Background
Joseph Malula was born on December 17, 1917, in Kinshasa. His mother was from Equateur Region, his father a Baluba.
Joseph Malula was born on December 17, 1917, in Kinshasa. His mother was from Equateur Region, his father a Baluba.
Educated at the Petit Séminaire. Bolongo and the Grand Séminaire, Kabwe, where he studied classics and humanities for eight years. He then began his ecclesiastical career as vicar in the parish of Christ-Roi, becoming the Auxiliary Bishop of Leopoldville between 1959 and 1964. At the Leopoldville exhibition of 1958 he delivered a famous paper on the place of the Congolese church in the Congolese state.
In his struggle for more autonomy for the Congolese church Cardinal Malula was the first to use the word “authenticity”, in 1968, when he sought more rapid Africanisation of the clergy and the African expression of forms of worship. But he opposed President Mobutu in his more extreme measures such as the abolition of Catholic Christian names and the demand that the youth wing of the Mouvemcnt Populaire de la Revolution, MPR, should establish cells in every Catholic institution throughout the land.
Malula wrote an article in “Afrique Chretienne” attacking President Mobutu’s desire to make everything “authentically African” by 1980. As a result he was expelled from his house on January 25, 1972, and went into exile in Rome. In July, after five months’ exile he was allowed to return, after he had given way on all major issues where the church had clashed with the state.
He started his own movement towards Africanisation of the Church as early as 1967, but later clashed with Mobutu on a number of occasions, finally meeting head on, in the major quarrel of January 1972 over the policy of introducing party cells into church institutions.
A strong willed and determined personality who has frequently spoken out courageously in defence of the church. Early in his career as leader of one of the most important Catholic communities in Africa (two fifths of the Zairois are nominally Catholic) he had an important following and voice in political affairs. He was influential through the Catholic school oldboy network in Kinshasa and had a major say in shaping the Catholic education system and appointing teachers.