model for a nation divided by conflict. “What Congo’s leaders can learn from Kimbangu is that the guy didn’t work for himself. He sacrificed himself to free people who had been in slavery, who had been suffering,” said Paul Kasonga, a Kimbanguist pastor who serves millions of adherents in Mongala province. For ordinary believers, Kimbangu’s message of liberation for all Congolese remains as urgent today as it was a century ago. “The lesson that people can learn from the church is that the prophet, the founding prophet, fought for people’s rights,” said Toussaint Mungwala, a Kimbanguist pastor in Kwilu province who converted to the movement from Catholicism in the 1980s. Even decades after his death, Kimbangu’s unheralded struggle continues to shape the identity and future of the Congolese nation.

Pope Leo XIV has launched an ambitious, 11-day pastoral tour across four African nations, a demanding itinerary whose scope and complexity echoes the iconic globe-spanning journeys Pope St. John Paul II undertook during his early papacy. Across each stop, the pontiff will center his messages on four core themes: peaceful coexistence between Christian and Muslim communities, the urgent harms of overexploiting Africa’s natural and human resources, systemic corruption, and the global crisis of migration.

The tour kicks off in Algeria, running from April 13 to 15, a stop that carries deeply personal meaning for Pope Leo. The pontiff’s own religious order draws its foundational inspiration from St. Augustine, the 5th-century theological giant who lived, served as bishop, and died in what is today the coastal Algerian city of Annaba, then known as Hippo. Leo will visit the ancient site to pay homage to the saint.

Beyond faith, Algeria’s legacies and modern realities will frame the Pope’s other priorities: a majority Sunni Muslim nation on North Africa’s Mediterranean coast and a former French colony, the country sits at the intersection of interfaith dialogue and migration challenges. Last year, Algeria’s parliament passed a historic law formally branding 132 years of French colonial rule a crime against humanity, calling for restitution of property seized during the occupation to redress centuries of historical harm. During his visit, Pope Leo will honor the memory of migrants who died in shipwrecks while attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, and will make a historic stop at Algiers’ Great Mosque to underscore his call for Christian-Muslim harmony.

From Algeria, the Pope will travel to Cameroon for a three-day visit from April 15 to 18, where peacebuilding will take center stage. On April 16, he will lead a high-profile peace gathering in the northwestern city of Bamenda, featuring firsthand testimony from a Mankon traditional ruler, a Presbyterian moderator, a local imam, and a Catholic nun.

Cameroon’s western regions have been locked in devastating conflict since 2017, when English-speaking separatists launched an insurgency aimed at creating an independent English-speaking state separated from the country’s French-speaking majority. Research from the International Crisis Group estimates the conflict has killed more than 6,000 people and forced over 600,000 residents from their homes. In the country’s north, separate violence linked to Boko Haram militants continues to plague communities, as the extremist insurgency based in neighboring Nigeria has spilled across the border.

Blessed with rich reserves of oil, natural gas, cobalt, bauxite, iron ore, gold, and diamonds, Cameroon’s extractive sector makes up nearly a third of the nation’s total exports, per data from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. But human rights organizations and the Catholic Church have repeatedly warned that almost all revenue from resource extraction flows to foreign corporations and a small domestic elite, with almost no benefit reaching the rural and Indigenous communities that live in immediate proximity to mining and drilling sites. While French and British firms have long controlled the sector, Chinese companies have rapidly expanded their footprint in Cameroon in recent years, particularly in the gold-mining regions of the country’s east.

A 2023 United Nations expert report documented severe human rights abuses and environmental damage from unregulated gold mining in eastern Cameroon, where widespread mercury use poisons waterways and local communities. UNICEF has also found that the gold rush has driven hundreds of children to drop out of school to work in informal, makeshift mines, where they risk their lives for less than a dollar’s worth of ore sold on local black markets.

The third stop on the tour is Angola, where the Pope will stay from April 18 to 21. Roughly 58% of Angola’s 38 million residents identify as Catholic, and Leo will open his visit with prayers at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, a revered Marian shrine that ranks among the most important Catholic pilgrimage sites in the country. The original chapel at the site was constructed at the end of the 16th century by Portuguese colonists after they built a fortress at Muxima, which went on to become a key processing point in the transatlantic slave trade: enslaved African people were baptized at the shrine before being forced onto ships bound for the Americas.

