Thinkers Timeline

Simon Kimbangu was a Congolese religious leader and the founder of Kimbanguism, one of the largest African-initiated churches in the world. He was born on 12 September 1887 (some sources say 1889) in the village of Nkamba, in the Lower Congo region. The area was then part of the Congo Free State, later the Belgian Congo. His family were members of the Kongo people. Kimbangu was educated at a British Baptist Missionary Society school. He was baptised in 1915 and worked as a Baptist catechist, teaching others the Bible. He was married to Marie Mwilu, who would later become an important leader in her own right. For several years he worked in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville), doing jobs including palm oil work. He tried to ignore what he described as a divine calling to preach and heal. In April 1921, he returned to Nkamba and began his public ministry. He preached, healed the sick, and was said to raise the dead. Thousands of people came to see him. His ministry lasted only about five months. In September 1921, Belgian colonial authorities arrested him. He was tried in a military court and sentenced to death in October 1921. The Belgian King Albert I commuted this to life imprisonment with 120 lashes. Kimbangu spent the next 30 years in prison in Lubumbashi (then Elisabethville), nearly 2,000 kilometres from his home. He died there on 12 October 1951.

Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was a Sudanese Islamic reformer, political thinker, civil engineer, and Sufi mystic, known to his followers as Ustadh ('the teacher') Mahmoud. He developed one of the most ambitious twentieth-century reinterpretations of Islam, which he called the Second Message of Islam. He was executed for apostasy by the Sudanese government in January 1985. He was 76. He was born in 1909 in a village near Rufa'a, on the eastern bank of the Blue Nile about 150 km south of Khartoum. His family came from a Sufi religious tradition linked to the Qadiriyya order. He was educated at Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum (later the University of Khartoum), graduating as a civil engineer in 1936. He worked briefly for Sudan Railways, then started his own engineering business in Rufa'a. His political life began with the founding of the Sudanese Republican Party in October 1945, an anti-monarchical, pro-independence movement seeking a Sudanese republic free of British-Egyptian colonial rule. He was imprisoned twice in 1946 by the British colonial administration, the second time for two years. During his second imprisonment and in a subsequent period of religious seclusion (khalwa) at his home in Rufa'a from 1948 to 1951, he developed the theological vision that would shape the rest of his life. He emerged from seclusion to lead a small but committed movement called the Republican Brotherhood, distinct from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood despite the similar name. He published his masterwork The Second Message of Islam in 1967. As President Gaafar Nimeiri's regime imposed Sharia law in Sudan from 1983, Taha distributed pamphlets opposing the move. He was arrested on 5 January 1985, tried for apostasy in a hasty proceeding he refused to recognise, and publicly hanged on 18 January 1985.

Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teacher, poet, and peace activist. He is one of the most important Buddhist teachers of the modern world. Many readers in the West first met Buddhist ideas through his books. He was born in 1926 in central Vietnam, in what was then a French colony. He became a monk at the age of 16. He took the religious name Thich Nhat Hanh. 'Thich' is the religious surname taken by all Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns, after the family name of the Buddha. He studied Buddhism in Vietnam and later studied comparative religion at Princeton University in the United States. During the Vietnam War (1955-1975), he founded a movement called Engaged Buddhism. Monks, nuns, and lay people worked to help villagers caught in the war. They rebuilt destroyed villages, set up schools, and cared for refugees. They refused to take sides between the Communist North and the American-backed South. Both sides treated this as betrayal. In 1966, Thich Nhat Hanh travelled to America to ask the United States to end the war. He met Martin Luther King Jr., who later nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Vietnamese government refused to let him return home. He lived in exile for 39 years. He founded a monastery in southern France called Plum Village in 1982. From there he wrote over 100 books and travelled the world teaching mindfulness. In 2018 he returned to Vietnam to die in the temple where he had become a monk. He died there in 2022, aged 95.

Hans Küng was a Swiss Catholic priest and theologian. A theologian is a scholar who studies the meaning and history of religion. He was born in 1928 in Sursee, a small town in central Switzerland. He died in 2021 in Tübingen, Germany, at the age of 93. Küng studied for the priesthood in Rome and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1954. From 1960 he was a professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1962 the Pope chose him as one of the youngest expert advisers at the Second Vatican Council. This was a great meeting of Catholic bishops that aimed to bring the Church into the modern world. Küng was one of the most famous and controversial Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. He challenged the official teaching that the Pope could not be wrong on matters of faith and morals. He also criticised compulsory celibacy for priests and the ban on women priests. In 1979 the Vatican withdrew his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian. He kept his post at Tübingen and remained a Catholic priest. In his later years he led a global project on shared ethics across religions.