Kimpa Vita
Kimpa Vita announced in 1704 that Saint Anthony had entered her body, that Jesus had been born in Kongo and the apostles were Black, and that the kingdom's civil war must end with the capital reoccupied; two years later she was burned as a heretic, and the church she started is the oldest African Christian movement there is. She was born around 1684 into the Kongo nobility, baptised Beatriz, and trained as a nganga marinda, a medium of the old religion, in a kingdom that had been Catholic since 1491 and had been tearing itself apart since the Portuguese and their allies destroyed its army at Mbwila in 1665. By 1700 there was no king in São Salvador. Three claimants held three fortresses, the capital was a ruin in the bush, and the Capuchin missionaries preached that the war was God's punishment. Her possession by Anthony, the saint the Capuchins had made the most popular in the country, turned their own doctrine round. She taught that the missionaries were lying about a white Christ, that the holy places of the faith were in Kongo, and that Anthony wanted the king to return to the capital. She walked there herself and settled among the ruins with thousands of followers. The Antonians were the largest movement in the kingdom within a year, and the claimant Pedro IV, whom she had backed, found her more dangerous than useful. She was arrested in 1706, pregnant, by his men, tried by the royal council with two Capuchins as assessors on charges of heresy and witchcraft, and burned with her companion João Barro on 2 July at Evululu, aged about twenty-two. Pedro reoccupied São Salvador in 1709 and ended the war she had demanded be ended. The Antonians were hunted and sold, and a good many of the captives shipped to the Americas in the next years were hers, which is one theory of where the Stono rebels of 1739 in South Carolina, who marched under a banner and shouted a Portuguese word, had learned their Christianity.
- Lived: 1684 CE – 1706 CE
- Nationality: Kongolese
- Roles: prophet, religious_leader