Today, Angola ranks as the fourth-largest oil producer on the African continent and among the top 20 global oil producers, according to the International Energy Agency. It is also the world’s third-largest diamond exporter, and holds substantial reserves of gold and critical minerals required for global clean energy technologies. Yet despite its vast natural wealth, 2023 World Bank data shows that more than 30% of Angolans survive on less than $2.15 per day. The country won independence from Portugal in 1975, but immediately descended into a 27-year civil war that only ended in 2002, leaving more than half a million people dead and deep, lasting socioeconomic scars across the nation. Vatican officials confirmed that in Angola, Pope Leo will deliver a message of hope and healing focused specifically on the country’s young people.

The tour will conclude in Equatorial Guinea from April 21 to 23, a small former Spanish colony that was transformed overnight when large offshore oil reserves were discovered in the mid-1990s. Today, oil makes up nearly half of the country’s GDP and more than 90% of its total exports, according to the African Development Bank. But despite this resource windfall, the World Bank’s 2023 report confirms that more than half of the population lives in poverty, with 70% of the nation’s 2 million residents surviving on low incomes.

Equatorial Guinea is an authoritarian petrostate ruled by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has held power since 1979, making him the longest-serving sitting head of state in Africa. Obiang and his ruling family face widespread accusations of systemic corruption, human rights abuses, and authoritarian crackdowns: Human Rights Watch and other global rights groups have documented that almost all oil revenue has been siphoned to enrich the Obiang family and close allies, rather than lifting the general population out of poverty. The government also faces repeated accusations of arbitrary harassment, arrest, and intimidation of political opponents, independent journalists, and civilian critics.

Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni confirmed that beyond addressing the harms of unregulated resource extraction across the continent, Pope Leo will directly raise issues of systemic corruption and the responsibilities of democratic governance during his tour. This coverage of the papal visit is produced by the Associated Press, which receives funding support for its religion coverage through a collaboration with The Conversation US, via funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP retains full editorial responsibility for all content.

