Eggers offers us a vibrant, thoughtful and fluently written historical ethnography of the Kitawala movement, an independent religion in DR Congo with origins in Watchtower Christianity. Skilfully weaving historical data, sourced from state archives in Belgium, with oral histories collected in various regions in DR Congo (from the capital city Kinshasa to remote locations in South Kivu and Lualaba Provinces among others), and tin trunk histories written by Kitawala historians (and which are circulated in the Kitawalist communities), Eggers introduces the Kitawalists as ‘everyday intellectuals who engaged actively and creatively with the political, economic, and spiritual contexts in which they lived, who theorized and experimented’ (7).
The book spans an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion. The chapters are subdivided in three sections: ‘beginnings and destinations’, ‘violence and power’ and ‘posts and presents’. The first chapters deal with the beginnings of the Kitawala movement. These are multiple, so we learn, and they need to be situated within a large ecosystem of healing movements. Eggers then moves on to an exploration of the various forms of colonial violence that Kitawalists were confronted with, and how these experiences also led to fragmentation, discord and unruliness within the Kitawalist communities. The final chapters situate Kitawala within the postcolonial religious landscape in DR Congo, and highlight continuities of violence, resistance and contestation since colonial times, all while paying attention to the diversity within the contemporary Kitawala world. ‘Unruly’ may have been an easy descriptor for the Kitawala movement itself, as Kitawalists have disrupted both the colonial and the postcolonial state in various manners. Yet, as Eggers shows, various Kitawalists have been considered ‘unruly’ within the movement as well. The Kitawalist movement is not at all a homogenous movement.
Eggers does not have the ambition to write the history of the Kitawala movement, but presents it as ‘a book about the people who have practiced different versions of Kitawala and the many ways they have interpreted and utilized theology, doctrine, and ritual to specific ends in specific contexts’ (6–7). With every transmission, re-adaptations and repurposing of ideas, texts and networks occur(ed). Here, we arrive at another dimension of ‘unruliness’. She writes: ‘Unruly ideas (…) are ideas in flux, shaped by the context and agency of those who encounter, adopt, and alter them’ (16).
This book thus does more than only stitching together different episodes of Kitawala history in DR Congo. Rather, Eggers puts into action a conceptual history (‘Begriffsgeschichte’) of ‘power’: she analyses the various ways in which ‘power’ was imagined, embodied, exerted, experienced, used and contested in colonial and postcolonial Congo wherever Kitawala texts, ideas, practices and rituals seduced Congolese.
The analysis is explicitly woven around the notions of ‘transmission’ and ‘circulation’, and implicitly around ‘networks’. An anthropologist may see many connections with ANT-theory, though Eggers does not position her work in this paradigm. This book is nevertheless about the agency of human actors as proselytisers and intellectual agents, and surely also about the agency of non-human actors like spirits, ideas, texts (notebooks, e.g.), ritual props, institutions, the environment (e.g. mango trees) and transportation infrastructures. One of the most compelling analytical lines in this regard is Eggers’ attention to a ‘profound history’, i.e. ‘the register of history in which “spirits, ancestors and God intervene in human action”’, advocated for by the Congolese historian Wamba dia Wamba (177).
Refreshing are Eggers’ recurrent reflections about what the collected materials say and do not say, what we can learn from them and what we cannot know. She thus reminds time and again about the political and material constructed-ness of historical archives (anywhere). Moreover, I especially appreciate how Eggers shies away from filling in the gaps herself, thus avoiding any projections.
Some brief excursions to the Kimbanguist movement are made. Though, more comparison could have been made with Anne Mélice's work (Reference Mélice2011), whose research on ‘orthodoxie’ and ‘hétérodoxie’ was exactly also about the internal struggles, unruliness and contests for power of Kimbanguists.
In conclusion, Unruly Ideas is exemplary for its rigorous, empathic and thoughtful historiography. Eggers’ writing is down-to-earth, engaged, yet critical. This book deserves a wide readership beyond African history, as scholars in religious studies and political science will find it innovative.
