Worshippers clothed in white gathered in a small candlelight room in western Kenya on Christmas to commemorate the birth of the “Black Messiah.”
They prayed in front of a photo of Mama Maria, an African woman who co-founded their religious sect, Legion Maria.
Hours before, AFP reporters encountered Stephen Benson Nundu, a guy who claimed to be a prophet.
Nundu carried a framed photo of Baba Simeo Melchior—the so-called “Black Messiah”—with his hands clasped and a big medallion around his neck.
Legion Maria—or Legio Maria in the language of the Luo, an ethnic group to which many of its members belong—was founded in 1966.
According to its website, it began around 1938, when a “mystic woman” appeared to numerous Roman Catholics and delivered prophecies regarding “the incarnation of the son of God as a Black man.”
Simeo Ondetto, later known as Baba Simeo Melchior, one of its co-founders, is hailed as the “returned son of God” and Legion Maria’s “eternal spiritual leader.”
The religious movement has millions of followers in Kenya and eight other African nations, including Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
According to Timothy Lucas Abawao, the church’s deputy head, the movement “is not a cult.”
“A cult essentially is an organization that… believes in the leader. But we believe in Jesus Christ, and we believe in God,” he told AFP.
AFP interviewed Abawao during Christmas celebrations in Nzoia, one of the movement’s places of worship.
He said, “Baba Messiah came for Africans,” and his followers believe he is “truly Jesus Christ.”
“He took on the colour of the Black man socolor that the Black man could understand him in his own language and receive salvation,” he said.
Legion Maria is not the only African religious movement to feature a Black supreme being.
In South Africa, Isaiah Shembe’s followers claim he received divine commands in 1913 to establish the Nazareth Baptist Church, and many regard him as a messianic figure. He died in 1935, yet his church still has many million adherents.
In the former Belgian Congo, Simon Kimbangu is said to have miraculously healed a sick woman in 1921, establishing the Kimbanguist church.
Kimbangu, who was convicted of threatening state security and Belgian colonial order, died in prison in 1951 after spending thirty years behind bars.
According to its website, the late Olumba Olumba Obu, the founder of Nigeria’s Brotherhood of the Cross and Star, represents “the Holy Spirit” and “the Triune God.”
Odhiambo Ayanga told AFP on the margins of a Legion Maria gathering that God “as he came for the white, he also came for the black.”