VATICAN CITY – A landmark papal journey is set to kick off Monday, as Pope Leo XIV makes his first visit to Algeria, launching an 11-day, 11,000-mile trek across four African nations that underscores both the rapid growth of Catholicism on the continent and the complex challenges it and local communities face. The sweeping itinerary, which includes stops in Algeria, Angola, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, requires 18 separate flights and will see the 70-year-old pontiff deliver addresses and homilies in four languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese and English. The logistical scale of the journey has drawn comparisons to the extensive global travels of a young St. John Paul II. When Leo identified himself as “a son of St. Augustine” on the night of his election, many Algerians initially interpreted the comment as a reference to ancestral ties to the North African nation, where the 5th-century Christian leader lived and died. While the line actually referenced Leo’s commitment to Augustinian spirituality, the connection to one of Christianity’s most influential figures – who is widely recognized by Algeria’s Sunni Muslim majority – has already served as a warm opening for the pontiff’s visit. This tour marks a deliberate priority on Africa, a region that has become central to the global expansion of the Catholic Church, yet carries a unique set of social, political and theological challenges that Leo will directly address. Across the four nations, which span vastly different cultural and historical contexts, Leo’s agenda covers a broad spectrum of pressing issues. Key themes include the human and environmental costs of unregulated resource extraction – a critical concern in a region that supplies much of the world’s oil, yet where a large share of the population lives in deep poverty. He will also address systemic corruption in long-ruling authoritarian regimes, and peace-building in regions torn by sectarian and separatist conflict. In Cameroon, where Catholics make up 29% of the population, organizers expect massive turnout, with as many as 600,000 faithful set to attend one of Leo’s public Masses. The pontiff will also host a dedicated peace gathering in Bamenda, a northwestern city that has been ravaged by years of separatist violence. For local Catholic believers, the visit is a moment of profound spiritual significance. “To see His Holiness Pope Leo XIV arrive in Cameroon, for us who are Catholic Christians, it further strengthens our faith, it further strengthens our ties with our God,” said Simon Pierre Ngombo, a Cameroonian Catholic. “It is a perfect moment to touch each other’s hearts.” For Algeria, the visit offers a high-profile platform for Leo to advance his push for peaceful coexistence between Christians and Muslims, at a moment of heightened global religious tension tied to the U.S.-Israeli conflict in Iran. Notably, Vatican officials confirmed that no additional security measures have been added for the trip despite ongoing regional instability. Leo, who has already positioned himself as a moderate counterweight to U.S. President Donald Trump within American religious circles, will visit the Great Mosque of Algiers, where interfaith dialogue will be a core focus of discussion, according to Algiers Archbishop Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco. Algeria carries a painful modern history: a brutal 1990s civil war, known locally as the “black decade,” killed an estimated 250,000 people during a government campaign against an Islamist insurgency. Just last year, the country took a major step toward addressing its colonial past, when parliament voted to formally label 130 years of French colonization a crime against the Algerian people, and called for restitution of property seized during colonial rule. “The visit acts as a bridge between the Christian and Muslim worlds, while reflecting the richness of the country’s history,” Vesco told Algeria’s official news agency APS. However, the trip has already seen one notable point of disagreement: Algerian authorities rejected a Vatican request for Leo to travel to Médéa, 30 miles south of Algiers, to pray at the site of the Tibhirine monastery, where seven French Trappist monks were abducted and killed by Islamist fighters in 1996, during the civil war. The monks were among 19 Catholic clergy and laypeople killed during the conflict, and were beatified as martyrs for the faith in 2018, in the first such ceremony ever held in a majority-Muslim nation. In a commentary supporting the government’s decision, state-run daily El Moudjahid noted that “Algeria has no intention of reopening a painful chapter of its history,” though Leo is still expected to acknowledge the monks’ sacrifice during his visit. Beyond interfaith dialogue, the tour shines a light on the dramatic transformation of the Catholic Church in Africa. Recent Vatican statistics show that the continent accounted for more than half of all new Catholic baptisms globally in 2023, adding 8.3 million new faithful to the church. What was once a region dependent on Western missionary work now exports thousands of priests and nuns to congregations around the world every year. Angola and Cameroon are consistently among the top African countries for new priestly vocations: as of December 2024, Angola counted 2,366 seminarians, while Cameroon had 2,218, ranking just behind leading vocation hubs Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania. But this exponential growth has brought significant growing pains, as the church adapts to local cultural contexts while upholding core theological doctrines. Past popes have repeatedly reminded African clergy of the requirement to uphold celibacy vows, and a 2009 visit to Angola and Cameroon by Pope Benedict XVI was overshadowed by global backlash to his claim that condoms worsen the global AIDS crisis, a statement widely condemned by public health experts. Today, one of the most pressing challenges the Vatican faces in Africa is ethnic division within church leadership, particularly in the selection of bishops. According to the Rev. Fortunatus Nwachukwu, second-in-command at the Vatican’s missionary evangelization office, bishops assigned to multi-ethnic dioceses are frequently rejected by local clergy and faithful based on their ethnic origin. Nwachukwu terms this trend the “son of the soil syndrome,” noting that the Vatican emphasizes the identity of “son of the church” over ethnic affiliation. Another longstanding point of tension is the traditional practice of polygamy, which African bishops have repeatedly raised as a critical cultural issue for the church. In response, the Vatican released a full doctrinal document last year reaffirming the church’s commitment to monogamous marriage, and convened a special working group to study the issue. Catholic doctrine holds that marriage is a lifelong, monogamous union between one man and one woman, a position that clashes with longstanding cultural norms in many rural and nomadic African communities, where multiple wives and large families are often seen as an economic necessity for survival. Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni confirmed that Leo will hold multiple meetings with clergy, bishops and lay faithful during the tour to reaffirm the church’s teaching on Catholic family life. Leo will also turn a spotlight on the harms of resource extraction and corruption in former European colonies that are now major global suppliers of oil, gold, diamonds and iron. While these industries have driven economic growth in recent decades, the benefits have largely accrued to a small elite, while local communities and the environment have suffered severe harm. This issue is particularly acute in Equatorial Guinea, where President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has held power since 1979, and he and his family face widespread international accusations of systemic corruption and authoritarian rule. This focus on environmental justice and economic equity aligns with the legacy of Pope Francis, who centered these themes in his landmark 2015 environmental encyclical *Laudato Si’* (Praised Be), a document Leo has openly endorsed and actively promoted. This Associated Press religion coverage is produced through a collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP retains sole responsibility for all content.

As Benin prepares for a pivotal presidential election on Sunday, the entire campaign season has been overshadowed by growing alarm over the expansion of a violent Islamist insurgency that has already destabilized much of West Africa, turning this once largely peaceful nation into the conflict’s latest front line.

The vote comes just four months after outgoing two-term President Patrice Talon survived a coordinated coup attempt, a crisis that was only averted when regional power Nigeria deployed warplanes to target mutinous soldiers plotting to overthrow his civilian government. Nigeria’s swift intervention stopped Benin from following the trajectory of neighboring Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, all of which have fallen to military takeovers in recent years amid widespread public anger over civilian governments’ failure to counter al-Qaeda and Islamic State-affiliated militant groups.

Benin’s own vulnerability to the insurgency was underscored in late March, when fighters from Jama’a Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda affiliate, killed 15 Beninese soldiers in a raid on a military outpost in Kofouno, near the Niger border. The attack continued a deadly pattern that emerged in 2025: that January, 28 soldiers died in an assault on W National Park, a vast protected reserve that spans Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso, and a further 54 troops were killed in the same area just three months later, marking the deadliest single string of losses for Benin’s military at the hands of insurgents.

