ABSTRACT
Although sub-Saharan Africa has been involved with European languages and literacy for over a century, and has seen numerous ‘national literatures’ arise in these languages (Gerard, 1972), and although Christian literature has been introduced in many African languages in connection with biblical translations (Hastings, 1979), relatively little scholarship has been conducted on the consequences of literacy, per se, in African religion.1 This essay proposes such a project for the Kongo tradition of coastal Zaire, Angola and Congo, and puts forward methodologies for the analysis of the articulation of oral and written language use in Kongo religion. The essay will examine genre uses in the oral and written phases of Kongo religion, and will then study at closer range two examples of early Kongo writing on religion. The first is part of an account by African teachers of North Kongo’s major historic healing cult, Lemba, written in the 1900-20 era on commission by missionarylinguist Karl Laman as part of a vast corpus of writing about a way of life that was rapidly disappearing (Janzen, 1972). The second is a much briefer text, written in 1921 by the personal secretaries of the Kongo prophet Kimbangu, describing the remarkable beginning of one of the major independent churches of Black Africa (Nfinangani and Nzungu in Raymaekers, 1971). These two very different texts have, as we shall see later, similar structures for the portrayal of religious phenomena.
