Oral history project celebrates Congolese evangelists’ faith, courage.

Muyishi Mutangidiki, a Congolese Mennonite evangelist, struggled to turn his head from the direct fury of the sun. Bound hand and foot to a corpse, a torrent of taunts further paralyzed him.

“Have you felt his breath on the back of your neck yet?” jeered a chief of the Bashilele people, lounging in the relative coolness of palm trees with the village elders.

Mutangidiki’s persecutors were struggling with the unfamiliar story of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The Bashilele people resisted conversation about Jesus, at first, and treated Mutangidiki with hostility, said David Lupera, the first ordained Mennonite of this ethnic group. Lupera recounted this historic event to Jim Bertsche, who served with Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission (AIMM) in Congo for nearly three decades and as administrator in the United States from 1974-86.

Mennonite Mission Network actively collaborates with AIMM and Mennonite Church Canada Witness in Congo through the Partnership Council that includes three Congolese Mennonite denominations and representatives of the network of French-speaking Anabaptists. Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite World Conference have observer status in the Partnership Council.

In preparation of the centennial of Communauté Mennonite au Congo (Congo Mennonite Community) in 2012, AIMM has launched an oral history project that aspires to record the witness of early Mennonites in a Congolese version of Martyrs’ Mirror. The timing of this endeavor is crucial, as important information has already been lost to the passage of the years, including the name of the evangelist who was tied to the dead man. (Muyishi Mutangidiki is a pseudonym composed of Congolese-language words for “teacher” and “evangelist,” respectively.)

Adolphe Komuesa Kalunga, Congo Mennonite Community’s president, spoke to the significance of the Congo history book project.

“We cannot stick the story of people living on earth in a drawer somewhere. In Africa, we practice oral tradition, but those who know our story are in the process of leaving us. If this history is not written down now, we will lose the story,” Komuesa said.

The active phase of the story-gathering was launched with a workshop in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, in November 2009. Fohle Lygunda trained seven Congolese researchers in techniques for collecting and transcribing oral histories. Lygunda has a doctorate in mission and leadership from Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky and is the director for French-speaking Africa with the Dictionary of African Christian Biography.

For the past year, the oral history researchers, armed with digital recorders and notebooks, have been navigating their motorcycles along forest paths to remote villages to collect the histories that illustrate how Congolese Mennonite believers lived their faith over the last century. These stories bear witness to the dedication of women and men, laypeople and pastors, who through their actions and words lived their commitment to Christ in specific, often difficult circumstances.

AIMM plans to convert the oral histories into two published volumes of Congolese history, one in French and one in English, with the release date scheduled to coincide with the centennial celebration at Congo Mennonite Community’s headquarters in Tshikapa in June 2012.
“We are going to make a lot of noise to celebrate these 100 years of Mennonite presence in Congo,” Komuesa said. “This history doesn’t only involve Congolese Mennonites; it also includes those Mennonites who brought the gospel to Congo.”

AIMM, which is simultaneously marking its 100th anniversary as a mission agency, hopes that an additional benefit of stories like Mutangidiki’s will be to encourage North American Mennonites to greater courage and faithfulness in living out their faith.
Mutangidiki learned to read and write in the Djoko Punda school established by Lawrence and Rose Haigh, the first workers with Congo Inland Mission, a predecessor agency of AIMM. Mutangidiki became a follower of Jesus and was trained as an evangelist, as were many of his classmates. By the late 1920s, Congolese evangelists had moved into villages around Djoko Punda to begin schools and clinics and plant churches.

According to Jim Bertsche—author of the history of the Mennonites in Congo from a North American perspective, CIM/AIMM: A Story of Vision, Commitment and Grace—after a decade of enlarging Christian presence around the mission center, there was a growing sense of urgency to reach out further to the Bashilele people, who were skilled in forging iron and hunting but had resisted all missionary overtures.

Mutangidiki and his wife said yes to God’s call to live as evangelists among the Bashilele people. After sessions that met with stony indifference from the chief and elders, the Mutangidikis received grudging permission to build their house at the very edge of a Bashilele village.

“Will knowing about Jesus help us be able to smelt iron better than our ancestors?” the chief derisively asked Mutangidiki.

Uncharacteristically of African hospitality, the villagers did not help the Mutangidiki couple build their thatch-and-stick home, and they did not help the Mutangidikis plant their fields. Fortified by faith and undeterred by hostility, Muyishi Mutangidiki tied a piece of scrap metal to a tree branch and beat it with a rock every morning calling children to come and learn at the school, but no one appeared.

Every Sunday, the Mutangidikis went to the center of the village to sing praises to God and to talk about Yesu Musungidi wetu, Jesus, our Savior, but no one was interested.
One day, the chief summoned Muyishi Mutangidiki and said, “You keep telling us about someone named Jesus.”

“That’s true,” Mutangidiki said.

“You tell us that he raised people from the dead while he was on earth.”

“He did.”

“You say that he himself died and rose from his grave three days later.”

“He did.”

“Well, we want to try this Jesus business here in our village today. Do you see that corpse over there? That man died last night.”

The chief continued to explain that the village elders had decided that if Mutangidiki’s Jesus could bring the corpse back to life, the whole village would become Christians with rejoicing. However, if the dead man didn’t start breathing before sundown, when tradition dictated burial, Mutangidiki would be buried alive in the grave with the corpse.

The villagers tied Mutangidiki, face up toward the sky, to the lifeless body, then retreated to the shade of the palm trees to await the resurrection. Occasionally they called out to Mutangidiki, asking if there were any stirrings of life, any whisper of breath on the back of his neck.

The sun was low in the sky when a messenger boy burst into the assemblage, announcing the imminent arrival of a Belgian government official, an emissary of the colonizing power that held Congo in its grip.

The chief quickly ordered Mutangidiki to be cut free. In the commotion surrounding the Belgian’s arrival, Mutangidiki slipped away to rejoin his praying wife. In the course of trading news with the chief, the Belgian asked the chief about Mutangidiki’s school.

“Muyishi Mutangidiki is well,” the chief replied. “In fact, he was here with us just a short while ago.”

When the Belgian finished his business and left, the villagers joked about whether the Mutangidikis would leave that night or wait until daybreak to make their escape.

The following morning, the villagers were astonished to hear the scrap-metal bell calling the children to school as usual.

At the sound of the bell, the young boy, Lupera, turned to his group of friends and said, “If those evangelists are still here in the village after the way our fathers tortured them yesterday, they must have something important to tell us. I’m going to find out what it is.”

And with those steps toward Mutangidiki’s classroom, Lupera began the journey that took him into leadership positions in the Congolese Mennonite churches that today have 125,000 members and manage eight hospitals, a Bible institute, several hundred elementary and secondary schools, a sawmill and a variety of development projects.

The Congolese Menno­nites also participate with other denominations in the administration of the Université Chrétienne de Kinshasa (Kinshasa Christian University).