W National Park, along with adjacent Pendjari and Arly Parks, forms West Africa’s largest contiguous protected wilderness, covering more than 1.7 million hectares of dense forest. Combined with the region’s highly porous international borders, the terrain provides ideal cover for militants to establish hidden bases and cross between countries undetected by security forces.

According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (Acled), a violence monitoring organization, attacks in the border triangle linking Niger, Benin and Nigeria have spiked dramatically over the past 18 months, turning once-quiet remote transit routes into active conflict zones. Acled data shows that at least 1,000 people were killed in this border region in 2025, more than double the death toll recorded in 2024.

The rising violence has spread fear and disruption among local communities, who now worry their country could face the same level of devastation that neighboring Nigeria has endured from decades of Boko Haram insurgency. “We only want to work, to educate the youth, but it’s becoming so difficult,” a local school teacher told the BBC. “We can’t imagine our country becoming like Nigeria with Boko Haram’s threats, which has killed so many people.” A mother of one added: “We are afraid to go to the fields. I don’t know what to do, where to go. Anytime, those guys could come here and rape us, steal our stuff or kill us. It’s not easy. Benin doesn’t deserve this. The youth don’t deserve this.”

Heading into Sunday’s vote, the race for the presidency is a two-candidate contest between Romuald Wadagni, the 49-year-old incumbent finance minister and ruling coalition candidate who is currently the poll front-runner, and 56-year-old challenger Paul Hounkpè, a former culture minister.

In a bid to ease voter anxieties over security, Wadagni opened his campaign in March in Kandi, a key trade hub near the Niger-Nigeria border, before touring other violence-hit northern localities including Banikoara and Ségbana. Addressing thousands of cheering supporters, he pledged to make the safety of all Beninese citizens a non-negotiable daily priority if elected. “We will not let any dark forces come and take our lands or threaten citizens,” Wadagni said. “We will make sure our whole country is under protection.”

Hounkpè, who launched his campaign from Benin’s economic capital Cotonou, has echoed the focus on security while calling for a major shift in regional diplomacy. “We must join forces with our neighbours without losing our dignity,” he said. “Benin cannot act alone, close cooperation with Niger and Burkina Faso is essential.”

Hounkpè’s call for detente carries particular weight, as relations between Benin and the coup-ruled military governments of Niger and Burkina Faso have collapsed since 2023. Benin is a member of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which suspended the membership of the three coup-hit nations and initially threatened military intervention to restore civilian rule in Niger. In response, the three military-led states formed a separate political alliance, reoriented their foreign policy toward Russia, and accused ECOWAS of acting as a proxy for Western powers – a claim the regional bloc denies.

While Wadagni has also signaled openness to improving ties with the military governments, he is widely viewed as closer to Western powers than Hounkpè. Relations between Benin and Niger, currently led by Gen Abdourahmane Tiani, are particularly strained: Niger has kept its border with Benin closed since Tiani seized power in 2023, citing what it calls “hostile manoeuvres” originating from Benin’s territory, a charge Talon’s outgoing government rejects.

The election comes as Talon steps down after completing two full terms in office. His supporters argue he has preserved Benin’s standing as a stable civilian democracy, a key distinction at a time when military leaders in the region such as Burkina Faso’s Capt Ibrahim Traoré have publicly argued that democracy “kills” and that populations must abandon democratic governance. But Talon’s critics say democratic institutions have eroded during his tenure, pointing to changes to electoral and party registration laws that have drastically reduced opposition participation in national politics.

The new rules led to the main opposition bloc, The Democrats, being completely shut out of all seats in January’s parliamentary elections. The party’s intended presidential candidate was also disqualified from Sunday’s vote, after failing to secure the required number of candidate sponsorships. In a recent analysis, the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies noted that Hounkpè’s qualification for the race was only possible through a political arrangement with the ruling coalition, which provided the sponsorship signatures he needed to meet legal requirements.

With the main opposition excluded from the contest, many high-profile Democrats have thrown their support behind front-runner Wadagni, a move widely seen as a pragmatic bet on his likely victory and expectation of future government posts. Hounkpè, however, remains confident he can pull off an electoral upset, framing himself as the candidate of real change for Benin.

Regardless of which candidate claims victory on Sunday, most Beninese voters are anticipating a peaceful transfer of power, and share the same core hope: that the new administration will make greater progress repairing strained regional relations and rolling back the insurgency that has brought growing violence and uncertainty to the country’s northern borderlands.