Simon Kimbangu

Congolese Baptist preacher whose healing ministry, beginning in April 1921, drew mass followings within months and was treated by Belgian colonial authorities as a threat to colonial order. Arrested that September and sentenced to death, a sentence commuted to life imprisonment, he died in prison in 1951 after thirty years without ever being released. The church his followers built, the Kimbanguist church, received official recognition in 1959 and is widely regarded as an early expression of Congolese religious and political self-assertion against colonial rule.